Anne Barnard
174 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
been the last point o identiÄcation with
the Islamic State.”
This observation hits home in the
operatic story o two middle-aged,
middle-class brothers in a refugee
camp who initially welcomed . Abu
Omar’s wife was killed by al Qaeda
militants in 2005. His brother Abu
Fahad, a former army medic, also lost
his wife, who was killed the next year
when U.S. and Kurdish troops shot up
the family car at a checkpoint. After
they beat him, Abu Fahad found his
eldest daughter “in the backseat o the
car trying to eat shards o window
glass”; she had just “watched her mother’s
head explode.” “Abu Fahad wasn’t a
zealot,” Verini writes. “He wasn’t even
particularly devout.” He continues:But he had watched his country
invaded, occupied, turned upon
itself; his city degraded from a
“paradise,” as he described the
Mosul o his youth, to a hell; his
wife killed; himsel and his family
and friends humiliated by soldiers o
the army he’d once nursed to health;
his children driven mad, denigrated,
denied futures. To a man like that,
sane as he is, talk o a millenarian
utopia, o any utopia, o any improve-
ment o life beyond the malediction
it has become, holds promise.Verini also gives deserved attention
to the heavy sacriÄces and bravery o
the Iraqi forces. Twenty thousand Iraqi
troops died between 2014 and 2016
alone. One gunner, known as “Sponge-
Bob,” a nickname bestowed on him by
his young son, had earlier survived
torture by a Shiite militia, despite being
Shiite himself. During the Äght for
Mosul, he was evaporated by a suicidegoofy selÄes, making it initially appear
to be a buoonish sideshow in a crowded
Äeld o more conventional actors.
In Iraq, however, where and its
predecessors had incubated for years,
the group’s rise was plain to see amid
Iraq’s political disorder. Journalists saw
it, but strained news budgets meant
shrinking coverage as the United States,
brieÁy it turned out, withdrew.
WHY THEY FIGHT
Verini does an excellent job o describ-
ing the Iraqi leg o the elephant and his
starting point: guilt. He assigns much
o it to U.S. policies and the leaders in
Iraq and elsewhere whom those policies
have supported or tolerated. Yes, the
United States helped create , not in
the literal way that conspiracy theorists
believe but by destabilizing Iraq, ruling
it clumsily, and then supporting the
scorched-earth, sectarian approach o
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Verini reminds readers o how, during
the run-up to the invasion, U.S. Secre-
tary o State Colin Powell elevated the
obscure Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who
would found the group that became
, to a jihadi celebrity by citing him
in his famous speech before the £
Security Council. And Verini explains
how exploited the Maliki govern-
ment’s corruption, bribing or co-opting
ocials as it raised money, inÄltrated
institutions, and amassed weapons, even
as it denounced graft to gain popularity.
By the time took over Mosul in 2014,
the group was the only real alternative to
Maliki, and some Moslawis, given their
lived experience, decided it was worth a
try. Amid their political, security, and
economic rationales, one researcher tells
Verini, “religious ideology might have