Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Sabha felt an uneasiness, like a tremor welling up from somewhere deep in the foundation of the old fortress. “What kind of person,” he wondered, “can command with only his eyes?”

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.

To serve as ruler of a Middle Eastern country is to give up any expectation of dying of old age. It’s especially true in Jordan, where the extraordinary perils of the job seem to generate a kingly appetite for dangerous hobbies. Hussein survived at least eighteen assassination attempts in his lifetime. He was just fifteen on the summer day in 1951 when his grandfather—Jordan’s first king, Abdullah I—was shot to death by a Palestinian gunman as the two royals were visiting Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. The young prince gave chase, narrowly escaping death himself when the assassin turned and fired a bullet that deflected off a medal on his uniform, according to the palace’s version of events. Later, his enemies would try ambushes, plane crashes, and even poisoned nasal drops, which Hussein discovered when he accidentally spilled the dispenser and watched in horror as the frothing liquid cut through the chrome on his bathroom fixtures. The king dodged death so many times that he took on an aura of invincibility. Jordanians would often say that Hussein possessed baraka—Allah’s favor. The prospect that one of his sons could be equally blessed seemed unlikely.

Jordan already bore deep scars from previous struggles with Islamic extremists, dating back to its earliest days as a monarchy. Some saw the very existence of the state as anathema, an attempt by colonial powers to keep Muslims divided and weak. As they saw it, Jordan’s royal family, the Hashemites—rulers of the holy city of Mecca for nine hundred years—had played a role in the betrayal.

is true that no country called Jordan existed—and, likewise, no group of people called Jordanians—until the early twentieth century. For a thousand years, the arid lands east of the Jordan River were part of Islamic empires, or caliphates, that at times extended from North Africa to the Balkans and encompassed all of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. The first caliphs, who were viewed as successors to the Prophet Muhammad, ruled from Damascus and Baghdad. They were supplanted in time by the Ottoman Turks, who expanded the Islamic Empire and established an Ottoman Caliphate under the supervision of powerful sultans in Istanbul. The Turkish conquerors permitted limited self-rule in Mecca, allowing the Hashemites to retain control of the city’s holy sites in a tradition dating back to the tenth century. Then, early in the twentieth century, came a Hashemite whose ambition and audacity would alter the family’s destiny and redraw the boundaries of the Middle East.

Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the seventy-eighth emir of Mecca and the great-grandfather of Jordan’s King Hussein, came to power as the Ottomans were lurching toward collapse. After the Turks sided with Germany at the outset of World War I, Sharif Hussein began secret negotiations with Britain with the aim of instigating a rebellion seeking Arab independence. In 1916, he agreed to help Britain and the Allied powers drive against the Turks in exchange for a promise of future British recognition of the new Arab-Islamic nation. Four of the sharif’s sons—Ali, Faisal, Abdullah, and Zeid—would lead Arab armies in what became known as the Great Arab Revolt, at times fighting at the side of the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, later immortalized by historians and filmmakers as Lawrence of Arabia. 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-Pico...

On the eastern side of the river, home to Bedouin tribes and vast deserts, the British carved out an enclave for Sharif Hussein’s third son, Abdullah I. The British had taken a small step toward honoring their promises to the ruler of Mecca, but their creation—initially called the Emirate of Transjordan, and later the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—seemed a few ingredients shy of a real country. No historical precedent existed for such a country, nor was there anything resembling a national identity among the scattering of tribes who lived in the region. The new state lacked significant reserves of oil or gas, or minerals for mining, or water for agriculture. Even its emir, Abdullah, had bee...

The first serious threat came from the Ikhwan hordes who invaded the country in the 1920s and were finally dispatched by Saudi intervention. Then, in the late 1960s, it was Palestinian guerrillas who threatened Jordan’s sovereignty. A patchwork of militant groups, drawn from the four hundred thousand Palestinian immigrants and refugees massed in Jordan after three decades of wars, staged attacks on Jordanian troops and tried repeatedly to assassinate King Hussein. The monarch launched an offensive that became known as Black September, killing thousands of Palestinian militants and driving many more into Syria or Lebanon. Heavy clashes spilled into the largely Palestinian town of Zarqa, where the man who would become known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was then a boy of four years. In the 1980s, it was regional unrest that threatened to spill across Jordan’s relatively peaceful borders. Thousands of Palestinian youths clashed with Israeli troops in the first intifada, or uprising, while young Jordanian men volunteered by t...

