Black Flags The Rise of ISIS [Paperback]

WINNER OF THE 2016 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION

“A Best Book of 2015”—The New York Times,The Washington Post, PeopleMagazine, San Francisco Chronicle,Kansas City Star, andKirkus Reviews

In a thrilling dramatic narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents. Drawing on unique high-level access to CIA and Jordanian sources, Warrick weaves gripping, moment-by-moment operational details with the perspectives of diplomats and spies, generals and heads of state, many of whom foresaw a menace worse than al Qaeda and tried desperately to stop it.Black Flagsis a brilliant and definitive history that reveals the long arc of today’s most dangerous extremist threat.

Named a Best Book of 2015 by Michiko Kakutani ofThe New York Times,The Washington Post,People Magazine,San Francisco Chronicle, Kansas City Star, andKirkus Reviews

“Gripping. . . . Mr. Warrick has a gift for constructing narratives with a novelistic energy and detail, and in this volume, he creates the most revealing portrait yet laid out in a book of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the founding father of the organization that would become the Islamic State. . . . For readers interested in the roots of the Islamic State and the evil genius of its godfather, there is no better book to begin with thanBlack Flags.”—Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times
 
“Warrick charts Zarqawi’s rise from booze-swilling Jordanian street tough to one of the most brutal jihadists in the world. He demonstrates how much the militants of the Islamic State owe to Zarqawi, who was killed in 2006—not only their ideology but even the color of thelS,