'Pulse-pounding' Sinclair McKay 'Truly masterful' Damien Lewis 'Who needs spy fiction when
fact can provide as thrilling a story as this?' Lindsey Hilsum The Spymaster of Baghdad is the
gripping story of the top-secret Iraqi intelligence unit that infiltrated the Islamic State.
More so than that of any foreign power the information they gathered turned the tide against
the insurgency paving the way to the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.
Against the backdrop of the most brutal conflict of recent decades we chart the spymaster's
struggle to develop the unit from scratch in challenging circumstances after the American
invasion of Iraq in 2003 we follow the fraught relationship of two of his agents the
al-Sudani brothers - one undercover in ISIS for sixteen long months the other his handler -
and we track a disillusioned scientist as she turns bomb-maker threatening the lives of
thousands. With unprecedented access to characters on all sides Pulitzer Prize-finalist
Margaret Coker challenges the conventional view that Western coalition forces defeated ISIS and
reveals a page-turning story of unlikely heroes unbelievable courage and good old-fashioned
spycraft. 'Moving visceral utterly revelatory. A stunning tour de force by an author who has
lived every word of it on the ground' Damien Lewis author of Zero Six Bravo 'This compelling
account of how Iraqi agents infiltrated ISIS takes us deep beneath the lurid headlines and into
a sharply focused world of courage ingenuity terror and love' Sinclair McKay author of
Dresden 'In Margaret Coker's deeply reported unputdownable account the previously unknown
Iraqi heros of the war against the Islamic State turn out to be braver than Bond and as subtle
as Smiley' Lindsey Hilsum author of In Extremis 'We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Falcons
Unit for their important role in the fight against the most lethal terrorist group of our time'
Anne Speckhard Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism
