Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell began, just before Zarqawi’s bearded image appeared on a large screen behind the council’s circular table. Nada Bakos, watching on a TV monitor at work, heard the line and cringed. Yes, Zarqawi lived in the remote mountains of northeastern Iraq—in an area off limits to Iraq’s military. To suggest that Saddam Hussein was providing sanctuary to him was contrary to everything that Bakos, the Zarqawi expert, knew to be true. It was like claiming that America’s twenty-second president, Grover Cleveland, had “harbored” Geronimo, the famed Apache chieftain of the frontier West who attacked settlers and Blue Coats from his base along the U.S.-Mexican border.

With one speech, the White House had transformed Zarqawi from an unknown jihadist to an international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement.

Unlike Shiites or Roman Catholics, Sunni Muslims lack a centralized religious hierarchy that settles theological debates.