一本探祕ISIS邪惡起源的新書 Tracing the Birth of ISIS

In the last month, terror attacks that left 130 dead in Paris and 43 dead in Beirut and took down a Russian airliner with 224 people aboard have made the entire world horribly aware that the Islamic State not only seeks to establish a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, but also is beginning to export its monstrous savagery abroad. Although the Islamic State has been in the headlines for only two years, and its metastasis has been alarmingly swift, the seeds of the group — in its many incarnations — were planted many years ago, as Joby Warrick’s gripping new book, “Black Flags,” makes clear.

上個月，巴黎有130人在恐怖襲擊中喪生，貝魯特亦有43人因恐怖襲擊喪生，俄羅斯一架航班因恐怖襲擊墜落，機上224人無人生還，整個世界驚恐地意識到，伊斯蘭國(Islamic State)不僅謀求在敘利亞與伊拉克建立哈里發的國土，也開始向海外輸出慘無人道的暴行。儘管伊斯蘭國廣受媒體關注只有兩年的時間，它的擴散極爲迅速，令人擔憂，喬比·瓦里克(Joby Warrick)引人入勝的新書《黑旗》(Black Flags)中闡明，這個組織的種子以多種多樣的形式，早在多年之前便已播下。

Mr. Warrick, a reporter for The Washington Post and the author of the 2011 best seller “The Triple Agent,” has a gift for constructing narratives with a novelistic energy and detail, and in this volume, he creates the most revealing portrait yet laid out in a book of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the founding father of the organization that would become the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL).

瓦里克是《華盛頓郵報》(The Washington Post)的記者，亦是2011年最佳暢銷書《三重特工》(The Triple Agent)的作者，他擅長以小說式的活力和細節組織敘事，在這本書裏，他爲伊斯蘭國（亦稱ISIS或ISIL）的前身組織的創始人阿布·穆薩布·扎卡維(Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi)做出了迄今最爲發人深省的的描述。

Although this book owes some debts to Jean-Charles Brisard’s 2005 book, “Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda,” Mr. Warrick places that material in context with recent developments and uses his own copious sources within the United States and Jordanian intelligence to flesh out Mr. Zarqawi’s story and the crucial role that American missteps and misjudgments would play in fueling his rise and the advance of the Islamic State.

儘管這本書從讓-查爾斯·布利薩德(Jean-Charles Brisard)2005年的著作《扎卡維：基地組織的新面孔》(Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda)中有所借鑑，瓦里克把這些素材與事態的最新發展結合起來，動用了自己在美國與約旦情報機關中的大量人脈，充實了扎卡維的故事，以及美國的錯誤行動與錯誤判斷在他的崛起與伊斯蘭國的發展之中，扮演了多麼重要的作用。

Perhaps emulating the approach Lawrence Wright took in “The Looming Tower,” his masterly 2006 account of the road to Sept. 11, Mr. Warrick focuses parts of this book on the lives of several individuals with singular, inside takes on the overarching story. They include a doctor named Basel al-Sabha, who treated Mr. Zarqawi in prison; Abu Haytham, who ran the counterterrorism unit of Jordan’s intelligence service and fought the Islamic State in its various guises for years; and Nada Bakos, a young C.I.A. officer who became the agency’s top expert on Mr. Zarqawi. This narrative approach lends the larger story of the Islamic State an up-close-and-personal immediacy and underscores the many what-ifs that occurred along the way.

或許是模仿勞倫斯·賴特(Lawrence Wright)在2006年出版的揭示911事件成因的傑作《末日巨塔》(The Looming Tower)，瓦利斯的書中也有幾部部分是關注整個故事中幾個具有特殊內部視點的人物，其中包括在獄中給扎卡維看病的巴塞爾·阿里-薩布哈(Basel al-Sabha)醫生；約旦情報機構反恐部門的領導人阿布·海薩姆(Abu Haytham)，多年來他與伊斯蘭國的各種僞裝形式進行鬥爭；年輕的中央情報局官員納達·巴克斯(Nada Bakos)，他成了中情局研究扎卡維的頂級專家。這樣的敘事方式爲更大範圍的伊斯蘭國的故事帶來一種貼近而且個人化的直接性，強調出它發展過程中的各種可能性。

In “Black Flags,” Mr. Zarqawi comes across as a kind of Bond villain, who repeatedly foils attempts to neutralize him. He was a hard-drinking, heavily tattooed Jordanian street thug (well versed in pimping, drug dealing and assault), and when he found religion, he fell for it hard, having a relative slice off his offending tattoos with a razor blade.

