The Rise of Militant Islam: An Insider’s View of the Failure to Curb Global Jihad

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 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 ‘The 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 author, who served in the Defence Intelligence Staff, the British Ministry of Defence’s top intelligence assessment organisation, 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 uncovers the connections between them. He shows how the key to the growth of Al-Quaeda as a global terrorist organisation 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.