This paper explores Islamic State’s use of fire in its own words and images. After conducting a systematic analysis of Islamic State’s official videos, books, and publications, particularly Dabiq, Rumiyah, and An-Naba’, I concluded that fire is the single most prevalent trope in the profusion of IS imagery and literature. This paper grapples with this central question: Why is fire central to IS vision of itself? Fire is a ubiquitous motif in IS speeches, chants, sermons, videos and publications. My analysis focuses on four video and three textual sources. Video sources include the 55-minute foundational “documentary,” Flames of War (September 2014), the 7-minute“What Are You Waiting For?,” the infamous Healing the Chests of the Believers (February 2015), showing the immolation of a Jordanian air force pilot, and Flames of War II (November 2017). Textual sources are the inaugural issue of Dabiq, which adopts al-Zarqawi’s words, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify-by Allah’s permission-until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq,” as motto; an article, in the 7th issue of Dabiq (February 12, 2015), titled “The Burning of the Murtadd Pilot,” about the immolation of Kasasbeh, and a 3-page article in the 5th issue of Rumiyyah (January 6, 2017), Dabiq’s successor, titled “The Flames of Justice,” which discusses the merits of using fire to punish unbelievers. Fire figures prominently in the Quran, the hadiths, and Islamic eschatological literature. Fire, as hell, and the Garden, as paradise, are central to how groups like IS define themselves and their enemies. But fire is also one of the great engines of civilization: “the great transmuter,” the historian Stephen Pyne called it, of wood, metal and sociality. A stimulus for the imagination, the flame is “one of the greater operators of images,” wrote the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Critics likened the magic of cinema to fire’s capacity to beguile, and equated the rise of the internet to the rediscovery of fire. Fire, then, is prevalent in Islamic State’s literature and imagery because it fuses life and death, faith and media, belief with battlefield, primal stirrings and advanced gadgetry. Fire helps Islamic State forge a dualistic identity: a celebrated self, occupying a hearth that must be defended, pitted against a reviled other that must be incinerated by the torch (this includes anyone, Muslim or not, who does not declare fealty to the Caliph).