Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Zarqawi chose Afghanistan. With a pair of friends, he made his way to Kandahar, eventually arriving at the headquarters of the one former Afghan Arab who might have been expected to welcome him: Osama bin Laden. But instead of getting a warm greeting from his old mujahideen comrade, Zarqawi was rudely snubbed. The al-Qaeda founder refused even to see Zarqawi, instead sending one of his aides to check out the Jordanians.

What an asshole. Blowing up the World Trade Center is one thing, but being a terrible host is something else entirely. Good manners cost nothing.

Zarqawi was left to languish in a guesthouse for two weeks before Bin Laden finally dispatched a senior deputy, a former Egyptian army officer named Sayf al-Adel, to meet with him.

I'd like to know more about this guesthouse. I may have been hasty in my condemnation of bin Laden if he had a guesthouse. Was there a pool? And, more importantly, was there a pool boy?

Al-Adel, writing about the events years later, acknowledged that he also was leery of Zarqawi, a man who already had a reputation for being stubborn and combative.

In any organization, whether it be the largest online retailer in the country, or Global Islamic Jihad, people skills are important. Someone who considers himself somehow separate and above his coworkers really cannot be tolerated. You want someone who is committed to the goals of the organization, but who also just views it as a job, and doesn't let the daily stresses get to him (or her). At the end of the day, even if everyone else isn't faithful enough, they are advancing the cause, and there is time to gloat when you're the only martyr to get the 72 virgins. Do the lesser, flawed martyrs get a smaller number of virgins? Maybe 12 virgins, four of whom were immodest with their ankles, and one who regularly gave blowjobs on the third date.

“In a nutshell, Abu Musab was a hardliner when it came to his disagreements with other fraternal brothers,” al-Adel would write. “Therefore, I had reservations.

Is it wrong of me to hope they had a formal performance review process?

Despite Zarqawi’s many shortcomings, al-Adel gradually came to feel sympathy for his visitor, who, in his lumbering, inarticulate way, reminded al-Adel of a younger version of himself. Anyone as stubbornly opinionated as Zarqawi could never be part of al-Qaeda, and al-Adel never suggested that he should join. But the al-Qaeda deputy had an idea about a different way Zarqawi could be helpful to the organization.

His first training base was initially made up only of a handful of close friends from Jordan, along with their families. But Zarqawi sent invitations to some of his old mujahideen comrades and prison contacts, and soon others were making the trek to western Afghanistan.

Did al Qaeda provide a template for the invitations? Were they sent by eVite or something similar? The purely mundane operational aspects of the al Qaeda network are what interest me most of all. We expect the Nazis to do be organized like that, because they were Germans, but Islamic Jihadists? Have I scoffed at Islamofascism as a concept, only to be wrong?

He had taken a second wife, Asra, the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of his Palestinian campmates, discomfiting some of his al-Qaeda sponsors, who viewed the marrying of children as unseemly.

I have no idea why a grown man would want to deal with a teenager on a regular basis like this. It's one thing if they are your own child, I suppose, since you can live in hope that they will grow up and leave the house, but if you marry them... you don't even have that. It's like the Twilight books, where the immortal vampire has been alive for thousands of years, and wants to hang out with teenagers. What could you possibly talk about? "I remember when the Black Plague was a thing..." And everything is just so dramatic with teenagers. They have no sense of perspective and can't really distinguish between their favorite band breaking up, and being forced to marry a creepy middle aged pedophile. Both are the end of the world.

He spent his free time reading books, learning basic computer skills,

Microsoft Word for Jihadists!

In the West, newspapers were beginning to speculate about whether America’s government, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, was preparing for a possible second war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi, for one, believed the stories.

That's just crazy talk.

In the weeks and months after the attacks, as hostility toward Americans soared,

This could really use some more background. Why did hostility soar after the attack? The first reaction, across the world, was horror at what had happened, and an outpouring of support. What events changed this? What stories were traveling through the Mideast? Was this a general animosity, or only from some segments of society?

Bakos filled out an application and took an exam, and, to her amazement, an agency recruiter called back to set up an interview.

I could use a new job, and am completely lacking in both moral fiber and empathy.

Special Activities Division.

SAD.

She suggested that the turmoil in Iraq was not unlike the birth pains experienced by Germany as it was refashioned into a democratic state after World War II.

