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Pulitzer Prize, General nonfiction, 2016
In a thrilling dramatic narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents.
When Jordan granted amnesty to a group of political prisoners in 1999, it little realized that among them was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist mastermind and soon the architect of an Islamist movement bent on dominating the Middle East. In Black Flags, an unprecedented account of the rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick shows how the zeal of this one man and the strategic mistakes of Presidents Bush and Obama led to the banner of ISIS being raised over huge swaths of Syria and Iraq.
Zarqawi began by directing terror attacks from a base in Northern Iraq, but it was the American invasion in 2003 that catapulted him to the head of a vast insurgency. By falsely identifying him as the link between Saddam and bin Laden, US officials spurred like-minded radicals to rally to his cause. Their wave of brutal beheadings and suicide bombings persisted until American and Jordanian intelligence discovered clues that led to a lethal airstrike on Zarqawi's hideout in 2006.
His movement, however, endured. First calling themselves al-Qaeda in Iraq then Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, his followers sought refuge in ungoverned pockets on the Iraq-Syria border. When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, and as the US largely stood by, ISIS seized its chance to pursue Zarqawi's dream of an ultraconservative Islamic caliphate.
Drawing on high-level access to CIA and Jordanian sources, Warrick weaves moment-by-moment operational details with the perspectives of diplomats and spies, generals and heads of state, many of whom foresaw a menace worse than al Qaeda and tried desperately to stop it. Black Flags is a definitive history that reveals the long arc of today's most dangerous extremist threat.
- Sales Rank: #3705 in Audible
- Published on: 2015-09-29
- Released on: 2015-09-29
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 813 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A Fast and Furious History Lesson
By Robert J. Hard
So far there are two really superb books on the rise of the ISIS menace. One is Will McCants's ISIS Apocalypse (reviewed by me a couple of months ago. See "Apocalypse Now" in the reader reviews for that fine work.) Black Flags--The Rise of ISIS by Jody Warrick is the other. Surely there will be a third great book detailing the American-supported effort to crush these vermin, but that story has not been told because it has not yet occurred. But mark my words--it will.
Warrick's narrative arc begins in Jordan, and centers on the prison where terrorists and suspects are held. The lead characters are Jihadist activists who will go on to play pivotal roles in Iraq and Syria, the redoubtable (if reluctant) King Abdullah II, and the principal figures of the Jordanian intelligence service. Cruel but not sadistic, hard-nosed but still human, dogged but not dogmatic, it is the Jordanian intelligence officials who come across as some of the real heroes of the piece. Warrick's access to them is a true journalistic tour de force.
The main Jihadist character is Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, leader of something of a break-away faction of Al Qaeda in Iraq and founder of ISIS. A true religious fanatic (there is simply no other word for him), Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to fight the infidel Americans and curry favor with Osama Bin Laden. Although his battlefield exploits showed extraordinary courage, Bin Laden and his cohorts disliked and distrusted him and kept him at a far remove. As the Taliban strongholds were wrested free by the Americans, Zarqawi retreated to a lawless enclave of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein's government, From that inauspicious backwater in 2002 Zarqawi put together the skeleton of a Jihadist militia that would ultimately lead the insurgency against the Americans in Iraq.
With unprecedented access to primary sources, Warrick has been able to produce a detailed profile of Zarqawi's rise to power--his character, his murderous message, and why that message fell on such receptive ears. (Spoiler alert: It had a lot to do with American missteps in the occupation, but such missteps occurred in a context that was hardly America's making. Underlying the insurgency, and the subsequent rise of ISIS, is the 1000-year-old Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict. The Iraqi Shi'ites, long suppressed by the majority Sunnis, were only too thrilled to settle ancient scores. That's what they were in the midst of doing when Zarqawi's group essentially rallied them under the banner of "Kill every Shia you can find." Ultimately Zarqawi would die in his "safe house" when it was hit by American 500-pounders. But the bones of his Jihadist organization and its revolting ideology would survive. The best analysis of his successor, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (the self-styled Caliph) is found in McCants's ISIS Apocalypse, mentioned above.)
