In the pages that follow, the ‘I’ renders Thierry’s voice. I write from his raw speech, from our many exchanges, and from the documentary traces we questioned and tested against one another.

— Isis

I painted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at a time when his face was still far less known than the black flag that was beginning to cross screens around the world. His portrait circulated. It was reproduced on the internet, notably from our photographic archives and Flickr, and foreign journalists came to the Abode of Chaos seeking out this figure whom the West was still learning to identify.

This interested me enormously. Because I didn't just want to paint a picture of a terrorist. I wanted to understand why this man had uttered a word that many seemed to consider mere propaganda excess: State. Islamic State. The word is crucial.

Al-Qaeda meant "the base." A network. A distributed architecture. An organization capable of striking far from its territory without necessarily claiming to govern it permanently. Daesh has a different ambition. It wants territory.

A capital city. Borders, even if it claims to abolish those inherited from the modern regional order. An administration, a police force, courts, taxation, resources, civil servants, registers, levies, schools, communications, and an army.

In other words, it no longer merely claims to fight the state. It claims to become the state. That's what immediately interested me. Because a terrorist group can be tracked like a network. A proto-state raises a much deeper question.

It administers populations. It controls roads. It sells or diverts resources. It levies taxes. It judges. It punishes. It produces documents. It builds a bureaucracy. And this bureaucracy can perfectly coexist with absolutely archaic violence.

This is the paradox I wanted to bring into The Abode of Chaos. The black flag. Al-Baghdadi. The fighters. The executions. The ruins. But behind the images, the administration. That's perhaps what struck me most.

I had spent part of my life building databases and observing how a state classifies people, businesses, events, and territories. I therefore knew that power becomes far more dangerous when it simply stops killing and starts recording.

The register. The tax. The receipt. The authorization. The property. The court. The recruitment.

These are also instruments of sovereignty. Barbarity does not preclude bureaucracy. History has amply demonstrated this. Daesh demonstrated it once again.

And it was precisely this association between a claimed archaism and technological ultramodernity that made the phenomenon so unique. On one side, a rigorous and brutal representation of Sharia law. Torture.

Executions. Slavery. The destruction of cultural heritage. A desire to symbolically return to a mythologized religious origin.

On the other hand: social networks. Video montages. Communication systems. Multilingual propaganda. High-definition images. Multiple camera angles. Slow motion.

Drones.

A true cinematic grammar.

This is the modern monster. An ideology that claims to be turning the clock back by centuries while using the most modern tools of the very civilization it claims to be fighting. This contradiction was not one for them. Technology was simply a weapon. And they understood this remarkably quickly.

This is where the Abode of Chaos once again fulfills its function as a seismograph. I've been working with images since the 1980s. I knew computer-generated imagery when a few seconds of processing cost a fortune. I saw the emergence of the internet. Compression. Digital video. Networks. I knew what it meant to create an image.

When I watched certain Daesh productions, I wasn't just looking at their content. I was looking at their production. The angles. The shots. The editing. The lighting. The sound. The rehearsal. The dramaturgy. The preparation for broadcast. It was no longer the shaky, clandestine video recorded almost accidentally on a phone.

Some sequences were constructed like productions. And unfortunately, the death at the end wasn't a special effect. That's precisely what gave them their power. The viewer unconsciously recognized the grammar of cinema. But they knew the body was real.

Daesh understood that in a global attention war, images could create more psychological territory than some military conquests. An execution takes place in one location. The video is watched in a hundred countries. The murder kills one person. The image seeks to terrorize millions more. This is the industrialization of terror.

Terrorism had long understood the media function of attacks. Daesh took it a step further: it became its own production studio. It was no longer entirely dependent on Western television to transform its acts into spectacles. It manufactured the spectacle. It staged it. It translated it. It distributed it.

Then the world's media faced a terrible dilemma: to show in order to inform was also to participate, in part, in the dissemination of the image created by the perpetrator. Not to show was to risk failing to document what was happening. This question concerns me directly as an artist.

What do we do with an image created by the one who kills?

Reproducing it as is could become a posthumous victory for its propaganda. Erasing it could become a mutilation of memory. My response has always been: to reinterpret it within a different framework. To contextualize it. To confront it. To create a dialogue with other traces. To wrest from the executioner the monopoly on his legend.

This is what the Abode of Chaos does. The portrait of al-Baghdadi is not an icon. It is an element of a network. Around it exist Iraq. Syria. Saddam Hussein. The ruins of the Iraqi state. The Sunni and Shiite divides. Al-Qaeda. Western interventions. The Kurds. Regional powers. In other words, the face is placed back within its genealogy.

Because al-Baghdadi didn't appear out of thin air. Daesh was born from a specific history: the destruction of Iraqi order after 2003; the marginalization and anger of a segment of the Sunni population; the presence of former Ba'athist regime officials and military personnel within the new insurgent structures; al-Qaeda in Iraq; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; and then the organization's successive transformations.

Finally, the Syrian war, which opens a second arena for state disintegration. Iraq on one side. Syria on the other. And between the two, a border that the new caliphate specifically aims to abolish. This is where the gesture becomes historically powerful.

