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The Rise of ISIS
Doubleday
October 2015
On Sale: September 29, 2015
368 pages ISBN: 0385538219 EAN: 9780385538213 Kindle: B00RRT346E Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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 the government of 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 character-driven 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,
U.S. officials inadvertently 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 unstable, ungoverned
pockets on the Iraq-Syria border. When the Syrian civil war
broke out in 2011, and as the U.S. largely stood by, ISIS
seized its chance to pursue Zarqawi’s dream of an
ultra-conservative Islamic caliphate. Drawing on unique high-level access to CIA and Jordanian
sources, Warrick weaves gripping, 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 brilliant and definitive history
that reveals the long arc of today’s most dangerous
extremist threat.
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