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

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The twenty-seven-year-old former computer programmer deliberately styled himself after his hero, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for whom he briefly served before being arrested and thrown in the Camp Bucca prison in 2006. Now he sought to replicate his mentor’s look, from the shaggy black hair, cap, and beard to his penchant for posing unmasked for cameras

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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

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Most important, the commandos had found a way to get under the terrorists’ skin. The insurgents were no longer the deadliest, most unpredictable force in Iraq. Now it was their turn to be afraid, and exposed. The truth, as Joseph and his comrades discovered, was that the Islamic State’s fighters were skilled butchers, but lousy soldiers. “They’re

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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

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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

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Shopkeepers who tried to stay open found themselves subjected to arbitrary and occasionally bizarre regulations. In some neighborhoods, grocers were threatened with punishment if they displayed cucumbers and tomatoes in the same stall. The jihadists maintained that the vegetables resembled male and female body parts and should not be permitted to

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Now Syrians were learning just how cynical Assad’s goodwill gesture had been. Among the inmates discharged over the spring and summer were a number of radical Islamists who belonged to known terrorist organizations. Some were jihadists who had been picked up while attempting to cross into Iraq to join the insurgency there. Others were suspected

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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

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