There is no Gallerie Mansour in downtown Beirut, but the Islamic State’s links to the trade in looted antiquities have been well documented. I first explored the concept of terrorists raising money by selling stolen or illicitly excavated antiquities in The Fallen Angel in 2012. At that time there was no proof, at least not in the public realm, that terrorists were actually lining their pockets by selling treasures from the past; it was merely something that I suspected was occurring. I take no satisfaction in being proven correct, especially by the likes of ISIS.
But ISIS has not been content merely to sell antiquities; it destroys them, too, especially if they conflict with the group’s interpretation of Islam. After sweeping into Palmyra in May 2015, ISIS holy warriors promptly destroyed many of the city’s glorious Roman temples. Forces loyal to the Assad regime recaptured Palmyra as I was finishing the first draft of The Black Widow. Having sworn at the outset that I would not chase the shifting sands of the conflict, I chose to leave chapter 39 as originally written. Such are the hazards of attempting to catch history in the act. I regret to say I am confident the civil war in Syria will continue for years, if not decades, much like the war that almost destroyed its neighbor, Lebanon. Territory will be won and lost, captured and abandoned. Thousands more will become refugees. Many more will die.
I did my utmost to explain the roots and explosive growth of ISIS accurately and dispassionately, though I am confident that, given America’s divided and increasingly dysfunctional politics, some will quibble with my portrayal. There is no doubt that the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 created the seedbed from which ISIS sprang. And there is also no doubt that the failure to leave a residual American force in Iraq in 2011, combined with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, allowed the group to flourish and spread on two sides of an increasingly meaningless border. To dismiss the group as “un-Islamic” or “not a state” is wishful thinking and, ultimately, counterproductive and dangerous. As the journalist and scholar Graeme Wood pointed out in a groundbreaking study of ISIS published in the Atlantic: “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” And it is rapidly taking on many functions of a modern state, issuing its citizenry everything from driver’s permits to fishing licenses.
At least four thousand Westerners have heeded the clarion call to come to the caliphate, including more than five hundred women. A database maintained by London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue finds that most of the women are teenagers or in their early twenties, and are likely to be widowed at a young age. Others face the very real prospect of losing their own lives in the violent world of the caliphate. In February 2015, three radicalized teenage girls from the Bethnal Green section of East London slipped out of the United Kingdom on an Istanbul-bound flight and made their way to the Syrian city of Raqqa, the caliphate’s unofficial capital. In December 2015, as the city came under both Russian and American air assault, all contact with the girls was lost. Their families now fear the three teenagers are dead.
Many Western ISIS recruits, men and women, have returned home. Some are disillusioned; others remain committed to the cause of the caliphate. And still others are prepared to carry out acts of mass murder and terror in the name of Islam. In the near term, Western Europe faces the greatest threat, in no small measure because of the large and restive Muslim populations living within its open borders. ISIS has no need to insert terrorists into Western Europe because the potential terrorists are already there. They reside in the banlieues of France and the Muslim quarters of Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Malmo, East London, and Luton. At the time of this writing, ISIS had carried out devastating attacks in Paris and Brussels. The perpetrators, for the most part, were born in the West and carried European passports in their pockets. More attacks will surely follow, for the security services of Western Europe have proven themselves woefully unprepared—especially the Belgian S?reté, which has countenanced the creation of a virtual ISIS safe haven in the heart of Brussels.
The American homeland, however, is ISIS’s ultimate target. While researching this novel, I was struck by the number of times I heard someone say that an attack on a U.S. city is imminent, sooner rather than later. I was struck, too, by the number of times a high-level government official told me that this state of affairs is “the new normal”—that we must live with the fact that bombs will occasionally explode in our airports and subways, that we can no longer expect to be fully safe in a restaurant or a concert hall because of an ideology, and a faith, born of the Middle East. President Barack Obama seemed to express this point of view after the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the siege at the Hypercacher market. Cautioning against overreaction, he dismissed the perpetrators as “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” It was not a deli, of course; it was a kosher market. And the four victims were not “a bunch of folks.” They were Jews. And for that reason alone they were targeted and mercilessly slaughtered.
But how did the West arrive at this place? In the afterword of Portrait of a Spy, I warned what would happen if America and its allies mishandled the so-called Arab Spring. “If the forces of moderation and modernity prevail,” I wrote in April 2011, “it is possible the threat of terrorism will gradually recede. But if radical Muslim clerics and their adherents manage to seize power in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, we might very well look back fondly on the turbulent early years of the twenty-first century as a golden age of relations between Islam and the West.” Unfortunately, the promise of the Arab Spring has been broken, and the Arab world is in turmoil. With the age of oil in retreat, its future is bleak. If history is a guide, a leader of destiny might arise from the chaos. Perhaps he will hail from the biblical cradle of civilization, near the banks of one of the four rivers that flowed from the Garden of Eden. And perhaps, if he is so inclined, he might refer to himself as Saladin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS