Narrator: At dawn on a February morning in 2015, a woman named Sajida al-Rishawi was led from her cell to a gallows in a Jordanian prison. For nearly a decade, she had been a ghost—a failed suicide bomber whose name had faded from public memory. But in the preceding weeks, her name was suddenly on the lips of diplomats and terrorists across the globe. The newly ascendant Islamic State, or ISIS, had demanded her release in exchange for a captured Jordanian pilot. When their gruesome video showed the pilot being burned alive, Jordan’s response was swift and final. Rishawi’s execution was an act of retribution, the closing of a circle that had opened ten years earlier in a scene of unimaginable horror.

To understand the rise of ISIS, one must first understand the story of this woman and the man who sent her on her mission. In his gripping account, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, author Joby Warrick meticulously unpacks the origins of the world’s most feared terrorist organization, revealing that its roots run deeper than anyone imagined, back to a bloody wedding party in Amman and the brutal vision of a single man.

Narrator: The story of ISIS’s clash with Jordan begins not in the deserts of Syria or Iraq, but in the glittering ballroom of the Radisson Hotel in Amman in November 2005. The room was alive with celebration, filled with music and the joy of a wedding party. Among the guests were two young cousins, nine-year-old Lina and fourteen-year-old Riham, dressed in white. On the podium, the fathers of the bride and groom stood beaming. None of them saw the two figures in dark coats who entered the room, one of whom was Sajida al-Rishawi.

Suddenly, a blinding flash and a deafening explosion tore through the ballroom. A male suicide bomber had detonated his vest, killing the two fathers on the podium instantly. Rishawi, his accomplice, fumbled with her own device, which failed to explode. She fled into the chaos. Abu Haytham, a captain in Jordan’s intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, was one of the first responders. Pushing his way through the carnage, he saw the broken bodies and the two young girls, Lina and Riham, lying still in their torn white dresses. He later recalled thinking they looked "just like angels." Staring at the devastation, he asked aloud, "How does someone with a human heart do a thing like this?"

The attack, which struck two other hotels that night and killed sixty people, was masterminded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It was a pivotal moment for Jordan. The massacre of civilians at a wedding turned the Jordanian public decisively against Zarqawi and his extremist ideology. The event left a deep scar on the national psyche and hardened the kingdom’s resolve to fight this new, more nihilistic form of terrorism. It was this history that made ISIS’s demand for Rishawi’s release a decade later not just a political calculation, but a painful national insult.

Narrator: The architect of the Amman bombings, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was not a religious scholar or a seasoned military commander. He began as a common criminal and street thug in Jordan, known for his tattoos and penchant for violence. His transformation into the forefather of ISIS was a story of radicalization in prison, strategic opportunism, and, ironically, the unintended consequences of American foreign policy.

After his release from a Jordanian prison, Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan but was initially rejected by Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaeda network viewed him as an undisciplined and excessively brutal extremist. While bin Laden favored a gradualist approach, Zarqawi preached a different gospel. He believed in immediate, spectacular violence to provoke chaos and establish an Islamic state right away. He famously declared, "The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq," referencing an apocalyptic prophecy.

His moment came with the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The ensuing chaos provided the perfect theater for his brand of terror. But his ascent to global infamy was cemented by Washington itself. In a 2003 speech to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell named Zarqawi as the crucial link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. While the intelligence was flawed, the speech was a stunning gift. It elevated Zarqawi from a relatively obscure jihadist to a household name, making him a magnet for the most violent and radical fighters flocking to Iraq. The U.S. had inadvertently created its own arch-nemesis, a man whose fame, as Warrick notes, would now "extend throughout the Arab world." This new status allowed him to build the organization that would eventually morph into ISIS.

Narrator: In January 2015, the legacy of Zarqawi came roaring back to life. An F-16 fighter jet from the Royal Jordanian Air Force crashed in Syria, and its young pilot was captured by ISIS, the direct successor to Zarqawi’s organization. For Jordan’s King Abdullah II, the situation was a political nightmare. He was already facing domestic pressure over Jordan's role in the U.S.-led coalition and the strain of hosting over a million Syrian refugees.

ISIS saw an opportunity. They contacted the pilot’s family and made their demand: the freedom of Sajida al-Rishawi, the failed bomber from the 2005 Amman attacks. The demand was a calculated move, designed to reopen old wounds and humiliate the Jordanian monarchy. While King Abdullah was in Washington pleading with American lawmakers for more support, the crisis reached its horrific conclusion. ISIS released a slickly produced video showing the pilot being burned to death in a cage.

The King’s response was one of cold fury. He cut his trip short and flew back to Amman. He told President Obama, "When I get home I’m going to war, and I’m going to use every bomb I’ve got until they’re gone." His frustration with his allies was palpable. He had complained to Senator John McCain that Jordan was flying more missions than almost any other coalition partner but was still waiting for basic resupplies. Back in Jordan, his orders were simple and absolute. Pointing to the cases of Rishawi and another Iraqi inmate, he told his aides, "I don’t want to hear a word from anyone." Within hours, both were executed. It was a grim, decisive act of vengeance, closing a bloody chapter that Zarqawi had opened ten years prior.

Narrator: The central, chilling takeaway from Black Flags is that ISIS was not a spontaneous eruption of violence but the methodical and predictable outcome of a specific, brutal ideology perfected by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Its rise was not inevitable; it was fueled by a series of miscalculations, from the power vacuum created by the Iraq War to the West's failure to grasp the unique nature of Zarqawi's apocalyptic vision. Unlike al-Qaeda, which sought to win hearts and minds, Zarqawi’s movement—and later ISIS—sought only to terrorize, purify, and conquer, believing that sheer brutality was a divine instrument.

The book serves as a stark reminder that history’s most dangerous movements are often born from the actions of individuals the world initially dismisses. It forces us to look beyond headlines and drone strikes to understand the ideologies that animate them. The story of Zarqawi and the birth of ISIS is a lesson in how a single person’s dark vision, when mixed with geopolitical chaos, can ignite a fire that threatens to consume the world. It leaves us with a critical challenge: if we failed to see the rise of ISIS coming, how do we ensure we are not blind to the sparks of the next global threat?