The Spymaster of Baghdad by Margaret Coker

Author:Margaret Coker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dey Street Books
Published: 2020-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Since that night, Abrar’s family had devoted all their efforts to overturning the administrator’s decision. Her uncle stepped in to petition for her reinstatement. Her father tried, too. All the old-timers at the ministry, men who were Sunni like her family, pushed as much as possible on her behalf. But they no longer held much power. Abrar’s outburst had made her too poisonous to touch.

While they were busy trying to repair the damage she had caused, Abrar was looking to the future.

Since the Islamic State had declared its caliphate in northern Iraq, Abrar had known that her life would change in a radical way. The reemergence of an insurgency to take on the corrupt Iraqi government and sweep it away was just what she and her online friends had been eagerly awaiting for years. For months, these confidants had been pressuring her to join them in the Islamic State. But it wasn’t easy for a young woman in Baghdad, who wasn’t married and had never spent a night of her life away from her parents’ home, to figure out a way to cross the front lines to reach the territory under the group’s control. Losing her job turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened, as it gave Abrar the opportunity to act.

It wasn’t in Abrar’s nature to do everything she was told, but she had no problem following the directions of the mentor she had found online in her favorite online chat room, Shumukh al-Islam. Abrar had followed Abu Nabil’s discussions online for years. Unlike her father and her uncle, Abu Nabil didn’t have a university degree. But he was a proud Iraqi, born in Samarra—the same city as the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. His education came from the battlefields of Iraq after the Americans invaded in 2003. He fought the occupiers and was even imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. He proudly wore the scars of torture he said he received from the crusader forces. He never tired of saying that God willed him to survive his detention at their hands, so he had dedicated his life to jihad, a calling he learned about in prison.

Abu Nabil quoted Koranic verses beautifully and he always had an answer for the problems that she posed online about the injustice the government had shown to Sunnis like them, about the nefarious plans that Western powers had to keep Iraq weak and divided. He wasn’t boastful, but it was plain to Abrar that Abu Nabil was a man trusted by the leaders of the Islamic State, especially after they promoted him to oversee the province around Samarra, a job that made him one of the twenty most important leaders of the group.

Over time, Abrar developed intense feelings for him. She had been warned over and over not to trust anyone, but she told Abu Nabil about the secret research she had devoted herself to in the often trying circumstances that she faced in her work in Baghdad.

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