Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

King Abdullah II, fourth sovereign of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Sajida al-Rishawi.

Ahmad the hoodlum, a high school dropout with a reputation as a heavy drinker and a brawler. They had watched him wander off to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to fight the communists, then return as a battle-hardened religious fanatic.

Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted that he would create his caliphate immediately—right now. He would seek to usher in God’s kingdom on Earth through acts of unthinkable savagery,

the prophetic passages of the Muslim holy texts known as the Hadith, Zarqawi saw his fate foretold. He and his men were the black-clad soldiers of whom the ancient scholars had written: “The black flags will come from the East, led by mighty men, with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their home towns.” These conquerors would not merely reclaim the ancient Muslim lands. They also would be the instigators of the final cataclysmic struggle ending in the destruction of the West’s great armies, in northern Syria.

most notorious of Jordan’s prisons is the old fortress of al-Jafr,

Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, but he preferred to be called “al-Gharib,” or “the Stranger,” a handle he had picked up during his days as a fighter in the Afghan civil war.

Some, however, were already calling him “the one from Zarqa,” the tough industrial town in northern Jordan where he grew up. The phrase in Arabic is “al-Zarqawi.”

same themes appeared in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the influential Egyptian author whose works inspired the founders of al-Qaeda.

The list started with Jordan’s monarch, King Hussein, whom Zarqawi saw as the illegitimate leader of an artificial country, responsible for the unspeakable crime of making peace with Israel.

From the harsh wastelands of the interior, they thundered into the newly formed countries of Jordan and Iraq in the early 1920s with the intention of toppling governments and creating a unified Islamic theocracy, or caliphate, spanning all of the Middle East.

the Muslim Brotherhood was effectively part of the Jordanian establishment.

Jordan’s royal family, the Hashemites—rulers of the holy city of Mecca for nine hundred years—had played a role in the betrayal.

no country called Jordan existed—and, likewise, no group of people called Jordanians—until the early twentieth century.

On the eastern side of the river, home to Bedouin tribes and vast deserts, the British carved out an enclave for Sharif Hussein’s third son, Abdullah I.

The new state lacked significant reserves of oil or gas, or minerals for mining, or water for agriculture. Even its emir, Abdullah, had been imported from abroad.

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.

Abdullah, like his father, supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s role as a moderate opposition force in Jordan. And, like his forebears, he would look for ways to bolster the informal alliance, by granting occasional favors and concessions that would benefit the group’s leadership politically and ensure loyalty to the crown.

Many months would pass before Abdullah learned that list had included certain Arab Afghans from the al-Jafr Prison whose Ikhwan-like zeal for purifying the Islamic faith should have disqualified them instantly.

The captain had yet to divine Zarqawi’s true plans, but he was certain they had nothing to do with raising honeybees in Pakistan’s northwestern mountains.

Maqdisi—had acquired land mines and antitank rockets and were preparing to attack Israeli soldiers at one of the border crossings with Jordan.

At first, he recalled, the Jordanians who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan “were the good guys, fighting the communists,” in ideological lockstep with the country’s most important allies, including the Americans, the British, and the Saudis.

“He didn’t fit the profile,” Battikhi said. “Here’s a guy who had been a thug and a drunk. His family had gotten worried and tried to steer him toward religious groups to straighten him out. But then it was like he went too straight. So now you’ve got the worst of both worlds.”

He dropped out of high school, despite above-average grades and test scores showing an aptitude for art. He skated through two years of compulsory military service, but then got himself fired from a city job his father had arranged for him.

Zarqawi had become his self-chosen nickname—“the Stranger.”

The very idea of peace with the Jewish state was anathema to many Islamists. Some formerly steadfast supporters of King Hussein never forgave the monarch for this act.

the preacher and scholar named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, showing up at his house in Amman to say he wanted to “work on behalf of religion in Jordan,” as Maqdisi later recalled. The two began a years-long partnership that began with Koranic study groups for other Afghan veterans and progressed to the organizing of small cells for more ambitious endeavors.

