Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

“Lo and behold, the spark has been ignited in Iraq,” the dead leader was heard to say, “and its fires shall only get bigger until it burns the Armies of the Cross in Dabiq.”

Officially banished, Baghdadi said, was the group known as the al-Nusra Front. In its place was a newly merged organization that Baghdadi called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.

The Islamic State would function like a real government, with flow charts for acquiring approvals and special departments in charge of social media, logistics, finances, training, recruitment, and even the management of candidates for suicide missions, who were kept apart from the regular fighters to ensure proper indoctrination.

ISIS’s men raised their black flags over the main government buildings and claimed Raqqa as the new capital of the Islamic State.

Khirbet al-Joz, a farming village that had become a kind of in-country base for his Syrian Emergency Task Force. The former congressional aide and his team had made a project of restoring basic services in the town, still scarred by months of fighting and looting. After

“We need to have a game-changing action,” McCain told a TV interviewer after returning home. “No American boots on the ground, [but] establish a safe zone, and protect it and supply weapons to the right people in Syria who are fighting for obviously the things we believe in.”

President Obama managed to secure a deal, with Russia’s help, to remove all chemical weapons from Syrian territory, and the prospect of military intervention was again pushed aside.

The country’s minority Sunnis had ruled Iraq up until the U.S. invasion, when power was handed to Shiites. Now, with American troops out of the way, the score settling had begun in earnest, or so it seemed to the Dulaims. It

Sunnis candidly acknowledged that the tribes had handed ISIS the keys to Anbar Province, but only as a temporary measure.

Mosul’s Great Mosque

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