But such talk did not constitute a crime. Abu Haytham acknowledged as much to Zarqawi on the last of his three days in Mukhabarat custody after the scene at the airport. The captain was questioning Zarqawi, for what would turn out to be the last time, when his subject began to complain bitterly about his limbolike existence at the agency’s headquarters. “Take me to court if you have something on me!” Zarqawi pleaded. “If I had something on you, I would take you to court!” Abu Haytham acknowledged. It was a rare moment of mutual candor. The captain explained again the necessity of keeping men such as Zarqawi on a tight leash. “It’s nothing personal,” he said. “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.” The next day, Zarqawi and his mother returned to the airport for a Pakistan-bound flight. There would be no interference this time, but the Mukhabarat would still be watching.

There, on March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein attacked Kurdish villagers with deadly nerve gas, killing as many as five thousand men, women, and children in history’s worst chemical attack against a civilian population. The region never fully recovered; after the first Iraq war, in 1991, daily patrols by U.S. aircraft kept Saddam’s planes and tanks out of Kurdish settlements, but the absence of a central authority gave rise to local militias and warlords that skirmished with Iraqi ground troops and with each other.

But the CIA’s interest in the Islamists had little to do with religious codes. Now that al-Qaeda had been chased from Afghanistan, the Ansar al-Islam base represented the largest known gathering of militants with ties—albeit minor ones—to Bin Laden’s group. Faddis’s orders were to assess the strength of the combined force of Arab and local Islamists living in the Iraqi enclave. If possible, he was also to determine how, if at all, Ansar’s militants were coordinating their operations with Iraqi government forces. Regardless of whether al-Qaeda and Iraq had colluded in the past, the White House worried that Saddam Hussein might use terrorists as proxies to strike a blow against the West. Friendly Kurds had reported seeing chemical weapons in Ansar’s camp, deepening suspicions within the White House that Saddam was arming the Islamist militants for a future terrorist strike.

“Look, if we can produce solid intelligence that proves Saddam is in bed with al-Qaeda, that’s fabulous,” he recalled telling his men during a group huddle in the summer of 2002. “But we’re not saying anything remotely like that until we get solid evidence that’s happening. We’re not going to pass off rumors and bullshit as the truth.” Faddis’s group consisted of eight men, all of them with extensive military experience and two of them members of the CIA’s secret paramilitary unit known as the Special Activities Division. Their base was a small house provided to them by friendly Kurds a few miles from the Ansar camp. It served as an operations center as well as living quarters for the men, who spent much of their days conducting surveillance and joining in the questioning of captured militants seized by friendly Kurds. Their access to Ansar and al-Qaeda prisoners was extraordinary; the Americans were able to interrogate dozens of prisoners, and they considered each new account against a growing database of intelligence gleaned from earlier detainees as well as their own surveillance of Ansar’s camps. The findings were beamed to CIA headquarters in the form of hundreds of classified electronic messages, relayed to Langley via Faddis’s satellite phone.

It was true, he learned, that the militants harbored a deadly secret: a stockpile of poisons they were testing for possible use in terrorist attacks abroad. Through the CIA’s interrogations, and with additional help from well-placed spies, the nature of Ansar’s poisons fixation became clear. The group had managed to acquire dozens of gallons of deadly chemicals, including cyanide, and a small supply of castor beans for making highly lethal ricin. Each of the ingredients could be purchased easily and legally—potassium cyanide is used in film developing—and there was no sign that Ansar’s militants possessed the equipment or know-how for making real chemical weapons. Still, the experiments seemed serious enough. Inside their makeshift lab, amateur technicians mixed cyanide with skin cream and other cosmetics. Their rumored experiments on stray dogs

