Black Flags the Rise of Isis Scholarly Review
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Review: 'Black Flags,' Tracing the Birth of ISIS
In the concluding month, terror attacks that left 130 expressionless in Paris and 43 dead in Beirut and took down a Russian airliner with 224 people aboard accept fabricated the unabridged earth horribly aware that the Islamic State not simply seeks to establish a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, but also is beginning to export its monstrous savagery abroad. Although the Islamic State has been in the headlines for only two years, and its metastasis has been alarmingly swift, the seeds of the grouping — in its many incarnations — were planted many years ago, as Joby Warrick'south gripping new book, "Blackness Flags," makes articulate.
Mr. Warrick, a reporter for The Washington Post and the author of the 2011 all-time seller "The Triple Agent," has a gift for constructing narratives with a novelistic energy and particular, and in this volume, he creates the most revealing portrait yet laid out in a book of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the founding father of the organization that would become the Islamic Land (also known every bit ISIS or ISIL).
Although this book owes some debts to Jean-Charles Brisard's 2005 book, "Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda," Mr. Warrick places that textile in context with recent developments and uses his own copious sources inside the U.s. and Jordanian intelligence to mankind out Mr. Zarqawi's story and the crucial role that American missteps and misjudgments would play in fueling his rise and the accelerate of the Islamic State.
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Perhaps emulating the approach Lawrence Wright took in "The Looming Belfry," his masterly 2006 account of the road to Sept. 11, Mr. Warrick focuses parts of this book on the lives of several individuals with singular, inside takes on the overarching story. They include a dr. named Basel al-Sabha, who treated Mr. Zarqawi in prison; Abu Haytham, who ran the counterterrorism unit of measurement of Jordan'southward intelligence service and fought the Islamic Country in its various guises for years; and Nada Bakos, a young C.I.A. officer who became the bureau's summit proficient on Mr. Zarqawi. This narrative arroyo lends the larger story of the Islamic Land an up-close-and-personal immediacy and underscores the many what-ifs that occurred along the way.
In "Black Flags," Mr. Zarqawi comes across every bit a kind of Bail villain, who repeatedly foils attempts to neutralize him. He was a hard-drinking, heavily tattooed Jordanian street thug (well versed in pimping, drug dealing and assault), and when he found religion, he fell for it hard, having a relative piece off his offending tattoos with a razor bract.
He traveled to Afghanistan in 1989 to wage jihad; during a stint in a Jordanian prison, he emerged as a leader known and feared for his ruthlessness as an enforcer among Islamist inmates. He began thinking of himself as a man with a destiny, and in the aftermath of the American invasion of Transitional islamic state of afghanistan in 2001, he set up a pocket-sized preparation camp in Iraq'due south northeastern mountains, nigh the Iranian edge.
At this point, Mr. Zarqawi was merely a small-time jihadist. But then, Mr. Warrick writes, "in the almost improbable of events, America intervened," declaring — in an effort to make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein — that "this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq's dictatorship and the plotters backside the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." Every bit C.I.A. analysts well knew, this assertion was simulated; in retrospect, information technology would also accept the perverse upshot of turning Mr. Zarqawi into "an international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement." Weeks later, when United States troops invaded Iraq, this newly famous terrorist "gained a battleground and a cause and shortly thousands of followers."
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Accused by the Bush administration of existence in league with Saddam Hussein, Mr. Zarqawi would employ the Americans' toppling of the dictator to empower himself. He was a diabolical strategist, and he speedily capitalized on two disastrous decisions made by the Americans (dissolving the Iraqi Regular army and banning Baath Party members from positions of authorization), which intensified the land's security woes and left tens of thousands of Iraqis out of work and on the street. Shortly, erstwhile members of Mr. Hussein's military were enlisting in Mr. Zarqawi'southward army; others offered safe houses, intelligence, greenbacks and weapons.
While the Bush-league White House was debating whether there even was an insurgency in Republic of iraq, Mr. Zarqawi was helping to straight the worsening violence at that place, orchestrating car and suicide bombings and shocking beheadings. He too used terrorism to change the battlefield, fomenting sectarian hatred between the Shiites and the disenfranchised and increasingly biting Sunnis, guaranteeing more chaos and discrediting the electoral process.
Mr. Zarqawi's penchant for ultraviolence had won him his favorite moniker, "the sheikh of the slaughterers," but past mid-2005, his bloodthirstiness and killing of Shiite innocents worried Al Qaeda's leadership, which warned him that "the mujahed movement must avert whatsoever action that the masses do not understand or corroborate."
After many narrow escapes, Mr. Zarqawi was finally killed past a The states airstrike in June 2006, and over the next few years, the United States managed to decimate much of his organization. Notwithstanding, unsafe embers remained, and they would burst into flames under the group's new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who shared Mr. Zarqawi'southward gustatory modality for gruesome violence, and who had built upward a valuable network of supporters while serving time in Camp Bucca, a United States-controlled prison known every bit a "jihadi university" for its role in radicalizing inmates. The sectarianism of the Iraqi prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki drove increasingly marginalized Sunnis into the embrace of the Islamic State — a dynamic hastened by the withdrawal of American troops in 2011. Meanwhile, in Syrian arab republic, the chaos of civil state of war created perfect conditions for the Islamic State'south explosive growth and a dwelling house base for its self-proclaimed caliphate.
The final capacity of this volume have a somewhat hurried feel. In fact, more than detailed examinations of the rise of Mr. Baghdadi, the Islamic State's sophisticated apply of social media, and its efforts to displace Al Qaeda every bit the leader of global jihad can exist found in two illuminating recent books: "ISIS: Inside the Regular army of Terror," past Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, and "ISIS: The Country of Terror," past Jessica Stern and J. Grand. Berger. But for readers interested in the roots of the Islamic State and the evil genius of its godfather, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, there is no better book to begin with than "Black Flags."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/books/review-black-flags-tracing-the-birth-of-isis.html
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