Black Flags (Pulitzer Prize Winner): The Rise of ISIS

So far there are two really superb books on the rise of the ISIS menace. One is Will McCants's ISIS Apocalypse (reviewed by me a couple of months ago. See "Apocalypse Now" in the reader reviews for that fine work.) Black Flags--The Rise of ISIS by Jody Warrick is the other. Surely there will be a third great book detailing the American-supported effort to crush these vermin, but that story has not been told because it has not yet occurred. But mark my words--it will. Warrick's narrative arc begins in Jordan, and centers on the prison where terrorists and suspects are held. The lead characters are Jihadist activists who will go on to play pivotal roles in Iraq and Syria, the redoubtable (if reluctant) King Abdullah II, and the principal figures of the Jordanian intelligence service. Cruel but not sadistic, hard-nosed but still human, dogged but not dogmatic, it is the Jordanian intelligence officials who come across as some of the real heroes of the piece. Warrick's access to them is a true journalistic tour de force. The main Jihadist character is Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, leader of something of a break-away faction of Al Qaeda in Iraq and founder of ISIS. A true religious fanatic (there is simply no other word for him), Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to fight the infidel Americans and curry favor with Osama Bin Laden. Although his battlefield exploits showed extraordinary courage, Bin Laden and his cohorts disliked and distrusted him and kept him at a far remove. As the Taliban strongholds were wrested free by the Americans, Zarqawi retreated to a lawless enclave of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein's government, From that inauspicious backwater in 2002 Zarqawi put together the skeleton of a Jihadist militia that would ultimately lead the insurgency against the Americans in Iraq. With unprecedented access to primary sources, Warrick has been able to produce a detailed profile of Zarqawi's rise to power--his character, his murderous message, and why that message fell on such receptive ears. (Spoiler alert: It had a lot to do with American missteps in the occupation, but such missteps occurred in a context that was hardly America's making. Underlying the insurgency, and the subsequent rise of ISIS, is the 1000-year-old Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict. The Iraqi Shi'ites, long suppressed by the majority Sunnis, were only too thrilled to settle ancient scores. That's what they were in the midst of doing when Zarqawi's group essentially rallied them under the banner of "Kill every Shia you can find." Ultimately Zarqawi would die in his "safe house" when it was hit by American 500-pounders. But the bones of his Jihadist organization and its revolting ideology would survive. The best analysis of his successor, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (the self-styled Caliph) is found in McCants's ISIS Apocalypse, mentioned above.) In a delicious irony, Zarqawi's ragtag bunch of AK-toting thugs was under the watchful eye of a CIA team that had smuggled themselves into Iraq to get a handle on Saddam's military and its possible links to radical Islamists back in 2002. It was soon obvious that the only only thing that Saddam and the Islamists shared was mutual hatred. (Indeed, Charles "Sam" Fadis, the 47-year-old leader of the CIA team of soldier-spies, realized that a team of under cover Iraqi military men camped nearby were doing the same as he was--spying on the militants to assess how much of a threat they were.) For six months Fadis begged and pleaded with his superiors for a strike that would have wiped out Zerqawi's whole troop, then numbering just a few hundred at most. In irony bordering on paradox, his requests were turned down. Initially, Stan McCrystal at the Pentagon proposed a large, complex strike (which Rumsfeld, to his credit, supported), but which Condoleza Rice opposed on political grounds and others felt was just too complex. Fadis proposed a variety of simpler approaches (any one of which could have been decisive), but these too were turned down. The last turn-down came in January 2003. Among the arguments against an assault at this point was that the decision to invade Iraq had been made, but the public rationale had not been. In that a main pillar of the argument was that Saddam was supporting Islamic terrorists (the reality was just the opposite), it would ruin our argument for invading Iraq if the terrorists were eliminated in a pre-emptive strike before the war began. In other words, having terrorists in Iraq was just too good a pretext for an invasion to let it go to waste by actually solving that problem before it got out of hand, the rationale being that since we were invading anyway, we could wipe them out more publicly once we got there. What the White House war planners failed to appreciate, of course, was that these guys did not have their feet nailed to the sand, and were free to disband and relocate once the invasion occurred. That is what they did, and in the chaos that ensued from our abject failure to plan for post-invasion government, they were well-entrenched in urban areas before we knew they'd left the countryside. Many tens of thousands of lives were lost in consequence, and the ISIS threat emerged from the ruins. It would be too cynical to suggest that everyone in the White House knew that there was no link between Saddam and the Islamo-terrorists. Some did, but some didn't, and the loudest voice of denial came from Dick Cheney (misadvised by the equally misguided Douglas Feith). Dick Cheney's apparent faith in the veracity of this fictional linkage is almost a thing of beauty--if the consequences