The other question preoccupying the White House—whether Iraqi forces were somehow helping the Islamists—was even easier to unravel. Faddis’s team picked up the trail of suspected Iraqi operatives in the area near the Ansar camp, and confirmed that the men were members of Saddam Hussein’s feared intelligence service. But Faddis soon discovered that the Iraqis were doing exactly as he was: trying to collect intelligence on the militants. The Iraqis watched from afar and tried to recruit informants—a risky proposition, given Ansar’s history of poisoning suspected spies and displaying their severed heads on stakes outside the fort. Far from colluding with the Islamists, the Iraqis appeared fearful of them. Still, the Bush administration had promised to hunt down al-Qaeda-allied terrorists wherever it found them, and to Faddis, this bunch fit the definition perfectly. The United States had a “golden opportunity,” Faddis wrote in one of his cables to CIA headquarters in Langley. Ansar al-Islam was a terrorist organization with an ambitious international agenda. It was harboring dozens of Arab militants with known links to al-Qaeda. More disturbingly, it possessed chemical poisons that could potentially be used with horrifying effect in the cities of Europe or the United States. But the threat in its entirety could be erased, Faddis wrote, with a single well-placed blow.

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.

The assertions were coming faster than Bakos could mentally counter them. It was becoming painful. This was not how intelligence analysis was supposed to work. When Cheney had made similar claims on Sunday talk shows, Bakos often found herself yelling at the television screen, as though she were contesting a referee’s blown call in a football game. Now Powell, like Cheney, was “asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be anything but,” she later said. Ultimately, the speech would tarnish Powell’s reputation and further undermine the credibility of the Bush administration with key allies, particularly after claims that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false. The other painful side effect would not be fully appreciated until much later. With one speech, the White House had transformed Zarqawi from an unknown jihadist to an international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement. The image of the mysterious Zarqawi glowering at world leaders from the UN Security Council’s screen sent hordes of reporters scurrying to their computers to figure out who he was. Newspaper reporters and TV crews flocked to Jordan to write profiles and interview people who claimed to know him. Zarqa, the gritty industrial town of the terrorist’s youth, now had a new favorite son.

“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.”

Sam Faddis was in another part of Iraq in March 2003, when, more than a week after the start of the U.S. invasion, the Bush administration finally authorized an attack on Ansar al-Islam’s camp. Dozens of Tomahawk missiles slammed into the compound at Sargat, leveling the buildings and destroying the equipment the Islamists used to mix their poisons. U.S. commandos, backed by hundreds of Kurdish militiamen, chased the remaining Islamists into hills, where some managed to scurry to safety across the Iranian border. From the dead and captured, the soldiers recovered passports and identity cards from more than a dozen countries, from Algeria to Yemen. But there was no sign of Zarqawi. Other CIA operatives later confirmed that the Jordanian had by then already moved to Baghdad to await the arrival of the U.S. troops. Among the first Americans to enter the shattered Ansar camp was a CIA operative who had been among the eight members of Faddis’s surveillance team. In his description to Faddis, the man described a ruined base and his sinking feeling that an opportunity had slipped away. “Everybody who mattered left before we got there,” the CIA officer told Faddis. “All that was left were the foot soldiers. The cannon fodder. “It was better than nothing,” he said. “But we missed our shot.”

The mood in Baghdad was changing. Bakos and her fellow CIA officers could sense the shift during their still-unconstrained travels into the city’s neighborhoods to meet contacts or visit a favorite ice-cream place. The smiles and shy waves of the early weeks of the occupation had long since been replaced by sullen stares and drawn shades. Iraq was rapidly tiring of occupation, while the Bush administration’s attention seemed permanently fixed on settling the score with its political rivals in Washington. The moral underpinnings of the White House’s war effort were collapsing like rotten timbers, and aides to the president were working furiously to control the damage. The weapons of mass destruction that had loomed so threateningly in Bush’s speeches had not been found after four months of searching. Likewise, Americans had seen nothing of Saddam Hussein’s supposed links to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Congress was beginning to push for answers, and so, in the summer of 2003, the White House ratcheted up the pressure on the CIA’s analysts to find some.

