ISIS

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, 361 pages

Within the last decade and a half, the Islamic State, known variously as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Daesh, has evolved from the start-up terrorist organization Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (JTJ) into the subordinate group Al-Qaeda in Iraq and finally into a quasi-state controlling an area the size of West Virginia and somewhere between 3 and 8 million people with an army possessing highly advanced military equipment.  More notably for those outside ISIS' zone of control, the group has proclaimed itself the restoration of the global caliphate, has received pledges of fealty from other radical groups in Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia, and the Caucasus, and has shocked the world with slickly produced propaganda videos featuring mass beheadings of non-Muslims and people being burned alive in cages, the execution of homosexuals by throwing them off rooftops and the demolition of cultural antiquities thousands of years old as idolatrous ties to the pagan past.  In the process, despite being denounced by Muslim authorities including even their former sponsors in Al-Qaeda, ISIS has emerged as both a major source of assistance and the premier source of inspiration to Islamic terrorists around the world.

The subtitle of this study of ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror, seems a bit exaggerated - most of the book is a view from outside.  The authors do give a solid history of the development of ISIS, explaining how a Jordanian thug became the seed from which ISIS grew, helpfully irrigated by Al-Qaeda, Iran, and Syria, sprouting in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, fed by defecting Baathist officials and thriving on (wholly justified) Sunni fears of Iran-backed Shiite pogroms in Iraq and Alawite oppression in Syria.  The authors are clear about the barbarism on all sides of the civil wars in the region, of which ISIS' atrocities are the epitome rather than the exception.

There are a few minor problems.  The authors occasionally contradict themselves - discussing the ISIS presence in Libya, they cite the transfer of fighters from the elite Al-Battar battalion as an indicator of the country's importance to ISIS, but later they reveal that the breakup of Al-Battar was due to concerns about the battalion's loyalty.  More disappointingly, they never deal with specifics of ISIS' religious ideology.  Their explanation of the opportunistic reasons for much of ISIS' local support is interesting, especially given what it reveals about the successes and failures of anti-ISIS strategies and the hidden fragility of the caliphate's position.  Yet it is not political opportunism that has drawn tens of thousands of eager recruits from around the world to the Syrian desert, and it is not mere opportunism that has convinced established terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and Abu Sayyaf to pledge their loyalty to these upstarts.  Weiss and Hassan spend time explaining how the ISIS ideology developed, how it is spread, and why it is deceptive, but the book would have benefited greatly from a detailed account of what it is - without it the book falls prey into the postmodern journalistic myopia which reduces everything to power politics.