In a delicious irony, Zarqawi's ragtag bunch of AK-toting thugs was under the watchful eye of a CIA team that had smuggled themselves into Iraq to get a handle on Saddam's military and its possible links to radical Islamists back in 2002. It was soon obvious that the only only thing that Saddam and the Islamists shared was mutual hatred. (Indeed, Charles "Sam" Fadis, the 47-year-old leader of the CIA team of soldier-spies, realized that a team of under cover Iraqi military men camped nearby were doing the same as he was--spying on the militants to assess how much of a threat they were.) For six months Fadis begged and pleaded with his superiors for a strike that would have wiped out Zerqawi's whole troop, then numbering just a few hundred at most.
In irony bordering on paradox, his requests were turned down. Initially, Stan McCrystal at the Pentagon proposed a large, complex strike (which Rumsfeld, to his credit, supported), but which Condoleza Rice opposed on political grounds and others felt was just too complex. Fadis proposed a variety of simpler approaches (any one of which could have been decisive), but these too were turned down. The last turn-down came in January 2003. Among the arguments against an assault at this point was that the decision to invade Iraq had been made, but the public rationale had not been. In that a main pillar of the argument was that Saddam was supporting Islamic terrorists (the reality was just the opposite), it would ruin our argument for invading Iraq if the terrorists were eliminated in a pre-emptive strike before the war began. In other words, having terrorists in Iraq was just too good a pretext for an invasion to let it go to waste by actually solving that problem before it got out of hand, the rationale being that since we were invading anyway, we could wipe them out more publicly once we got there.
What the White House war planners failed to appreciate, of course, was that these guys did not have their feet nailed to the sand, and were free to disband and relocate once the invasion occurred. That is what they did, and in the chaos that ensued from our abject failure to plan for post-invasion government, they were well-entrenched in urban areas before we knew they'd left the countryside. Many tens of thousands of lives were lost in consequence, and the ISIS threat emerged from the ruins.
It would be too cynical to suggest that everyone in the White House knew that there was no link between Saddam and the Islamo-terrorists. Some did, but some didn't, and the loudest voice of denial came from Dick Cheney (misadvised by the equally misguided Douglas Feith). Dick Cheney's apparent faith in the veracity of this fictional linkage is almost a thing of beauty--if the consequences had not been so ugly and so vastly at variance with America's best interests. While Cheney plays a very small role in Warrick's narrative, and is never singled out for any kind of special criticism, it is hard not to see him as either a bullying imbecile or a pathological liar or both.
(In truth, Cheney probably saw Saddam as unfinished business from his time as Secretary of Defense in the first Iraq War in 1991. He longed to finish that business, but there was no serious legal basis for starting another war. In that context, 9-11 came like a gift from the Almighty, providing a rare opportunity for an historic do-over. If, that is, Saddam was somehow instrumental in 9-11. Hence Cheney's pathological need to connect the dots, even when it was manifest that the dots were on completely different pages and written in different books. To the degree that Islamic extremists are a threat to Western values, Saddam's secularist regime was one of the better allies we could have had, but such was the prevailing arrogance and almost willful blindness, this practical political reality was rejected out of hand.)
For Warrick there are definitely some heroes in this page-turning tale. One is Nada Bakos, the 20-something CIA analyst who made a specialty of profiling and tracking Zarqawi. How a farm girl from Montana (there were only nine boys and girls in her high school class) has the chops to sift thousands and thousands of pages of raw intelligence to limn an accurate picture of a major terrorist about whom no one else in the Agency had any inkling is something of an enduring mystery. But there it is, and it says something good about the CIA that it could still find and cultivate talent of that ilk. (Cheney tried unsuccessfully to bully her into silence, and was still badgering her to establish an Iraqi link to the terrorists of 9-11 two years after the invasion of Iraq!) In yet another irony of history's turning wheel, numbers of Baathist soldiers whom we stripped of all power and prestige after the invasion have now re-emerged among the ranks of ISIS, giving ISIS a level of military competence they never would have had if we had just left things alone.)
