Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

“How,” he said aloud, “does someone with a human heart do a thing like this?

Same question that I asked.

The man’s given name was Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, but he preferred to be called “al-Gharib,” or “the Stranger,” a handle he had picked up during his days as a fighter in the Afghan civil war. Some, however, were already calling him “the one from Zarqa,” the tough industrial town in northern Jordan where he grew up. The phrase in Arabic is “al-Zarqawi.

But in Maqdisi’s view, each Muslim bore a personal obligation to act when confronted with evidence of official heresy. It wasn’t enough for the faithful simply to denounce corrupt rulers. They were compelled by Allah to slaughter them.

The Arabs were victorious, but Britain’s promises to Sharif Hussein expired even before the conflict ended. Britain and France preemptively divvied up the captured Ottoman lands into British and French protectorates under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. After the war, the maps were redrawn to create entirely new states, including the kingdoms of Iraq and Syria and, on the narrow strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a Jewish homeland that would later become Israel.

But by that time, the obscure jihadist named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh had become the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And there was nothing a king of Jordan could do but berate his aides in an exasperated but utterly futile pique. “Why,” he demanded, “didn’t someone check?

Wow, what a monumental clerical error.

“Here’s a guy who had been a thug and a drunk. His family had gotten worried and tried to steer him toward religious groups to straighten him out. But then it was like he went too straight. So now you’ve got the worst of both worlds.

Oops

Out of all the names on the list, one in particular evoked surprise: a Jordanian from Zarqa whose given name was listed as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh. Zarqawi was back.

This had to not have been a surprise.

“Iraq,” Zarqawi told friends, “will be the forthcoming battle against the Americans.

The one analyst who knew Abu Musab al-Zarqawi the best had reasons to be skeptical.

The US seems to have repeatedly underestimated Zarqawi. Hopefully we're learning for the future.

the CIA for months over possible links between the September 11 attacks and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi had emerged as an intriguing figure, but the CIA’s reports on the man were far more cautious than those coming from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, the shadow intelligence service set up by Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, an Iraq hawk and a Bush appointee.

Shady

“They were asking us to prove a negative: to prove to them that Zarqawi wasn’t part of al-Qaeda, and wasn’t working with Saddam,” Bakos said. “And even when we tried to do that, the answer would be: ‘So what? All those people have the same agenda, so who cares?

Wow.

It was quick work, even by the Mukhabarat’s standards, and Abu Haytham knew the confession would invite suspicions. Jordanians and even Westerners would assume that the spy agency had used torture to produce a suspect in a murder case that had damaged the country’s standing with its most important ally.

The implication is that they did indeed use torture.

Much later, intelligence officials and terrorism experts who studied the early war years marveled at Zarqawi’s strategic cunning. Whether deliberately or by coincidence, he picked targets that would confound U.S. ambitions for Iraq and ensure that the occupation of the country would be long and painful.

Unfortunate that we weren't as strategic.

Countless articles and books have documented the Bush administration’s missteps, from the refusal to halt massive looting after the invasion to the wholesale dismantling of the Iraqi military and security structure by Bremer’s CPA. But no Americans appreciated the magnitude of the blunders more than the intelligence officers and U.S. diplomats in Iraq who were watching Zarqawi’s organization gain momentum.

In town, the hallmarks of modern civilized life slipped away, one by one: garbage collection, phone service, electricity. 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

This would be funny if it wasn't true.

By corralling Islamist radicals and ordinary Iraqis in a lawless desert pen, U.S. officials inadvertently created a “jihadi university” that helped inculcate Islamist ideas into a new generation of fighters, the officer said.

Hard Choices

Have to add this to my WTR list. Clinton seemed to have some incredibly difficult decisions.