had not been so ugly and so vastly at variance with America's best interests. While Cheney plays a very small role in Warrick's narrative, and is never singled out for any kind of special criticism, it is hard not to see him as either a bullying imbecile or a pathological liar or both. (In truth, Cheney probably saw Saddam as unfinished business from his time as Secretary of Defense in the first Iraq War in 1991. He longed to finish that business, but there was no serious legal basis for starting another war. In that context, 9-11 came like a gift from the Almighty, providing a rare opportunity for an historic do-over. If, that is, Saddam was somehow instrumental in 9-11. Hence Cheney's pathological need to connect the dots, even when it was manifest that the dots were on completely different pages and written in different books. To the degree that Islamic extremists are a threat to Western values, Saddam's secularist regime was one of the better allies we could have had, but such was the prevailing arrogance and almost willful blindness, this practical political reality was rejected out of hand.) For Warrick there are definitely some heroes in this page-turning tale. One is Nada Bakos, the 20-something CIA analyst who made a specialty of profiling and tracking Zarqawi. How a farm girl from Montana (there were only nine boys and girls in her high school class) has the chops to sift thousands and thousands of pages of raw intelligence to limn an accurate picture of a major terrorist about whom no one else in the Agency had any inkling is something of an enduring mystery. But there it is, and it says something good about the CIA that it could still find and cultivate talent of that ilk. (Cheney tried unsuccessfully to bully her into silence, and was still badgering her to establish an Iraqi link to the terrorists of 9-11 two years after the invasion of Iraq!) In yet another irony of history's turning wheel, numbers of Baathist soldiers whom we stripped of all power and prestige after the invasion have now re-emerged among the ranks of ISIS, giving ISIS a level of military competence they never would have had if we had just left things alone.) Another hero (not dwelt on but certainly of serious note) is Gen Stan McCrystal, who led the Special Forces in Iraq. This was urban fighting at its toughest and dirtiest--house to house, room by room, usually in the dark of night. Maybe it was atonement for not coming up with a better plan to kill Zarqawi in 2002, but McCrystal led numbers of these urban attack squads personally.There aren't many in the Pentagon with such a valid claim to gallantry. President Bush does not come off that badly. While Rumsfeld is locked in denial that an insurgency is even occurring, Bush sadly realizes that everything has gone terribly, terribly wrong and does his level best to right the ship that he has inadvertently steered onto the rocks. President Obama comes off less well, hoping that diplomacy and some sort of mythical public pressure will force Assad of Syria from office without his having to commit American troops. Most particularly grievous was (and remains) the failure to arm the Free Syrian Army (the non-Islamist Sunni opponents of Assad) in a timely manner. Such an opportunity was presented, and rejected by Obama, in the summer of 2012. I thought Warrick was a bit one-sided in his argument in this section, failing (as he did) to mention that the President was locked in a tight re-election race at the time. In that getting our troops out of war in the Middle East was a central tenet of his campaign message (as it had been in 2008), it struck me as a tad unreasonable to expect the man to completely reverse himself in the middle of a campaign and fan the winds of war. The exigencies of politics aside, the President's continuing refusal to get involved a year later, in 2013, is something else again. The facts on the ground had changed, and seriously worsened, and by then he would have had enough political cover to change course and do something constructive (meaning destructive, where ISIS is concerned). Interestingly, among those arguing unsuccessfully for a more aggressive approach was Hillary Clinton. Consequently, I would surmise that no matter who wins the 2016 Presidential sweepstakes, U.S. forces will be taking a more active role in Syria in 2017. But I digress. The arc of Black Flags takes us back to Jordan where it began. And Warrick argues convincingly that that's where our key alliance must begin. That King Abdullah was in Washington in mid-January 2016 and did not get to meet with the President, signals to me that he is still substituting hope for experience, which may make the next President's job--and the lives of Syrians and Iraqis both--a lot tougher than they absolutely need to be. It will not be easy. It is not simply a matter of dropping a bunch of bombs and then walking away triumphant, as some simple minded souls seem to believe. The lesson of the Iraq fiasco is that once the bombs stop falling, you need to pick up the pieces: Restart the water and food supplies, provide at least basic medical care, get electricity and phones working, provide a police force that is at least reasonably honest, courts of justice, and prisons that aren't training grounds for the next generation of terrorists. We are talking about the work of years, not weeks or months. Obama doesn't think that the American people wish to bear that burden. For all I know, he's right. But we really ought to talk about it. In conclusion. Black Flags reads like a fast-paced novel: part spy thriller. part war story, part political intrigue. I really wish it were fiction, but it's not. It is the sad and tragic history of our immediate past and present, with insights into our future.

