Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

In the prophetic passages of the Muslim holy texts known as the Hadith, Zarqawi saw his fate foretold. He and his men were the black-clad soldiers of whom the ancient scholars had written: “The black flags will come from the East, led by mighty men, with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their home towns.

“These people are very dangerous,” Ibrahim said. “Even if they’re not physically dangerous, they have a way of affecting you. Even I have to be careful that they don’t affect me.

A member of the group had volunteered to plant explosives inside a local adult cinema called the Salwa. After a few minutes in the theater, the would-be assailant had become so engrossed in the film that he forgot about his bomb. As he sat, glued to the screen, the device detonated under his feet. No patrons were hurt, but the bomber lost both his legs.

Clearly porn is the key to defeating Isis. We need to drop porn on them 24-7.

The same themes appeared in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the influential Egyptian author whose works inspired the founders of al-Qaeda.

Qutb features prominently in The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright's masterful book about al Qaeda.

Under the Islamists’ strict moral code, exposing the man’s naked body to others would constitute both a humiliation and a sin.

Man, there sure are a lot of rules around what part of your body you can show to people and what you can't. Like, kind of an extreme number of rules.

Perhaps the most anxious man in the room was Khaled Mashal, the leader of the militant Palestinian faction Hamas and a repeated target of Israeli assassination attempts. Two years earlier, agents from Israel’s Mossad spy service had jabbed Mashal with a poison needle on an Amman street a few miles from where he now stood. He survived only after a furious King Hussein prevailed on the Israelis to provide his doctors with an antidote.

Later, his enemies would try ambushes, plane crashes, and even poisoned nasal drops, which Hussein discovered when he accidentally spilled the dispenser and watched in horror as the frothing liquid cut through the chrome on his bathroom fixtures.

This would make a killer commercial for Flonaze. "Our nasal spray is so strong it will eat through chrome. Just imagine what it will do to mucus!"

After his soldiers killed the French-born prince of Antioch, Nur ad-Din arranged for the sovereign’s head to be placed in a silver box and sent to the caliph in Baghdad as a gift.

Hope he got a gift receipt.

In earlier times, its interrogation methods included physical cruelties so extreme that some Jordanians referred to the Mukhabarat’s imposing prison as “the fingernail factory.

Charming.