When Daesh fighters symbolically destroy the borders between their Iraqi and Syrian territories, they aren't simply saying, "We've gained a few kilometers." They're saying, "The political order that carved up this region no longer binds us." This is where the historical wound of the Arab world, which I discussed during our conversations, resurfaces.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire. The mandates. European borders. Modern states. Successive humiliations. It would obviously be absurd to claim that this history mechanically leads to Daesh. Hundreds of millions of Muslims and Arabs live through this history without becoming jihadists.

But an ideology knows how to take a real historical wound and fabricate a monstrous response. That is precisely what the caliphate's discourse does. It says, in essence: you have been divided. Humiliated. Dominated. We will abolish these borders and restore a lost unity. It is a narrative. And a narrative can mobilize people even when it rests on a mythological reconstruction of the past.

The word caliphate is therefore essential. Even more so, in my view, than the word emirate. It evokes a much broader political and religious memory. It claims to reconnect the present to an interrupted historical continuity. Al-Baghdadi, therefore, does not present himself simply as a military leader. He seeks symbolic legitimacy.

And this is where anthropology intersects with geopolitics. To combat a movement, it is not always enough to destroy its vehicles. One must understand the story it tells to those it seeks to recruit. Otherwise, one kills the fighters and leaves intact the matrix that produces others.

Daesh understood this for its part. It wasn't just recruiting with a theology. It was recruiting with an aesthetic. Strength. Belonging. Adventure. Fighting brotherhood. The feeling of becoming part of History. And, for some disaffected young Westerners, the monstrous promise of a brutal transition from an anonymous existence to a supposedly heroic one. The image manufactured this projection.

That's why so many young Europeans were able to leave. And among them, women. France would later discover the terrible problem of those who returned. Some women had simply followed. Others had joined. Some had actively participated in the system. It was therefore necessary to immediately move beyond simplistic, sentimental categories.

Victim?

Accomplice?

Fighter?

Wife?

Propagandist?

Recruiter?

Each case had to be treated individually. The justice system and intelligence services found themselves facing extraordinarily difficult situations. Because the territorial collapse of the caliphate did not erase what individuals had learned, experienced, accepted, or committed.

Once again: destroying the territory does not necessarily destroy the network. This is probably the biggest mistake one could make with Daesh. The territorial caliphate was defeated. Daesh did not disappear. Branches, cells, affiliates, and ideological legacies continued to exist in several regions. Because the model was replicable.

And there, almost involuntarily, I find myself slipping back into my old computer vocabulary. A distributed system is harder to destroy than a centralized one. Al-Qaeda had already demonstrated this. Daesh added a territorial dimension to it for a few years. Then, when the territory disappeared, part of the system reverted to a network.

A state when it can possess territory. A network when it must survive without it. This is an extremely important shift. And it explains why military victory, however necessary, is never the end of the story on its own. I also want to be extremely cautious about all the theories surrounding the hidden backers of Daesh.

States pursued their own interests. Intelligence services infiltrated. Local actors made ad hoc alliances. Trafficking occurred. Powers sometimes considered that an adversary of their adversary could temporarily serve their own strategy. This is the sordid reality of proxy wars. But I refuse to transform this lack of simplicity into a comprehensive theory.

To say that several powers have tried to exploit the forces present on the ground is one thing. To claim without evidence that al-Baghdadi was secretly directed by Washington, Moscow, Tehran, or any other capital is quite another. I will not cross that line. It would precisely undermine the strength of our analysis.

The documented reality is already extraordinary enough. A man can take advantage of a vacuum created by several wars without having been created by a single invisible hand. Chaos possesses its own fertility. It is even one of the things I know best. Chaos is not absolute chance. It is a system in which so many forces interact that none fully controls the outcome.

Daesh was born from this kind of chaos. A devastated Iraq. A fractured Syria. Sunni humiliations. Jihadist networks. Former soldiers. Funding. Porous borders. Prisons. Ideologies. The internet. All of this converges. Then something emerges that ultimately surpasses many of those who thought they could control it.

That's the real lesson.

One can contribute to creating the conditions for a monster without having designed the monster.

And this monster can then become autonomous. That's where the portrait of Al-Baghdadi takes on its full power for me. I painted it because his face had to enter the memory of our time.

But around him, I also wanted to keep the flag. The symbols. The images. The ruins. Syria. Iraq. Because one man alone can never explain a phenomenon of this magnitude.

The portrait is merely the door.

Behind him lies a war society. A bureaucracy. A political theology. A clandestine economy. An image industry. A computer network. A memory of humiliation. And an ability to transform all these things into power.

This is why Daesh belongs so deeply to the Abode of Chaos. It encapsulates almost all the questions that run through my work: the power of signs, war, ruin, the network, religion, the image, technology, barbarity, bureaucracy, memory, and that ever-shifting border between order and Chaos.

Because Daesh produces something almost intellectually unbearable: an extremely organized order in the service of human chaos.

That's what we need to look at. The receipts next to the beheadings. The taxes next to the massacres. The files next to the ruins. The high definition next to the archaic torture. The drone above a scene that could have been taken from another millennium.

This is our era. It is not simply modern. It is capable of making all temporalities coexist. And the Abode of Chaos, by inscribing Al-Baghdadi on its walls, was obviously not celebrating this power. It was doing exactly what it must do: recording the moment when the archaic and the hypermodern met to produce a new form of terror.