I should begin by emphasizing that our knowledge of ISIL is extremely scant. We know close to nothing about ISIL’ social base. We know little about how it made its military gains, and even less about the nature of the coalitions into which it has entered with various groups — from other Islamist rebels in Syria to secular Ba‘athists in Iraq.

Sensationalist accounts of “shari‘ah justice” notwithstanding, we do not have much information about how ISIL administers the lives of millions of people who reside in the territories it now controls.

Information about the militants who fight for ISIL is likewise scarce. Most of what we know is gleaned from recruitment videos and propaganda, not the most reliable sources. There is little on the backgrounds and motives of those who choose to join the group, least of all the non-Western recruits who form the bulk of ISIL’ fighting force. In the absence of this information, it is difficult to even say what ISIL is if we are to rely on anything beyond the group’s self-representations.

Let me emphasize this last point. What we call ISIL is more than just a militant cult. At present, ISIL controls a network of large population centers with millions of residents, in addition to oil resources, military bases, and roads. It has to administer the affairs of the populations over whom it rules, and this has required compromise and coalition-building, not just brute force.

In Iraq, the group has had to work with secular Ba‘athists, former army officers, tribal councils, and various Sunni opposition groups, many of whose members are in administrative positions. In Syria, it has likewise had to negotiate with other rebel factions as well as tribes, and relies on local (non-ISIL) technical expertise to manage services such as water, electricity, public health, and bakeries.

The vast majority of ISIL’ estimated 20,000-31,500 fighters are recent recruits and it is not clear whether and how its leadership maintains ideological consistency among them. All told, our sense of ISIL’ coherence as a caliphate with a clear chain of command, a solid organizational structure, and an all-encompassing ideology is a direct product of ISIL’ propaganda apparatus.

We see ISIL as a unitary entity because ISIL propagandists want us to see it that way. This is why it is problematic to rely on doctrines espoused in propaganda to explain ISIL’ behavior. Absent more evidence, we simply cannot know if the behaviors of the different parts of ISIL are expressions of these doctrines.

And yet, much of the analysis that we have available relies precisely on ISIL’ propaganda and doctrinal statements. What does this emphasis obscure? Here I will point out several of the issues I consider most important.