Born in Iraq, toughened and grown in Syria, the Middle East's most violent Islamist group has returned to the motherland with a vengeance.
Known as the Islamic State in Iraq and al Shams, ISIS has stormed Mosul, Iraq's second city, then stampeded south at breathtaking speed threatening the capital, Baghdad.
That, ISIS's leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi may soon learn, was the easy part.
He may soon be proclaimed the Emir of a new Islamic caliphate - making real the fantasy of a state.
That will be the moment when his movement becomes most vulnerable.
Spreading terror, organising insurrections, undermining governments and guerrilla war are challenges that legitimate rulers could only ever dream of.
Insurgent tactics almost always give the initiative to the insurgent.
Al Baghdadi, who is believed to be Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, a native of Samarrah, has applied himself with extreme skill to the task of wrecking.
He took over that was then al Qaeda in Iraq after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other senior leaders were killed in American and British attacks which were orchestrated with the help of fellow Sunnis who had turned against their extreme view of Islam.
AQI has been almost crippled by 2011.
But the Syrian civil war, which it joined to depose Bashar al Assad, provided a resuscitating boost to a movement - which has so frequently tortured and murdered that the global leaders of al Qaeda have disowned it.
The suicidal daring of its members, many of them volunteers from Europe and Chechnya, at first impressed Syria's other rebel movements.
But by the end of last year the extreme violence of ISIS's methods had alienated even al Qaeda sponsored groups like the al Nusra front.
ISIS has been locked in bitter fighting against other rebel groups inside Syria.
Funded with donations from the Gulf, ISIS began turning its energies back into Iraq - six months ago it captured the city of Falluja.
It was able to draw on Sunni dismay of what has largely been seen as exclusion from power by the Shia dominated government of Nuri al Maliki.
And translate that into a devastating military campaign as it stormed south from Mosul though Baiji, Tikrit, and Sammarah, about 60 miles from Baghdad.
ISIS is unlikely to attack either Kirkuk or Baghdad, where it would meet resistance from Shia and Kurds.
But it may declare itself the "state" or "caliphate" it has always wanted to be.
If it does that it will mutate from a metastasizing idea of violent jihad to become an entity, a thing in a known place, not an idea with agents in the shadows.
Then it can be attacked, and even destroyed.
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