Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate by Mike Giglio

Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate
by Mike Giglio
PublicAffairs | Hachette Book Group 2019

When the “Arab Spring” of 2011 devolved into a nightmarish winter of civil war and Islamicist insurgency, journalist Matt Giglio was tasked with covering the major hotspots and engagements taking place in Syria and Iraq. For five years, Giglio interviewed and moved among the disparate elements of an unlikely coalition of forces fighting both the Assad regime and a new threat rising from within the rebellion itself: a wild-eyed band of Islamic fundamentalists known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). In his new book of dispatches, Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate, Giglio takes the reader uncomfortably close to the realities of a war almost chameleon-like in its character, where foes become allies and allegiances shift as quickly as the desert sands.

Giglio is currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, but prior to that reported on the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine for Newsweek and BuzzFeed. Based out of Istanbul, he embedded with local coalition forces, variously composed of Shias, Kurdish peshmerga, and Iraqi Special Operation Forces (ISOF) and Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Forces (ICTF), meeting an extremely diverse menagerie of people, all fighting with similar means but for different ends. 

When ISIS declared its “caliphate” in June 2014, it metastasized rapidly, absorbing large chunks of disaffected Syrian rebels who saw the lack of Western support for their cause as a betrayal. ISIS also harnessed technology and social media to appeal to potential recruits worldwide, who then snuck into Syria from the Turkish border, thereby stimulating a thriving business in human trafficking in which so many people looked the other way. Giglio’s trenchant reporting along the Turkish border reveals the people who had to play fast and loose with the truth to secure their own existence just as much as a profit, showing us the ugly gray areas between activities most label simplistically as “good” and “evil.” The foreign recruits would swell ISIS’s ranks until the “self-styled caliphate was larger in size than Great Britain … its territory spread across Iraq and Syria as its influence stretched throughout the world.” To defeat this menace, a “ramshackle” alliance of former enemies came together—critically aided by the covert assistance of Western troops and American airstrikes—to push back ISIS village by village, mile by mile. 

The campaign would climax close to three years later in the epic contest for Mosul, with desperate ISIS suicide bombers prowling the narrow city streets in car bombs. On the second day of the ICTF’s assault into western Mosul, Giglio was in the back seat of a Humvee patrol when the dreaded words rang out from an Iraqi officer in the front: sayyarah, mufakhakha! Car bomb. In this hair-raising account, Giglio’s writing thrums with the blood pulse of battle, speeding up only to jerk into slow motion as thoughts and visions race through a mind contemplating death. The driver of the parked Humvee punches the accelerator to avoid a direct hit, only to lodge on top of a dirt berm. The reader simply cannot put this book down.

What powers this book more than the chilling accounts of bullets zipping through the air and bombs roaring near and far, however, are the people Giglio encounters and the stories they share. They are the beating heart of this story, and they are truly unforgettable. There’s Leo, a Syrian Kurd from New Jersey with an accent thicker than Giglio’s, who returned to Syria to help fight the repression of Assad’s regime only to become one of millions of Syrian refugees struggling to survive on the margins. Giglio also poignantly introduces us to those hardy Kurdish fighters known as the peshmerga, or “those who face death.” They are the military force for the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq and were on the spear’s tip of the fighting with ISIS. All the people Giglio portrays in this book have some type of lesson to share or a warning to impart. It behooves us to listen and take note.

Giglio’s account ends in the autumn of 2017 with much of the ISIS threat contained. However, much has happened since then, such as the announcement of American troop withdrawals from northeastern Syria as a grotesque acquiescence to Turkish aspirations. The Kurds rightfully see this as a betrayal of unforgivable proportions. Then on October 26, 2019, President Donald Trump announced the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the acknowledged leader of ISIS) at the hands of U.S. military special forces. But like the mythical nine-headed hydra, how long until the next face of ISIS raises its chilling visage to the world? More importantly, with America abdicating its military and moral responsibilities to its regional allies, who will be left to resist it? 

—Peggy Kurkowski holds a BA in History from American Public University and is a copywriter living in Denver, Colorado.