In this essay for The New Yorker, Elliot Ackerman reflects on his friendship with Abed, a Syrian activist exiled for his role in the 2011 revolution, and how the rise of ISIS in the vacuum left by both the Iraq War and the Syrian revolution has made the two of them, in a strange way, veterans of the same war.

Two Revolutions, One Regret

Ackerman weighs his own lack of regret over fighting in Iraq against Abed's more conflicted feelings about the revolution that cost him his home, and finds in both men a shared reckoning with the gap between a cause's promise and its consequences.

A Power Vacuum Filled by Extremists

Ackerman traces ISIS's rapid seizure of Mosul, Tikrit, Fallujah, and Ramadi to the same conditions, corruption, sectarian exclusion, and the absence of a residual force, that allowed the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Iraq to rise before it, arguing that both the U.S. invasion and the Syrian revolution unintentionally opened the door.

An Appointment with History

Ackerman closes with Abed's 2011 poem about his "appointment with history," and a shared, unsettling recognition that some young ISIS fighter marching on Baghdad might feel the very same thing.

Read the Original Article

This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker.

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