Another hero (not dwelt on but certainly of serious note) is Gen Stan McCrystal, who led the Special Forces in Iraq. This was urban fighting at its toughest and dirtiest--house to house, room by room, usually in the dark of night. Maybe it was atonement for not coming up with a better plan to kill Zarqawi in 2002, but McCrystal led numbers of these urban attack squads personally.There aren't many in the Pentagon with such a valid claim to gallantry.
President Bush does not come off that badly. While Rumsfeld is locked in denial that an insurgency is even occurring, Bush sadly realizes that everything has gone terribly, terribly wrong and does his level best to right the ship that he has inadvertently steered onto the rocks. President Obama comes off less well, hoping that diplomacy and some sort of mythical public pressure will force Assad of Syria from office without his having to commit American troops. Most particularly grievous was (and remains) the failure to arm the Free Syrian Army (the non-Islamist Sunni opponents of Assad) in a timely manner.
Such an opportunity was presented, and rejected by Obama, in the summer of 2012. I thought Warrick was a bit one-sided in his argument in this section, failing (as he did) to mention that the President was locked in a tight re-election race at the time. In that getting our troops out of war in the Middle East was a central tenet of his campaign message (as it had been in 2008), it struck me as a tad unreasonable to expect the man to completely reverse himself in the middle of a campaign and fan the winds of war. The exigencies of politics aside, the President's continuing refusal to get involved a year later, in 2013, is something else again. The facts on the ground had changed, and seriously worsened, and by then he would have had enough political cover to change course and do something constructive (meaning destructive, where ISIS is concerned). Interestingly, among those arguing unsuccessfully for a more aggressive approach was Hillary Clinton. Consequently, I would surmise that no matter who wins the 2016 Presidential sweepstakes, U.S. forces will be taking a more active role in Syria in 2017.
But I digress. The arc of Black Flags takes us back to Jordan where it began. And Warrick argues convincingly that that's where our key alliance must begin. That King Abdullah was in Washington in mid-January 2016 and did not get to meet with the President, signals to me that he is still substituting hope for experience, which may make the next President's job--and the lives of Syrians and Iraqis both--a lot tougher than they absolutely need to be.
It will not be easy. It is not simply a matter of dropping a bunch of bombs and then walking away triumphant, as some simple minded souls seem to believe. The lesson of the Iraq fiasco is that once the bombs stop falling, you need to pick up the pieces: Restart the water and food supplies, provide at least basic medical care, get electricity and phones working, provide a police force that is at least reasonably honest, courts of justice, and prisons that aren't training grounds for the next generation of terrorists. We are talking about the work of years, not weeks or months. Obama doesn't think that the American people wish to bear that burden. For all I know, he's right. But we really ought to talk about it.
In conclusion. Black Flags reads like a fast-paced novel: part spy thriller. part war story, part political intrigue. I really wish it were fiction, but it's not. It is the sad and tragic history of our immediate past and present, with insights into our future.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Reads like a novel, but is full of information
By Mamlukman
Generally I'm fairly critical, and I find mistakes or things I don't like. Not here. This is as good as it gets--it reads like a novel. If you come to this book knowing nothing, you will know a lot after you read it. If you come to this book as an amateur expert, there's still a lot here. In short, a fantastic book. One of the few I can unreservedly recommend.
