Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

“The Americans and their media made us imagine that Iraq would never be Iraq until Saddam Hussein went away,” Zaydan said. “Iraq is seven thousand years old. America is only two hundred years old. It’s

In its place was a newly merged organization that Baghdadi called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. The latter word, roughly synonymous with the English term “Levant,” referred to the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, from southern Turkey through present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. English-speakers would know the new organization as ISIL, or ISIS.