在《黑旗》中，扎卡維有點像007故事中的反派，他一再努力令自己中立化，卻總是失敗。他曾經是個酗酒、滿身刺青的約旦街頭流氓（精通拉皮條、販毒和打人），後來他找到了信仰，深深沉浸其中，讓一個親戚用剃刀把他身上帶有不敬內容的文身割去了。

He traveled to Afghanistan in 1989 to wage jihad; during a stint in a Jordanian prison, he emerged as a leader known and feared for his ruthlessness as an enforcer among Islamist inmates. He began thinking of himself as a man with a destiny, and in the aftermath of the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he set up a small training camp in Iraq’s northeastern mountains, near the Iranian border.

1989年，他去往阿富汗發動聖戰；在約旦監獄服刑期間，他成了一名領袖，以對同一監獄中的伊斯蘭教徒冷血無情著稱，並且深受畏懼。他開始認爲自己負有使命，後來，2001年美國入侵阿富汗時，他在伊拉克東北部靠近伊朗邊界的山脈中開設了一個小型訓練營。

At this point, Mr. Zarqawi was just a small-time jihadist. But then, Mr. Warrick writes, “in the most improbable of events, America intervened,” declaring — in an effort to make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein — that “this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” As C.I.A. analysts well knew, this assertion was false; in retrospect, it would also have the perverse effect of turning Mr. Zarqawi into “an international celebrity and the toast of the Islamist movement.” Weeks later, when United States troops invaded Iraq, this newly famous terrorist “gained a battleground and a cause and soon thousands of followers.”

當時，扎卡維還只是一個三流聖戰者。但在那個時候，沃裏克寫道，“美國介入了最荒謬的事件，”爲了推翻薩達姆·侯賽因(Saddam Hussein)，美國宣佈，“這個鮮爲人知的約旦人與伊拉克的獨裁政權有聯繫，是2001年911恐怖襲擊事件背後的策劃者。”正如中央情報局的分析員所知，這個斷言是錯誤的；事後看來，它也產生了錯誤的效應，令扎卡維成了“國際名人，以及伊斯蘭運動中備受讚譽的人士。”幾個星期後，美國軍隊入侵了伊拉克，這個聲譽鵲起的恐怖分子“得到了戰場，以及一個理由，很快就得到了成千上萬的擁躉。”

Accused by the Bush administration of being in league with Saddam Hussein, Mr. Zarqawi would use the Americans’ toppling of the dictator to empower himself. He was a diabolical strategist, and he quickly capitalized on two disastrous decisions made by the Americans (dissolving the Iraqi Army and banning Baath Party members from positions of authority), which intensified the country’s security woes and left tens of thousands of Iraqis out of work and on the street. Soon, former members of Mr. Hussein’s military were enlisting in Mr. Zarqawi’s army; others offered safe houses, intelligence, cash and weapons.

小布什政府指責扎卡維同薩達姆·侯賽因聯盟，於是扎卡維就利用美國推翻這個獨裁者的機會增加自己的權力。他是個惡魔般的戰略家，很快就利用了美國的兩個災難性的決定（其一是解散了伊拉克陸軍，其二是解除了伊拉克復興黨員們的公職），這兩個決定令國家的安全問題進一步惡化，令數萬伊拉克人失業，流落街頭。很快，侯賽因的前軍隊就集結在扎卡維麾下；其他人則爲他們提供安全屋、情報、現金和武器。

While the Bush White House was debating whether there even was an insurgency in Iraq, Mr. Zarqawi was helping to direct the worsening violence there, orchestrating car and suicide bombings and shocking beheadings. He also used terrorism to change the battlefield, fomenting sectarian hatred between the Shiites and the disenfranchised and increasingly bitter Sunnis, guaranteeing more chaos and discrediting the electoral process.

