The Terror Years - From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State

Zusatztext 51824077 Informationen zum Autor LAWRENCE WRIGHT is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of eight previous books of nonfiction! including In the New World! Remembering Satan! The Looming Tower! Going Clear! and Thirteen Days in September! and one novel! God’s Favorite . His books have received many prizes and honors! including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower . He is also a playwright and screenwriter. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin! Texas.   www.lawrencewright.com The Man Behind bin Laden In March 2002, a band of horsemen journeyed through the province of Paktika, in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. Predator drones were circling the skies and American troops were sweeping through the mountains. The war had begun six months earlier, and by now the fighting had narrowed down to the ragged eastern edge of the country. Regional warlords had been bought off, the borders supposedly sealed. For twelve days, American and Coalition forces had been bombing the nearby Shah-e-Kot Valley and systematically destroying the cave complexes in the al-Qaeda stronghold. And yet the horsemen were riding unhindered toward Pakistan. They came to the village of a local militia commander named Gula Jan, whose long beard and black turban might have signaled that he was a Taliban sympathizer. “I saw a heavy, older man, an Arab, who wore dark glasses and had a white turban,” Jan said four days later. “He was dressed like an Afghan, but he had a beautiful coat, and he was with two other Arabs who had masks on.” The man in the beautiful coat dismounted and began talking in a polite and humorous manner. He asked Jan and an Afghan companion about the location of American and Northern Alliance troops. “We are afraid we will encounter them,” he said. “Show us the right way.” While the men were talking, Jan slipped away to examine a poster that had been dropped into the area by American airplanes. It showed a photograph of a man in a white turban and glasses. His face was broad and meaty, with a strong, prominent nose and full lips. His untrimmed beard was gray at the temples and ran in milky streaks below his chin. On his high forehead, framed by the swaths of his turban, was a darkened callus formed by many hours of prayerful prostration. His eyes reflected the sort of decisiveness one might expect in a medical man, but they also showed a measure of serenity that seemed oddly out of place. Jan was looking at a wanted poster for Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had a price of $25 million on his head. Jan returned to the conversation. The man he now believed to be Zawahiri said to him, “May God bless you and keep you from the enemies of Islam. Try not to tell them where we came from and where we are going.” There was a telephone number on the wanted poster, but Gula Jan did not have a phone. Zawahiri and the masked Arabs disappeared into the mountains. in june of 2001, two terrorist organizations, al-Qaeda and the Egyptian Islamist group al-Jihad, formally merged into one. The name of the new entity—Qaeda al-Jihad—reflects the long and interdependent history of these two groups. Although Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, was the public face of Islamic terrorism, the members of al-Jihad and its guiding figure, Ayman al-Zawahiri, provided the backbone of the larger organization’s leadership and was responsible for much of the planning of the terrorist operations against the United States, from the assault on American soldiers in Somalia in 1993, and the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were bound to discover each other among the radical Islamists who were drawn to Afghanistan after the Soviet invas...

Product details

• Authors: Lawrence Wright
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2016
• EAN: 9780385352055
• ISBN: 978-0-385-35205-5
• No. of pages: 366
• Dimensions: 165 mm x 242 mm x 34 mm
• Series: ALFRED A. KNOPF
• Subject: Non-fiction book