As Business Insider notes, Robert Iger leads Disney at a landmark time for it - during his leadership, the corporation acquired control of Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm, and the value of the company's shares quadrupled.
Iger gave an interview to Variety about his career. The entrepreneur recalled his first job as a meteorologist and shared his story of working in the media. At the end of the interview, the Disney CEO presented a list of seven of his favorite books that he recommends every specialist read.
1. Black Flags: Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick
Warrick's book on ISIS won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. The author tells how the ideology of ISIS originated in one of the Jordanian prisons and how two US presidents unwittingly helped to spread it.
Warrick was able to talk to CIA officials and access documents from Jordan and track how diplomats, spies, generals and heads of state tried to stop the movement from spreading - some saw it as a greater threat than al-Qaeda's activities. Critics call the book "brilliant and complete".
2. The Wright Brothers, David McCullough
A book from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough about the life of the inventors of the first airplane, Wilbur and Orville Wright.
3. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
American performer Bruce Springsteen devoted seven years of his life to this book. In the work, Springsteen told the story of his life - "with his usual humor and originality."
4. "December 10: Stories" by George Saunders
According to the readers of the book, the story reveals the issues of modern human morality. The author tries to figure out what makes any person good in the eyes of others and what makes him human.
5. "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
6. "Survival by the method of intelligence: 100 key skills" by Clint Emerson
A practical survival guide from retired US Navy Clint Emerson, adapted for non-military users. The book includes instructions for self-defense, getting rid of surveillance or pursuers, and survival in other dangerous situations.
7. Tender is the Night, Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Classic novel by American writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1934. The life story of a talented psychiatrist and his wife, whose wealth pushes them towards death.
The billionaire summed up the year by choosing the five best books to read by the fireplace in the coming New Year holidays.
One of the richest people in the world, Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote in a personal blog about which books impressed him the most in 2017.
“Reading is my favorite way to indulge my curiosity. Although I was lucky to meet interesting people and visiting amazing places for work, I still think that a book is the best way to learn new topics that interest you. This year I chose works devoted to completely different topics,” said Gates.
He noted that he liked the book "Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS" (Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS) by Joby Warrick. Her billionaire recommends her to anyone who wants a history lesson on how ISIS took over Iraq.
“On the other hand, I also enjoyed John Green's Turtles All the Way Down, which tells the story of a young woman who hunts down a missing billionaire. The novel touches on such serious topics as mental illness, but John's stories are always so entertaining and full of great references to other works. Another good book I recently read is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. I was trying to learn more about the forces hindering economic mobility in the US, and this book helped me understand the role that public policy has played in creating the conditions for racial segregation in American cities, ”said the billionaire.
The Microsoft founder also wrote more in-depth reviews of the books he thought were the best of the year. The list includes a memoir by one of his favorite comedians, a history of poverty in America, an immersive energy history book, and two Vietnam War stories.
"If you're looking for a great book to read by the fireplace this holiday season, you can't go wrong with one of these," Gates said. Forbes provides a list of books and the billionaire's comments on them.
Top 5 books of 2017 according to Bill Gates
1. “The best we could do”, Thi Bui.(The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui).
This magnificent graphic novel is a deeply personal memoir of what it means to be a parent and a refugee. The family of the author, artist Thi Bui fled Vietnam in 1978. After giving birth to a child, the artist decided to learn more about the experience of her parents living in a country torn apart by foreign occupiers.
2. Displaced: Poverty and Prosperity in an American City by Matthew Desmond. (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American Cityby Matthew Desmond).
If you want to understand how poverty is intertwined, you must read this book on the Milwaukee eviction crisis. Matthew Desmond painted a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty. His book gave me a better idea of what it means to be poor in this country than any other I have ever read.
3. Trust Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard. (Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, Eddie Izzard).
The story of stand-up comedian Izzard is captivating: he endured a difficult childhood and worked tirelessly to overcome his lack of natural talent and become a world-class star. If you're a fan like me, you'll love this book. His writing is very reminiscent of his stage performances, so I laughed out loud several times while reading.
4. "Sympathetic", Viet Thanh Nguyen. (The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen).
Most of the books I read and the films I saw about the Vietnam War represented the American point of view. The award-winning novel offers much-needed insight into what it was like to be a Vietnamese in those years, trapped between two sides in a conflict. Despite being a dark romance, The Sympathizer is also a gripping tale of a double agent and the trouble he gets himself into.
