Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

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 on a colonial map, whose value lay in the oil buried beneath its sands. It was a country of tribes that traced their lineage to the beginning of civilization itself.