American officials hoped that some of them could be persuaded to cooperate if offered the right inducement, such as emigration papers or cash. Among these men, none appeared more promising on paper than the weeping Hasan al-Izbah. The Iraqi was not only a high-ranking intelligence official; he also happened to be Iraq’s official liaison to Palestinian militants regarded by the West as terrorists. Saddam Hussein had openly backed violent groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, in part to shore up his anti-Israel credentials with fellow Arabs. Someone within Saddam’s spy agency could illuminate the murky world of Iraqi terrorist links, and perhaps it could be Izbah—if Bakos could persuade him to talk.

Bakos guided Izbah through a web of Iraqi terrorist connections, letting him describe in detail the Palestinian and Iranian operatives that Saddam had supported over the years, at least until he grew weary of them and ordered them killed. But when the subject turned to al-Qaeda, Izbah shrugged. There was nothing to talk about, he said. Perhaps there had been a low-level meeting years earlier, a discreet encounter intended to size up the other side. But nothing had come of it. Iraq’s secular regime persecuted and killed Islamic extremists, and al-Qaeda’s leaders abhorred the Iraqi dictator. The distrust was too great to allow even the most rudimentary cooperation. “What about Zarqawi?” Bakos finally asked. “We had heard of him,” Izbah said. “But there was no relationship.” Nothing at all? Bakos pressed further to see if Izbah would hedge his answer. “If you had met him,” she asked, “is he the kind of person you would have tried to recruit?” The answer was simple and emphatic: “No.” Izbah had kept his promise, and now Bakos fulfilled hers. A phone was brought in, and the former spy chief was allowed to call his wife for the first time since his capture, weeks earlier. Bakos stayed in the room for a moment to make sure the call went through. When a voice came on the other end of the line, Izbah again broke down in a geyser of tears. Leaving the Iraqi in the care of the American MP, she edged toward the door and slipped away.

part of the worsening violence in Iraq, he was helping direct it. Bakos studied the reports and prepared to write the summary that would be included in the next day’s briefing papers for the White House. By now the essential conclusion looked solid: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the attacks. The terrorist the Bush administration had cited as a reason for attacking Saddam Hussein had in fact become empowered by the Iraqi leader’s defeat. A minor worry before, when he was confined to a remote corner of Iraq’s northern mountains, now he had been set loose in the Iraqi heartland and was becoming more menacing by the day. 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. The opening salvo against an Arab embassy would effectively discourage other Muslim nations from participating in Iraq’s rebuilding in a way that might give the Americans legitimacy. That blow was followed by two others that, in sequence, showed “brilliant strategy,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior CIA terrorism analyst who went on to advise two U.S. presidents.

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. Years later, CIA officials who were brought into the final planning for the March 2003 invasion expressed astonishment at the lack of forethought on how the country would be managed after Saddam Hussein’s deposal. Junior officers were pressed into service at the eleventh hour to draft papers on possible risks U.S. soldiers could face in attempting to preserve order in occupied Iraq. But by then it was already too late to affect the outcome.

“We had created a black hole,” he said. The failure to provide security after the invasion had been a sin of omission: U.S. officials had not anticipated the breakdown in civil authority that would follow the invasion. By contrast, the decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and ban Baath Party members from positions of authority were as deliberate as they were misguided. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, anyone seeking a management job—from school principal or police captain to the head of the intelligence service—was obliged to join the Baath Party. So were applicants for Iraq’s universities. Overnight, tens of thousands of professional workers and experienced bureaucrats were out of work, and U.S. officials in Iraq found themselves confronting two mammoth problems. One was an absence of the kinds of local security agencies best equipped to preserve order and root out illicit networks. The other was a large contingent of embittered and well-connected Iraqi officials who now had to fend for themselves without salaries or pensions.

