Michael: Most people think terrorist masterminds are born from zealous ideology in remote training camps. The truth is far more mundane, and far more terrifying. The man who created ISIS wasn't a scholar or a soldier. He was a street thug and a bouncer. Kevin: Wait, a bouncer? Come on. You're telling me the ideological forefather of one of the most feared terrorist organizations in modern history was checking IDs at a nightclub? That sounds like a bad movie plot. Michael: It sounds like it, but it's the chilling reality. And it’s at the heart of the book we’re diving into today: Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick. Kevin: Okay, I'm intrigued. Who is this author, Joby Warrick? How does he know all this? Michael: That's the key. Warrick is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent for The Washington Post. And this book, Black Flags, also won the Pulitzer, largely because of the unbelievable access he got. He’s talking to high-level CIA operatives, Jordanian intelligence officers, the people who were in the room, on the ground, watching this disaster unfold in slow motion. Kevin: Wow. So this isn't just a history book, it's an inside story. Michael: Exactly. It reads like a political thriller, but every word is true. And Warrick starts the story not at the beginning, but at a brutal, tragic endpoint that sets the stage for everything. He drops us right into Amman, Jordan, in 2005, at a wedding.

Kevin: A wedding? That feels like a strange place to start a book about ISIS. Michael: It’s the perfect place, because it shows you the soul of the organization. It’s a Wednesday night in November. The Radisson Hotel ballroom is glittering, lit up like a carnival. A wedding party is in full swing—music, dancing, families celebrating. On the podium, the fathers of the bride and groom are standing together, beaming in their rented tuxedos. Kevin: I can picture it perfectly. Just pure joy. Michael: Pure joy. And into that joy walk two figures in dark coats. Meanwhile, miles away, a captain in the Mukhabarat, the Jordanian intelligence service, named Abu Haytham is working a long shift. He gets a call just before 9:00 p.m. An explosion at the Grand Hyatt hotel. Then another call—a blast at the Days Inn. And then, the Radisson. Kevin: Oh no. Michael: The bomber at the Radisson walks to the front of the ballroom, right near the podium, and detonates his vest. The book describes a blinding flash and a shockwave that just flattens everyone. The fathers of the bride and groom are killed instantly. The music stops. The air fills with smoke and screams. Kevin: That is just sickening. To target a wedding… Michael: That’s the point. It was designed for maximum psychological horror. Abu Haytham races to the Radisson and pushes his way inside. And the scene he finds is just carnage. He sees bodies everywhere. And then he sees two little girls, cousins, aged nine and fourteen, named Lina and Riham. They’re in their torn white party dresses, lifeless on the floor. And Warrick includes this heartbreaking detail—Abu Haytham’s first thought when he sees them is, "Just like angels." Kevin: Wow. That's… I don't even have words for that. Michael: And Abu Haytham, this hardened intelligence officer, says aloud to no one, "How does someone with a human heart do a thing like this?" It’s the central question of the whole book. Kevin: What about the second figure? You said there were two. Michael: That’s the other critical piece of this story. The second bomber was a woman, Sajida al-Rishawi. Her explosive vest malfunctioned. In the chaos, she just fled. The Jordanians launched a massive manhunt and captured her a few days later. She goes on television and confesses, a ghost-like figure explaining how her husband blew himself up and she failed. Kevin: So she’s caught. She’s the one responsible for this. Michael: She’s part of the team, yes. She’s convicted and sentenced to death, but for nearly a decade, she just languishes in a Jordanian prison. She becomes a footnote. Warrick even includes this bizarre detail where she’d ask her lawyer, "When will I be going home?" as if she was completely disconnected from the gravity of what she’d done. Kevin: Going home? After being part of a massacre? That’s a chilling level of detachment. Michael: It is. But then, almost ten years later, in 2015, her name explodes back into the headlines. The organization that planned the Amman bombings has evolved. It’s now bigger, scarier, and it calls itself ISIS. They’ve just captured a young Jordanian fighter pilot after his jet crashed in Syria. Kevin: And they want to trade him for her. Michael: Exactly. They demand the release of Sajida al-Rishawi. Suddenly, this failed bomber from a decade-old attack is the most valuable prisoner in the world. Jordan's King Abdullah II is in an impossible position. He’s in Washington, actually pleading with American lawmakers for more support, more bombs to fight ISIS. He’s frustrated, telling them, "I’m not getting support from your side! We’re flying two hundred percent more missions than all the other coalition members combined, apart from the United States." Kevin: So he's out there trying to lead the fight, and then this happens. He's completely blindsided. Michael: Completely. And while these tense, secret negotiations are happening, ISIS does what it does best. They release a video. It shows the young pilot, Muath al-Kasasbeh, being burned alive in a cage. Kevin: Oh, man. I remember when that came out. The whole world was horrified. Michael: King Abdullah sees the video and immediately cuts his trip short. He flies back to Amman, and his resolve is like iron. He tells his aides, "I don’t want to hear a word from anyone." He gives the order. That night, Sajida al-Rishawi is taken from her cell and executed by hanging. Kevin: So it’s just this brutal, vicious cycle. They murder the pilot in the most horrific way imaginable, and Jordan responds with an execution. It feels like an act of pure vengeance. Michael: It is. It’s an eye for an eye. King Abdullah 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." The execution was a message. But you’re right, it’s a cycle. It’s a world of pure retaliation, which is exactly the world the architect of the 2005 bombings wanted to create.

