https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/review-after-isis-frantzman/
October 27, 2019 marked the death of infamous “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Once his demise had been confirmed, optimistic media voices asserted that the last chapter of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had been written. The western world very much wants to believe we are living in a new, post-ISIS era. But are we?
Several months before the death of Islamist madman Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Israeli journalist and scholar Seth Frantzman published his tour de force volume, After ISIS: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East—a thought-provoking and at times heartbreaking narration of a war and its ongoing aftermath.
Does Frantzman believe we are living in an “after ISIS” world? Not exactly.
His book provides a painstakingly researched and carefully documented overview of a modern war. It includes the author’s personal accounts of explosive battle scenes, half-buried mass graves, and hungry, homeless children—scenes he witnessed while deployed with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.
Here, for example, he describes what he saw in the aftermath of the Yazidi slaughter:
Here in the killing fields of Sinjar, the bones of those killed in 2014 sit on the surface. Human hair pokes through grass that has grown on the bodies. Skull fragments. Bullet casings… A teenager’s soccer jersey that says “Emirates” on it. The clothes people wore when they were murdered are there. The blindfolds they wore could be seen.