It was in this reordered Iraq that Zarqawi would find both freedom to maneuver and powerful allies willing and able to support his cause. Captains and sergeants who once served Saddam Hussein now enlisted in Zarqawi’s army, and some rose to leadership positions. Others offered safe houses, intelligence, cash, and weapons, including, investigators later concluded, the aerial munitions and artillery shells that provided the explosive force for Zarqawi’s biggest car bombs.

On November 10, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief sat down again to describe the unraveling security situation in a formal report to headquarters. The images Gerry Meyer sketched this time were even more dire. The insurgency he described was not only real, it was winning. The terrorists, with help from Baathist allies, were well supplied and appeared capable of moving freely, with little fear of either American troops or the hastily reconstituted but ineffective local police departments. In the eyes of ordinary Iraqis they appeared to be powerful and “largely unchallenged,” he wrote, eroding any lingering hope that American military might be able to stabilize the country. “The ease with which the insurgents move and exist…is bolstering their self-confidence further,” Meyer wrote, according to a version of the “aardwolf” obtained by American journalists soon after it was transmitted to Langley. As for the terrorists’ supporters—disaffected Sunni Muslims and former officers of Saddam Hussein’s security establishment—they had been handed a perfect opportunity to regroup, the station chief said. “The continued sense of isolation in the Sunni heartland, the complete dissolution of the army and other institutions of security, rigid de-Baathification, and the lack of economic opportunities or political direction gave these regime elements the confidence they needed to repair their networks and reestablish themselves,” the report said.

McLaughlin and other CIA officials began ticking off a list of components of a classic insurgency from a standard Pentagon field manual. Iraq, they said, was facing an organized resistance movement that sought to overthrow central authority through subversion and armed conflict. They described the collusion between domestic opponents and foreign terrorists and highlighted what was known about the movement’s leadership, tactics, and weapons. According to one participant, the Defense Department’s representatives were unmoved. “The military wasn’t interested in hearing this,” the official recalled years later. “They were hoping they were done with the war, and they didn’t go in for any talk about insurgencies.”

One month later, the White House enjoyed a brief respite from the tide of grim news with the announcement of the capture of Saddam Hussein during a December 13, 2003, raid on a remote farmhouse near his hometown of Tikrit. But the former dictator’s arrest brought no relief from the now daily attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi civilians. Zarqawi, after months of fighting from the shadows, was gaining confidence as the de-facto leader of a full-blown insurgency in Iraq. His movement, now supported by thousands of embittered Iraqis and sympathetic Islamists from across the Muslim world, would soon pose the greatest single threat to American ambitions in Iraq.

“The fertile soil was Iraq after de-Baathification,” Richer said. “The rain and sunshine were the ineptitude of the provisional authority and U.S. misunderstanding of Iraqis and their culture. “All of that,” he said, “allowed Zarqawi to blossom and grow.”

On April 23, soldiers from the Eighty-second Airborne Division and Third Armored Calvary Regiment had rolled into the nearby city of Fallujah and set up camp inside government buildings and a school. On the evening of April 28, a crowd of about two hundred protesters defied a citywide curfew and gathered outside the school building, chanting and yelling at U.S. paratroopers inside. The Americans would later say that some in the crowd had brandished weapons, and shots were fired. In any case, the GIs opened up with a volley that killed seventeen demonstrators and wounded seventy. Investigators from Human Rights Watch later found no evidence of bullet damage to the school where the troops were staying. Iraqis were outraged, but Zaydan was among the tribal officials who counseled restraint. “We tried with all our might not to create problems with the Americans,” he would say years later. After gathering informally to discuss a solution, the heads of the major clans from central Anbar Province picked emissaries to meet with the U.S. commanders in Fallujah.