5. "Energy and civilization: history", Vaclav Smil.(Energy and Civilization: A History, Vaclav Smil).
Vaclav Smil is one of my favorite authors and this is definitely his masterpiece. He explains how our need for energy has shaped human history, from donkey-powered mills to today's quest for renewable energy. This is the simplest book, but after reading it, you will become smarter and more informed about how energy innovations are changing the course of civilizations.
January 18, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
So far there are two really superb books on the rise of the ISIS menace. One is Will McCants's ISIS Apocalypse (reviewed by me a couple of months ago. See "Apocalypse Now" in the reader reviews for that fine work.) Black Flags--The Rise of ISIS by Jody Warrick is the other. Surely there will be a third great book detailing the American-supported effort to crush these vermin, but that story has not been told because it has not yet occurred.
Warrick's narrative arc begins in Jordan, and centers on the prison where terrorists and suspects are held. The lead characters are Jihadist activists who will go on to play pivotal roles in Iraq and Syria, the redoubtable (if reluctant) King Abdullah II, and the principal figures of the Jordanian intelligence service. Cruel but not sadistic, hard-nosed but still human, dogged but not dogmatic, it is the Jordanian intelligence officials who come across as some of the real heroes of the piece. Warrick"s access to them is a true journalistic tour de force.
The main Jihadist character is Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, leader of something of a break-away faction of Al Qaeda in Iraq and founder of ISIS. A true religious fanatic (there is simply no other word for him), Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to fight the infidel Americans and curry favor with Osama Bin Laden. Although his battlefield exploits showed extraordinary courage, Bin Laden and his cohorts disliked and distrusted him and kept him at a far remove. As the Taliban strongholds were wrested free by the Americans, Zarqawi retreated to a lawless enclave of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein's government, From that inauspicious backwater in 2002 Zarqawi put together the skeleton of a Jihadist militia that would ultimately lead the insurgency against the Americans in Iraq.
With unprecedented access to primary sources, Warrick has been able to produce a detailed profile of Zarqawi's rise to power--his character, his murderous message, and why that message fell on such receptive ears. (Spoiler alert: It had a lot to do with American missteps in the occupation, but such missteps occurred in a context that was hardly America's making. Underlying the insurgency, and the subsequent rise of ISIS, is the 1000-year-old Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict. The Iraqi Shi "ites, long suppressed by the majority Sunnis, were only too thrilled to settle ancient scores. That" s what they were in the midst of doing when Zarqawi "s group essentially rallied them under the banner of" Kill every Shia you can find ." Ultimately Zarqawi would die in his "safe house" when it was hit by American 500-pounders. But the bones of his Jihadist organization and its revolting ideology would survive. The best analysis of his successor, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (the self-styled Caliph) is found in McCants's ISIS Apocalypse, mentioned above.)
In a delicious irony, Zarqawi's ragtag bunch of AK-toting thugs was under the watchful eye of a CIA team that had smuggled themselves into Iraq to get a handle on Saddam's military and its possible links to radical Islamists back in 2002. It was soon obvious that the only thing that Saddam and the Islamists shared was mutual hatred. (Indeed, Charles "Sam" Fadis, the 47-year-old leader of the CIA team of soldier-spies, realized that a team of under cover Iraqi military men camped nearby were doing the same as he was--spying on the militants to assess how much of a threat they were.) For six months Fadis begged and pleaded with his superiors for a strike that would have wiped out Zerqawi's whole troop, then numbering just a few hundred at most.
In irony bordering on paradox, his requests were turned down. Initially, Stan McCrystal at the Pentagon proposed a large, complex strike (which Rumsfeld, to his credit, supported), but which Condoleza Rice opposed on political grounds and others felt was just too complex. Fadis proposed a variety of simpler approaches (any one of which could have been decisive), but these too were turned down. The last turn-down came in January 2003. Among the arguments against an assault at this point was that the decision to invade Iraq had been made, but the public rationale had not been. In that a main pillar of the argument was that Saddam was supporting Islamic terrorists (the reality was just the opposite), it would ruin our argument for invading Iraq if the terrorists were eliminated in a pre-emptive strike before the war began. In other words, having terrorists in Iraq was just too good a pretext for an invasion to let it go to waste by actually solving that problem before it got out of hand, the rationale being that since we were invading anyway, we could wipe them out more publicly once we got there.
