Sublime

Othman was the director of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission.

In Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941–89), professor of Islamic philosophy at King Abdulaziz University, used his influence among the country’s disaffected youth to promote an uncompromisingly belligerent interpretation of jihad that, he argued, was incumbent on all Muslims. “Jihad and the rifle alone,” Dr. Azzam proclaimed to his students. “

This group, headed by a Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden and an Egyptian dissident (and former Muslim Brotherhood member) named Ayman al-Zawahiri, formed an organization dubbed al-Qaeda (“the base” or “the fundamentals”) that, ten years later, would turn its focus away from the corrupt leaders of the Arab and Muslim world—what the Jihadists term t

Bin Laden was, in other words, an infrastructure guy. He was essentially running a mujahidin base in Pakistan. In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the…

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Now Syrians were learning just how cynical Assad’s goodwill gesture had been. Among the inmates discharged over the spring and summer were a number of radical Islamists who belonged to known terrorist organizations. Some were jihadists who had been picked up while attempting to cross into Iraq to join the insurgency there. Others were suspected al-

IN THE LATE 1950S, Yasser Arafat had founded Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement. Arafat was born in Cairo in August 1929. His father had come from Gaza City, while his mother had grown up in Jerusalem. When his mother died, his father sent him to live in Jerusalem’s Old City with his mother’s family. He eventually moved back to Cai