After reading "Rise of ISIS: A Threat we Can Not Ignore", I was sorely disappointed to end up with hard-sell propaganda about Hamas instead of a scholarly work. "Black Flags", on the other hand, is a fantastic, easy-to-read narrative that actually focuses on the origins of ISIS for those of us interested in really understanding where the movement originated. Sure, you can see their recruiting techniques and activities any day on the news. This book is not heavily focused on that, but really what brought us to this moment: The collapse of post-Saddam Iraq, civil war in Syria, simmering ethnic and religious sect rivalries and two key figures who we get a first-hand look at through a prison doctor. Warrick is a good story-teller and it was easy to follow along with the facts and individuals who make up this story and really put together all of the factors at play on how ISIS has become so powerful, and to also really understand why we shouldn't simply label it is just another Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc...because the goal of this book is to tell you - it really isn't at all. What the book does not get into is every single detail about the war ISIS has unleashed against Iraq, Syria, the West and a number of other civil societies, but the author picks some good illustrations, such as the invasion of Ramadi and how it reflects the ISIS style of governance. As I said, this is really historic background and a relatively short book for those of us fascinated by the topic.

(I finished this book concurrently with other books examining Al Qaeda and the rise of ISIS in the Middle East and this review should be read in the context of the other books. A list of many of the books is at the bottom of this post.) This is the best of the books on the origins of ISIS. There are articles on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with more recent and useful information than this book, but it's hard to understand Baghdadi without understanding his forerunner Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and this book tells Zarqawi's story well. There have been several long-form articles on ISIS and what is known of their leadership over the years, the one that maybe gives a synopsis of Baghdadi closest to this book is Graeme Wood's "What ISIS Really Wants" I highly recommend the interview with Nada Bakos by PBS Frontline. Also helpful are the sections of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's memoir on hunting Zarqawi, which I reviewed last year. What I liked about Warrick's perspective is that he begins and ends in Jordan and highlights the difficulties that the new King Abdullah faced when he assumed the Hashemite throne. Jordan maintains a rather secular society by housing an intelligence aparatus that is notorious for its methods but effective at stopping terrorists; King Hussein had survived 18 assassination attempts. Abdullah's initial amnesty to potential enemies included the pardoning of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's associates. Zarqawi had been a high school dropout, a dissident who was harsh and never smiled but would become like a little boy when his mother was around. Zarqawi's parents signed him up for Islamic training after his rebellious youth, in which he perfomed many sadist acts including raping boys. His gang wanted to relive the glory days of Afghan jihad. By the time of Zarqawi's release from prison, he'd been both well-radicalized and interrogated/tortured many times. From Jordan, Zarqawi fled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he was initially snubbed by Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, Zarqawi goes mostly independently to Iraq to try and impress Al Qaeda by setting up a mini-Afghan training camp but kept his distance from Baghdad. Zarqawi's focus was on operations in the Levant rather than trying to strike the US. While the US would later claim Hussein was harboring Zarqawi, Saddam was scouting for intelligence on his operations just as the CIA was. Those operations included experimenting with poison gas, among other things. Colin Powell's speech at the UN mentioning Zarqawi gave him more publicity than he would have had otherwise; recruits flooded in and preparations were made to fight a prolongued struggle against the US and its allies. A CIA analyst that kept tabs on Zarqawi, Nada Bakos, fits an interesting profile. She grew up in the continental US and was hired right out of college with an economics degree; she applied for the CIA on a whim. She had no intelligence background but became an excellent analyst. Sam Faddis, analyst operating in northern Iraq (probably living among the ethnic Turkmen) scouts Zarqawi's activities and passes word that there are chemical operations, and a lot of terrorists, and the US should consider a strike on the camp. President Bush, however, turned down the idea of a strike before the US' deadline for Saddam to surrender. He doesn't want to look like he's striking before he said, or start the war before he said he would. Bakos maintains that the problem of ISIS could have been nipped in the bud then, but the US missed a golden opportunity and thousands of lives have been needlessly lost as a result. The author writes that King Abdullah hated Saddam Hussein but felt the American invasion was a grave mistake and would only lead to an outcome that would favor Al Qaeda and the other extremists. VP Dick Cheney, on the other hand, violated protocol