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ISIS Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS By Joby Warrick NewYork, NY: Doableday, 2015 344 pages $28.95
Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick's study of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is primarily a history of the emergence and expansion of the organization well before it began using the name ISIS. Approximately, the first two-thirds of the book deal with the activities of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian street criminal turned terrorist, who became the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a predecessor of ISIS. As a violent street thug, Zarqawi was convinced by his mother to study Islam at a local mosque in the hope he could be straightened out. While he did respond to some Islamic ideas, he filtered these ideas through his own violent outlook and later became further radicalized in Afghanistan.
After returning to Jordan, the incipient jihadist leader was imprisoned by authorities in 1992 for terrorism-related activities. Then, in the harsh conditions of al-Jafr Prison, Zarqawi formed a partnership with a radical Islamist propagandist and spiritual leader, Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, eventually becoming the unquestioned leader of the radical Islamist prisoners. Later, Zarqawi was released from prison in 1999 through what Warrick characterizes as a Jordanian bureaucratic mistake concerning who was eligible for a sweeping royal pardon following King Abdullah's assumption of the throne. Eventually the ex-inmate ended up back in Afghanistan as the leader of a small band of terrorists. While there, Zarqawi hoped to coordinate with Osama bin Laden, but the al-Qaeda leader did not have the time or interest to meet with him and assigned this duty to subordinates.
Zarqawi's rise, from a small-time radical bin Laden could not be bothered with to an internationally known terrorist leader, occurred because of the Iraq war. In late 2001 or early 2002, Zarqawi saw a potential Iraq war as an opportunity to lead his small band of terrorists against the American troops he felt were certain to invade the country. He and his followers correspondingly infiltrated into an area of Kurdish Iraq outside of the control of Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. There he attached himself to Ansar al-Islam, a group of...