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The more specific story of the violent armed groups
which emerged espousing this ideology is detailed too.
Bin Laden, who cut his teeth as so many others did in
the Soviet/Afghan conflict of the 80s, is shown as starting
out as very much the junior partner of Islamic Jihad
leader Aymar al-Zawahri. It is interesting to learn he had
no direct contact (as is often reported) with America,
though the close co-operation with the Pakistani secret
services and the CIA who funded and supported his and
other gangs makes this distinction rather academic.
Bin Laden became seen as a ‘Godfather’ figure due
to his genius for media manipulation, culminating of
course with the calculated violent symbolism of September
11th, also recounted in detail here. But Burke
also shows the many other groups in action both before,
during and after the New York attack, often with either
limited or no contact with bin Laden. The GIA in Algeria
are shown to far surpass bin Laden and followers in
terms of violence against their own general population,
who had stubbornly failed to give them mass support.
The leadership of bin Laden’s faction has indeed been
decapitated following the US invasion of Afghanistan,
but the anger caused in the wider Muslim world and the
subsequent assault on Iraq has let to a rapid increase in
the sympathy for and potential recruits to such groups.
The Madrid bombing is shown as the work of a cadre
not only wholly disconnected from bin Laden, but not
even working in his style any more; no symbolic target,
BUY Jason Burke books online from and
no suicides, and being the work of genuinely impoverished
immigrants rather than the disaffected middleclass
types chiefly at work in such atrocities previously.
More than ever now, it is bin Laden and Al Qaeda as an
idea and ideal that is the danger.
One amazing fact, particularly farcical given the
neo-con justification of the Iraqi invasion, is that in the
first Gulf War bin Laden actually offered up his band of
fighters to the House of Saud to fight against Saddam
Hussein defending the home of Wahaabism against
the secularist Iraqi infidel. It was only after this offer
was turned down that bin Laden truly took against the
Saudi royals, seeing them as weaklings who had to
rely on ‘kufr’ American protection. The notion of bin
Laden siding with Saddam as a ‘fellow Muslim’ could
scarcely be further rooted in the realms of fantasy, and
shows the true depths of the (deliberate?) neo-con misunderstanding
of how their ideology works.
The media-spawned over-simplification of the
Islamist phenomenon is highlighted by the distinction
Burke demonstrates between the Taliban government
of Afghanistan and the gang of bin Laden’s that they
housed. We all know Al Qaeda and the Taliban became
firmly interwoven with each other some time after bin
Laden and his followers first sought refuge in Afghanistan;
what is less well known is the intense dislike the
latter showed to the former, and how near they came
to being thrown out, until it became a matter of local
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