A real thriller About the author
Margaret Coker puts the fortitude of Iraqis at the heart of her heart-stopping account of the unit which infiltrated Islamic State. By Vin Arthey
Margaret Coker is an investigative journalist who for 15 years delved into corruption, counter-terrorism and cyber warfare across the Middle East, culminating in her appointment in 2018 as Bureau Chief for the New York Times in Baghdad.
The "spymaster” of her book’s title is Abu Ali al-basri, an Iraqi intelligence operative who championed human intelligence (HUMINT), and founded the tiny, elite “Falcons” group of spies, their task being not to solve the war against terrorism, but “to be like a falcon, hunting its prey”. Their work helped turn the tide against the Isis insurgency and made possible the killing of Isis leader Abu Bakr al-baghdadi in 2019.
We learn a little about Abu Ali’s background and childhood, but he remains in the shadows, our link between the Iraqi government, the US army, the CIA and the Falcons. The book itself can be read like a novel, a thriller, with the participants (the Falcons and the Isis jihadis as the main players) hiding and re-emerging as the narrative progresses.
Coker’s great achievement is to set the horrors that Iraq has experienced as al-qaeda morphed into the Islamic State (Isis) as a backdrop to the lives and experiences of ordinary Iraqis. She reminds us that Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim in a country where the majority are Shia Muslim. There was a logic, then, to the successor government being Shia, but the prime minister Nouri al-maliki was neither strong nor effective.
Disaffected Sunnis, especially Saddam’s army and police, were keen to antagonise the new regime, to the point of fomenting civil strife or becoming jihadist terrorists with Isis. Spymaster Abu Ali warned prime minister al-maliki about the growth of Isis, but his evidence of the imminent attack from the north was ignored by the military chiefs.
These great crises impacted on ordinary Iraqis, be they Shia or Sunni, even spies or jihadis and it is particularly through the experience of women – sisters, wives and mothers – that the reader negotiates a way of seeing how appalling daily life can become.
We meet them in the kitchens of homes in cities and suburbs that were just place names for us in the West. We get the names of the children sent to the market and the nature of the specific ingredients they are to buy. Then we wait in anguish with their families when news comes through that the market has been bombed and lives have been lost. These women and their families feature significantly in the dozen colour photographs the book includes.
The other side of these scenes is the Falcons’ courage, and their tradecraft. Abu Ali is a master of disinformation. Many of the reported Isis attacks, truck bombs as well as suicide bombs, never happened. Cells had been penetrated, suicide
Ewan Morrison is a multiaward-winning novelist, screenwriter and essayist. His 2019 novel, Nina X, won the Saltire Society Scottish Fiction Book of the Year and is currently being developed as a feature film. How To Survive Everything is published on 1 March by Saraband, price £9.99