by calling CIA agents individually to try and sway their analysis to show an Al Qaeda-Hussein link to help persuade Congress and the world that Iraq itself was a threat. Once the invasion ws on, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Cheney did not want to hear about an insurgency. The CIA warned that Zarqawi's network was growing and beginning an insurgency but it fell on deaf ears; this is remarkable since Zarqawi was listed as a reason for justifying the invasion in the first place. Many CIA officers actually lost their jobs. (Reading Left of Boom and other books about CIA incompetence and gross violation of US law makes me unsympathetic to the CIA on these points.) While the war spirals downward, Zarqawi writes a raving plea to Bin Laden to endorse his war, including the large-scale killing of Shia. Al Qaeda rejects the targeting of Shia and other Muslims who might turn against Zarqawi and Al Qaeda. Zarqawi uses his own suras and hadith passages to justify his suicide attacks and other measures. Some scholars furiously debated Zarqawi's positions. The author points out the apocalyptic beliefs about the mahdi and the caliphate that some hadiths indicate will be set up in Syria. Sunni Islam is often compared to Protestantism in Christianity-- there is no central authority which determines correct doctrine. Sunni imams can issue contradicting fatwas and rulings. But Al Qaeda was critical of Zarqawi's alienation of a majority population in Iraq and this led to conflict. Warrick chronicles the battle of Gen. Stan McChrystal and JSOC against Zarqawi, and the long road to Zarqawi's death. Task Force 626 works 18 hour days and ride a series of small victories toward their overall objective of capturing or killing Zarqawi. Meanwhile, Shiia reprisal militias also fight against Zarqawi-backed Sunni insurgents. Jordanian intelligence picks up a large plot to bomb a target in Jordan, but King Abdullah's concerns are only met with a rebuke from USVP Cheney. Throughout the book, Warrick weaves in a story about a would-be female suicide bomber in Jordan who came in from Iraq. Prior to the war, Zarqawi had succeeded in killing a USAID worker but had failed to do anything larger in Jordan. (Zarqawi's group succeeded in blowing up the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad in 2003.) The woman was arrested in 2005 after arriving at a hotel with her husband intent on blowing it up. Her husband's bomb worked and killed 60 people, while hers did not. The woman allegedly claimed she did not intend to kill innocents, had been duped in Iraq, and had never met Zarqawi. Her story is relevant because ISIS demanded her release in 2015, shortly after which she was executed. The February 2006 bombing of the Samarra mosque, which the US claimed was an Al Qaeda plot, prompted hundreds of reprisal killings which might mark the peak of the insurgency. The Jordanian government set up successful traps for Zarqawi soldiers. Task Force 626 was able to launch pre-emptive raids and finally succeeded in killing Zarqawi by aerial bomb in June. Nada Bakos had mixed feelings on his death. On the one hand, he was dead; on the other, the US had missed the earlier opportunity to eliminate him and now Zarqawi was a martyr with many disciples. Iraq might be pacified for a time, but disgruntled and fearful Sunni would take up arms again if they felt threatened and Zarqawi's network was still out there. Meanwhile, a parallel set of events was unfolding in Syria. Future Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford was stationed in Iraq from 2004-2006 where he witnessed US policy ramifications first-hand. Syria had been strongly opposed to the US-led war and its porous border with Iraq allowed a an easy way for fighters to come in easily and refugees to go out. Syria re-established formal diplomatic ties with Iraq in 2006 just as Ford was departing for a position in Algeria. The Syrian government would later be implicated in pro-Sunni attacks within Iraq. As a college student in the 1980s, Ford had spent time in Syria and enjoyed Syrian hospitality there, and President Obama appointed him US Ambassador in 2010. Warrick notes that King Abdullah in Jordan began to implement modest reforms to placate any nascent protest movement and encouraged Assad to do likewise. (PM Erdoğan of Turkey supposedly encouraged him likewise) On the eve of the Arab Spring, Ford had angered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by lecturing him on human rights. During the early days of the protest movement, Ford visited Hama which was interpreted as a tacit backing by the US of a rebellion against Assad. Assad responded to protests with force and by releasing hundreds of Zarqawi-style extremists from prison in order to prove his point that there were indeed an extremist threat within Syria, and Ford was forced to leave in 2011. Pandora's box was now open as the Arab Spring freed many other extremists to operate across the Middle East and North Africa. The least-known character in the story is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would rise to a prominence Zarqawi would have envied by adopting many of his tactics. Warrick recounts what was known of Baghdadi at the time of authorship: He was 32 and working on his doctorate when the US invaded Iraq. He was released from an American-controlled prison because he came across as a scholarly figure and not seen as a threat; he got his doctorate in 2007. His time in