Isis

Fawaz A. Gerges traces the origins, rise, territorial expansion, and eventual military defeat of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, arguing that the group is fundamentally a symptom of broken politics in the Middle East rather than an aberration. The book identifies four interrelated factors behind the group's emergence: the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the destruction of its state institutions, the sectarian dysfunction of Iraq's post-invasion political system, the Syrian civil war, and the derailment of the Arab Spring uprisings by counterrevolutionary forces. Gerges places ISIS within the broader history of the Salafi-jihadist movement, a term referring to militant activists who seek to replace secular governance with a theologically grounded state modeled on seventh-century Islamic principles.

Gerges opens by establishing the scale of the Islamic State's conquests. By late 2014, the group controlled roughly 100,000 square kilometers across Syria and Iraq, governed a population of close to 10 million, and fielded an estimated 20,000 to 31,500 fighters. It dissolved the international border between the two countries, symbolically casting aside the colonial-era map drawn by Britain and France. Gerges stresses that the group's most distinctive characteristic was its capacity to build governing institutions: a hierarchical bureaucracy, a functioning judiciary, diversified revenue streams, and ministries for public services, health, agriculture, education, and finance. The group raised as much as $800 million annually from taxation alone and derived substantial income from oil and gas sales, making it nearly self-funded.

The book traces ISIS's ideological lineage to the broader Salafi-jihadist family, which over several decades produced groups including Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Al Qaeda Central (AQC), and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Three foundational manifestos guided the movement's leaders, advocating total offensive jihad, prioritizing war against the "near enemy" of secular Muslim rulers over the "far enemy" of the United States, and arguing that extreme violence produces submission. Gerges distinguishes ISIS sharply from AQC. While AQC, led by Osama bin Laden and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri, prioritized attacking the United States and remained a stateless transnational movement, ISIS focused on the Shia, the Iraqi and Syrian regimes, and Iran, viewing the struggle against the West as secondary. The group's central ambition was to build a de facto caliphate with a distinct national identity, including flags, currencies, school textbooks, and a de facto national anthem. It defined the umma, or global Muslim community, in exclusively Sunni terms; non-Sunni populations faced extra taxation, property confiscation, or deportation. The group engaged in systematic cultural cleansing, destroying ancient sites across its territory, and perpetrated atrocities against minorities. Following its seizure of Sinjar in 2014, ISIS killed Yazidi men and boys of fighting age. The Yazidis are a religious minority concentrated in northern Iraq. The group abducted over 5,000 Yazidi girls and women, forcing them into sexual slavery administered through a bureaucratic system. Christians in captured areas were given the choice to convert, pay a special tax called jizya, or forfeit all property and leave.

The book reconstructs ISIS's origins through the biography of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a semiliterate Jordanian born in 1966 who grew up in modest circumstances, dropped out of school, and was imprisoned for sexual assault and drug possession before discovering Islam. Three turning points shaped him: his father's death in 1984, his discovery of religion, and his imprisonment in Jordan's al-Suwaqah prison from 1995 to 1999, where torture transformed him into a hardened radical. After his release, Zarqawi established a training camp in Afghanistan rather than joining Al Qaeda, preserving his independence. He eventually reached northern Iraq, where he built a network in the Sunni Triangle, the predominantly Sunni area of central Iraq. Gerges emphasizes that Iraq had never experienced a jihadist insurgency before 2003. The US-led invasion destroyed state institutions, disbanded the 300,000-strong army, and imposed de-Baathification, a campaign that purged members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from government positions. These conditions allowed Zarqawi's network to grow from fewer than 30 fighters to an estimated 5,000.

Zarqawi pledged allegiance to bin Laden in October 2004, renaming his group Al Qaeda in Iraq, but the merger masked deep disagreements. In a 2005 letter intercepted by the United States, Zawahiri warned Zarqawi that attacks on Shia mosques and beheadings of hostages were losing Muslim support. Zarqawi ignored these pleas, seeking to provoke all-out sectarian war. By 2006, his tactics had alienated the Sunni community, and tribal leaders organized the Sahwa, or Awakening, councils, which, backed by US funding and weapons, grew to 80,000 members and pushed AQI from major cities. After Zarqawi was killed in June 2006, his successors declared the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) without consulting AQC. By 2010, when both successors were killed in a joint US-Iraqi raid, the organization appeared near collapse.

