ISIS, Islamic State of Syria and al-Sham.
Sham also refers to the Levant.
That's a stretch.
After capturing Mosul, Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) announced "the beginning of the end of the Sykes Picot agreement," as the Guardian put it. The arrival of better-armed critics of the agreement seemed to herald a fundamental transformation of the Middle East's borders -- but behind ISIS's recent success lie a number of ironies inherent in both the group's rhetoric and our own assumptions about the Middle East.
For all the imagination with which we've mentally remapped the region, we remain strangely wedded to the notion that political upheaval could reveal a new, more authentic set of Middle Eastern borders -- based on ethnic and sectarian divisions, perhaps, or the re-emergence of some pre-imperialist geography. But recent developments suggest that if things do change dramatically, force and chance will play a greater role in determining what happens next than demography, geography, or history.
Consider the moniker "Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham." Both Iraq and al-Sham are place names with their own historical and political cachet, but it's telling that ISIS's leadership couldn't come up with a single geographical term to describe its current area of operations. Al-Sham -- which has sometimes been translated as Syria, though perhaps "Greater Syria" or "the Levant" gives a clearer sense of the geography -- was most recently the name of an Ottoman province based in Damascus. Iraq, by contrast, was a geographical term that came into its own with the arrival of the British in the 1920s.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/17/there_is_no_al_sham_iraq_isis_syria_levant_maps