Germany was not a multiethnic state, though. There were no great divisions in the populace that could be easily exploited by demagogues -- Hitler had removed those. A better analogy might have been Germany after WW I. If you look at the multiethnic states that have existed for any length of time in history, they have been either empires, totalitarian regimes, or the US and Switzerland. If Czechoslovakia cannot survive, why do we expect Iraq to?

In January 2004, some ten months after his arrival in Baghdad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sat at a keyboard to compose a letter to Osama bin Laden.

the tree of triumph and empowerment cannot grow tall and lofty without blood and defiance of death.

In just over a month, Fallujah would become forever associated with the deaths of four American security contractors who were ambushed and then dismembered, dragged through the streets and burned, with their bodies left dangling from a Euphrates River bridge.

We correctly call these men "mercenaries".

four American security contractors,

Mercenaries. Not security contractors.

Ford’s decades of diplomatic experience had shown that political solutions existed for almost every conflict. Eventually, even Sunnis and Shiites would weary of killings and destruction and grope toward a solution that would allow the sides to peacefully coexist as Iraqis.

Why does he assume they want to be Iraqis?

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 mingle.

To be fair, they do resemble male and female body parts...

The killings happened on both sides, of course, but many Sunnis, after decades of comparatively privileged status under Saddam, were incensed that U.S. forces were failing to stop the attacks.

The defeat of the Sunni insurgency in Southern Iraq after the first Gulf War, that the US let be put down since the no-fly zone specified fixed wing aircraft, rather than helicopter gunships, probably did not help.

Still other folders contained long e-mails to al-Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden himself, as well as PowerPoint presentations and priceless video recordings of meetings of Zarqawi’s leadership council, in which the Jordanian discussed strategy and plans.

Has anything other than evil ever come from PowerPoint?

“There was a PowerPoint briefing that was as good as any given by one of our commands,” said a military analyst who was among those who pored through the computer’s contents.

And, look what happened with our commands -- torture and incompetence. We took good, wholesome soldiers and turned them into torturers.

Zarqawi, when it was his turn, told jokes and stories.

It is grossly unfair of the author to put this line in, and not actually give us any of Zarqawi's jokes and stories. I want to know what happens when a Priest, a Rabbi and a Suicide Bomber are waiting by the pearly gates!

The extreme secrecy of her job—her family still had only a vague idea of what she did for a living—limited her socializing mostly to work friends.

This is a mistake. Why socialize exclusively with coworkers and colleagues when you can live a life of lies? "What do you do?" "I'm a burka model. I travel a lot to the Mideast for the runway shows -- it's a little weird, but apparently my eyes and the bridge of my nose are exquisite if you block out the rest of my face." "How did you...?" "That's a funny story. I was in Paris, which has a large Arab population by the way, because of their involvement in Algiers, and I had bangs at the time, and I was eating a croissant, and it was in front of my face when I happened to see a man staring at me..."

The CIA’s acquisition of the letter was a closely guarded secret, so Bakos was only allowed to view it from inside a secure chamber that analysts call “the vault.

To prevent any monitoring, the vault spun wildly -- the occupant would be strapped into a chair, with the document strapped to a desk in front of them, and both would be spinning and twisting through the air while hallucagenic images were projected on the walls, and the Doors played at a deafening level. Interns would go in to read books of poetry while smoking pot.

The problem, which Zawahiri outlined in restrained prose, was simply this: Zarqawi’s bloodthirstiness was beginning to damage the al-Qaeda brand among Muslims.

It was a peculiarity of Osama bin Laden that he would assign analysts with names as close as possible to what they were analyzing.

The admonition was accompanied by praise for Zarqawi’s courage and military accomplishments, and Zawahiri closed the letter by asking for some cash

Dear sir, We question the practices of your jihad, and find that your methods are not only unwise, but also tarnish the good reputation of al Qaeda. Please send money. Yours, etc. Zawahiri

Such open defiance of al-Qaeda’s leadership was mystifying, coming from a man who had worked so hard to obtain Bin Laden’s approval. Bakos and other counterterrorism officers picked apart the letters and transcripts from inside their classified “vault,” wondering whether Zarqawi was making a conscious play for global leadership of the jihadist movement, or just being boneheaded.

Too many people stop and wonder "evil or stupid?" The answer is invariably both.

Zarqawi had embraced the emerging power of the Internet to craft a reputation as a fierce warrior who killed Allah’s enemies without mercy.

Unfortunately, Zarqawi was unable to get the domain name fierce-warrior-who kills-Allah’s-enemies-without-mercy.com, since that was taken by squatters. He was able to get the .org, .us, and .tv, though, and he lobbied various religious leaders for a fatwah against cyber squatters.

