Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

His intended audience by now knew exactly the kind of battle he meant. Since Berg’s savage murder, Islamist media were awash in Zarqawi-inspired gore. The Jordanian’s men carried out dozens of executions, many of them videotaped, including the beheadings of a Bulgarian truck driver, a South Korean translator, and an Egyptian contractor. Scores of others would follow, including Americans, Britons, Japanese, Austrians, and Italians. Lebanese kidnapping victims who were freed through ransom told stories of torture and unimaginable cruelty in makeshift prisons; of poor immigrant laborers who lacked money for ransom being killed slowly with electric drills; of other victims being held down while their tongues were hacked out. Young foreign-born Islamists who answered Zarqawi’s call to jihad most often ended in suicide-bomber school. Some would be called upon to sacrifice their own lives to destroy targets with no discernible gain other than to kill a few innocent Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong place. In recruiting volunteers for suicide bombings, Zarqawi was knowingly defying a Koranic commandment that strictly forbids Muslims from taking their own lives. Some Islamic scholars have held that military suicide missions might be permitted under extreme circumstances, and jihadists have argued for decades over exactly where the lines fall. Zarqawi seized on a small loophole in Islamic law and stretched it to absurd proportions, using hand-picked clerics to sanction the use ...