He dressed in ninja black, not flowing robes, and posted grisly images that attracted thousands of young men who believed he was avenging Muslims for centuries of humiliation and defeat. And unlike Bin Laden’s ponderous video sermons, Zarqawi used the Internet to bolster his reputation as a fierce jihadist and outlaw warrior. Unlike Bin Laden and his aides, his followers were fighting and killing Americans every day in Iraq. authorities increased the dead-or-alive bounty for Zarqawi to $25 million - the same as for Bin Laden.īy 2005, Zarqawi had more fighters, money and weapons than Al Qaeda ever commanded.

It also gave Zarqawi the confidence to announce he would build an Islamist super-group that would erase international borders, topple governments and establish a caliphate. In May 2004, Zarqawi issued a video that showed him, as the title explained, “slaughtering an American” named Nick Berg. insurgency into a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, a sectarian bloodletting that still is playing out. As Zarqawi had hoped, it turned the anti-U.S. Then his fighters began bombing and beheading Shiite Muslims and destroying their holy sites. headquarters in Baghdad, to discredit the American occupation. He sent suicide bombers to blow up embassies, hotels and other Western targets, including the U.N. The speech “transformed Zarqawi from an unknown jihadist to an international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement,” Warrick writes.Īfter the U.S.-led 2003 invasion, Zarqawi built a resistance network of embittered Iraqis and foreign jihadists. In addition to other errors, Powell wrongly accused Saddam Hussein of harboring Zarqawi, showing his scowling bearded face on TV screens around the world. Powell addressed the United Nations in February 2003 to urge war against Iraq. Still, he was a minor figure until then-U.S.

He then aligned himself with Osama bin Laden and organized bombings and assassinations in Jordan that landed him in jail until an amnesty in 1999. He joined a warlord’s militia in Afghanistan in 1989 and earned his stripes as a mujahid - a holy warrior. Warrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a fluid writer, takes the tale back to Zarqawi’s early years. It now threatens to remake the Middle East. It has cycled through several names and leaders, but the fanatic religious movement founded by Zarqawi has eclipsed Al Qaeda in influence, scale and ambition. Joby Warrick’s “Black Flags: The Rise of Isis” is invaluable for anyone struggling to understand the gruesome excesses and inexplicable appeal of ISIS.

Black Flags by Joby Warrick