What the White House war planners failed to appreciate, of course, was that these guys did not have their feet nailed to the sand, and were free to disband and relocate once the invasion occurred. That is what they did, and in the chaos that ensued from our abject failure to plan for post-invasion government, they were well-entrenched in urban areas before we knew they "d left the countryside. Many tens of thousands of lives were lost in consequence, and the ISIS threat emerged from the ruins.
It would be too cynical to suggest that everyone in the White House knew that there was no link between Saddam and the Islamo-terrorists. Some did, but some didn't, and the loudest voice of denial came from Dick Cheney (misadvised by the equally misguided Douglas Feith). Dick Cheney's apparent faith in the veracity of this fictional linkage is almost a thing of beauty-- if the consequences had not been so ugly and so vastly at variance with America's best interests. While Cheney plays a very small role in Warrick's narrative, and is never singled out for any kind of special criticism, it is hard not to see him as either a bullying imbecile or a pathological liar or both.
(In truth, Cheney probably saw Saddam as unfinished business from his time as Secretary of Defense in the first Iraq War in 1991. He longed to finish that business, but there was no serious legal basis for starting another war. In that context, 9 -11 came like a gift from the Almighty, providing a rare opportunity for an historic do-over. If, that is, Saddam was somehow instrumental in 9-11. Hence Cheney's pathological need to connect the dots, even when it was manifest that the dots were on completely different pages and written in different books. and almost willful blindness, this practical political reality was rejected out of hand.)
For Warrick there are definitely some heroes in this page-turning tale. One is Nada Bakos, the 20-something CIA analyst who made a specialty of profiling and tracking Zarqawi. How a farm girl from Montana (there were only nine boys and girls in her high school class) has the chops to sift thousands and thousands of pages of raw intelligence to limn an accurate picture of a major terrorist about whom no one else in the Agency had any inkling is something of an enduring mystery. But there it is, and it says something good about the CIA that it could still find and cultivate talent of that ilk. (Cheney tried unsuccessfully to bully her into silence, and was still badgering her to establish an Iraqi link to the terrorists of 9-11 two years after the invasion of Iraq!) In yet another irony of history"s turning wheel, numbers of Baathist soldiers whom we stripped of all power and prestige after the invasion have now re-emerged among the ranks of ISIS, giving ISIS a level of military competence they never would have had if we had just left things alone.)
Another hero (not dwelt on but certainly of serious note) is Gen Stan McCrystal, who led the Special Forces in Iraq. This was urban fighting at its toughest and dirtiest--house to house, room by room, usually in the dark of night. Maybe it was atonement for not coming up with a better plan to kill Zarqawi in 2002, but McCrystal led numbers of these urban attack squads personally.There aren't many in the Pentagon with such a valid claim to gallantry.
President Bush does not come off that badly. While Rumsfeld is locked in denial that an insurgency is even occurring, Bush sadly realizes that everything has gone terribly, terribly wrong and does his level best to right the ship that he has inadvertently steered onto the rocks. President Obama comes off less well, hoping that diplomacy and some sort of mythical public pressure will force Assad of Syria from office without his having to commit American troops. Most particularly grievous was (and remains) the failure to arm the Free Syrian Army (the non-Islamist Sunni opponents of Assad) in a timely manner.
Such an opportunity was presented, and rejected by Obama, in the summer of 2012. I thought Warrick was a bit one-sided in his argument in this section, failing (as he did) to mention that the President was locked in a tight re -election race at the time. In that getting our troops out of war in the Middle East was a central tenet of his campaign message (as it had been in 2008), it struck me as a tad unreasonable to expect the man to completely reverse himself in the middle of a campaign and fan the winds of war. The exigencies of politics aside, the President's continuing refusal to get involved a year later, in 2013, is something else again. The facts on the ground had changed, and seriously worsened, and by then he would have had enough political cover to change course and do something constructive (meaning destructive, where ISIS is concerned).Interestingly, among those arguing unsuccessfully for a more aggressive approach was Hillary Clinton. taking a more active role in Syria in 2017.
But I digress. The arc of Black Flags takes us back to Jordan where it began. And Warrick argues convincingly that that"s where our key alliance must begin. That King Abdullah was in Washington in mid-January 2016 and did not get to meet with the President, signals to me that he is still substituting hope for experience, which may make the next President"s job--and the lives of Syrians and Iraqis both--a lot tougher than they absolutely need to be.