One of the major themes of the book is something I have said for about 50 years: The people on the front line, the actual workers, know what's going on. The further up the chain of command you go, the more information gets twisted and distorted. By the time you get to the president (of a corporation or the USA), ignorance reigns supreme. There are exceptions, but they are rare. (In a personal example that seems like a Dilbert cartoon but is true, I once made the huge mistake of talking to a VP while waiting for the elevator. Within minutes I was in my supervisor's office being chewed out for not going through the chain of command. But if the president only talks to senior VP's, who only talk to the VP's, who only talk to the senior directors, who only talk to the directors, who only talk to the managers…ignorance prevails.)
King Abdullah of Jordan makes appearances throughout the book. He warns of things to beware of, he suggests courses of actions, he pleads for help. He is ignored--constantly. Why the West is not listening to him and supporting him in every way possible is a mystery. Did you know about the "Amman Message" Abdullah issued in 2004? I didn't, and I've studied this subject for 20 years. It has its own web site: Amazon won't let me post it, but you can search for it.
Various people (for example, State Dept. spokesperson Marie Harf in 2015) have blamed socio-economic problems for the rise of Islamic extremism. Read what the extremists say about themselves (for example, ISIS publishes a slick monthly magazine called "Dabiq" that's available online (again, do a search). Not once do extremists complain about the economy, jobs, discrimination, or all of the Western hit list of societal ills. So what motivates them? Religion. It's that simple. So if the West offers them democracy, free speech, and better jobs, Islamic extremists just mock them if they take any notice at all. Anyone who thinks this isn't about religion simply hasn't read or listened to what the extremists have to say. So propaganda aimed at non-religious issues just misses the mark and bounces off its intended targets. What the West should be supporting wholeheartedly are religious arguments (as in "The Amman Message" or "Open Letter to al-Baghdadi"). These religious arguments should be given full page advertisements in major newspapers and magazines, should be discussed constantly, and should be reproduced and dropped as leaflets oven extremists territory. They should also be reproduced and distributed in every mosque in the world--Muslim countries and non-Muslim countries alike. Every dollar spent on these activities would be better spent than a million dollars on bombs.
Another hero of the story is Nada Bakos, a CIA analyst assigned to track Zarqawi. She writes reports to her superiors, who alter her reports to suit their own bosses, who alter them to suit their own bosses…. you get the idea. Page 97: "Bakos often found herself yelling at the television screen, as though she were contesting a referee's blown call in a football game. Now Powell, like Cheney, was "asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be anything but," she later said." Bush and the boys twisted her reports 180 degrees, turning black into white! Good job.
Another revealing incident is when the CIA operatives and some Kurds have Zarqawi and his group in their sights in a hideout in N. Kurdistan. They plea for an air strike to take him out. Nope, do can do. Then they plea for better weapons to take him out. Nope. Then they plea for permission to just go in with what they've got. Nope. Political considerations. And so it goes…Zarqawi of course got away by the time Bush decided to act--after the 2004 election. But hey, that didn't matter did it? Just the foundation of ISIS, a few thousand deaths, the destabilization of Europe, mass terrorism, you know, the usual.
One can only hope that in 10 years it is not necessary to write a book detailing all the missed opportunities and the ignorance of leaders.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
An Important Book for This Dangerous World
By J. M. Alexander
This is a very pertinent book about the rise of the terrorist group that we most commonly call ISIS. Much of it focuses on two very important characters in this tragedy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (given name Ahmad Fadil al Khalayleh), the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner to ISIS; and King Abdullah II, the fourth sovereign of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. My treatment will be more on Zarqawi, but Abdullah is definitely the only “hero’ in this tale.
Zarqawi was born in Jordan on October 30, 1966. His family was working class, his father a municipal worker and his mother a devoutly religious parent. As a young man Zarqawi was introduced to radical Islamists when he traveled to Afghanistan in 1989, weeks after the Soviets had withdrawn, but just in time to join the assault on the pro-Moscow Afghan government that was left to fend for itself. By the time he left Afghanistan in 1993, he was a combat veteran with a few years of battlefield experience. He had been steeped in the doctrine of militant Islam, learning at the feet of radical Afghan and Arab clerics who would later ally themselves with the Taliban or with Osama bin Laden. He firmly believed that the victory in Afghanistan was granted by God.
