Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Al-Kasasbeh’s recorded account of his December 24 mission mostly followed the actual events. An F-16 pilot with nearly three years of experience, the Jordanian had been assigned to hit ISIS targets inside a grid of coordinates that included the city of Raqqa. His plane was part of an armada of Arab and Western aircraft that had been bombing ISIS since September 2014, when President Barack Obama launched an expanded air campaign in an attempt to drive the terrorist group from its safe havens in Iraq and Syria. Obama had ordered U.S. warplanes and drones into Iraq a few weeks earlier to halt an ISIS advance that threatened Iraq’s Mosul Dam and the Kurdish capital, Erbil. Then he announced a broader coalition that included aircraft from Jordan and five other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. “This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out [ISIS] wherever they exist,” Obama said in a televised speech.

“You bear responsibility before Allah,” al-Sisi said. “The world in its entirety awaits your words. Because the Islamic nation is being torn apart, destroyed, and is heading to perdition. We ourselves are bringing it to perdition.” Weeks later, after ISIS released the video of the pilot’s execution, the grand imam delivered one of the harshest condemnations by a prominent cleric. ISIS was not merely un-Islamic, he said; they were “Satanic.” Al-Azhar would later carry out its own crackdown on extremist clerics, removing imams who condoned violence. Yet it was clear that the banishing of a few imams would not diminish the Islamic State’s allure. Among ISIS’s thousands of volunteers are young men whose motivation derives less from theology than from a desire to fight authoritarian Arab regimes such as al-Sisi’s. Rami Khouri, a Lebanon-based journalist and researcher who has chronicled the rise and fall of Islamist movements over four decades, noted that Zarqawi’s intense hatreds were shaped more by prison than by any sermon or religious treatise. “The radicalization of many of the actors who created al-Qaeda and then ISIS happened in Arab jails,” Khouri said. “The combination of American jets and Arab jails was the critical fulcrum around which al-Qaeda and ISIS could germinate.”