Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joby Warrick traces the origins and rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) through a narrative spanning two decades, centering on the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose ideology of extreme violence gave birth to the movement, and the intelligence officers, diplomats, and political leaders whose miscalculations helped it flourish.

The book opens in February 2015, as Jordan's King Abdullah II, on a state visit to Washington, ordered the execution of Sajida al-Rishawi, a failed suicide bomber imprisoned since 2005 for her role in three simultaneous hotel bombings in Amman that killed 60 people. The execution was triggered by a crisis: ISIS had captured a Jordanian fighter pilot and demanded Rishawi's release. Abu Haytham, the head of counterterrorism at Jordan's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, managed the negotiations and recognized the demand as a deliberate invocation of the group's origins under Zarqawi. Warrick uses the crisis to frame the book's central arc, tracing how Zarqawi's movement survived his death to become a self-declared state.

Warrick introduces Zarqawi through the eyes of Basel al-Sabha, a young prison doctor assigned in 1998 to al-Jafr, a notorious Jordanian desert fortress. Sabha encountered radical Islamist inmates controlled not by their intellectual leader, the firebrand preacher Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, but by a powerfully built figure who commanded absolute obedience without uttering a word. Born Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh in the industrial town of Zarqa, Zarqawi was a high school dropout and street criminal who found religion at his mother's urging, then traveled to Afghanistan in 1989 to fight alongside the mujahideen, Islamist volunteers battling the Soviet-backed government. He returned to Jordan radicalized, formed a militant cell with Maqdisi, and was arrested in 1994 before he could attack an Israeli border post. In prison, Zarqawi transformed himself into a leader, memorizing the Koran and cultivating a reputation for fearlessness. When King Hussein died in 1999, his son Abdullah inherited the throne and declared a traditional general amnesty. Parliament's list of more than 2,500 prisoners was inadequately vetted, and Zarqawi walked free.

The Mukhabarat tried to contain Zarqawi through regular harassing visits but found no legal grounds to hold him. In September 1999, he left Jordan for Pakistan, ostensibly to start a honey business, and made his way to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden's deputy Sayf al-Adel proposed that Zarqawi run his own training camp near the city of Herat, funded by al-Qaeda but operating independently. After the September 11, 2001, attacks drew U.S. forces into Afghanistan, Zarqawi was wounded in a bombing, fled to Iran, and crossed into northeastern Iraq to join Ansar al-Islam, a Taliban-like Kurdish Islamist group.

CIA operative Charles "Sam" Faddis led a team into northern Iraq in 2002 and pinpointed Zarqawi's base. He urged a strike, but the Bush White House vetoed the raid, fearing it could start the Iraq war prematurely or undermine Secretary of State Colin Powell's upcoming speech to the United Nations Security Council. In that February 2003 speech, Powell declared that Iraq harbored a terrorist network headed by Zarqawi, displaying his photograph on a screen. CIA analyst Nada Bakos, the agency's top Zarqawi expert, watched in dismay, knowing the claim contradicted the intelligence. The speech transformed Zarqawi from an obscure jihadist into an international celebrity and a magnet for recruits. When U.S. forces finally destroyed the Ansar camp weeks later, Zarqawi had already fled to Baghdad.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq provided Zarqawi with a battlefield and a cause. Decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and ban members of Saddam's Baath Party from government threw tens of thousands of experienced officials out of work, driving many into Zarqawi's orbit. Beginning in August 2003, devastating car bombings struck the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the United Nations headquarters, and the Imam Ali Mosque in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. Intercepted communications linked the attacks to Zarqawi. When CIA station chief Gerry Meyer warned of a developing insurgency, the White House relieved him of command.

In a January 2004 letter to Bin Laden, Zarqawi laid out his strategy: provoke Iraq's Shiite majority through relentless attacks to force Sunnis into a sectarian war. He sought al-Qaeda's endorsement and months later received it. He horrified the world with the videotaped beheading of Nicholas Berg, a young American entrepreneur, broadcast over the Internet in a deliberate echo of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. The video made Zarqawi an icon among hardened jihadists and marked a new form of terrorism as spectacle. Waves of suicide bombings, kidnappings, and executions followed, pushing Iraq toward civil war.

Zarqawi also struck at his homeland. The Mukhabarat disrupted a 2004 plot to detonate a chemical bomb in Amman that could have killed tens of thousands. In November 2005, three simultaneous hotel bombings in Amman killed 60 people, most of them Jordanian wedding guests. The attacks backfired: Massive protests erupted, Zarqawi's own relatives publicly renounced him, and al-Qaeda's leadership rebuked him. Abdullah deployed Mukhabarat teams to work alongside U.S. special forces inside Iraq.

General Stanley McChrystal, commanding U.S. special operations, built a relentless campaign of nightly raids and intelligence fusion that dismantled Zarqawi's network. The breakthrough came when the Mukhabarat identified Zarqawi's spiritual adviser, an Iraqi imam who met him regularly. On June 7, 2006, airborne cameras followed the imam to a house in the village of Hibhib near the city of Baqubah. Two 500-pound bombs flattened the house, and Zarqawi died minutes later from blast injuries.

Zarqawi's death, combined with a U.S. troop surge, Sunni tribal revolts, and intensified raids, brought the organization to near collapse by 2008. But Iraq's Shiite-led government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki deepened Sunni grievances through political marginalization, keeping the embers alive. When Syria's uprising erupted in 2011 and President Bashar al-Assad responded with overwhelming force, the Islamic State of Iraq's new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, dispatched operatives into the chaos. Baghdadi had been a shy Islamic law scholar on track for an academic career before the 2003 invasion radicalized him, and a stint at the U.S. detention facility Camp Bucca, a breeding ground for extremism, cemented his transformation. His operatives established the al-Nusra Front as a Syrian beachhead, which became one of the rebellion's most effective fighting forces, funded by private donors in Kuwait and Qatar.

Within the Obama administration, CIA director David Petraeus, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta pushed for arming moderate Syrian rebels, but Obama rejected the plan, fearing entanglement in another war. In April 2013, Baghdadi unilaterally announced the merger of his Iraqi organization with the al-Nusra Front into the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Al-Qaeda's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, publicly rebuked Baghdadi, but Baghdadi ignored the directive, completing the split with al-Qaeda. When Assad used chemical weapons against civilians in August 2013, Obama signaled military action but failed to secure congressional or British support. The collapse of Western resolve devastated the moderate opposition and drove fighters toward Islamist groups.

ISIS seized the Syrian city of Raqqa and imposed totalitarian rule: public executions, crucifixions, and military training camps for children. In June 2014, approximately 1,500 ISIS fighters overran Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, routing a defending force hollowed out by corruption. On July 4, Baghdadi appeared at Mosul's Great Mosque to declare the restoration of the caliphate.

The book closes with two acts of savagery that provoked fierce responses. In January 2015, captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh was burned alive in a metal cage in a professionally produced execution video. The killing sparked unprecedented condemnation across the Muslim world. Abdullah launched massive air strikes against ISIS and traveled to the pilot's family home as fighter jets returned from bombing runs. In an afterword, Warrick extends the narrative to the November 2015 Paris attacks, in which nine attackers killed 130 people in coordinated assaults on cafés, a concert hall, and the national stadium. Warrick draws parallels between Zarqawi and the Belgian ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud, both petty criminals radicalized in prison, and argues that the attacks demonstrated ISIS's capacity to project violence into Western countries through combat-trained operatives.