When Zarqawi returned to Jordan he wanted to continue the jihad he had carried out in Afghanistan, but quickly ran afoul of the Jordanian secret service. He was jailed, and after some time was transferred to a notorious prison that had been recently reopened. He was accompanied by a number of other jihadist, most of whom were common street thugs. However, he was also housed with Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a firebrand preacher who advanced an austere brand of Islam which he had invented. In his view, each Muslim bore a personal obligation to act when confronted with evidence of official heresy. It wasn’t enough for the faithful simply to denounce corrupt rulers. They were compelled by Allah to slaughter them. Maqdisi was the leader, and told the inmates what to think. But he was also a polite intellectual, not the right mix for controlling the hard men he encountered in prison. Maqdisi needed an enforcer. In Zarqawi, he found the perfect helper: a man with the distinction of being at once slavishly devoted and utterly ruthless. Maqdisi may control what the prisoners thought, but Zarqawi controlled everything else. The harsh conditions in the prison may have been meant to break the jihadists, but they instead cemented their devotion to their cause, to each other, and especially to Zarqawi. Although a tough, frightful individual, Zarqawi displayed great loyalty and kindness to his fellow prisoners. He was the man they would follow.
Zarqawi seemed destined to a long imprisonment until the death of Jordan’s King Hussein in February of 1999. Surprisingly, the king had named his son, Abdullah, to ascend to the throne, even though it had long been assumed that the king’s brother, Hassan, would be his successor. Abdullah took power determined to continue the good works of his father. One of the first issues facing the young king was a long standing tradition dating back to Jordan’s founding whereby new kings were expected to declare a general amnesty in the country’s prisons, granting pardons to inmates convicted of non violent offenses or political crimes. This was a way to “clean the slate and score points with important constituencies, from the Islamists”, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, “***to powerful East Bank tribes.” Parliament was given the task of nominating release worthy prisoners and drafting the particulars of the amnesty. In the end, the list, now with more than twenty-five hundred names, was endorsed by Parliament and sent to the palace for the final approval. The king, then just six weeks into his new job and still picking his way through a three-dimensional minefield of legislative, tribal, and royal politics, faced a choice of either adopting the list or sending it back for weeks of additional debate. He signed it. Among the names was that of Zarqawi.
Zarqawi needed to go where he could advance the radical causes that he had become inculcated with in Afghanistan and in prison. He thus returned to Afghanistan to link up with his prior mentor, Osama bin Laden. But, rather than being accepted, he was snubbed- he was probably too violent and too stubborn to be part of al-Qaeda. Indeed, while bin Laden had sought to liberate Muslim nations gradually from corrupting Western influences so they could someday unify as a single Islamic theocracy, or caliphate, Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted that he would create his caliphate immediately. Zarqawi also saw a future when not only would ancient Muslim lands be reclaimed, but he and his followers would also be the instigators of a final cataclysmic struggle ending in the destruction of the West’s great armies at a grand battle in northern Syria. But, rejected by bin Laden, where could Zarqawi find the environment for his revolution? The event following the attack of 9/11 provided the answer-Iraq.
Secretary Powell’s speech to the UN linked Zarqawi and Saddam, saying that the dictator “harbored” Zarqawi, an associate of bin Laden. The CIA intelligence expert who had studied Zarqawi cringed at the statement, knowing that although there may be some technical element of truth- Zarqawi was hiding in a remote area of Iraq- there was no evidence that Saddam was aiding him in any way. Indeed, Saddam despised Islamists and had tortured and killed many. With Powell’s statement, he tried to link al-Qaeda to Iraq, but unwittingly transformed Zarqawi from an unknown jihadist to an international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement. In deciding to use the unsung Zarqawi as an excuse for launching a new front in the war against terrorism, the White House had managed to launch the career of one of the century’s great terrorists. We thus initially empowered Zarqawi and then, in the environment following the tragic invasion of Iraq, provided him with the turmoil necessary for his movement to thrive. Al-Quaeda in Iraq became a reality and a grave threat to American troops, and to any hope of peace in he region.
