Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

disappeared, as stories circulated about sectarian killings and assaults. In her mostly Sunni neighborhood, flyers began appearing in doorways, warning of coming attacks from Alawite death squads. At the same time, al-Ameer’s Alawite friends were getting similar warnings about Sunnis. Meanwhile, the regime’s notorious goon squads—hired gangs called shabiha or “ghosts”—snatched women and children from the streets and then returned them, sometimes dead, other times beaten and tortured, with tales about being brutalized by Alawite thugs. By late 2011, a new chant was added to the repertoire at the daily protests: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to their coffins.” Then it was al-Ameer’s turn to be caught. She was on her way to a visit with her mother when police officers pulled her off a public bus and brought her to one of the intelligence service’s special interrogation centers in Damascus. Again she believed she would die. Instead, her captors locked her in a cell and forced her to listen as they beat and tortured one of her friends. When al-Ameer still refused to break, the officers strapped her into a chair and attached electrodes to her temples and chest. The pain shot through her body like liquid fire as her captors laughed to see if she would cry out. “We’re going to exterminate all of you, you Sunnis!” one of the officers said, using epithets that al-Ameer, years later, could not bring herself to repeat. After she had spent eighty-five days in prison, family members w...