VICE News reporter Medyan Dairieh spends three weeks embedded with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the first journalist given that kind of access to the group's fighters, checkpoints, and administrators. The footage follows the group in the weeks after its lightning advance across northern Iraq, where it seized US weapons abandoned by retreating Iraqi forces and pushed into Kurdish territory, sending Christian and other minority families fleeing amid reports of massacres. Dairieh films morality police enforcing dress codes, recruits training, and clerics at Friday sermons, while fighters explain the group's declared aim of restoring a caliphate under leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Formerly known as ISIS and once tied to al-Qaeda, the group appears here mid-transformation, building courts, schools, and services in the territory it holds rather than just fighting for it. The film offers no narration heavy with analysis, just a camera inside checkpoints and offices most reporters never reached, recording a group turning captured land into something meant to function as a state.