Incensed by the murders, the group decided, with Maqdisi’s reluctant support, to use their weapons in a coordinated attack on an Israeli outpost along the border. The plan called for striking the guard station with back-to-back suicide bombs followed by small-arms fire.

arrest of Zarqawi in his bed on March 29. He and twelve other members of the cell eventually signed confessions admitting to possessing illegal weapons and plotting an act of terrorism.

“Your penalties only strengthen our faith in our religion!”

The spy agency was still pondering the question six months later, right up to the morning he turned up at the airport with his mother and a pair of coach-class tickets for Pakistan.

Tribal identity is a matter of profound importance among Jordan’s East Bank communities, and Zarqawi’s Bani Hassan lineage tied him to one of the biggest and most important tribes in the region, dating back to the time of Muhammad and beyond.

Though inconclusive, their review suggested that Zarqawi could suffer from a kind of multiple-personality disorder, one in which the subject’s deep insecurities and shattering guilt battled with an outsized ego convinced of its own greatness.

“He had a hero complex and a guilt complex,” Abu Mutaz said. “He wanted to be a hero and saw himself as a hero, even when he was a thug. But it was the guilt that made him so extreme.”

“I welcomed him as a guest, but I refused to work with him again in any way in view of his narcissism, not to mention other traits.”

“The time for training is over,” the Afghan caller had said, speaking in Levantine-accented Arabic.

Zarqawi’s trustworthiness remained in question, so al-Adel proposed an experiment: Let the Jordanian run his own training camp, specifically catering to Islamist volunteers from Jordan and the other countries of the Levant as well as Iraq and Turkey. Al-Qaeda could provide start-up money, and then watch from a distance to see what Zarqawi could accomplish. The “distance” in this case would be a separation of some 350 miles: the camp for Levantine fighters would be “somewhat remote from us,” al-Adel acknowledged, located near the Iranian border in Herat,

In Iraq’s northeastern mountains, there was one such place. Just a few miles from the Iranian border, a handful of Kurdish villages and towns had attained a precarious autonomy outside the writ of the Iraqi dictatorship.

“Helpers of Islam.” Its leaders were Sunni Muslim extremists who quickly imposed harsh Sharia law in the villages they controlled. They banned music in all forms, forced women to cover their faces in public, and outlawed schools for girls.

If Iraq had played even a minor role in supporting al-Qaeda’s September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the case for an invasion would be clear-cut.

After the start of the Afghan offensive, didn’t he flee to Iraq instead of joining Bin Laden at Tora Bora?

“They were asking us to prove a negative: to prove to them that Zarqawi wasn’t part of al-Qaeda, and wasn’t working with Saddam,”

One of them, demonstrated repeatedly throughout her career, was that political leaders tended to choose selectively from a menu of classified material in order to present a skewed, self-serving version of reality to the voting public.

“I did it,” Suweid said, “for al-Qaeda and for Zarqawi.”

“Look, if we can produce solid intelligence that proves Saddam is in bed with al-Qaeda, that’s fabulous,” he recalled telling his men during a group huddle in the summer of 2002. “But we’re not saying anything remotely like that until we get solid evidence that’s happening. We’re not going to pass off rumors and bullshit as the truth.”

Faddis’s team picked up the trail of suspected Iraqi operatives in the area near the Ansar camp, and confirmed that the men were members of Saddam Hussein’s feared intelligence service. But Faddis soon discovered that the Iraqis were doing exactly as he was: trying to collect intelligence on the militants.

United States was preparing to offer Jordan its advanced Patriot missile-defense system, in hopes of securing the Hashemite kingdom’s support when the shooting began.

Abdullah recalled later. Aides warned the monarch that the president was upset over comments he had made to a British newspaper, accusing the Bush team of being “fixated on Iraq” and determined to start a war that would “really open a Pandora’s box in the Middle East.”

An attack by U.S. troops on an Arab leader—even one as unpopular as Saddam—would inflame the region, putting Jordan at risk.

“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell began, just before Zarqawi’s bearded image appeared on a large screen behind the council’s circular table. Nada Bakos, watching on a TV monitor at work, heard the line and cringed.