Review The Origins Of ISIS

Mabon, Simon and Royle, Stephen, The Origins Of ISIS, London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017

 

The Origins of ISIS attempts to take a holistic view of Iraqi history to explain the rise of the Islamic State. The main argument is that Iraq has lacked sovereignty since its creation by the British after World War I. That only got worse after the 2003 American invasion. Vacuums were created which were filled by tribes, sectarianism, militias and the insurgency. While this was an ambitious attempt trying to understand Iraqi history and politics just to write a book proved to be too much for the two authors Simon Mabon and Stephen Royle. They end up skipping from topic to topic, get some points wrong, and most importantly claim that Al Qaeda in Iraq was different from the Islamic State showing that the writers could have spent more time studying the background of the group.

 

The main argument of the book is that Iraq has always struggled to be a sovereign state leading to people to look towards other authorities other than the government such as the Islamic State. Iraq was a child of British colonialism with disputed borders and competing authorities and identities. Saddam Hussein attempted to impose his totalitarian rule upon the country but then things began to fray under the 1990s United Nations’ sanctions which led people to tribes and religion for support as the state contracted because it was starved of resources. Then the 2003 invasion wiped away the state replaced by a horrible U.S. occupation that created vacuums and state fragmentation and gave rise to militias and insurgents to fill that space. That’s the environment that led the Islamic State and its call for the caliphate to wipe away what it claimed was the artificial boundaries of Iraq and unite all Muslims. This is not a bad thesis and the strongest part of The Origins of ISIS. The problem is everything that surrounds it. The faults outweigh this one positive.

 

One problem is the authors tried to include to many topics in a very short book leading to large jumps in the writing. One time Mabon and Royle are talking about identity politics and then they flip to how Turkey dealt with the Islamic State. That’s a very rough transition.

 

Second, they get many minor points about Iraqi politics wrong and most importantly don’t understand the origins of the Islamic State. They claimed that Prime Minister Haidar Abadi who took power in 2014 at the start of the war against the insurgency had the backing of a national unity government which helped relieve internal tensions. In fact, every Iraqi government since the fall of Saddam have been national unity ones. What’s most glaring however is that the book considers Al Qaeda in Iraq as being a branch of Al Qaeda and not the same as the Islamic State. The Islamic State and Al Qaeda had a falling out over the leadership of the global jihad which led the two to split. The authors seem to think that led to a new group called the Islamic State when it didn’t. Perhaps the authors spent too much time trying to digest Iraqi history and could have spent more time on the Islamic State’s past.

 

I give The Origins Of ISIS an “A” for its attempt to tackle the structural issues in Iraq that helped create the Islamic State, but a “D” for its execution. The discussion of Iraqi sovereignty is interesting but the rest of the book just has too many mistakes and issues to make it worthwhile. There are others that do a much better job covering the history of the group.

 

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