It will not be easy. It is not simply a matter of dropping a bunch of bombs and then walking away triumphant, as some simple minded souls seem to believe. The lesson of the Iraq fiasco is that once the bombs stop falling, you need to pick up the pieces: Restart the water and food supplies, provide at least basic medical care, get electricity and phones working, provide a police force that is at least reasonably honest, courts of justice, and prisons that aren't training grounds for the next generation of terrorists. We are talking about the work of years, not weeks or months. Obama doesn't think that the American people wish to bear that burden . For all I know, he "s right. But we really ought to talk about it.
In conclusion. Black Flags reads like a fast-paced novel: part spy thriller. part war story, part political intrigue. I really wish it were fiction, but it "s not. It is the sad and tragic history of our immediate past and present, with insights into our future.
March 10, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Generally I "m fairly critical, and I find mistakes or things I don" t like. Not here. This is as good as it gets--it reads like a novel. If you come to this book knowing nothing, you will know a lot after you read it. If you come to this book as an amateur expert, there's still a lot here. In short, a fantastic book. One of the few I can unreservedly recommend.
One of the major themes of the book is something I have said for about 50 years: The people on the front line, the actual workers, know what's going on. The further up the chain of command you go, the more information gets twisted and distorted. By the time you get to the president (of a corporation or the USA), ignorance reigns supreme. There are exceptions, but they are rare. (In a personal example that seems like a Dilbert cartoon but is true, I once made the huge mistake of talking to a VP while waiting for the elevator. Within minutes I was in my supervisor"s office being chewed out for not going through the chain of command. But if the president only talks to senior VP"s, who only talk to the VP's, who only talk to the senior directors, who only talk to the directors, who only talk to the managers…ignorance prevails.)
King Abdullah of Jordan makes appearances throughout the book. He warns of things to beware of, he suggests courses of actions, he pleads for help. He is ignored--constantly. Why the West is not listening to him and supporting him in every way possible is a mystery. Did you know about the "Amman Message" Abdullah issued in 2004? I didn't, and I've studied this subject for 20 years. It has its own web site: Amazon won't let me post it, but you can search for it.
Various people (for example, State Dept. spokesperson Marie Harf in 2015) have blamed socio-economic problems for the rise of Islamic extremism. Read what the extremists say about themselves (for example, ISIS publishes a slick monthly magazine called "Dabiq" that's available online (again, do a search). Not once do extremists complain about the economy, jobs, discrimination, or all of the Western hit list of societal ills. So what motivates them? Religion. It "s that simple. So if the West offers them democracy, free speech, and better jobs, Islamic extremists just mock them if they take any notice at all. Anyone who thinks this isn't about religion simply hasn't read or listened to what the extremists have to say. So propaganda aimed at non-religious issues just misses the mark and bounces off its intended targets. What the West should be supporting wholeheartedly are religious arguments (as in "The Amman Message" or "Open Letter to al-Baghdadi"). extremist territory. They should also be reproduced and distributed in every mosque in the world--Muslim countries and non-Muslim countries alike. Every dollar spent on these activities would be better spent than a million dollars on bombs.
Another hero of the story is Nada Bakos, a CIA analyst assigned to track Zarqawi. She writes reports to her superiors, who alter her reports to suit their own bosses, who alter them to suit their own bosses…. you get the idea. Page 97: "Bakos often found herself yelling at the television screen, as though she were contesting a referee"s blown call in a football game. Now Powell, like Cheney, was "asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be anything but," she later said." Bush and the boys twisted her reports 180 degrees, turning black into white! Good job.
Another revealing incident is when the CIA operatives and some Kurds have Zarqawi and his group in their sights in a hideout in N. Kurdistan. They plea for an air strike to take him out. Nope, do can do. Then they plea for better weapons to take him out. nope. Then they plea for permission to just go in with what they "ve got. Nope. Political considerations. And so it goes…Zarqawi of course got away by the time Bush decided to act--after the 2004 election. But hey, that didn "t matter did it? Just the foundation of ISIS, a few thousand deaths, the destabilization of Europe, mass terrorism, you know, the usual.
One can only hope that in 10 years it is not necessary to write a book detailing all the missed opportunities and the ignorance of leaders.
Favorite books of Disney CEO Robert Iger, which he shared in an interview with Variety..
As Business Insider notes, Robert Iger leads Disney at a landmark time for it - during his leadership, the corporation acquired control of Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm, and the value of the company's shares quadrupled.
Iger gave an interview to Variety about his career. The entrepreneur recalled his first job as a meteorologist and shared his story of working in the media. At the end of the interview, the Disney CEO presented a list of seven of his favorite books that he recommends every specialist read.
