Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Then, in the most improbable of events, America intervened. Few beyond the intelligence service had heard of Zarqawi when Washington made him a terrorist superstar, declaring to the world in 2003 that this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The claim was wrong, yet, weeks later, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, the newly famous and well-funded terrorist gained a battleground and a cause and soon thousands of followers. Over three tumultuous years, he intentionally pushed Iraq to the brink of sectarian war by unleashing wave after wave of savage attacks on Shiite civilians in their mosques, bazaars, and schools.

Zarqawi’s successors called themselves by different names before settling on ISIS—or simply the Islamic State. But they continued to refer to Zarqawi as the “mujahid sheikh,” acknowledging the founder who had the audacity to believe he could redraw the maps of the Middle East. And, like Zarqawi, they believed their conquests would not end there. 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.”

One of the early attempts at a bombing had been a spectacular failure: 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.

WHOOPS

Even prison inmates he denounced as kafirs, or disbelievers. To Muslims the term is no mere epithet; if used in a fatwa, it implies that the person has lost the protection of Islamic law and can be killed with impunity.

Zarqawi spent long hours at the man’s bedside as he recovered, becoming so impressed with his devotion that he arranged to have one of his own sisters flown to Pakistan to marry the man.

It was a rare moment of mutual candor. The captain explained again the necessity of keeping men such as Zarqawi on a tight leash. “It’s nothing personal,” he said. “You have to understand how we look at you,” he said. “You’re an extremist.” “You have to understand how I look at you,” Zarqawi retorted. “You are all infidels.”

One of the Kurdish groups was a Taliban-like movement that included scores of Afghan war veterans and called itself Ansar al-Islam, or “Helpers of Islam.” Its leaders were Sunni Muslim extremists who quickly imposed harsh Sharia law in the villages they controlled. They banned music in all forms, forced women to cover their faces in public, and outlawed schools for girls. They also developed a fondness for experimenting with poisons, building a crude lab in which they exposed stray dogs to cyanide and homemade ricin.

These guys sound fun

Co-workers began streaming out of the building under a general evacuation order, but Bakos, then a rookie analyst, with honey-blond hair and soft brown eyes, couldn’t bring herself to leave.

LOL what

And so it was that Bakos, in her third year as a CIA officer, was invited to participate in the education of the second-most-powerful man in the country.

I learned from VEEP that this is not even remotely true. The VP is like tenth most powerful tops

“With that speech, Colin Powell gave him popularity and notoriety,” said Abu Hanieh, the Islamist-turned-author from Amman. “Before anyone knew who he was, here was the secretary of state of the world’s most powerful government saying Zarqawi was important. Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world, from Iraq and Syria to the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula. People were joining al-Qaeda because of him.” It was one of the great ironies of the age, Abu Hanieh said. In deciding to use the unsung Zarqawi as an excuse for launching a new front in the war against terrorism, the White House had managed to launch the career of one of the century’s great terrorists. “And Zarqawi responded,” Hanieh added, “by turning all their warnings about terrorism into reality.”

Opinion polls showed steadily falling approval for Bin Laden’s movement throughout the Muslim world starting around 2004, or just around the time Zarqawi began commanding international attention with videotaped beheadings and suicide bombings. Support for attacks on Muslim civilians—the Islamic State of Iraq’s calling card—had fallen even more.

The direct costs of invading, occupying, rebuilding, and stabilizing Iraq had drained more than a trillion dollars from the U.S. Treasury, with indirect costs adding another trillion to the taxpayers’ tab.

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 twenty times higher.