Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State

Last year was a “blood year” in the Middle East – massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and foreign fighters – many from Europe, Australia and Africa – flowing into Syria at a rate ten times that during the height of the Iraq War. What went wrong?

In Blood Year, David Kilcullen calls on twenty-five years’ experience to answer that question. Th...