“We went to them and we said, ‘We are tribes, and we can have a tribal solution: you pay diyya—blood money,’ ” Zaydan recalled. “ ‘These [victims] had families, some had kids. Pay the families money to guarantee their future, so their kids won’t be part of the resistance.’ ” The reply came days later. Yes, the United States was willing to compensate the victims’ families. The rate was set at three thousand dollars for each dead Iraqi. Zaydan was furious. “Three thousand dollars? That’s what you pay to replace one of your police dogs!” he fumed. “After that, we realized that the Americans had no good intentions,” he said. It was the first of a series of unhappy encounters for Zaydan, a man who might have seemed a likely ally to any army that toppled Saddam Hussein. He had been barely thirty years old when members of his tribal family decided to back a coup attempt, organized by an Iraqi air force general from a prominent Anbar clan, against the dictator. When the plot was discovered, Saddam rounded up and executed more than 150 army officers and detained more than a thousand other Iraqi Sunnis, including Zaydan and one of his brothers. Zaydan, condemned to die with the others, was granted clemency at the last minute, in a general pardon intended to repair relations with the powerful Sunni tribes that had long helped Saddam stay in power.

Yet, even after the death sentence, and despite his deep antipathy for many of the dictator’s policies, Zaydan settled into an odd ambivalence toward the Iraqi leader. He admired Saddam’s toughness. He privately cheered his fearless defiance of the West, which for many Sunnis evoked a glorious past when Iraq was part of a mighty empire, and Baghdad was a global center of science and learning. For all their technology, the Americans were arrogant upstarts, with little appreciation for the cultural richness of a land that had given birth to written language, mathematics, astronomy, and the law. Iraq was not a mere product of lines drawn ...

“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 year...

Worse, they had stripped power from Iraq’s long-dominant Sunni tribes and handed it over to Shiites, leaders Zaydan viewed as “thieves and bandits” whose true allegiance lay with Iran. In Baghdad, Sunnis were being targeted by roving bands of Shiite militiamen. Zaydan watched with conflicted emotions as other members of his tribe formed secret cells, initially for self-defense but later to engage in hit-and-run attacks against American troops. Stories began to circulate about a mysterious Jordanian who paid hard cash to any Iraqis who joined his movement. Zaydan would never swear allegiance to the jihadist who called himself Zarqawi. But others in the Dulaim clan did.

At one point, the American commander managed to insult his visitors with a comment that seemed to lump together Iraqis and terrorists. One of the sheikhs, angered, accused the Americans of being dupes of Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Shiite politician who provided the Bush administration with faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

Bin Laden was an odd choice to receive such a rant. Though Sunni himself, the al-Qaeda founder saw himself as a unifier of Muslims and had never expressed interest in attacking Shiite innocents. In fact, he had condemned it, as Zarqawi doubtlessly already knew. Perhaps the Jordanian believed he could change Bin Laden’s mind, for he proceeded to the heart of his message: a plan for a coming battle that called for killing Shiites in even greater numbers. Such a campaign, he argued, would simultaneously achieve three objectives: destabilizing Iraq, eliminating a hateful apostasy, and, most important, forcing Sunnis to take up arms in a war that would lead to their liberation—a war that he would ignite—an “awaking of the slumberer and rousing of the sleeper.”

This sectarian resentment was woven into the country’s fabric, a legacy of massacres and pogroms that dated back to Islam’s founding generation. And yet, particularly in the later decades of the twentieth century, Iraqis had come to share a common national identity and a uniquely Iraqi sense of patriotism, one that had been made stronger by an eight-year war against Iran’s Shiite-led theocracy. Before Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, Sunnis and Shiites mingled easily in Iraqi schools and universities and often lived side by side in mixed neighborhoods. Now, thanks in large measure to Zarqawi, the country was segregating itself into armed enclaves. Soon the nights belonged to Shiite and Sunni gangs who carried out reprisal killings and dumped mutilated bodies in alleyways and irrigation canals.

Tehran, seeing an opportunity to bedevil America—a bitter foe since the 1979 revolution that brought the Shiite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, and had even armed Saddam in his war with Iran—was running its own proxy armies inside Iraq. Soon the country’s highways were seeded with sophisticated, Iranian-designed IEDs, specially engineered to penetrate the shells of American Humvees.

