More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Jordanians throughout the country were enraged and united—against him.
In the terrorist’s hometown of Zarqa, his brother and fifty-six other relatives posted an ad in a local newspaper publicly renouncing their kinship with him.
These “blooper” moments would later be publicly released by the Americans in an attempt to undercut Zarqawi’s propaganda image as a savvy street fighter.
Baqubah, a city of half a million, was a restive mix of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, barely sixty miles from the Iranian border.
One thing that appears incontrovertible is that Zarqawi was conscious long enough to look into American eyes.
The Jordanian might be gone, but the foul strain he had helped to unleash was stronger than ever, Zaydan told friends.
On March 18, violent protests broke out in the southern city of Dara’a after police arrested and tortured local teens for writing antigovernment graffiti.
Aleppo, Syria’s largest city,
Instead, Assad would seek to bludgeon, gas, and shoot his way out of the crisis.
Many of the early protesters in Aleppo and Hama were angry not at Assad per se but at corruption within the president’s inner circle.
Assad could reliably depend on members of his minority Alawite sect, which controlled the country’s elite army divisions and the security services.
“The early intelligence was that Syria’s ‘spring’ was not likely to go anywhere—it would be killed in the crib, and in a vicious way,”
The government of Syria had allowed a mob to besiege the American diplomatic mission.
Assad had said in a televised speech to the nation. “It kills in the name of religion, destroys in the name of reform and spreads chaos in the name of freedom.”
But over the months that followed, two different groups—one inside the regime, one based abroad—would take steps to introduce true takfiris to the conflict, turning Syria’s domestic crisis into an international disaster.
happened to be hosts to Russia’s only naval base in the Middle East.
These were men who had once called themselves al-Qaeda in Iraq, and disciples of Zarqawi. Now they spent their days hiding out in the shabby outer suburbs of Mosul and a handful of other towns, communicating only rarely, for fear of detection. They had adopted a new name—the Islamic State of Iraq—and
The twelve months following Zarqawi’s death were the deadliest of the war for U.S. troops, with 904 killed.
Violence-weary Sunni tribes, banding together into militias that called themselves “Sons of Iraq,” were beginning to drive foreign jihadists from their villages, sometimes killing them.
Michael V. Hayden, the CIA director, declared the organization in 2008 to be in “near-strategic defeat.”
The direct costs of invading, occupying, rebuilding, and stabilizing Iraq had drained more than a trillion dollars from the U.S. Treasury, with indirect costs adding another trillion to the taxpayers’ tab.
Sunni distrust of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki exploded into open revolt in 2007, following the arrests of prominent Sunni politicians and the dismissals of Sunni commanders in the Iraqi army and security agencies.
The following year, the Shiite-led government took steps to disband the Sons of Iraq militias that had helped drive out foreign Islamists, saying it would not tolerate the existence of private militias in the country.
The Iraqi government jubilantly displayed photos of two corpses pulled from the building’s rubble, confirming the deaths of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the top two commanders of the Islamic State of Iraq since Zarqawi’s death.
The Islamic State of Iraq lacked resources, fighters, and sanctuary. And, perhaps most critically, it lacked a cause—a single big idea with which it could rally its depleted forces and draw other Muslims into the fold. Soon, within the chaos of revolutionary Syria, it would find all four.
In the sixth month of Syria’s uprising, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was ready to make a move. He tapped one of his most trusted deputies, a native Syrian and a veteran from the Zarqawi days, to lead an expedition into the Syrian heartland. Outside the capital and other regime strongholds, the institutions that maintained security within Syria were failing, one by one. Here was a chance for Zarqawi’s followers to leap to another badly weakened host.
There, far from Syria’s contested cities, they met with local contacts, including former members of the Zarqawi network in Syria as well as other jihadists who were newly released from Bashar al-Assad’s jails, as the participants themselves would later confirm.
“Syria would not have been ready for us if not for the Syrian revolution,”
the men would establish a Syrian-run Islamist militia to join the rebels already battling Bashar al-Assad’s government. They called themselves Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Support Front for the People of Greater Syria.
The goal was to impose Islamic rule without borders,
Now Baghdadi would bring them all back, on a scale that evoked the savagery of the Ikhwan hordes that had swept the Arabian Peninsula a century earlier. And, like Zarqawi, he would find a way to force the world to watch.
as a member of Iraq’s al-Bu Badri tribe, he could claim to be part of the same ancestral line as Muhammad—a
What is clear is that he moved to Baghdad as a young man to attend college, and earned a bachelor’s degree in Islamic law and theology in 1999.
who, better than most, understood the Koran’s injunction to defend Muslim lands against invaders.
The promotion effectively made Baghdadi the third-ranking officer of the Islamic State, subordinate only to the senior leader and the minister of war.
It’s the post he held on April 18, 2010, when U.S. missiles and Iraqi rockets flattened a safe house outside the city of Tikrit, eliminating the group’s number one and number two leaders in a single blow.
approved of the promotion was a ruthless Iraqi army colonel named Samir al-Khlifawi, the leader of the group’s military council. A former Baathist who joined the insurgency after the U.S. invasion, Khlifawi urged Baghdadi to accept the top leadership and promised to serve as his top deputy and mentor,
“He cloaked himself with all the right religious credentials, and paid close attention to imagery, to clothing, to the way he moved and talked,” the official said. “He would go to great lengths to show that he was in his rightful place.”
Mouaz Moustafa, it was a first introduction to a new job that would prove to be exhilarating and heartbreaking, often in the same day:
Americans are naturally sympathetic toward those who seek to liberate their country from dictatorship, and here U.S. democratic principles “had aligned with U.S. national interests, in terms of what we need to do in Syria,” he said. “And we just thought the policy would shift in that direction.”
Arab governments secretly sent aid as well, usually the lethal kind.
In Qatar and Kuwait—both wealthy Gulf kingdoms and allies of the United States—the Islamists’ backers included government ministers who believed the jihadists offered the best chance for defeating the Assad government.
Awkward negotiations began for a clandestine training site in Jordan for secularist rebels, the core of a future “Southern Front” that could advance toward Damascus while Assad’s army was mired in fighting in the north and east of the country.
Abdullah was incredulous. Why, he would ask, would anyone supply arms to jihadists whose central aim is to create a seventh-century theocracy in the heart of the Middle East?
Abdullah, in his discussions with aides, imagined a fractured Syria divided into zones controlled by Sunnis, Alawites, and Kurds, each supported and supplied by foreign partisans.
“We weren’t convinced that al-Nusra was coming for us next week, but we were worried about all these trained jihadis coming back to Europe and having a passport,” the senior adviser said. “This is when the mood music in the Situation Room started to change.”
The Syrian president replenished his weary forces with Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and used his air force to bomb and strafe rebel positions.
Petraeus’s CIA put together a plan for building, training, and arming a moderate rebel army that could eventually overthrow the regime and establish authority in provinces now effectively controlled by Islamists. The plan was presented to President Obama at a White House meeting in late August, and Panetta was among the core group of senior advisers to argue for its acceptance.
There had been many instances in U.S. history where a well-intentioned decision to arm a guerrilla movement had horribly backfired, the president noted, according to Clinton’s account. Why would this time be different?
The videotape ended with a recording of Zarqawi’s voice.
