Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Despite his lack of military experience, Baghdadi offered certain advantages to the group. One was the Sharia scholar’s willingness to provide religious cover for acts of brutality that clerics around the world had condemned as un-Islamic. Everything that made the group so widely reviled—the beheadings, the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, the extortion, the war against Shiites, the spilling of so much innocent Muslim blood—Baghdadi not only endorsed, but declared legally justified under Islamic law. His other great asset was his suitability for the role of caliph—symbolically important for an organization that wanted its “Islamic State” claims to be taken seriously. Baghdadi, with his genealogical and scholarly pedigrees, could aspire to heights of leadership beyond Zarqawi’s grasp. Over the years that followed, Baghdadi worked deliberately to prepare himself for the mythical role to which he had been divinely appointed, according to a U.S. official familiar with Baghdadi’s history. “He cloaked himself with all the right religious credentials, and paid close attention to imagery, to clothing, to the way he moved and talked,” the official said. “He would go to great lengths to show that he was in his rightful place.” It was in the service of that goal that Baghdadi dispatched his emissaries across the border in August 2011, seeking a Syrian launchpad for the caliphate that still languished on the ground in his native country. A successful venture, in Baghdadi’s view, wou...