prison with other jihadis allowed him to form a network and as Sunni felt threatened by an increasingly vengeful Shiia-led government, and events unfolded in Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring, there was a chaos that Baghdadi was able to tap into. Baghdadi's group attacked Iraqi prisons, freeing people they could immediately employ. While the CIA warned the White House that ISIS was headed toward Baghdad, everyone was surprised by the rapidity at which the larger US-equipped Iraqi army abandoned entire regions of the country to a few head-strong fighters. Warrick also tells the story of a Syrian-American lobbyist who looks for aid for the Free Syrian Army and the frustrations he experiences as Syria is torn apart. As the radical Al-Nusra Front forms to fight Assad, King Abdullah allegedly opposes Gulf state money going to arm them, forseeing a worsening of the problem. Warrick recounts the debate in the White House about arming the FSA and quotes from Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton's memoirs (both of which I have reviewed here), which Obama would not back, especially during the 2012 election season. Mustafa had a hard time helping the Syrians, but his group are the ones who captured samples of Assad's chemical weapons attacks. Robert Ford resigns from the State Department in 2014 because he can no longer support US policy. Warrick's account ends as ISIS is in full control of the situation. While there are calls for introspective Islamic reform from Egypt's President Fattah al-Sisi, it remains to be seen if influential Muslims worldwide follow. I give this book 4.5 stars out of 5. Warrick does a great job telling the stories of those who saw the precursor to ISIS and understood best how it was formed. He also does a good job showing the perilous position of Jordan who has to live with the consequences. This is a very informative book, the best of four I have finished thus far on the origins ISIS. Warrick does not focus as much on the methods and operations of ISIS itself. -------- Al Qaeda and ISIS books reviewed in 2016: The Siege of Mecca - Yaroslav Trofimov (5 stars) The Bin Ladens - Steve Coll (4 stars) Growing Up Bin Laden - Najwa and Omar Bin Laden (4.5 stars) Guantanamo Diary - Mohamedou Ould Slahi (4.5 stars) The Black Banners - Ali Soufan (5 stars) Black Flags - The Rise of ISIS - Joby Warrick (4.5 stars) ISIS - Jessica Stern (4 stars) ISIS Exposed - Eric Stakelbeck (2.5 stars) The Rise of ISIS - Jay Sekulow (1 star)

If you are confused about ISIS, ISIL, al Qaeda, bin Laden, Sunnis, Shiites etc., what it all means and how it’s all connected, this book gives a great insight into the history of the tale of woes from the Middle East.

Names such as Abu-Musad al-Zarqawi, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and al-Nusra have become very familiar to anyone keeping abreast of world affairs. They are all players within the seemingly evermore turbulent and violent landscape of the Middle East. Yet, I suspect that very few of us understand the relationship between the various factions and key players of these Islamist groups, how they have come into being and what their distinctive ideologies are. Joby Warrick is a Pulitzer Prize winning, American journalist who is the national security reporter for The Washington Post, and in this brilliantly written and thrilling narrative he traces the origins of ISIS from the brutal activities of the sadistic Jordanian, al-Zarqawi who established Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, the first incarnation of the ISIS we are so familiar with today. As well as describing the rise and spread of ISIS and the other militant groups, Warrick remorselessly reveals how western action, or often inaction, contributed to the flourishing of this vile regime. Reading it, as I did, very soon after the Chilcott report on the war in Iraq, was timely to say the least. Warrick’s research and inside knowledge is remarkable and expansive, but in no way does it make the account turgid. In fact, I had to keep reminding myself that this was a work of non-fiction and not an action-packed novel. It is, to use an old cliché, a page-turner, and, from the very first page, when he recounts the order for the execution for the female bomber involved in the carnage of Amman’s Raddison Hotel in 2006, I found it utterly compelling as a read. It has made me much more enlightened about the context of current affairs and I strongly and unreservedly commend this book to anyone who wants to get a better handle on these world-shaping events and people. Indeed, I would go so far as to describe it as indispensable.

Best book ever about ISIS. An incredible journey!

Muy bien escrito. Narra el ascenso de al-Zarqawi, precursor de un movimiento que se convertiría en la rama Iraquí de Al-Qaeda y que tras su muerte, y tras unos años de decadencia, acabaría convirtiéndose en Isis. Zarqawi es originario de Jordania, así que también se mezcla un poco con la historia de Jordania y trata con especial detalle los atentados del movimiento en ese país. Muy informativo, diría que bastante neutral y tras una lectura una obtiene una visión más objetiva de lo sucedido en la región.

One of those books which you can read without taking any break. Some eye opening decisions by leaders of few countries which led to the rise of ISIS and created miseries in the Middle East. This is a must read book if one wants to understand what went wrong in Iraq & Syria.