Zarqawi had essentially created a three-sided war, with U.S. forces drawing fire from the other two sides at once. His embrace of “revolting” violence, so passionately described in his letter to Bin Laden, had been distilled into a book, titled The Management of Savagery. The volume, which began circulating on jihadist Web sites in early 2004, urged unflinching cruelty in order to achieve the Islamists’ ultimate objectives.

The monarch had also lodged complaints with U.S. officials about the aftermath of the invasion. In July 2003, before Iraq spiraled into chaos, Abdullah met with L. Paul Bremer, the White House–appointed head of Iraq’s provisional government, and urged him to reconsider decisions to disband the Iraqi army and blacklist members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Pulling Bremer aside during a meeting at an economic forum in Jordan, the king warned that the decisions “would blow up in all of our faces,” according to his account of the conversation. “I said I hoped he understood that if he was going to de-Baathify across the board, he would be setting himself up for major resistance across the board, and would create a power vacuum that someone would have to fill,” Abdullah wrote in his 2011 memoir. As for disbanding the army, “it was crazy…a recipe for anarchy and chaos,” he said.

Bremer’s reply was brusque, as he recalled it. “I know what I’m doing,” the American diplomat said. “There’s going to be some kind of compensation. I’ve got it all in hand, thank you very much.” To the king, it was no surprise to see how quickly security unraveled. As a Sunni himself, he could empathize with Iraq’s minority Sunnis, who, after decades of privileged status, saw themselves as increasingly isolated and threatened. Those anxieties would drive some Iraqis toward radical Islamists, who in turn would open the door to foreign jihadists. Of course al-Qaeda and its allies would leap at a chance to establish a base in a strategically important corner of the Middle East.

In the same month the chemical plot was disrupted, U.S. television networks carried images of GIs abusing prisoners at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Arab anger boiled over at photos of naked inmates wearing dog collars and being sexually humiliated by female soldiers. Abdullah, during a visit to Washington that spring, urged President George W. Bush to apologize to Iraqis for the degrading treatment of prisoners, which Bush did, with Jordan’s king standing by his side.

“They’re ten times worse,” the king replied. “When you had a secular regime under Saddam, men and women were pretty much equal.”

Abdullah’s candor did not sit well with some Bush appointees in the room. Liz Cheney, the vice president’s elder daughter, then a senior official in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs section, turned to one of the king’s aides with a word of unsolicited advice, according to the king’s memoir: Abdullah should avoid making such discordant statements in public. The aide initially wondered if the comment was meant as a joke, but the next day, Cheney telephoned him again to reinforce the message. She said she had discussed the king’s remark with Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department official who had been one of the architects of Bush’s Iraq policy, and both had agreed that Abdullah should keep his views to himself. The monarch was exasperated. “What I said over dinner was true,” he wrote afterward. “I was shocked that some members of the administration and their supporters seemed to feel that there could be no dissent on Iraq—and that in America, a country that prides itself on opinionated self-expression, they would try to muzzle inconvenient news.” The reality that was becoming painfully clear to Abdullah was an Iraq engulfed in flames and seeding the entire region with dangerous sparks. Jayousi and his poison bomb had drifted into Jordan on a fire whirl, and Jordan’s Mukhabarat had only narrowly managed to stop them. Meanwhile, the man who directed and financed the plot remained free inside Iraq to try again.

The Americans pledged to stick around only until Iraq was strong enough to stand on its own. How long would that take? Months, surely; perhaps even a year? No one knew. The Sunni towns north and west of Baghdad were sliding rapidly into lawlessness, and parts of Fallujah and Ramadi were effectively controlled by insurgents, some of them foreigners who had traveled to Iraq for jihad. The new Iraqi leadership and its U.S. backers desperately needed Sunni allies: respected, credible Sunnis who could help pacify the region and lead the Sunni tribes through a democratic transition that included elections and a unity government that shared power equally among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.

