Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

Though some would cast his movement as an al-Qaeda offshoot, Zarqawi was no one’s acolyte. His brand of jihadism was utterly, brutally original. Osama bin Laden had sought to liberate Muslim nations gradually from corrupting Western influences so they could someday unify as a single Islamic theocracy, or caliphate. Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted th

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

Assured that the Jordanians would protect him, “he just started spewing,” the official said. Suddenly the agency’s interrogators were filling notebooks with rare insider accounts of AQI’s command structure and tactics. One of Karbouly’s jobs, according to the former senior intelligence official, was to oversee incoming supplies for Zarqawi’s bomb f

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

Though she had never met Zarqawi, she could not grasp that the leader of AQI had really wanted her to sacrifice her own life to kill mothers and children at a wedding party. The fault was probably hers, she said, for, deep down, she had never been sure that she would be capable of pressing the detonator when the moment came, with her future and tha

Had it not been for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Islamic State’s greatest butcher would likely have lived out his years as a college professor. Until 2003, life was steering him toward a quiet career of teaching Islamic jurisprudence to twenty-year-olds, rather than strapping bombs to their chests.

“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.

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.

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.