The Isis factor

ISIS
The State of Terror
Jessica Stern and J M Berger
Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers; 385 pages; $27.99

ISIS
Inside the Army of Terror
Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan
Regan Arts; 270 pages; $14

The Islamic State and its atrocities - beheadings, mass executions, the enslavement of women and children, and the destruction of cultural antiquities - are in the headlines every day now. The terror group not only continues to roll through West Asia, expanding from Iraq and Syria into Libya and Yemen, but has also gained dangerous new affiliates in Egypt and Nigeria and continues to recruit foreign fighters through its sophisticated use of social media.

Given the ascendance of the Islamic State (also known as Isis or Isil), it's startling to recall that in January 2014, US President Barack Obama referred to it as a "JV [junior varsity] team", suggesting that it did not pose anywhere near the sort of threat that Al Qaeda did.

Since then, yards of copy and scores of pixels have been devoted to trying to chronicle and comprehend the group. Two new books pull together and analyse a lot of material on it. Although much of their coverage (on matters like the organisation's use of social media, its fuelling of sectarian hatred and its combination of ultraviolence with civil governance) will be familiar to those who follow the news, the authors do nimble jobs of turning their copious research and their own expertise on terrorism into coherent, accessible narratives that leave us with an understanding of the Islamic State's history and metastasis, and its modus operandi.

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by the journalists Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan draws upon the authors' extensive reporting to give readers a fine-grained look at the organisation's evolution through assorted incarnations (Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Mujahidin Advisory Council and the Islamic State of Iraq) and its operations today.

ISIS: The State of Terror by the Harvard terrorism scholar Jessica Stern and J M Berger, a contributor to Foreign Policy magazine, covers much of the same ground but with less granular detail. The authors also offer some vague recommendations on how they think the West should deal with the Islamic State: focus on "containment and constriction" rather than overwhelming military force, and exert more effective control of the digital battleground.

The most compelling sections of the Stern-Berger book are devoted to comparing Isis and Al Qaeda. The authors describe Al Qaeda as an exclusive "vanguard movement", a "cabal that saw itself as the elite intellectual leaders of a global ideological revolution that it would assist and manipulate". Through the 1990s, they write, Al Qaeda "grew into a corporation, with a payroll and benefits department, and operatives who travelled around the world inserting themselves into local conflicts".

Isis, in contrast, is more of a populist start-up operation. Online, Ms Stern and Mr Berger note, "it amassed and empowered a 'smart mob' of supporters", polling "its constituents and making shrewd calls about when to listen and who could safely be ignored".

As Mr Weiss and Mr Hassan see it, many reluctant supporters regard the Islamic State as "the only option on offer for Sunni Muslims who have been dealt a dismal hand in the past decade - first losing control of Iraq and now suffering nationwide atrocities, which many equate to genocide, in Syria. They view the struggle in the Middle East as one between Sunnis and an Iranian-led coalition, and they justify ultraviolence as a necessary tool to counterbalance or deter Shia hegemony".

Both books also provide lucid assessments of the role that missteps and disastrous decision-making on the part of the United States played in fuelling the rise of the Islamic State and its antecedents and affiliates. Ms Stern and Mr Berger write that the 2003 invasion of Iraq "reinforced jihadi claims about America's hegemonic designs on the Middle East, providing a recruiting bonanza at a time when the terrorists needed it most".

The occupation and postwar planning would prove equally disastrous. Both books remind us that decisions announced by L Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator in Iraq, in 2003 - to dissolve the Iraqi Army and to ban Baath Party members from government - resulted in huge numbers of angry, unemployed Iraqis, easily recruited into a burgeoning insurgency and a dangerous lack of security. In fact, Mr Weiss and Mr Hassan contend that most of the Islamic State's "top decision makers served in Saddam Hussein's military or security services", and in that sense, "'secular' Baathism has returned to Iraq under the guise of Islamic fundamentalism".

Finally, both books point out that the United States' withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2011 and the Obama administration's political disengagement have had lasting consequences for what Mr Weiss and Mr Hassan call "the country's future instability".

"The rise of ISIS," Mr Berger and Ms Stern conclude, "is to some extent, the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power, but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will, and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. What remained were ruins." They quote King Abdullah II of Jordan saying that the battle with Isis will be a "generational fight".

Mr Weiss and Mr Hassan sound an even more pessimistic note. "The army of terror," they write at the end of their book, "will be with us indefinitely."

© The New York Times News Service 2015