Joby Warrick - Black Flags and Red Lines

Forever Wars in a Time of Fraying Alliances

Abstract

The collapse of the Islamic State’s caliphate in 2018 was not the end of a terrorist group, but rather another turn in a cycle. Pulitzer-prize winning author and journalist Joby Warrick illuminates the surprising roots of some of the most dangerous Islamists movements and explains how past policy decisions inadvertently contributed to their global expansion and, in the case of ISIS, remarkable rebirth. Projecting forward, he shows how the weakening of Western alliances and international institutions is speeding ISIS’s resurgence as a deadly insurgency in Iraq and Syria and the rise of regional affiliates in the Middle East and beyond.

Biography

A national security reporter covering terrorism, rogue states, and weapons proliferation, Joby Warrick joined The Washington Post’s National staff in 1996. He has covered national security, the environment and the Middle East and writes about terrorism. He is the author of two books, including 2015’s “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS,” which was awarded a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. His first book, “The Triple Agent,” recounts the 2009 suicide attack by an al-Qaeda informant on a CIA base at Khost, Afghanistan, that killed seven U.S. intelligence operatives.

Before joining The Post, Warrick covered the fall of communism in Eastern Europe as a UPI correspondent and worked as a reporter at the Delaware County (Pa.) Daily Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. While in Raleigh, he co-authored “Boss Hog,” a series of investigative stories that documented the political and environmental fallout caused by factory farming in the Southeast. The series won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service.

Honors & Awards:

• Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, 2016
• Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service, 1996
• White House Correspondents Association Edgar A. Poe award, 1996
• Overseas Press Club of America Bob Considine Award for best newspaper interpretation of international affairs, 2003

Education: Temple University, BA in journalism