Book Review: “The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising” by Patrick Cockburn

Cockburn’s alarming assessment of ISIS dispenses with wishful portrayals of the group as easy to defeat, instead taking seriously its takeover of Fallujah and Mosul as emblematic of its strength.

by Steven Zhou

The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising by Patrick Cockburn. Publisher: OR Books 150 pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-939293-59-6 • E-book ISBN 978-1-939293-60-2 Release date: 28 August 2014

For over a decade, the United States has fought a post-9/11 “War on Terror”, often by giving terrorists more publicity than they deserve. Now, after a disastrous foray into Iraq—among other blunders—the world’s sole superpower has helped create the bogeyman it always feared. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now simply known as the Islamic State, may not pose a truly existential threat to the “free world,” but the people who live within its sphere of influence understand its menacing power. With fighters based about an hour from Baghdad, ISIS seems to be growing bolder by the day.