Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

THE RISE OF ZARQAWI

Interesting that they make point that the US made Zarqawi famous- yet this book makes his legacy famous-er?

The inmates were too few to justify the hiring of a separate prison physician, and so it was that Basel al-Sabha, a recent medical-school graduate assigned by the Health Department to the local village, was pressed into service as the doctor of record for fifty of the most dangerous men in Jordan.

Rough asignment

“Why,” he demanded, “didn’t someone check?”

Oops! (you'd think he could have changed his mind?)

“I knew at that moment that I would be hearing about him,” he said. “This man was going to end up either famous, or dead.

or both....

In earlier times, its interrogation methods included physical cruelties so extreme that some Jordanians referred to the Mukhabarat’s imposing prison as “the fingernail factory.

Good name for a nail salon?

One of the Syrians, Abu al-Ghadiya, a trained dentist and comrade from Zarqawi’s mujahideen days who spoke four languages, served as a kind of travel agent and logistics chief,

And made sure the team flossed daily and changed out their toothbrushes every thirty days.

Cheney concluded that there was “no place more likely to be a nexus between terrorism and [weapons of mass destruction] capability than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

That sounds like sufficient evidence :(

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.

what we were telling them meant that this was no longer a victory. It was a freaking nightmare.

“The problem for the White House,” Richer said, “was that the president had just landed on a ship to say that we had won.

If Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could have dictated a U.S. strategy for Iraq that suited his own designs for building a terrorist network, he could hardly have come up with one that surpassed what the Americans themselves put in place over the spring and summer of 2003.

you guys think this is an insurgency?

Watching them watch us, I realized this fight was going to be long and tough.

Zarqawi had essentially created a three-sided war, with U.S. forces drawing fire from the other two sides at once.

ability of a few extremists to influence perceptions through acts of barbarity places greater responsibility on the moderates, of all religions, to speak up,” the king said. “If the majority remains silent, the extremists will dominate the debate.

This was al-Qaeda 2.0.

Use of the "2.0" moniker feels a bit out of place?

as Zarqawi and al-Qaeda sparred over the permissibility of hacking the heads off of hostages,

Lively debate...

Assad is not indispensable, and we have absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power,” Clinton said, sounding out each syllable with an icy resolve.

Nice

But the more serious scarring was harder to see. The government of Syria had allowed a mob to besiege the American diplomatic mission. And then, whether through inaction or by design, it had let the intruders rampage through the embassy grounds—a violation, in essence, of sovereign U.S. territory.

“When I was protesting, I was surrounded by all these men and women who were like me, dreaming the Syrian dream,” she said. “Today if I go there I won’t find them. The regime has stolen them from us.

Raqqa’s 220,000 citizens would become the first urban population to experience life in a city fully under the control of the Islamic State.

all that was left was the “culture of backwardness and terror, after extinguishing the light of the mind.