Order ISIS: INSIDE THE ARMY OF TERROR here
"We have watched you in Anbar for three and a half yeats," he told Lamb. "We have concluded that you do not threaten our faith or our way of life. Al-Qaeda does."
I can be a pretty obsessive guy. I'm sure you all know someone who is more or less like me. I'm that guy who has actually watched the latest ungodly online video before you've ever heard of it. The latest in online ungodliness is the spectacle of death the Islamic State (let's call them ISIS) has been pulling together for Occidental media in 2014. I don't like ISIS and I think what they do to people is abhorrent, but I also find them fascinating for one reason: they are the first pseudo-national entity since the Nazis to thoroughly reject our way of life and take arms against it. Wanting to know more about this phenomenon I never anticipate in a million years, I have read ISIS: INSIDE THE ARMY OF TERROR, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, which thought me a lot about the history of ISIS, but very little about their inner workings, which ended up being a bit frustrating.
One thing that blew my mind about ISIS: INSIDE THE ARMY OF TERROR is how so much of what I knew about terrorism in the Middle East was actually wrong. ISIS wasn't created out of a vacuum. It's an organization that has roots in Salafism, which existed long before the inception of Al-Qaeda and that will exist long after ISIS is defeated. It's an ideology that has caused a lot of pain and death, and that is still misunderstood by Occidental society. The American people have spent a lot of time sweating bullets about Osama Ben Laden, but it's his unlikely ally Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi that joined forces with him to create Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who preached the extreme form of Salafism practiced in ISIS controlled territories today. Ben Laden actually was the moderate of the two, as far as terrorists can be moderates.
Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan do a terrific job at explaining how Occidental ignorance of the Middle Eastern traditions and Islam has turned the War on Terror into a destructive dead end that turned Iraq into a hyper-violent dystopia. Their research is extensive and detailed although they're cruising through two decades so fast, it can become hard to follow. I was glad to have watched FRONTLINE: LOSING IRAQ before reading that book and I can only recommend that you do so. It gave me basic explanations that I used as anchoring points for my reading. There is a lot of stuff that happened in that conflict. A lot of Arabic men with samey noms de guerre are involved, so it's good not to jump into it cold, it might lose you.
al-Zarqawi was charismatic but an intellectual lightweight. "He never struck me as intelligent," Mohammed al-Dweik, al-Zarqawi's future lawyer, said years later.
So, while ISIS: INSIDE THE ARMY OF TERROR offers a tremendous historical perspective on the destructive course of Salafism in the Middle East, it offers actually poor insight on the terrorist army it's named after. Almost nothing is said about the terrifying phenomenon of foreign fighters recruiting, which is still freaking everyone out in North America, due to its sheer randomness and unpredictability. I understand the organization is notoriously opaque to the press and that it's difficult to get insight on them, but one of the major selling point of the book is interviews with some of their Mujahideens, but to be honest it's little pieces here and there. It was unsatisfying, given that I really wanted to understand what life it like for the people that deliberately choose this violent and bizarre life. It's not exactly a book about ISIS as it is about the culmination of Salafism, which ISIS is at the very end of, for now.
The reason why we keep shooting movies about World War II and zombies is exactly the same and it's going to be the reason why we're going to shoot movies about ISIS once they're going to stop feeling like an immediate threat: they are the embodiment of evil for Occidental society. They are dehumanized and have seemingly not redeeming, humane traits. It's a bit depressing that this conflict is going to end up sold back to us in a couple years, but Hollywood has done that with pretty much every conflict in the history of men, or at least those in history books. ISIS: INSIDE THE ARMY OF TERROR doesn't live up to its name at all and might disappoint a lot of readers, but it also actually does the right thing by exposing the complicated nature of this issue. So, I was torn about this book that didn't give me what it advertises, but I can't be mad at it because I understand the nature of the beast better now.
The reason why we keep shooting movies about World War II and zombies is exactly the same and it's going to be the reason why we're going to shoot movies about ISIS once they're going to stop feeling like an immediate threat: they are the embodiment of evil for Occidental society. They are dehumanized and have seemingly not redeeming, humane traits. It's a bit depressing that this conflict is going to end up sold back to us in a couple years, but Hollywood has done that with pretty much every conflict in the history of men, or at least those in history books. ISIS: INSIDE THE ARMY OF TERROR doesn't live up to its name at all and might disappoint a lot of readers, but it also actually does the right thing by exposing the complicated nature of this issue. So, I was torn about this book that didn't give me what it advertises, but I can't be mad at it because I understand the nature of the beast better now.