“He killed Sergio?” the president asked, referring to the diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in Zarqawi’s spectacular bombing of the UN building during the war’s first summer. Bush had met the dapper Brazilian and liked him. “I didn’t know that.

"Condi, remove him from the Christmas card list -- that would just be cruel to his widow..."

“Why don’t we just kill ’im?” Bush asked, to nervous laughter around the room.

McCrystal did not know it at the time, but this was a running joke in the situation room. No one was ever mentioned without the president asking that question. Sometimes, it was funny, like when someone mentioned the Prime Minister of Canada. Sometimes it was awkward, like when someone mentioned his father. But George W. Bush had a joke, and he was the President, and what was the point of being President If you cannot make everyone laugh uncomfortably at your joke?

One report dispatched to the Pentagon in late September described the discovery of a letter, signed by Zarqawi himself, authorizing an attack on the infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where many of Zarqawi’s men were being held. The strike was to be carried out by “AMZ elements”—the military abbreviation for Zarqawi’s forces—in October or November, during the annual Ramadan observance, a time when an act of martyrdom is said to carry special rewards in the afterlife.

At last they lay side by side: his-and-hers suicide vests, tailor-made for the couple and constructed to be powerful, yet slim enough to go unnoticed under their street clothes.

Suicide vest tailor is one of those careers that I never even thought about pursuing -- who knew it was an option? It's like being a cat ophthalmologist or something.

Even a suicide vest should fit comfortably.

Your last few moments on Earth should be as comfortable as possible. I would not want to wear an itchy, uncomfortable suicide vest.

Someone had regarded Sajida al-Rishawi as worthy of a role in al-Qaeda in Iraq’s first mass-casualty terrorist strike outside of Iraq.

Was there no al Qaeda in Jordan? Were they overstepping their bounds?

As a final step, they were brought before one of Zarqawi’s hired clerics for a hasty and legally dubious marriage ceremony. It was done not for the couple’s sake—presumably, they would never live to consummate a marriage—but to avoid violating one of Zarqawi’s strict religious codes. To the Islamists, it is forbidden for a woman to travel unless accompanied by her husband or a close male relative.

It doesn't take that long to consummate a marriage.

the thousand-year-old al-Askari Mosque, a revered shrine in the heart of the ancient Iraqi city of Samarra.

I wonder what construction was used a thousand years ago.

Residents poured into the street to see a rubble pile where the dome had stood. An entire outer wall had collapsed, and the dome cratered inward, leaving a concrete stump and a tangle of twisted rebar.

Huh. Thousand year old rebar.

Zarqawi moved with the confidence and vigor of a man who relished a fight. He dressed fully in black, from his beard and gangsterlike skullcap to his ninja’s black pants and tunic. The only color contrast came from the green ammo pouch strapped to his chest and his jarringly white Made in the USA New Balance sneakers.

But, they were decent sneakers, and New Balance had offered them a sizable promotional fee.

“

there were some mistakes made.

“He wasn’t a bomb maker, but he understood how to get the material to the right places so it all came together,” the official said, “He was sort of like a project manager.

“After the Iraq war, the last thing we’re going to do is send the military to Syria. It will never, ever happen.

So wrong.

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.

A single fact about his family background would prove crucial later in life: as a member of Iraq’s al-Bu Badri tribe, he could claim to be part of the same ancestral line as Muhammad—a requirement, in the opinion of some Islamic scholars, for anyone seeking to become the caliph, or the leader of the Muslim nation.

Mohammad had a whole bunch of wives, many of them children. Was this tribe based on one of his raped child-wives?

He came of age during some of the most turbulent years in modern Iraqi history. Born in 1971,

Again, people born after me prove to be more accomplished than I am.

He was nearly twenty when the Iraqi army suffered its humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War.

He was thirty-two and on a track to obtain his doctorate, and a future professorship, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003.

A doctorate in Evil, no doubt.

He arrived on February 4. A military photographer snapped the startled visage of a round-faced man approaching the start of middle age,

No. No, no, no, no. He is younger than me. He was not at the start of middle age in 2004, he was 33. The very late 20s.

If Bucca was indeed a jihadi university, Baghdadi would ultimately become its greatest alumnus.

Valedictorian, Jihadi U. He narrowly beat out a man who was so disgusted at his failure, that he changed his name to Thomas Smith, moved to Nebraska, married an infidel, and had two children and a dog that he corralled with a white picket fence. "That will show those fuckers," he said.