Black Flags summary

Just six months after his release, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi walked into the departures terminal of Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, where he was immediately confronted by Jordanian intelligence officers.

When Zarqawi told them he was simply on his way to raise honeybees in the mountains of Pakistan, the lie was obvious, but the officers had nothing on him and had to let him go. In actuality, he was retreating to Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda would put him in charge of a terrorist training camp.

In 2003, with the US invasion of Iraq well underway, there was still no proof of the threat that had launched the war. After months of searching, no weapons of mass destruction had been found, and America couldn’t show any connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda terrorists.

Despite this, President Bush declared victory in May 2003, just two months after the war began. However, while the United States appeared confident in its success, America couldn’t even maintain security in Iraq itself.

In January 2004, Zarqawi sat down to write a letter to Osama bin Laden, asking for a favor. Zarqawi’s organization had been expanding and had already planned major attacks in Iraq, but if it could secure the resources and formal support of al-Qaeda, it could do much more damage.

Zarqawi hoped that bin Laden would jump at the opportunity, but instead, the leader was again reluctant. Zarqawi’s brutal slaying of Arabs and innocent bystanders went too far for the al-Qaeda founder.

On January 30, 2005, Iraq elected a National Assembly for the first time in history. Zarqawi naturally denounced the election as collaboration with America and decried all the participants as sinners.

He went out of his way to sabotage the polls. Zarqawi’s men carried out a number of attacks, specifically on Sunni political candidates and polling stations in Sunni districts, killing at least 44 people. In the end, Zarqawi got what he wanted; the Sunnis were too terrified to vote, and the election was invalidated.

Initially, it seemed like Syria would be immune to the agitation of the Arab Spring revolutions that swept across North Africa and the Middle East in 2010. But in 2011, that fantasy vaporized as calamity erupted in Syria.

The country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, refused to heed calls for reform and instead opted for violent retaliation, shooting peaceful protesters. Assad showed no intention of stepping down and instead allowed a full blown civil war to break out; chaos was inevitable and, one by one, the security institutions of the Syrian state began to fall.

In 2012, as the Syrian civil war continued to escalate, thousands of religious Muslims from the Sunni Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and North Africa put their bodies on the line for the jihadists who were resisting the Syrian tyrant, Assad. Huge numbers of sympathetic Arabs donated money as well as supplies and, in secrecy, Arab governments donated weapons to the cause.

Meanwhile, ISI was growing in size. Empowered by the steady stream of money and weapons, not just Arab Muslims, but radicalized Muslims from across the world entered Syria from Turkey to join ISI and their Syrian offshoot. Thousands of young Muslim men were even making the journey from Western Europe.