The Rise of Militant Islam

At the end of the Cold War the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction replaced the Soviet Union as the new enemy of world peace. The pariah WMD states became enemy No. 1. The significance of militant Islam’s growing disgust with Western foreign policy and apparent indifference to the suffering of Muslims worldwide was missed until it was too late.

In Rise of Militant Islam Anthony Tucker-Jones examines from an insider’s perspective how Western intelligence misinterpreted every landmark event on the road to 9/11 and ultimately failed to curb global jihad. The 9/11 attack provoked a ‘War on Terror’ which has yet to fully curb the threat of global jihad or bring ringleader Osama bin Laden to justice.

Anthony Tucker-Jones, who served in the Defense Intelligence Staff, the British Ministry of Defense’s top intelligence assessment organization, gained an unparalleled insider’s view of the growing war on terror and how the West’s intelligence agencies were wrong-footed at almost every turn. He traces the rise of international terrorism and its networks throughout the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Algeria, Chechnya, Somalia and across the Middle East, and he uncovers the connections between them. He shows how the key to the growth of Al Qaeda as a global terrorist organization was not only the emergence of Osama bin Laden, but also the growing understanding of asymmetrical warfare which the CIA had taught anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s.