&gt;  I&#x27;ve wondered why Obama uses ISIL, while practically everyone else is using ISIS.<p>The State Department interpretation of &#x27;al Sham&#x27; is Levant, hence the &#x27;L&#x27;.  Other agencies translate it as Syria because Levant doesn&#x27;t incorporate the full area.  But there&#x27;s no one-to-one Western name for the region indicated by the Arabic word.<p>The whole Daesh meme is amusingly naive; it&#x27;s like calling &quot;NATO&quot; as &quot;OTAN&quot; ( its French abbreviation ) and claiming that it annoys the British.  Really, they have better things about which to concern themselves than the <i>actually accurate</i> abbreviation some distant foreigners have adopted for them.