The subsequent invasion of Iraq began a series of blunders that Zarqawi was able to exploit to the fullest. The Americans were in fact treated well immediately after the fall of Saddam. However, that warm welcome quickly cooled for at least two reasons. One was the failure of the US to anticipate the breakdown of civil authority that followed the invasion, This was a serious planning omission that caused a great deal or resentment in the Iraqi people as they watched the looting and plunder that followed the invasions. The second was an act of commission when the Bush administration decided to disband the Iraqi army and ban all Baath party members from positions of authority. Since anyone seeking a management job under Saddam was required to join the Baath party, excluding all such trained individuals from the new government essentially removed the pool of qualified applicants from any significant jobs, including those in the security agencies best equipped to preserve order. Disbanding the army essentially left thousands of disgruntled soldiers who were ripe for recruitment, many of whom rose to positions of leadership in Zarqawi’s army. As the author so aptly pointed out:
“If Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could have dictated a U.S. strategy for Iraq that suited his own designs for building a terrorist network, he could hardly have come up with one that surpassed what the Americans themselves put in place over the spring and summer of 2003.”
Zarqawi was able to inflame sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni factions in Iraq and place the Americans in the midst of a three sided war.
Zarqawi approached the insurgency in Iraq with ruthless intensity. Not being an Iraqi, he had no qualms about the country being essentially destroyed by violence. If fact, such turmoil was consistent with his objective to raze and tear down the country, leaving it too depleted to support the return of a secular country called Iraq. He countenanced and encouraged violence against other Muslims, especially Shiia’s. Meanwhile, the internal insurgency saw Shiias rising against the minority Sunnis who had long dominated under Saddam. Many Iraqis saw the foreign Islamists as preferable to the Americans, especially as the US soldiers became more and more disenchanted with their role, and, perhaps more significantly, after the debacle at Abu Ghraib. But Zarqawi would ultimately be a victim of his own bloodthirsty tactics. Killing other innocent Muslims is, for most Muslims, inconsistent with the Koran, regardless of whether they be Sunni or Shia. Nor could the destruction of Mosques be countenanced. However, Islam has no centralized religious hierarchy to settle theological disputes. Instead, Muftis, Sunni clerics of a certain rank, can issues religious edicts called fatwas, even though they may disagree wildly on the same topic. Thus, Zarqawi was able to enlist such clerics to justify his barbarity against other Muslims. To combat this heresy, King Abdullah brought together more than two hundred Islamic scholars, representing more than fifty countries, to gather in Jordan and craft an expansive statement declaring that it was impossible to “***declare as apostates any group of Muslims who believes in God.” The King then called on all moderates, of all religions, to speak out against the barbarity of the extremists.
Despite such warnings, and the disenchantment of Muslims, Zarqawi continued this attacks, perhaps culminating, at least for Jordanians, in the bombing of a wedding party at the Raddison Hotel in Amman. Thereafter, the Jordanian secret police began to cooperate with the American special forces in gaining intelligence and conducting raids against terrorist cells in Iraq. One such bombing raid killed Zarqawi in June of 2006. But he left behind a dangerous legacy. Indeed, Zarqawi’s foreign-led terrorist network had morphed into something more insidious and homegrown, as scores of jihadists stood ready to take up his mantle.
