Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

There was little need for bluster; the sectarian fire that Zarqawi had tried to ignite was sweeping through Iraqi provinces on its own momentum. Within days of the hotel bombs in Amman, U.S. soldiers in Baghdad discovered a secret underground prison where Shiite police officers systematically beat and tortured Sunni detainees. Inside the converted bomb shelter, the soldiers found nearly two hundred malnourished Sunni men, many of whom later described a daily regimen of beatings and electric shocks. The bunker was located less than a block from the residence of Iraq’s Shiite interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, who would later acknowledge that “there were some mistakes made.” The discovery offered proof that the random sectarian attacks initiated by Zarqawi had prompted organized campaigns in response, supported in some cases by institutions of the Iraqi government. Even jihadists who questioned Zarqawi’s war against the Shiites began to believe that the Jordanian’s strategy was succeeding.