Once upon a time there was a terrorist who had a vision. A vision to spread his Anti-American jihad around the world. This man was so effective at selling his brand of Islamic terrorism that sleeper cells affiliated with his international network popped up in countries across the globe. Then one day, a terrible day indeed, his terrorists did the previously unthinkable by murdering over 3,000 people in a mass casualty terror attack that was our generation’s Pearl Harbor on September 11, 2001.

That man was Usama BinLaden and his organization, as you all know, was Al Qaeda. You remember them, they are the ones that Obama told us was as dead as their leader back in 2012 nary a week after jihadis had dragged our Ambassador to Libya through the streets like a human rag doll.

Well this time it seems that the old guard has been replaced, and beaten at their own game, by the new guard. In an article titled “Al Qaeda is out, ISIS is in!” in National Review, Jonah Goldberg explains how ISIS is the new shiny toy on the jihadi scene. Just how did this happen you ask?

Well it all started back in the 1990’s when the respective heads of the two organizations were jailed together for terrorism charges in a Jordanian prison. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (the grandfather of Al Qaeda) became a mentor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who went on to found ISIS) during their time in prison together. Their time as friends ended when both were released from prison and al-Zarqawi led a series of devastating, brutal attacks in post-war Iraq which enraged his mentor, even leading him to criticize his former pupil publicly.

When the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a caliphate had been established last year, Maqdisi unleashed his ire and called his former students organization “ignorant and misguided”. According to an article on the subject in the Guardian, “How ISIS crippled al-Qaida” Maqdisi’s anger was a sign to the international intelligence analyst community that he knew that al Qaeda had been surpassed in power by ISIS.

ISIS has their own news outlet, Al Hayat Media Center, which is responsible for the Twitter feed of the organization called Mujatweets. I kid you not, dear reader.

“One Mujatweet video shows smiling ISIS members handing out candy and ice cream to cheering children; others include images of militants fighting in Syria set to a song extolling the group’s virtues.”

Al Hayat is also responsible for all of the horrific beheading videos that are released, and in HD no less. As Goldberg explains, Al Qaeda used to be viewed as the creative one.

“It’s ironic. For a decade, terror analysts marveled about how creative al-Qaeda was. Lawrence Wright, in his gripping account of the rise of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, writes that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri deliberately set out to bring the best practices of the business world to religiously fueled terror and carnage. Al-Qaeda’s jihadis got paid vacations, round-trip tickets home to visit family, health care, etc. They saved huge money on retirement gifts, since Allah promised to provide 72 virgins at the end of a productive career in lieu of a gold watch.”

Now that creativity has been taken over by ISIS. The biggest boost ISIS received though, ironically, was handed to them by our President. When Obama withdrew American troops from Iraq, he virtually handed ISIS the keys on the way out of the country. Although he gave them a huge boost with his withdrawal, ISIS’s creative and marketing department really drove the surge of new recruits to the organization.

“Al-Qaeda was stodgy and abstract. The Islamic State is exciting and even fun, at least for a certain kind of fanatic. The reports describing — and viral videos showing — young men ransacking and pillaging, riding cars wherever they want, and buying sex slaves for as little as a pack of cigarettes are intoxicating for those who want to join an Islamic foreign legion for losers.”

Add to that babes in burkha’s posing with Kalishnakov’s and BMW’s and it is easy to see how a young jihadi’s heart could be won.