But these forces were not unchallenged at the time of and after Zarqawi’s death. The Muslim world had tired of the barbarity of Zarqawi’s tactics as videotaped suicide bombings and beheadings became more commonplace. More importantly, as described above, “fusion cells” comprised of US special forces, largely teams of Navy SEALS and Army DELTA Force, were becoming more and more successful in their pursuit of Islamist militants. Their tactics had been honed to a fine edge enabling small units of a half dozen commandos to carry out multiple raids on a single night. These operations worked on many levels. The accelerated tempo of the nightly operations kept the terrorists off balance, unable to coordinate or plan sophisticated attacks. The raids also produced torrents of fresh intelligence, including insights into the recruitment and training of suicide bombers. The US forces also discovered that, although the jihadists were skilled butchers, they were not good soldiers. By the end of 2008 Zarqawi’s old organization was significantly weakened.
By then it had transformed into the Islamic State of Iraq, and would ultimately be what we now know as ISIS. The first leader was one Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who headed the organization form 2006-2010. His successor was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This second Baghdadi had the same soaring ambitions as Zaqawi, foreseeing a caliphate stretching through much of Syria and Iraq, and envisioning the apocalyptic defeat of the West in a grand battle in northern Syria. However, in late 2011 his boasts were as empty as the group’s coffers. 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. As Zarqawi found a fertile ground for his jihad in war torn Iraq, Baghdadi would find a similar environment in the ascending turmoil in Syria.
The much heralded “Arab Spring” had spread from Tunisia to Egypt and threatened other parts of the Middle East and beyond. It first appeared as if Syria, led by Bashar al-Assad, might escape its reach. The country’s economic and political elite was solidly behind the ruling family, and the government’s officially secularist policies and brutal secret police kept ethnic and sectarian tensions bottled up. But as tensions rose elsewhere, they finally spread to Syria. By March of 2011 protests sprung up in many cities throughout the country. They seemed genuinely peaceful at the start, but Assad, contrary to what he viewed as failed attempts at appeasement in other countries, decided not to accommodate the protester’s demands for political and economic reforms. He would instead try to “***bludgeon, gas, and shoot his way out of the crisis.” Similar protests had arisen in Jordan, but King Abdullah quickly instituted reforms that quelled the uprising. Seeing the danger with the pending violence in his Syrian neighbor, and the threat to both his country and the entire Middle East, Abdullah tried to convince Assad to consider similar actions, but to no avail. Assad would fight on. Throughout 2011 the US refrained from intervening in the conflict, not only because of the limited options, but also because the conventional wisdom predicted Assad’s impending fall.
Attempting to gain support against the opposition, Assad painted them as terrorists. This was initially not true, but, by early 2012, became more credible as Baghdadi and ISIS flowed into Syria to oppose Assad. Its goal was not to save Syria, but to rekindle the ambition for a new Caliphate in the region. Now there was a credible force aligned against Assad. Baghdadi had fighters, and now money came flowing into his coffers from wealthy Sunni Arabs and governments who saw a chance to dethrone the Shia regime of Assad. But Assad also had powerful allies in Iran and Russia, as well as Hezbollah fighters. The stage was set for the bloody stalemate that has devastated the country.
As the conflict wore on, there were more calls for intervention by the US, including requests from Abdullah of Jordan. However, President Obama continued to be wary of being drawn into another Middle Eastern war, an attitude held by most of Congress and the electorate. The threat from ISIS became more telling as it made significant gains in IRAQ in 2014. In the late spring, the troops of the Islamic State surged across western Iraq and into the consciousness of millions of people around the world. Moving with remarkable speed, ISIS vanquished four Iraqi army divisions, overran at least a half-dozen military installations, including western Iraq’s largest, and seized control of nearly a third of Iraq’s territory. These rather recent events are fresh in many memories, especially as we saw the Iraqi army, trained and equipped by the United States, swiftly defeated by what seemed a rather comparatively ill-equipped and trained adversary. ISIS’s capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was especially troublesome, as a small rebel column of reportedly 1500 men quickly defeated an Iraqi force estimated at 25,000. But the author points out that the Iraqi forces were actually much smaller, perhaps no more than 10,000, and terribly ill equipped. The loss of men was largely due to desertion, and most of the heavy arms and equipment had been moved back to defend the threats to Baghdad. ISIS quickly took the city and with it, control of a great deal of resources. But there was another story behind these successes.
