Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

That she could face death was not a surprise to anyone. In 2006, a judge sentenced Rishawi to hang for her part in Jordan’s worst-ever terrorist attack: three simultaneous hotel bombings that killed sixty people, most of them guests at a wedding party.

I don't recall this event. Interesting how we either tune this out or (most likely) barely see it on the news due to our Western bias.

At one time, everyone in Amman knew her story, how this thirty-five-year-old unmarried Iraqi had agreed to wed a stranger so they could become a man-and-wife suicide team;

"In sickness and in death"

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

Then, in the most improbable of events, America intervened.

The USA intervening? No way!

Osama bin Laden had sought to liberate Muslim nations gradually from corrupting Western influences so they could someday unify as a single Islamic theocracy, or caliphate. Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted that he would create his caliphate immediately—right now.

Abdullah was in the Capitol, making a pitch to Senator John McCain, the Republican senator and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, when one of the king’s aides interrupted him. The monarch stepped into the corridor and, on the small screen of a smartphone, watched ISIS deliver its final statement on the proposed prisoner swap. As video cameras rolled, masked jihadists marched the young Jordanian pilot into a small metal cage that had been doused with fuel. Then they lit a fire and filmed as the airman was burned alive.

Jesus

The king, then just six weeks into his new job and still picking his way through a three-dimensional minefield of legislative, tribal, and royal politics, faced a choice of either adopting the list or sending it back for weeks of additional debate. He signed it. Many months would pass before Abdullah learned that list had included certain Arab Afghans from the al-Jafr Prison whose Ikhwan-like zeal for purifying the Islamic faith should have disqualified them instantly.

Nicely done.

Years later, when journalists would show up at her house to ask about Zarqawi’s reported accomplishments as a terrorist commander and bomb maker, she would seem genuinely amused. “He wasn’t that smart,” she told an American reporter.

Thanks mom

“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.”

Got em

The plan was deemed workable, but the Bush White House split sharply over whether to order the raid. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld favored the strike, but other senior aides, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, advised against it. The administration was already deep into the planning for an invasion of Iraq, opponents said, and any strike on Iraqi soil carried the risk of an escalation that could start the war prematurely.

A strike on the militant base now would undermine one of the pillars of Powell’s upcoming speech: the existence of terrorist networks on Iraqi soil. “That would wipe out my briefing,” Powell said, according to Baker’s account. Besides, he added, “We’re going to get [Ansar al-Islam] in a few weeks anyway.”

Disgusting

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.

Still, there were lines in the speech that baffled Bakos and her CIA colleagues. Powell acknowledged at the beginning that Zarqawi and his Ansar al-Islam allies operated in an area outside Saddam Hussein’s control. But he then asserted that “Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization,” suggesting that Iraq effectively controlled the group. Nothing in the CIA’s vetted reports confirmed that such a relationship existed.

This is criminal

Now Powell, like Cheney, was “asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be anything but,” she later said.

“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.”

Barely a year had passed since Zarqawi arrived in central Iraq, armed with only a few weapons, some cash, and his own ambitions. His stated goals were to isolate and harass the American occupiers and ignite conflict between Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni communities. He had managed to achieve both, and, what’s more, Iraqis had come to blame the Americans for the violence that he himself had sparked.

This is why you don't meddle in others' affairs