‘Sami Moubayed has written a must-read book. As a Syrian historian, Moubayed astutely explores the rise of the Islamic State first by tracking the historical origins of its ideology. He then smoothly takes the reader to the vivid details of life on the ground to explain how ISIS grew and established its so-called state. It is a perfect way to elucidate this complex phenomenon.’
HASSAN HASSAN
author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror
‘Sami Moubayed’s new book on ISIS is a great read. It is the best introduction to ISIS so far. He neither loses the reader in a cascade of foreign names nor overwhelms them with detail. What Moubayed does do with consummate skill is provide essential background and history to understand why Syria fell apart and where ISIS came from. Sami is the premier Syrian historian of his generation writing in English. He comes from an illustrious Damascene Sunni family and continues to live much of the year in Damascus, which gives him a unique and valuable perspective on events unfolding in his region.’
JOSHUA LANDIS
Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, author of Syria Comment and past President of the Syrian Studies Association
‘Under the Black Flag is particularly good on the blood-soaked history of relations between Islamists and Baathists in Syria before 2011, thus helping us to understand why that country’s Arab Spring so quickly morphed into a brutal, sectarian jihad.’
EDWARD MORTIMER
Financial Times
‘Moubayed’s insider account brings to bear the experience of two decades of analysing Syria and the Middle East.’
JUSTIN MAROZZI
The National
Published in 2015 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright © 2015 Sami Moubayed
The right of Sami Moubayed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
ISBN: 978 1 78453 308 3
eISBN: 978 0 85772 921 7
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London
To Sahban, who guided me along a thorny path, from Shukri al-Quwatli and Hashem al-Atasi to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Abu Mohammad al-Golani.
It has been a sad journey.
Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1. All Rise for the Caliph
- 2. Gentlemen to Jihadis
- 3. The Islamic Rebound in Syria: 1982–2011
- 4. The Rise of Jabhat al-Nusra
- 5. The Jihadis of Iraq
- 6. The Birth of ISIS
- 7. The House of Blood
- 8. Foreign Jihadis
- 9. Women in ISIS
- 10. ISIS’s Next Frontier
- Conclusion
- Key Figures
- Notes
Acknowledgements
This book was written during the most difficult of times. My country was at war, its social fabric shattered, its economy in ruins. Over 250,000 of my countrymen have died. Most were tragically killed in the ongoing violence, while others drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean. My friends, who had been a comfort to me – who had stood by me since I first began writing back in the 1990s – were all gone. Some had simply fled the carnage of Syria. Others were now investing time and money in careers in Europe and the Arab world. From the four corners of the globe, however, they all pitched in to help me complete this book, either by reading drafts, or by helping me with the original research. Abdulsalam Haykal, now based in Abu Dhabi, ranks high on the list. For nearly 20 years, he has given his time and offered priceless advice for every one of my books since our student days at the American University of Beirut. Even when physically absent, he has always been there – a hand to hold and a brother to lean on when times get rough. Mohammad al-Sawwah was my sounding board, spending endless hours at night in Damascus discussing Islam and its caliphate. So also did Jamil Murad of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) and Kassem Shaghoury, a student turned colleague and friend, who always has been my guiding hand in ideological politics. The formidable Farah Akel, my former research assistant at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, also took time to read through the book and offer her insights, as did my seasoned colleague Professor Joshua Landis, one of the finest Syriatologists today. A big thank you goes to my trustworthy personal assistant Abeer Jamal, whose time and efforts have proven a treasure – time and again, in everything I do.
I would like to thank my students, who have served as field reporters for this book, gathering data and conducting interviews from dangerous locations in the Syrian battlefield. A huge thank you goes to the editor of this book, Fadi Esber. Also a former student turned friend, Fadi left behind a promising career in the United States and a thundering success story at the London School of Economics to return to his native Damascus. He arrived in the middle of a grinding war, wanting to help his country rise from the ashes. He was a perfect example of a good citizen and a good son to a wonderful mother. Both she and Damascus were awaiting him with open arms. He gave to them both with tremendous passion. Fadi read four drafts of this book, did all the editing with a surgeon’s eye for detail, added entire chunks, and helped polish the manuscript into its final form. This book is as much his as it is mine.
Finally, I would like to thank my mother and father, who watched the rise of ISIS with tears and fears. I always assured them that tomorrow would be better. They rarely believed me. It was painful for their generation, having known Syria at the height of its glory, to see it collapse into war, chaos and lawlessness. Beneath the layers of fear and despair, however, I still see hope. Nothing lasts forever. This is the golden rule of life. One day, all the current players on the Syrian battlefield will be gone. Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS will disappear. Light prevails at the end of every tunnel, and dark clouds – no matter how vicious – eventually disappear. A country that has seen so much will certainly rise from its ashes. It always has, every single time, for nearly 10,000 long years. Politicians make mistakes. Regimes miscalculate. But history doesn’t. History always gets it right.
Preface
A gruesome video made the rounds online in mid-February 2015, sending shockwaves across the globe. The scene was coastal Libya, near the city of Sirt, hometown of the former Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. Twenty-one Egyptian Christians dressed in orange jumpsuits were lined up on the shore, kneeling on the ground, the waters of the Mediterranean washing against their trembling feet. Behind each of the orange-clad men was another line of twenty-one men. At the centre stood a man dressed all in black, to his left ten men in battle camouflage, to his right another ten in battle camouflage, all of the men wielding shining razor-sharp knives. They grabbed their helpless hostages by the collar as the man in black spoke in a North American accent addressing ‘the crusaders’. He promised to break the cross, kill the swine and conquer Rome. Then before him his henchmen slit the throats of the men kneeling before them. The video now cut to an image of the Mediterranean, just a few miles south of Europe, its waters soaked in blood. Before taking the knife to his victims, the man in black told the world:
Oh people, recently you’ve seen us on the hills of al-Sham [the Levant] and on Dabiq’s Plain [near Aleppo], chopping off the heads that have been carrying the cross of delusion for a long time, filled with spite against Islam and Muslims.
He was referring to the original ‘man in black’, Jihadi John, the chief executioner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Jihadi John, a British-born jihadi, had horrified the world, appearing in one video after another slitting the throats of helpless Westerners, dressed, of course, in the trademark orange jumpsuit. ISIS’s reign of terror now extends from the deserts of Iraq and the hills of the Levant to the shores of the Mediterranean.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a relatively new organization, born after the US occupation of Baghdad in 2003. Daesh is the Arabic acronym many Arabs and foreigners use to refer to ISIS. Its adherents hate that nam...