當小布什政府還在討論伊拉克境內是否有叛變之際，扎卡維已經開始在那裏製造日益惡化的暴力事件，他精心安排車輛炸彈與自殺炸彈，以及駭人的斬首事件。他還利用恐怖主義改變戰場，在什葉派與喪失選舉權，日益佈滿的遜尼派之間煽動宗派仇恨，在選舉過程中不斷製造混亂與懷疑。

Mr. Zarqawi’s penchant for ultraviolence had won him his favorite moniker, “the sheikh of the slaughterers,” but by mid-2005, his bloodthirstiness and killing of Shiite innocents worried Al Qaeda’s leadership, which warned him that “the mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve.”

扎卡維對大型暴力的熱愛爲他贏得了一個綽號，他自己也非常喜歡——“屠夫酋長”，但到2005年年中，他的嗜血與殺害什葉派無辜者的行爲令基地組織的領導人也爲之擔憂，他們警告他，“聖戰運動應當避免任何民衆不能理解或不贊同的行爲。”

After many narrow escapes, Mr. Zarqawi was finally killed by a United States airstrike in June 2006, and over the next few years, the United States managed to decimate much of his organization. Still, dangerous embers remained, and they would burst into flames under the group’s new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who shared Mr. Zarqawi’s taste for gruesome violence, and who had built up a valuable network of supporters while serving time in Camp Bucca, a United States-controlled prison known as a “jihadi university” for its role in radicalizing inmates. The sectarianism of the Iraqi prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki drove increasingly marginalized Sunnis into the embrace of the Islamic State — a dynamic hastened by the withdrawal of American troops in 2011. Meanwhile, in Syria, the chaos of civil war created perfect conditions for the Islamic State’s explosive growth and a home base for its self-proclaimed caliphate.

經歷了多次死裏逃生，扎卡維終於在2006年6月死於美國空襲之中，在接下來的數年裏，美國消滅了他的大部分組織。但是危險的星星之火仍然存在，終於在組織的新領袖阿布·貝克爾·巴格達迪(Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi)領導下成爲燎原之勢，他和扎卡維一樣熱衷殘酷暴力，布卡營地(Camp Bucca)服刑期間，更是建立起了支持者的寶貴網絡，這座監獄由美國控制，服刑者在這裏往往變得更加激進，因此素有“聖戰者的大學”之稱。伊拉克總理努裏·卡邁勒·馬利基(Nuri Kamal al-Maliki)的宗派主義令日益邊緣化的遜尼派教徒開始接受伊斯蘭國——這個勢頭隨着2011年美國撤軍而加快。與此同時，在敘利亞，內戰的混亂爲伊斯蘭國的迅速崛起創造了完美的條件，也爲它所自稱的哈里發提供了家園。

The final chapters of this volume have a somewhat hurried feel. In fact, more detailed examinations of the rise of Mr. Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s sophisticated use of social media, and its efforts to displace Al Qaeda as the leader of global jihad can be found in two illuminating recent books: “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, and “ISIS: The State of Terror,” by Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger. But for readers interested in the roots of the Islamic State and the evil genius of its godfather, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, there is no better book to begin with than “Black Flags.”

本書的最後一章有點像趕出來的。事實上，關於巴格達迪的崛起、伊斯蘭國對社交媒體精心設計的運用，以及它謀求取代基地組織，成爲全球聖戰領袖的努力可以在另外兩本頗具啓發性的新書中找到：邁克爾·韋斯(Michael Weiss)和哈桑·哈桑(Hassan Hassan)的《ISIS: 走進恐怖軍團》(ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror)，以及傑西卡·斯特恩(Jessica Stern)與J·M·伯格的《ISIS: 恐怖之國》(ISIS: The State of Terror)。但是對伊斯蘭國的起源，以及它的邪惡教父阿布·穆薩布·扎卡維感興趣的讀者們來說，《黑旗》是個最好的開始。