On June 29, the first day of the Islamic month of Ramadan, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (isis) declared its formation of a “caliphate” and consequently renamed itself the Islamic State, to indicate its new status.

In a statement released in English, Arabic, German, French and Russian, the former isis asserted that the region that’s now under its control—northwestern Iraq all the way up to northern Syria—is now an Islamic “caliphate” under the group’s leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. The expectation is that that territory will expand beyond Iraq and Syria, hence the dropping of those two nations from its name.

A caliphate is an Islamic republic transcending national boundaries and ruled by a supreme, politico-religious leader.

By this declaration, Baghdadi is now “the imam and [Caliph] for the Muslims everywhere,” as the group’s spokesman said in the statement. That means all Muslims, jihadists or otherwise, must now pledge their allegiance to the Islamic State and Caliph Baghdadi, the statement qualified. “The legality of all emirates, groups, states and organizations,” said the spokesman, “becomes null by the expansion of the [Caliph’s] authority and arrival of its troops to their areas.”

That’s pretty brazen talk. Charles Lister, Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, assessed that the declaration is “likely the most significant development in international jihadism since 9/11.” It’s a call to Islamic unity. The pronouncement is a dare to fellow jihadists from a militia disowned by al Qaeda in February for being “too hardline.” But it’s also a declaration of war to Islamic nations that won’t capitulate to the Islamic State.

The former isis is picking up fights in the world’s most explosive region. Despite isis’s immense territorial exploits in Iraq and Syria, the “caliphate” it claims to have created is far smaller than the caliphates of history. The last real caliphate was the Ottoman Caliphate, abolished in 1924. At its peak, it spanned most of the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus and parts of Eastern Europe.

While isis’s declaration and power play might impress some jihadists like al Nusra, with which it allied to share control of the Iraq-Syria border on June 25, other militants and militant nations will not be impressed.

Essentially, as the Daily Beast’s J. M. Berger wrote, isis has risked everything to declare a caliphate. “It is an all-or-nothing gambit,” Berger wrote. “isis has meaningfully put its existence on the line with [the] pronouncement. It is playing the lottery, and while the odds are stacked against it, sometimes people win the lottery.”

The problem for isis is that the Middle East has some powerful entities that rig geopolitical “lotteries.” The Islamic Republic of Iran cannot and will not sit idly by while a pariah terrorist group claims kingship of the Middle East. Iran might have actually supported and funded isis in the past, as some reports have indicated, but it appears that isis and Iran have crossed paths. Iran will use its clout in Iraq, its rising international legitimacy (thanks in no small measure to its apparent pragmatism in nuclear negotiations) and isis’s global marginalization to defeat or severely cripple the newly established Islamic State and assert its prophesied role as the end-time “king of the south” (Daniel 11:40).

Thanks to isis’s brazenness, the West, particularly the United States, will, to a significant extent, allow Iran’s rise and regional dominance. For more on this subject, check out our articles and videos. Our Trumpet Daily program “America Urges Mortal Enemy to Save Iraq” is a good place to start.