Sublime

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. “

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Assured that the Jordanians would protect him, “he just started spewing,” the official said. Suddenly the agency’s interrogators were filling notebooks with rare insider accounts of AQI’s command structure and tactics. One of Karbouly’s jobs, according to the former senior intelligence official, was to oversee incoming supplies for Zarqawi’s bomb f

The twenty-seven-year-old former computer programmer deliberately styled himself after his hero, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for whom he briefly served before being arrested and thrown in the Camp Bucca prison in 2006. Now he sought to replicate his mentor’s look, from the shaggy black hair, cap, and beard to his penchant for posing unmasked for cameras

That al-Kassam would be the first Palestinian martyr whose Che Guevara–like tale would make him the icon of Islamic Palestinian resistance in the generations to come.

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

He’d already scoured his home of everything that might have caused him harm in this situation: purging each and every suspicious belonging and even canceling all the television channels that regime supporters considered “biased,” such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, and filling his “Favorites” list with pro-regime channels: first came Al Manar and Al