Anne Barnard
172 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
i to say, as he puts it, “See, I knew all
along there was something horrible
lurking in the desert there.”
But it is instructive to look even more
broadly at the successes and failures o
writers who have tried to make sense o
the chaos consuming Iraq and Syria. Too
often, we approach it like the proverbial
blind men assessing an elephant: the one
at the tail thinks it is like a rope, the
one at the leg says it is like a tree, and so
on. Each arena o the sprawling conÁicts
poses its own challenges o access and
safety. Few people have seen every
aspect from the ground, and no book has
satisfyingly pulled it all together. Verini
focuses on Iraq and men. A recent
book by Azadeh Moaveni looks mainly at
women who joined in Syria.
Yet neither Iraq nor Syria fully makes
sense without the other. The details o
the hostilities in Syria, where the
conÁict began not with but with
President Bashar al-Assad’s violent
repression o a civilian protest move-
ment, are very dierent from those o
the war in Iraq. At the same time, Iraqis
and Syrians share a sense o abandon-
ment and abuse by their governments and
the world, and their conÁicts have
become inseparable. The Bush adminis-
tration’s misadventure in Iraq was the
reason the Obama administration was
unable or unwilling to take decisive action
to stop atrocities in Syria: the United
States was constrained by depleted
resources, a war-weary population, the
discrediting o its rhetoric about de-
mocracy and human rights, and its own
undermining o international institutions
and multilateralism. During the U.S.
occupation o Iraq, Assad’s weaponiza-
tion o Syrian extremists to harass
American soldiers in Iraq helped seedHe does situate the rise o in age-old
atavistic impulses. Not Islamic ones or
Middle Eastern ones but human ones—
the violence that springs from power
struggles, revenge, bloodlust. In the gory
battle scenes memorialized in Assyrian
friezes in Nineveh, the ancient city
that lay near modern-day Mosul, Verini
sees parallels to the gruesome photos
and videos Iraqis shared by smartphone.
“Everyone knew someone who’d been
killed on the Internet,” he writes.
Verini seeks to temper the hype
about , and he cuts it down to size,
portraying it as just the latest insurgent
group to use terrorism as a tool for
political goals. He recalls that it has
been over a century since jihadism
became a vehicle for anticolonialism,
reminding readers o the Royal Air
Force’s eorts to put down the Iraqi
revolt that began in 1920, a movement
that, like the rebels who fought the
British in Sudan decades earlier, in-
voked the Almighty against an occupier.
“Fifteen years before Guernica,” Verini
writes, “the British were bombing
unarmed Iraqis.” Nor is even the Ärst
insurgent group to promote an apocalyp-
tic worldview. He mentions the Jewish
rebels who fought the Romans in the Ärst
centuries and ¬² and ultimately
committed mass suicide on Masada.
As Verini notes, many news organi-
zations milked the story for its
“luridness,” yielding shallow coverage
“on the same spectrum as the Caliph-
ate’s own blood porn.” (He acknowl-
edges “a few exceptions”; in fact, there
are many brave journalists who reported
with context and measure.) Some
outlets, he muses, may have sought to
absolve themselves o their lack o
skepticism before the U.S. invasion, as