The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

Patrick Cockburn

Language: English

Pages: 192

ISBN: 1784780405

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The essential “on the ground” report on the fastest-growing new threat in the Middle East, from the winner of the 2014 Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award

Born of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, the Islamic State astonished the world in 2014 by creating a powerful new force in the Middle East. By combining religious fanaticism and military prowess, the new self-declared caliphate poses a threat to the political status quo of the whole region.

In The Rise of Islamic State, Patrick Cockburn describes the conflicts behind a dramatic unraveling of US foreign policy. He shows how the West created the conditions for ISIS’s explosive success by stoking the war in Syria. The West—the US and NATO in particular—underestimated the militants’ potential until it was too late and failed to act against jihadi sponsors in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan.

A Decade of Hope: Stories of Grief and Endurance from 9/11 Families and Friends

The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power, Politics, and Liberty

Islamophilia: a very metropolitan malady

Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore

Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror

Terrorism: A History

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

popular mood. The witness, a woman, relates: Just this evening, with my old mom, I went out for shopping and buying medicines in my car with a thin cloth showing my eyes only. What can I do? Last week, a woman was standing beside a kiosk, and uncovered her face drinking a bottle of water. One of them [ISIS] approached her and hit her on the head with a thick stick. He didn’t recognize that her husband was close to her. Her husband beat him up and he ran away shooting randomly into the sky as the

the size of Britain or Michigan, and the area in which they can mount operations is much bigger. The Syrian-Iraqi border has largely ceased to exist. It is worth looking separately at the situation in the two countries, taking Iraq first. Here nearly all the Sunni areas, about a quarter of the country, are either wholly or partially controlled by ISIS. Before it captured Mosul and Tikrit it could field some 6,000 fighters, but this figure has multiplied many times since its gain in prestige and

monarchies, backed by the US, facing off against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, supported by Russia. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose government has backed the Shia-led Iraqi state, pledged support for Maliki against the Sunni uprising, saying, “Iran will apply all its efforts on the international and regional levels to confront terrorism.” With a long border in common, Iraq is Iran’s most important ally, more important even than Syria. The Iranians were horrified by the sudden

elsewhere. Such local agreements and truces are becoming increasingly possible because of war weariness. They are unlikely to be more than temporary. However, as one observer in Beirut put it: “There were over 600 ceasefires in the Lebanese civil war. They were always fragile and people laughed at them but they saved a lot of lives.” The Syrian crisis comprises five different conflicts that cross-infect and exacerbate each other. The war commenced with a genuine popular revolt against a brutal

to target a common enemy such as Hosni Mubarak or Bashar al-Assad. The political, social, and economic roots of the upsurges of 2011 are very complex. That this wasn’t obvious to everyone at the time is partly a result of the way foreign commentators exaggerated the role of new information technology. Protestors, skilled in propaganda if nothing else, saw the advantage of presenting the uprisings as unthreatening, “velvet” revolutions with English-speaking, well-educated bloggers and tweeters

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