Kevin: This is all so horrifying. But that brings me back to the main question. Who was the guy who masterminded this? The man who started it all? You said he was a bouncer. Michael: Yes. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And his story is maybe the most shocking part of the book. Because he wasn't some brilliant strategist or religious scholar. He grew up in the tough, industrial town of Zarqa, Jordan. He was a high school dropout, covered in crude tattoos—which are forbidden by devout Salafis—known for drinking, getting into fights. He was a petty criminal, a thug. Kevin: That’s just… it doesn't compute. How does a person like that become a global jihadist leader? There has to be a missing piece. Michael: The first turning point was prison. He gets arrested for possession of weapons and spends years in a harsh Jordanian desert prison. That’s where he falls under the influence of a radical cleric and transforms. He becomes intensely religious, but it’s a religion filtered through his own violent, thuggish personality. He was charismatic, but in a terrifying way. One person in the book describes him as someone who could "command with only his eyes." Kevin: Okay, so prison radicalizes him. That story we've heard before. But that still doesn't make him the founder of ISIS. Michael: You're right. When he gets out of prison in a general amnesty in 1999, he’s still a relatively small figure. He travels to Afghanistan and tries to join up with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. And here’s a crucial detail: bin Laden and his inner circle basically reject him. Kevin: They turned him down? Why? Michael: They saw him as a loose cannon. His ideology was too extreme, even for them. Zarqawi believed in takfir—the idea that you could declare other Muslims who didn't follow his exact interpretation of Islam as apostates, and therefore, you could kill them. He wanted to start a sectarian war between Sunnis and Shias immediately. Al-Qaeda's leadership thought this was reckless and counterproductive. They had a more "gradualist" approach. So they kept him at arm's length. Kevin: So even al-Qaeda thought he was too much. What happens then? How does he get his big break? Michael: In two words: the United States. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the single greatest gift Zarqawi ever received. It created a power vacuum, chaos, and a powerful narrative of Western invaders defiling Muslim land. It was the perfect recruiting tool and the perfect battlefield for him. He slipped into Iraq and started his own franchise of brutality. Kevin: And this is where it gets even crazier, right? This is where the US government steps in and… helps him? Michael: Inadvertently, yes. Massively. In February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell gives a famous speech at the United Nations, making the case for war. He needs to prove a link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda. And the man his intelligence analysts hand him as the supposed link is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Kevin: Hold on. Was that even true? Was he the link? Michael: It was a huge stretch. Warrick's reporting makes it clear the connection was flimsy at best. Zarqawi was in Iraq, yes, but he wasn't working with Saddam. But Powell gets up in front of the entire world and names him. He paints him as this major al-Qaeda operative, a deadly threat connected to a rogue state. Kevin: And in doing so, they made him famous. Michael: They made him a superstar. Overnight, Zarqawi went from being a relatively obscure, second-tier jihadist to a household name across the Arab world. The book has this perfect line: "Now his fame would extend throughout the Arab world." Young, angry men who had never heard of him suddenly saw him as the lead resistance fighter against the American occupation. Kevin: That is a staggering, tragic irony. It’s like they were trying to point out a small fire, but in doing so, they poured gasoline all over it and handed the arsonist a megaphone. Michael: That's the perfect analogy. The US government essentially gave him a global marketing campaign that he could never have paid for. They created the very monster they claimed they were fighting. And he used that newfound fame to unleash a wave of violence that was shocking even by the standards of the Iraq War—beheadings, suicide bombings against mosques, all designed to provoke that sectarian civil war he always wanted. Kevin: And that apocalyptic vision… that’s what became the core of ISIS. Michael: Precisely. He preached about a final, cataclysmic battle against the West, quoting prophecies. He said, "The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq." He was killed by a US airstrike in 2006, but that spark he lit didn't go out. It smoldered, and eventually, it burst into the raging inferno of ISIS.

Michael: So when you put the two pieces together, you see this perfect storm. On one hand, you have Zarqawi's unique brand of pure, theatrical brutality, which we saw at that wedding in Amman. It was designed to terrorize populations and provoke governments into overreacting. Kevin: And on the other hand, you have a series of massive geopolitical blunders—from the invasion of Iraq itself to that UN speech—that handed him the fame, the recruits, and the platform he craved. Michael: Exactly. He couldn't have done it without the chaos of the war, and the war's architects couldn't have imagined they were creating a figure like him. Kevin: It's terrifying because it wasn't some grand, evil master plan from the start. It was a chaotic mix of one man's sociopathic brutality and the world's catastrophic mistakes. It feels so… preventable, in hindsight. Like a series of doors that were opened that should have stayed shut. Michael: That's the tragedy that hangs over the entire book. It’s a story of missed opportunities and unintended consequences. And it serves as a chilling warning about how these ideologies take root and spread, not just through ancient hatreds, but through modern failures. Kevin: It really makes you think about the hidden consequences of political decisions. A line in a speech, a policy choice made thousands of miles away, can end up creating a monster and leading to a scene like that horrific one at the Radisson. Michael: It’s a heavy topic, but understanding these origins is so crucial, especially now. The story of ISIS is a reminder that the most dangerous threats often grow in the shadows of our own mistakes. Kevin: Absolutely. It's a powerful and deeply unsettling book. It makes you question so much about how the world works. Michael: It really does. It’s a story that needs to be understood. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What part of this story surprised you the most? The idea of a street thug founding a global movement, or the way the world accidentally helped him? Find us on our social channels and let's discuss. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.