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A review by mburnamfink
ISIS: A History by Fawaz A. Gerges
3.0
ISIS: A History is a strongly sourced, objective account of the rise, personnel, and characteristics of the world's most infamous terrorist group. It's also a poorly edited mass that requires a lot of prior knowledge of the field, and could use at least two more passes to find some actual structure.
Gerges investigates the continuity and change between ISIS and previous Jihadi groups, like Al Qaeda in Iraq. ISIS focuses on the "near enemy" of Shiites and insufficiently devout Sunnis instead of the "far enemy" of the US and the Israel. Thanks to a complete collapse in State authority caused by the Syrian Civil War and Iraq's corrupt and sectarian government, ISIS expanded from a hunted band to a Caliphate dominating millions of people in a medieval nightmare. Gerges and his graduate assistants do the best possible job tracing the rise of ISIS's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the propaganda, but the man is still largely a cipher.
Gerges describes ISIS as theocratic plagiarists, making little advancement to Salafi-Jihadist thinking, but he doesn't really explain what that thinking is, or the importance of establishing of the Caliphate in the kind of utopian Muslim thinking that characterizes Jihad. From a conventional polisci perspective, it's true that ISIS provides basic government services (water, sewage, schools, police, etc) in areas that Iraq and Syria have abandoned, but the same could be said of the Taliban, and the Taliban hasn't attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters, or routed professional armies. Gerges claims that ex-Baathist officers in the upper ranks contributed to ISIS taking Mosul, but I need more evidence for strategic thinking from the people who brought you the Iraq-Iran War.
Obviously, there's a lot about ISIS that is simply unknowable to the West, because of their tendency to behead journalists and other outsiders. But I found Graeme Wood's 2015 article in The Atlantic a much more coherent introduction to the organization, that if less detailed, is far more revealing.
Gerges investigates the continuity and change between ISIS and previous Jihadi groups, like Al Qaeda in Iraq. ISIS focuses on the "near enemy" of Shiites and insufficiently devout Sunnis instead of the "far enemy" of the US and the Israel. Thanks to a complete collapse in State authority caused by the Syrian Civil War and Iraq's corrupt and sectarian government, ISIS expanded from a hunted band to a Caliphate dominating millions of people in a medieval nightmare. Gerges and his graduate assistants do the best possible job tracing the rise of ISIS's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the propaganda, but the man is still largely a cipher.
Gerges describes ISIS as theocratic plagiarists, making little advancement to Salafi-Jihadist thinking, but he doesn't really explain what that thinking is, or the importance of establishing of the Caliphate in the kind of utopian Muslim thinking that characterizes Jihad. From a conventional polisci perspective, it's true that ISIS provides basic government services (water, sewage, schools, police, etc) in areas that Iraq and Syria have abandoned, but the same could be said of the Taliban, and the Taliban hasn't attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters, or routed professional armies. Gerges claims that ex-Baathist officers in the upper ranks contributed to ISIS taking Mosul, but I need more evidence for strategic thinking from the people who brought you the Iraq-Iran War.
Obviously, there's a lot about ISIS that is simply unknowable to the West, because of their tendency to behead journalists and other outsiders. But I found Graeme Wood's 2015 article in The Atlantic a much more coherent introduction to the organization, that if less detailed, is far more revealing.