Gerges identifies Iraq's political dysfunction as the primary fuel for ISIS's revival. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki consolidated power over the military, police, courts, and central bank, retained the defense and interior minister positions, and issued arrest warrants for high-profile Sunni politicians. He failed to integrate Sahwa members into the security forces as promised. When Arab Spring protests reached Iraq in 2011, tens of thousands demonstrated. Al-Maliki responded with force: Security forces killed protesters, the government banned vehicles to block access to rallies, and a massacre at Hawija in April 2013 killed 53 people, strengthening armed rebellion. ISIS exploited this spiraling conflict, proclaiming its support for Sunnis and collaborating with Baathist armed groups, organizations loyal to Hussein's former ruling party.

The book reconstructs Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's path from obscurity to infamy. Born Ibrahim ibn Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai in 1971 in Samarra, he grew up in a lower-middle-class, religiously conservative neighborhood. The 2003 invasion radicalized him; he helped found an insurgent group and was detained at Camp Bucca, a US-run prison where former detainees say jihadists networked and radicalized one another. Seventeen of the 25 most important ISIS leaders spent time in US detention facilities. Gerges challenges the widely circulated thesis that former Baathist officers hijacked ISIS, arguing instead that these officers had already converted from Baathism to Salafi-jihadism during the 1990s sanctions era and the post-2003 resistance, a process accelerated by incarceration. ISIS converted Baathists to its cause, not the reverse.

Syria's descent into civil war provided ISIS with its second front. The Syrian uprising began in 2011 in rural areas devastated by drought and neoliberal economic policies and was initially neither sectarian nor violent. When the Assad regime responded with force, the revolt militarized and radicalized. In late 2011, Baghdadi sent Abu Mohammed al-Joulani and another lieutenant to Syria to establish a jihadist cell. The resulting group, Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian jihadist organization, concealed its connection to ISI and presented itself as a nationalist outfit, gaining popularity through military prowess and provision of services. In April 2013, Baghdadi publicly revealed the connection and declared a merger into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Joulani rejected the takeover and pledged allegiance to Zawahiri, triggering an internal jihadist civil war. ISIS prevailed, seizing al-Raqqa as its de facto capital and, by summer 2014, controlling 95 percent of the resource-rich Deir al-Zour province.

Gerges argues that the derailment of the Arab Spring, not the uprisings themselves, catalyzed ISIS's surge. The uprisings were peaceful, inclusive, and focused on social justice. Counterrevolutionary forces sabotaged the transition: Saudi Arabia spent over $100 billion to prevent change at home and invested billions abroad, while Iran backed the Assad regime and al-Maliki. This geostrategic cold war diverted the struggle toward sectarian rivalry, providing fuel for ISIS. By early 2016, approximately 36,500 foreign fighters from over 90 countries had traveled to Syria, including at least 6,600 from Western nations, drawn by a sophisticated social media campaign that offered alienated young Muslims a utopian vision centered on the caliphate. The group also carried out devastating attacks abroad, including the November 2015 Paris bombings orchestrated by Belgian ISIS operative Abdelhamid Abaaoud.

Gerges concludes by assessing the group's strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths included a loyal social base among aggrieved Sunnis, effective governance, and military prowess. Its fatal weakness was the absence of a positive vision: Beyond anti-Shia rhetoric and rudimentary services, the group offered no blueprint for economic development or political participation. It also fought simultaneously against the US-led coalition, Russia, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Hezbollah (a Lebanese Shia militia and political movement), the Kurds, and rival rebel groups. This strategic overextension united the world against it and led to the loss of its territorial caliphate in Iraq in 2017 and Syria in 2019. The group has since morphed into a rural insurgency, still lethal but diminished. Gerges argues that preventing resurgence requires addressing legitimate Sunni grievances, rebuilding war-torn cities, reconstructing states on the basis of the rule of law and inclusive citizenship, and ending the civil wars that sustain Salafi-jihadism.