Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror.

• Author: Smith, Anthony
• Position: Book review

BLOOD YEAR: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror

Author: David Kilcullen Published by: Black Inc, Carlton, 2016, 288pp, A$29.99.

David Kilcullen will be familiar to many readers as one of the key individuals behind the successful 'Surge Strategy' in Iraq; he was an Australian army officer who became a key part of General Petraeus's staff. His book on that experience, The Accidental Guerrilla (2009), received wide acclaim and established Kilcullen's bona fides on counter-insurgency as both a practitioner and an intellectual. That book was a clarion call for a smart military strategy that involved careful cultivation of societal and political elements.

On that basis Kilcullens take on the war against Da'esh (ISIS) is going to be met with wide interest. Two (potentially jaded) questions emerge from the outset. Why do we need yet another book on Da'esh and the strategic failure of the Iraq War? And what is the Blood Year referred to in the attention seeking title? On the latter, this is a reference to Da'esh's lightning capture of large parts of Iraq in mid-2014 and the violence that ensued. In fact, 2013 was also a bad year in Iraq, just like every year since 2011 in neighbouring Syria. This does play into a contemporary perception, though, that the international scene is getting progressively more violent (it is not), when unfortunately just about every year of recorded human history might in some way be a 'blood year'. Still, the point is well made that 2014 ended Pollyannish views that violent Sunni extremism was on the ropes.

To the question of what Kilcullen is offering here, this book is the view of someone who has been a long-term analyst of counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism. There are touches in this book that only someone with his front row seat of history could explain. His oudine of the targeted sectarian killings in the mid-2000s by al-Qaeda in Iraq (Da'esh's precursor group) is made vivid by personal observation. A heart-breaking description of a 12-year-old child who is tortured and killed with a power drill turns out to be the real story of the younger brother of his translator in Iraq. It is also a reminder that Da'esh has been a cult of death (and extreme levels of torture) for a long time. Importandy, Kilcullen reminds us that Da'esh has for more than a decade done all it could to polarise Iraqi society so that it could subsequently recruit disenfranchised Sunnis--extreme violence was about goading...