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If you read the "anti-imperialist" bilge about the rise of ISIS, you'd
think that it was a conspiracy planned out in advance by American,
British and Israeli spooks--the latest version of this articulated by
arch-buffoon Tariq Ali at the pro-war rally in London. In fact, ISIS was
the result of the American invasion of Iraq that installed a pro-Iranian
Shi'ite sectarian gang in Baghdad at the urging of Chalabi in
partnership with neocons. When Anbar Province erupted in 2004, the left
was ecstatic over the resistance in Fallujah that was led in part by the
same exact people who are in the driver's seat of ISIS today: Saddam's
officer corps and jihadists. A new book lays this out in detail.
NY Times, Dec. 1 2015
Review: ‘Black Flags,’ Tracing the Birth of ISIS
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In the last month, terror attacks that left 130 dead in Paris and 43
dead in Beirut and took down a Russian airliner with 224 people aboard
have made the entire world horribly aware that the Islamic State not
only seeks to establish a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, but also is
beginning to export its monstrous savagery abroad. Although the Islamic
State has been in the headlines for only two years, and its metastasis
has been alarmingly swift, the seeds of the group — in its many
incarnations — were planted many years ago, as Joby Warrick’s gripping
new book, “Black Flags,” makes clear.
Mr. Warrick, a reporter for The Washington Post and the author of the
2011 best seller “The Triple Agent,” has a gift for constructing
narratives with a novelistic energy and detail, and in this volume, he
creates the most revealing portrait yet laid out in a book of Abu Musab
Al-Zarqawi, the founding father of the organization that would become
the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL).
Although this book owes some debts to Jean-Charles Brisard’s 2005 book,
“Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda,” Mr. Warrick places that material in
context with recent developments and uses his own copious sources within
the United States and Jordanian intelligence to flesh out Mr. Zarqawi’s
story and the crucial role that American missteps and misjudgments would
play in fueling his rise and the advance of the Islamic State.
Perhaps emulating the approach Lawrence Wright took in “The Looming
Tower,” his masterly 2006 account of the road to Sept. 11, Mr. Warrick
focuses parts of this book on the lives of several individuals with
singular, inside takes on the overarching story. They include a doctor
named Basel al-Sabha, who treated Mr. Zarqawi in prison; Abu Haytham,
who ran the counterterrorism unit of Jordan’s intelligence service and
fought the Islamic State in its various guises for years; and Nada
Bakos, a young C.I.A. officer who became the agency’s top expert on Mr.
Zarqawi. This narrative approach lends the larger story of the Islamic
State an up-close-and-personal immediacy and underscores the many
what-ifs that occurred along the way.
In “Black Flags,” Mr. Zarqawi comes across as a kind of Bond villain,
who repeatedly foils attempts to neutralize him. He was a hard-drinking,
heavily tattooed Jordanian street thug (well versed in pimping, drug
dealing and assault), and when he found religion, he fell for it hard,
having a relative slice off his offending tattoos with a razor blade.
He traveled to Afghanistan in 1989 to wage jihad; during a stint in a
Jordanian prison, he emerged as a leader known and feared for his
ruthlessness as an enforcer among Islamist inmates. He began thinking of
himself as a man with a destiny, and in the aftermath of the American
invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he set up a small training camp in
Iraq’s northeastern mountains, near the Iranian border.
At this point, Mr. Zarqawi was just a small-time jihadist. But then, Mr.
Warrick writes, “in the most improbable of events, America intervened,”
declaring — in an effort to make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein —
that “this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship
and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” As
C.I.A. analysts well knew, this assertion was false; in retrospect, it
would also have the perverse effect of turning Mr. Zarqawi into “an
international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement.” Weeks
later, when United States troops invaded Iraq, this newly famous
terrorist “gained a battleground and a cause and soon thousands of
followers.”
Accused by the Bush administration of being in league with Saddam
Hussein, Mr. Zarqawi would use the Americans’ toppling of the dictator
to empower himself. He was a diabolical strategist, and he quickly
capitalized on two disastrous decisions made by the Americans
(dissolving the Iraqi Army and banning Baath Party members from
positions of authority), which intensified the country’s security woes
and left tens of thousands of Iraqis out of work and on the street.
Soon, former members of Mr. Hussein’s military were enlisting in Mr.
Zarqawi’s army; others offered safe houses, intelligence, cash and weapons.
While the Bush White House was debating whether there even was an
insurgency in Iraq, Mr. Zarqawi was helping to direct the worsening
violence there, orchestrating car and suicide bombings and shocking
beheadings. He also used terrorism to change the battlefield, fomenting
sectarian hatred between the Shiites and the disenfranchised and
increasingly bitter Sunnis, guaranteeing more chaos and discrediting the
electoral process.
Mr. Zarqawi’s penchant for ultraviolence had won him his favorite
moniker, “the sheikh of the slaughterers,” but by mid-2005, his
bloodthirstiness and killing of Shiite innocents worried Al Qaeda’s
leadership, which warned him that “the mujahed movement must avoid any
action that the masses do not understand or approve.”
After many narrow escapes, Mr. Zarqawi was finally killed by a United
States airstrike in June 2006, and over the next few years, the United
States managed to decimate much of his organization. Still, dangerous
embers remained, and they would burst into flames under the group’s new
leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who shared Mr. Zarqawi’s taste for
gruesome violence, and who had built up a valuable network of supporters
while serving time in Camp Bucca, a United States-controlled prison
known as a “jihadi university” for its role in radicalizing inmates. The
sectarianism of the Iraqi prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki drove
increasingly marginalized Sunnis into the embrace of the Islamic State —
a dynamic hastened by the withdrawal of American troops in 2011.
Meanwhile, in Syria, the chaos of civil war created perfect conditions
for the Islamic State’s explosive growth and a home base for its
self-proclaimed caliphate.
The final chapters of this volume have a somewhat hurried feel. In fact,
more detailed examinations of the rise of Mr. Baghdadi, the Islamic
State’s sophisticated use of social media, and its efforts to displace
Al Qaeda as the leader of global jihad can be found in two illuminating
recent books: “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” by Michael Weiss and
Hassan Hassan, and “ISIS: The State of Terror,” by Jessica Stern and J.
M. Berger. But for readers interested in the roots of the Islamic State
and the evil genius of its godfather, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, there is no
better book to begin with than “Black Flags.”
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