Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

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 the hundreds to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Some returned to their villages and refugee camps with military skills and new ideas. A few, like Zarqawi, formed into groups and began looking for ways to continue the struggle against perceived enemies of Islam.