The ISIS apocalypse

'The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State' by William McCants (Macmillan, 256 pages, $27)

The Western media has been obsessed with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) for almost two years. The jihadist group's atrocities are carefully coordinated to stir horrified tabloid headlines and social media clickbait, and observers have been happy to oblige. Publishers have also rushed to release books on such a sensational topic; bookshops are now full of volumes with spectacular titles about the barbarity of bloodthirsty jihadists. 

"The ISIS Apocalypse" by William McCants, a director at the Brookings Institution, has a deceptively grabby title. But its focus is less on the shocking butchery that gets such attention in the West and more on the origins, development and strategy of ISIS and its predecessors. The book is cool-headed and deeply researched, drawing on leaked and captured emails and other messages to give something like an inside account of ISIS's bloody rise across swathes of Syria and Iraq.

At its center is what McCants calls the "major changing of the guard in the global jihadist movement," when ISIS supplanted its former master Al-Qaeda. The book explains ISIS's ideological and tactical distinction from Al-Qaeda led by Osama Bin Laden and his "lieutenant" Ayman al-Zawahiri - a distinction that goes back to ISIS's predecessors in Iraq, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. 

Of course, the most germane pre-ISIS experience was in Iraq. Early dreams of setting up a jihadi caliphate focused on the Taliban's Islamic emirate in Afghanistan, but the American overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 was a rude awakening. The chaos after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 gave Al...