Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Only later, at the hospital, standing over a wooden slab in a makeshift morgue, was he overwhelmed by the horror of the evening: The broken bodies. The scores of wounded. The smell of blood and smoke. The girls, Lina and Riham, lying still in their torn white dresses. Abu Haytham, a doting father, had girls the same age. “How,” he said aloud, “does someone with a human heart do a thing like this?”

seriously.

Then, with black flags raised above Muslim capitals from the Levant to the Persian Gulf, they could begin the great apocalyptic showdown with the West.

yeah ok im actually scared

God granted the Muslim mujahidin in Afghanistan victory against the infidels,” declared Sayf al-Adel, a deputy to Osama bin Laden, in a written account of the war. It was an opinion widely held among the veterans, and Zarqawi was utterly convinced of its truth.

He seemed to enjoy showing off his knowledge of the Koran and the Hadith, the collection of apocryphal sayings of Muhammad and his companions, extensively mined by jihadists to justify their beliefs.

Apocryphal is a cool word

Bush decided to nix the plan, for now. “It was like getting punched in the gut,” Faddis said later. “We were all putting ourselves at risk. When the mission was sidelined, you knew right then and there what it meant. We weren’t going to pull the trigger now. And when the time came when we did pull the trigger, the important targets will no longer be here.