Cockburn surveys the Middle East with a tried loupe, serving as a correspondent there for more than 30 years, first with The Financial Times and presently with The Independent. His slim and beautiful The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising benefits immensely from that practiced eye. In a fleet retelling of the most tumultuous geopolitical theater this millennium, Cockburn vivisects Middle Eastern political, religious, and military movements—an incestuous relationship, in many cases—since 9/11 to arrive at the present tangled day.

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