Anna Lensky, blackincbooks.com 
A key Australian participant in the battle against terrorism gives a riveting, up-to-date account of the rise of ISIS and the broader failure of the War on Terror.
In this new book, David Kilcullen updates and expands his Walkleyaward-winning essay right up until the recent Paris attacks. Tracking the reach and reverberations of ISIS in 2015, this is an extraordinary history of the present by a writer with unique access and experience.
Release date: Monday 15 February
‘We’re now in the fifteenth year since 9/11 and, horrible though it
is to contemplate, we may be nowhere close to the end of the War on Terror.
For a while, it looked like things were improving: we were
getting on top of the threat. But that was before ISIS began
crucifying children, before the Taliban swept back out of the
mountains to seize the cities, before the bodies of asylum-seekers
began washing up on the beaches, before the first Russian cluster
bomb fell on a Syrian village, before the first suicide vest exploded
in a Paris concert hall.’—David Kilcullen, Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror
David Kilcullen argues we have witnessed a “blood year”—massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of foreign policy and military strategy in weeks. Here he calls on twenty-five years’ experience to explore what went wrong and what a coherent strategy might look like now. What is ISIS? Should we fight it as the state it claims to be? Would this mean greater Western and Australian engagement?
Kilcullen examines Russia’s involvement, Iran’s role and the Iranian nuclear deal, the European refugee crisis and the spillover of ISIS into Afghanistan. He also highlights ISIS expansion outside Iraq and Syria into foreign ‘wilayat’ provinces and their competitive influence
ISBN: 978-1-86395-825-7 • RRP $29.99 • 304 pages
Also available as an ebook