The sectarian problems in Iraq had never been resolved after the withdrawal of the Americans. The Shias now in power were “settling scores” with the Sunni minority who had controlled the country under Saddam. This split was not only religious, but also tribal. The author points out that, not only in Iraq, but also throughout the region, tribalism is still a strong unifier, and thus also a divider. The Sunni tribes were especially resistant and opposed to the Shia government. Their cooperation with ISIS was a major factor in much of its success. Indeed, the author noted that
“in the end, the movement’s greatest military success was less a statement of ISIS’s prowess than a reflection of the same deep divides that had roiled Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003.”
But the tribes had no intention of being subjugated to the type of governance that ISIS envisioned. They saw the rebels’ gains as more temporary But ISIS, once entrenched, gained a great deal of traction. It’s expansionist ambitions continued, matched by its continued savagery that had already worn thin with most of the Muslim world. Continued attacks on Jordan steeled the resolve of the people and of Abdullah, who joined with the US and other allies in conducting bombing strikes against ISIS. During a raid a Jordanian pilot, a Sunni Muslim, was shot down and captured. In a horrific display of violence ISIS burned him alive as videos streamed their cruelty across the globe. This may well have been a momentous point in the conflict. The author notes that
“ it was the death of the young pilot that sparked a change among ordinary Arabs. From Jordan’s cosmopolitan capital to the conservative Wahabi villages of Saudi Arabia came howls of condemnation and rage. The beheading of prisoners, brutal though it was, was specifically countenanced by the Koran and regularly practiced by the Saudi government as an official means of execution. But with the burning of a human being—and, in this case, a practicing Sunni Muslim—the Islamic State had broken an ancient taboo.”
Whether this change of attitude signals a change in the turmoil is something that is far from clear.
This book is an exhaustive, informative, and compelling work about a subject that occupies much of the public forum here and abroad. There are many facts revealed and questions raised and perhaps answered. I have always wondered what exactly ISIS wants, and if it can somehow be mollified. It’s goal as expressed by the author is the establishment of a caliphate and the ultimate defeat of Western forces in a grand battle in the lands now a part of Syria. This seems to lead one to the conclusion that, as has been said so often by the President and others, “ISIS must be destroyed”- not an easy task. Another question that I have asked is why Muslims are not more vocal in their opposition to ISIS, or do we not hear such news when they are. This book delves into the first by revealing the tribal and sectarian divides that underlie this entire region as perhaps lessening Arab protests. But she also reveals that the opposition by most Muslims, and particularly by Abdullah, is shown to be quite strident, at least in the author’s reporting. (Abdullah seems to be the only rational and thoughtful player on this stage of horrors.) Yet this is a story that is ignored by American media. We certainly hear of every bombing or other savage act– what not the condemnation by Muslim scholars? Another strong conclusion that one reaches from the book is that we do not, and can not fully understand the complex social, ethnic, religious, and tribal divides within the region. The author points out how such divides have been often exacerbated by a history of conquest by other Arabs, and, of course, by the Western colonialism that only ended after WWII. When one throws Israel into the mix, it only demonstrates how very complex the situation is. It also emphasizes the need for local remedies and the limits to the exercise of American power. In my opinion, we can do very little in the short term, and perhaps even less in the long term. The players in the region will have to resolve how they are going to live together, if they choose co-exist at all. All that we can do it make all possible efforts to protect our own country and people from a threat that, although small is scope, is real. ISIS is not, and could never be a force that could challenge us in a national sense, but, as we have seen, their brand of fanatic terrorism can inflict terrible individual carnage.
The always present threat of apocalypse lies with possession of a nuclear weapon. God forbid!
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