Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

Much later, intelligence officials and terrorism experts who studied the early war years marveled at Zarqawi’s strategic cunning. Whether deliberately or by coincidence, he picked targets that would confound U.S. ambitions for Iraq and ensure that the occupation of the country would be long and painful. The opening salvo against an Arab embassy wou

In the weeks after sixteen U.S. marines had been killed in a series of ambushes around the city, the Americans were in a vengeful mood. Firefights erupted daily in residential neighborhoods, and bullets tore through bedrooms where families slept. Checkpoint sentries reflexively shot at motorists who approached too quickly or failed to heed warnings

Captured Iraqi soldiers were paraded before cameras and then gunned down in open pits. Suspected apostates were murdered in the streets, and priceless Babylonian artifacts—a source of cultural pride for generations of Iraqis—were smashed into powder. Such acts were welcomed by small numbers of religious conservatives whose views aligned with those

The government of Syria had allowed a mob to besiege the American diplomatic mission. And then, whether through inaction or by design, it had let the intruders rampage through the embassy grounds—a violation, in essence, of sovereign U.S. territory.

Publicly, the monarchy could claim that the missile-defense system would shield Jordanians from any errant Iraqi SCUDs that might threaten Jordanian territory. In reality, the Americans wanted an additional safeguard against a possible Iraqi attack on Israel in retaliation for the invasion. It was yet another sign that war was coming.

reopened, everything had changed. The old textbooks and curricula—the “books of the infidels,” ISIS called them—had been tossed out, replaced by religious training. Meanwhile, the city’s hundreds of orphaned children and teens were moved to military camps to learn to shoot rifles and drive suicide trucks. Abu Ibrahim would sometimes see the young I

The U.S. troop withdrawal began in late 2007, and the last convoy of soldiers to exit the country would roll across the Iraq-Kuwait border on December 18, 2011, ending a deployment that cost nearly forty-five hundred American lives and left more than thirty-two thousand wounded. By the most conservative estimates, the Iraqi civilian death toll was

Others were flogged with electric cables, burned with lit cigarettes, or hung upside down by means of a stick placed under the knees, a position the guards gleefully called “grilled chicken.

Now Baghdadi had the core elements he needed for his reinvigorated ISIS army. Already, some of his fighters were moving to take control of small villages and towns in northern and eastern Syria, and now they would be joined by battle-hardened, ideologically disciplined fighters straight from Iraq’s worst prisons.