ISIS Apocalypse: Armageddon Coming, Islamic State Group Is Doomsday Cult, Says Expert

In order to recruit and expand, the Islamic State group relies heavily on the idea that the end of the world is near. The extremist Sunni Muslim group uses Islamic scriptures and prophecies to support its apocalyptic claim, all the while ignoring another contradicting prophecy.

“How did the Islamic State attract so many followers and conquer so much land? By being more ruthless, more apocalyptic and more devoted to state-building than its competitors,” according to a new book called "The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State," by William McCants, the ISIS director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution.

Emphases such as "on-state building now" and "don't put off the caliphate" because "we are waging the final battles of the apocalyptic" are attractive to young Islamic men across the world, McCants argued in his book, USNI News reported. ISIS reportedly advocates the idea that the apocalypse is imminent and that Islamic State fighters will battle the “infidels” of the West in Dabiq, a Syrian town now under ISIS control.

But there is one prophecy that the Islamic State has chosen to ignore, Business Insider reported Friday. In his book, McCants explained ISIS ignores the part about the Antichrist of the Islamic State that is stated in a collection of prophecies they accept. The prophecy states that, “the Antichrist will 'appear in the empty area between Sham [Syria] and Iraq,'” which is the very area now under ISIS control.

“The shrewd leaders of the Islamic State combined two of the most powerful yet contradictory ideas in Islam -- the return of the Islamic Empire and the end of the world -- into a mission and a message that shapes its strategy and inspires its army of zealous fighters,” according to McCants' book. “They have defied conventional thinking about how to wage wars and win recruits. Even if the Islamic State is defeated, jihadist terrorism will never be the same.”

Another Islamic prophecy that ISIS extremists repeat is that the "armies of 'Rome' will come to Northern Syria to fight Islamic soldiers." However, the Atlantic previously reported that people should now think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey.

"The fact that Turkish Muslims, not infidel Romans, control Constantinople, or Istanbul, today and are working with the infidel West against the Islamic State makes the Dabiq prophecy a poor fit for contemporary events," McCants wrote, Business Insider reported. "But in the apocalyptic imagination, inconvenient facts rarely impede the glorious march to the end of the world."