Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

The jihadists’ new chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was a man of soaring ambitions, but in late 2011, well into his second year as leader, his boasts were as empty as the group’s coffers. The Islamic State of Iraq lacked resources, fighters, and sanctuary. And, perhaps most critically, it lacked a cause—a single big idea with which it could rally its d

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

Zarqawi began memorizing the Koran, spending hour after hour reading, or staring blankly with the open volume in his lap. His diffuse rage took on a focus: a fierce, single-minded hatred for perceived enemies of Allah. The list started with Jordan’s monarch, King Hussein, whom Zarqawi saw as the illegitimate leader of an artificial country, respons

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.

There was, however, yet a fourth possible outcome: prolonged violence with no clear resolution. In this scenario, the country known as Syria would disintegrate in a maelstrom that slowly consumed other countries in its wake, destabilizing the region for decades to come. Abdullah, in his discussions with aides, imagined a fractured Syria divided int

Such hallmarks, like the voice on the audio recording, unmistakably belonged to Zarqawi, a man the Mukhabarat knew exceptionally well. He was, at the time of the bombing, the head of a particularly vicious terrorist network called al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the Jordanians had known him back in the days when he was Ahmad the hoodlum, a high school dropou

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

Powell later described the presentation as one of the biggest blunders of his career, a mistake he would attribute to sloppy intelligence and wishful thinking at senior levels of the Bush administration. In reality, every word of the Zarqawi portion of the speech had been written by senior officials of the CIA after weeks of rancorous debate with W

“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell began, just before Zarqawi’s bearded image appeared on a large screen behind the council’s circular table.