One of Ford’s assignments was to identify such allies and try to win them over. In his first month on the job, he traveled to Fallujah and arranged meetings with U.S. military commanders and Arab diplomats to get a sense of the task ahead of him. It was worse than he imagined. In Fallujah, the capital of the insurgency and traditionally the most rebellious city in Iraq, townspeople were in no mood to negotiate. The marines picked off occasional targets from their base on the outskirts of town, but most of the city remained a “denied area” to Americans in the weeks after the killing of the four American security contractors, officers told Ford. “Insurgents and foreign fighters largely operate without constraint within the city,” read a classified State Department cable describing Ford’s meeting with the marines. “Coalition forces are still seeking to disrupt insurgents and foreign jihadists with surgical strikes against Abu Musab al Zarqawi–related targets within the town in order to prevent Fallujah from operating as a safe-haven for extremists.” A Jordanian diplomat with extensive contacts within the Sunni tribes described the situation as all but hopeless. Sunnis remained bitterly opposed to the American presence in Iraq, and though some were conflicted about the presence of foreign insurgents, others welcomed them as a bulwark against persecution by Shiite militias seeking to settle scores after decades of Sunni rule. Out of desperation, some tribal elders had even take...

Ford’s decades of diplomatic experience had shown that political solutions existed for almost every conflict. Eventually, even Sunnis and Shiites would weary of killings and destruction and grope toward a solution that would allow the sides to peacefully coexist as Iraqis. But Zarqawi was no Iraqi, and he had no interest in coexisting. Zarqawi’s objective was to raze and tear down, leaving a scorched terrain too depleted to support the return of a secular country called Iraq.

In many more instances, death was frighteningly random. In the weeks after sixteen U.S. marines had been killed in a series of ambushes around the city, the Americans were in a vengeful mood. Firefights erupted daily in residential neighborhoods, and bullets tore through bedrooms where families slept. Checkpoint sentries reflexively shot at motorists who approached too quickly or failed to heed warnings shouted at them in English. In the desert outside Ramadi, forty-five Iraqis had died when American warplanes struck a building that U.S. officials insisted was an insurgent safe house. Iraqis said the jets mistakenly struck a wedding celebration. Amateur video showed bodies of women as well as children and infants. Outraged and humiliated, Ramadi’s Sunnis initially welcomed the resistance fighters, including the foreign Islamists who poured into the city promising to drive away the invaders. Compared with the local insurgents, the Islamists were organized, disciplined, and fearless. But it was soon clear that their plans included more than fighting Americans. The foreigners commandeered houses and forcibly collected “taxes” and supplies from shopkeepers. Declaring themselves in charge, they rolled into residential neighborhoods armed with heavy weapons and a harsh moral code that banned drinking, smoking, female education, and Western fashion and hairstyles. One Ramadi man defiantly lit a cigarette in front of such an Islamist patrol and was shot dead on the spot.

“He surrounds himself with the scum of Anbar,” Zaydan complained. “The people accept him because they are sheep without a shepherd. But the men close to him are lowlifes, people with no conscience. And they are drawn to Zarqawi because he has a lot of money.”

His intended audience by now knew exactly the kind of battle he meant. Since Berg’s savage murder, Islamist media were awash in Zarqawi-inspired gore. The Jordanian’s men carried out dozens of executions, many of them videotaped, including the beheadings of a Bulgarian truck driver, a South Korean translator, and an Egyptian contractor. Scores of others would follow, including Americans, Britons, Japanese, Austrians, and Italians. Lebanese kidnapping victims who were freed through ransom told stories of torture and unimaginable cruelty in makeshift prisons; of poor immigrant laborers who lacked money for ransom being killed slowly with electric drills; of other victims being held down while their tongues were hacked out. Young foreign-born Islamists who answered Zarqawi’s call to jihad most often ended in suicide-bomber school. Some would be called upon to sacrifice their own lives to destroy targets with no discernible gain other than to kill a few innocent Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong place. In recruiting volunteers for suicide bombings, Zarqawi was knowingly defying a Koranic commandment that strictly forbids Muslims from taking their own lives. Some Islamic scholars have held that military suicide missions might be permitted under extreme circumstances, and jihadists have argued for decades over exactly where the lines fall. Zarqawi seized on a small loophole in Islamic law and stretched it to absurd proportions, using hand-picked clerics to sanction the use ...