Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

ISIS seized the moment to fire off a stream of propaganda images on Twitter, showing its victorious troops parading around the center of the same city from which U.S. marines had ousted Zarqawi’s men a decade earlier. Among the fighters posing for photographs was Abu Wahib al-Dulaimi, the flamboyant, publicity-obsessed ISIS commander for Anbar Province who had shot the three Syrian truck drivers on an Anbar highway the previous spring. In one frame, he grimaces, rifle in hand, next to a burning police car, wearing a black overcoat and boots like a Western gunslinger. In another, he walks through one of the captured police stations carrying a stack of files, like some kind of doomsday office clerk. Iraqis who saw the images might have noticed the familiar last name: Abu Wahib’s surname identifies him as a member of the Dulaim tribe, making him a kinsman to the men who had organized the Fallujah protests. Enemies before, they were now officially on the same side. At the White House, President Obama’s security advisers viewed the same images with dismay. Administration officials quickly announced plans to speed up the delivery of promised military aid to the Maliki government, including new Hellfire missiles. Security for Iraqis was Maliki’s problem now—he had insisted on it—but a terrorist takeover of an Iraqi city could not be allowed to stand. To Zaydan, however, as for many other Sunnis, the revolt was purely an internal affair, one the Americans and the Baghdad governmen...