Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
by Joby Warrick
Summary
Joby Warrick tells the story of the Islamic State primarily through the life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose brutal insurgent group in occupied Iraq became the direct ancestor of ISIS, and the book functions almost as much as a biography of Zarqawi as it does as an account of the wider movement. Warrick traces Zarqawi from a petty criminal background in Jordan through radicalization in prison, to Afghanistan, and into Iraq after the 2003 American invasion, where sectarian chaos and the collapse of Iraqi state institutions gave his brand of extreme, publicly staged violence room to grow in ways it never could have under Saddam Hussein's government.
The book follows the American intelligence officials who tracked Zarqawi for years, the political decisions in Washington that Warrick argues helped create the conditions for his movement's rise, and the eventual American operation that killed him in 2006, well before the organization he built reached its full scale under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Warrick draws on the Syrian civil war's outbreak as the second major condition that let the group, already established in Iraq, expand across a new border into a self declared state.
Warrick writes with the pacing of a thriller even while working from carefully sourced reporting, and reviewers noted the tension between the book's title, which promises the full arc of ISIS, and its actual center of gravity in Zarqawi's own story. It suits a reader who wants to understand where the group's founding ideology and tactics came from through one man's specific radicalization, rather than a comprehensive institutional history of the caliphate it later became.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Joby Warrick the 2016 Prize for General Nonfiction for Black Flags, published in 2015 by Doubleday, citing a deeply reported book of remarkable clarity. The finalists that year were Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me and Carla Power's If the Oceans Were Ink. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the book in The New York Times, called it gripping, and The Guardian's P.D. Smith praised its narrative drive, comparing it to a thriller while still calling it compelling and authoritative.
HBO announced a miniseries adaptation of the book, with Bradley Cooper and Todd Phillips attached as producers and Tim Van Patten directing from a script by Gregg Hurwitz, though the project has not been the subject of further public updates since. Warrick, a longtime national security reporter, has continued covering the region since the book's publication, and Black Flags remains one of the most widely read English language accounts of how ISIS's founding generation emerged from the wreckage of the Iraq War.