1. Black Flags: Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick
Warrick's book on the terrorist organization ISIS won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. The author tells how the ideology of ISIS originated in one of the Jordanian prisons and how two US presidents unwittingly helped to spread it.
Warrick was able to talk to CIA officials and access documents from Jordan and track how diplomats, spies, generals and heads of state tried to stop the movement from spreading - some saw it as a greater threat than al-Qaeda's activities. Critics call the book "brilliant and complete".
2. The Wright Brothers, David McCullough
A book from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough about the life of the inventors of the first airplane, Wilbur and Orville Wright.
3. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
American performer Bruce Springsteen devoted seven years of his life to this book. In the work, Springsteen told the story of his life - "with his usual humor and originality."
4. "December 10: Stories" by George Saunders
According to the readers of the book, the story reveals the issues of modern human morality. The author tries to figure out what makes any person good in the eyes of others and what makes him human.
5. "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
6. "Survival by the method of intelligence: 100 key skills" by Clint Emerson
A practical survival guide from retired US Navy Clint Emerson, adapted for non-military users. The book includes instructions for self-defense, getting rid of surveillance or pursuers, and survival in other dangerous situations.
The West went to war to end terror. Instead, we conjured a man who later founded the Islamic State (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation - ed. note). This is covered in a new book by journalist Joby Warrick.
The Americans miscalculated.
It was 2004, the second year of intervention in Iraq was approaching, and gradually it became clear to the American government what they were facing.
Or more precisely: with whom.
In the shadow of the overthrow of dictator Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath regime, a tattooed ex-recidivist from an unknown Jordanian mining town led an insurgency against Iraq's majority Shia Muslims. A rebellion of unprecedented brutality - even for violent extremists. The destruction of shrines and disdain for civilian lives went hand in hand: mosques and historical shrines of Shiite Muslims were destroyed, and markets in Shiite cities were turned into sites of bloody attacks by suicide bombers.
Soon the man behind the ethnic cleansing will become known throughout the world as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He rose from the ashes of a devastating invasion and ignited a sectarian fire in a civil war that he later turned into the foundation of a movement that, after many mutations, was to become ISIS.
What's worse is that the West itself has made it possible. When it became clear in 2004 that Zarqawi was about to bury American plans, the US State Department released a poster with a couple of photographs of the Jordanian taken after his arrest and offered a $25 million reward. Zarqawi was named the mysterious mastermind behind the religious resistance movement in Iraq, the Americans' goal being to encourage the locals to inform the authorities about where he was hiding. But instead, the poster and the rumors that have sprung up around it have turned Zarqawi into a cult figure among the jihadists. Militant Islamists around the world - including in Denmark - joined his fight in Iraq. The myth of the invisible leader made Zarqawi incredibly popular. The jihadists have even used the American poster in their own propaganda.
Context
How to save the Middle East after the departure of ISIS?
Le Figaro 03.11.2016Who will defeat ISIS?
Haqqin.az 31.10.2016War with ISIS on the Mosul-Aleppo line
Star gazete 19.10.2016Political Islam after ISIS
As Safir 04.10.2016The story that is being played out in The Black Flag, which comes out in Danish on Wednesday, is quite symptomatic of a misreading of the roots of militant Islamism. Because with Zarqawi, the West itself took part in creating a monster that today, many years later, still bombs its way through the crowds of people in the Middle East, crowds of passengers in Brussels airports and audiences in a concert hall in Paris.
Journalist Washington Post Joby Warrick spent a good two years combing through classified documents and talking to a variety of people, from US agents to Iraqi Mukhabarat security officials. We meet a young CIA officer, Nada Bakos, who becomes the foremost intelligence expert on Zarqawi. We meet the intelligent Basel al-Sabha doctor, who treated Zarqawi while the Jordanian was in prison. And we meet Abu Haytham, the head of the Jordanian counterterrorism corps, whose mission is to destroy ISIS.
The portrait of the world-famous jihadist is formed precisely thanks to these images, it is thanks to them that we get an explanation: how a simple Jordanian prisoner - in the eyes of the West - could, after all, create what we today know as the Islamic State (ISIS).
"I've been fascinated by Zarqawi for years," says Warrick, who won journalism's most important prize, the Pulitzer Prize, for the book earlier in the year.
“He is a figure no less significant than Osama bin Laden when it comes to the development of global jihad. But we in the West do not understand who he was and what he created. And I'm afraid we still underestimate him today."
