Joby Warrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, explains how a strain of radical Islam currently spreading throughout Iraq and Syria began in a remote Jordanian jail with the unintentional assistance of American military action.
In order to smooth his transition to power after succeeding his father in 1999, Jordan's King Abdullah pardoned a group of political prisoners. He had no idea that among those freed was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist mastermind too deadly even for al-Qaeda, who would go on to lead an Islamist organization set on controlling the Middle East.
Zarqawi began by coordinating hotel bombs and killings in Jordan from a base in northern Iraq, but it was the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 that propelled him to the forefront of a massive insurgency. The CIA accidentally created a monster by identifying him as the connection between Saddam and bin Laden. Like-minded radicals rallied to his cause, seeing him as a hero against the infidel occupiers. Their wave of beheadings and suicide bombings lasted for years, until Jordanian intelligence gave the Americans with the critical information they needed to kill Zarqawi in a 2006 airstrike.
But his movement persisted, first known as al-Qaeda in Iraq and subsequently as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and sought sanctuary in insecure, ungoverned areas along the Iraq-Syria border. When the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, ISIS grabbed the opportunity to carry out Zarqawi's vision of a vast, ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom.
Joby Warrick blends combines heart-pounding, moment-by-moment operational specifics with sweeping historical perspectives to explain the lengthy history of today's most deadly Islamic extremist threat, drawing on unprecedented access to CIA and Jordanian sources.
Bloodthirsty fanatics who regarded all Western inventions and practices as works of the devil, they saw themselves as divinely appointed to purify the region by slaughtering all who allied with foreigners or deviated from their narrow vision of Islam.
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