From gigolo to superstar
The conclusion that Warrick draws from his analysis is that ISIS emerged long before the movement, in its landmark blitzkrieg in the spring of 2014, conquered large territories, occupied the large Iraqi city of Mosul, and proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate. This was due to the marginalization and oppression that Sunnis in Iraq and Islamists in Syria were subjected to by their respective governments. The root of the problem - marginalization and oppression - led to the fact that Zarqawi was then able to gain support and recruit infantry for himself. Subsequently, ISIS continued to profit from the same marginalization, and tomorrow, when ISIS is driven out, a new militant movement may do so again. Because Sunni Muslims always feel marginalized by the Shiite – and Western-backed – government in Baghdad.
“If I try to extract a simple main idea from my work on the book, it will be this: the US and the West have misanalyzed what was happening in foreign policy. As if it came as a complete surprise to us that we, too, were involved in the success of Zarqawi's project. We are also amazed today by ISIS, so it is important to remember the history, ”says the writer.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was born in the city of Zarga in 1966 to a poor Jordanian-Palestinian family of Bedouin origin, he grew up in the city of Zarga, as a young man he could not find his place in life and was often in trouble with the law . He drank like a man possessed, had tattoos, and was known to the local police as a pusher, robber, and gigolo.
He found consolation in the extreme, militant branch of Islamism. He got cleansed, had a relative cut off his tattoos with a razor blade, and ended his usual criminal past. Instead, he traveled to Afghanistan in 1989 to join the Mujahideen's fight against the Soviet occupation authorities. This marked the beginning of Zarqawi's career as an Islamist guerrilla leader.
“Zarqawi was an atypical role model for Islamists. He did not look like the strategist Osama bin Laden or the smart and refined Mohammed Atta (the "brain" of the September 11 attacks - ed.). Zarqawi was from another planet. Completely different type. He dressed up in black clothes, fired from a machine gun into the air and executed his captives himself. It is simply incomprehensible how he could later become such an important bird, ”says Joby Warrick.
In fact, Zarqawi joined the rebels in Afghanistan too late. But the Jordanian continued to fight his way through the ranks of the militant Islamists and was eventually arrested in Jordan and thrown into the infamous al-Swaqa prison. Being behind bars made Zarqawi even more radical, and when King Abdullah of Jordan came to power after his father in 1999 and released some political prisoners so that the change of power could go smoothly, he had no idea what he indirectly accepted participation in the revival of militant Islamism.
For ISIS, the myth has become a trump card
However, that is exactly what happened, says Joby Warrick in his book. The American occupation of Iraq gave Zarqawi's fundamentalism a foundation to lean on, and since then the Jordanian has been behind everything from bomb blasts and kidnappings to the execution of hostages like American businessman Nick Berg. Zarqawi cut off Berg's head himself, and the horrendous execution was filmed and posted online, a propaganda stunt that ISIS began many years later.
Like-minded people looked at Zarqawi as a hero of the resistance fighting the occupying authorities. And when his then organization, the Army of Monotheism and Jihad (Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad), later allowed itself to be swallowed up by al-Qaeda, Zarqawi was crowned as the "Emir" of the Iraqi branch - the forerunner of the ISIS movement.
The Jordanian was killed in an American bombing raid in 2006, but then all the bad things - if you look at it through the eyes of the West - had already happened. The question is, how did a street urchin with such a tarnished reputation, such a modest knowledge of religion, a man of such unattractive origins manage to rise to the top and lay the foundations of what is today regarded as one of the biggest security threats in the world?
“It surprises me too,” Warrick admits.
But perhaps the explanation for Zarqawi's success lies precisely in the fact that he was the antithesis of a jihadist leader, the writer muses.
“I think… Before becoming a jihadist, Zarqawi was a gangster. People who were drawn to his wrestling were drawn to his swagger and gangster mannerisms. First of all, criminal elements joined him. And they gave Zarqawi power, made him the leader.”
“While I was writing Black Flag, the fight in Syria was carried on by a new generation. It seems to me that Zarqawi was successful because his enemies exaggerated his personal importance, elevating him and making him more important than his own movement. They themselves are to blame. Thus, it can be said that we ourselves created Zarqawi, turning him into such a mythical figure.”
In this regard, it can be seen that the West, by turning Zarqawi into a myth, itself endowed the global jihadist movement with a PR strategy, from which ISIS and the spooky “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi later amassed considerable capital.
“Later on, ISIS took on the image of this jihadist man of action and is now using it in their propaganda for all their soldiers,” Warrick says.
"That's something to think about."