Nasiri - Inside the jihad: my life with Al Qaeda: a spys story

Although no Americans play a role in Mr. Omar Nasiris Inside the Jihad, the book is of immense interest and value to all Americans and Westerners in general. Indeed, it is not too much to say that with this book, Mr. Nasiri throws Americans a life preserver that may prevent them from drowning in the sea of deliberate misinformationfrom both Democratic and Republican political leadersconcerning their Islamist enemies.

U.S. and Western readers of Inside the Jihad will be struck by the complete lack of animosity Mr. Nasiri and the other mujahidin in the book have toward American and Western citizens and their cultures, freedoms, and liberties. Simply put, readers will find no Islamist fighter ready to kill himself because of early presidential primaries in Iowa or because the European Union mandates gender equality and homosexual rights. The reason people still believe Islamists are motivated by this kind of ephemera is due mainly to fifteen-plus years of lies from Americas bipartisan governing elite. These are lies based on that elites fear of the negative electoral impact of a domestic debate focused on the genuine motivation of the mujahidinan intense and still-building hatred for the content and impact of interventionist U.S. foreign policies in the Islamic world. The frantic eagerness of the U.S. governing elite to ignore the irrefutable evidence Mr. Nasiri provides in his book is evident today in the effort by the 2008 Republican presidential candidates to ostracize and silence fellow candidate Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas). Mr. Paul is the only candidate to accurately identify the Islamists motivation as being in large measure a reaction to a half-century of U.S. political, economic, and military intervention in the Muslim world. Mr. Paul has not denigrated America by saying this; but by forthrightly stating a plain-but-painful fact, American political elites have branded him a simpleton, a defeatist, and a traitor.

Mr. Nasiri, by his own personal example, also serves as a salutary warning to Americans and Westerners. At the beginning of his journey into Al Qaedas organization, Mr. Nasiri is hardly an Islamist firebrand. He is actually a streetsmart, Brussels-based Moroccan citizen, with a pronounced taste for wine, cigarettes, and women; and he has a talent for criminal activity, particularly the illegal procurement of weapons. He decides to become a mujahid not from Islamist fervor, but because he betrayed a cell of Islamists in Belgiuma cell that included his brotherand needed to leave Europe for his own safety. Mr. Nasiri turns to the French external intelligence service for help and volunteers to penetrate the Afghan training camps on its behalf. The French take a chance on him and provide funding for his endeavor, but they strongly doubt his chances of success. The French were in for a surprise.

Entirely through his own efforts, and after several false starts, Mr. Nasiri travels to Pakistan and works his way into this well-established system, managed by Abu Zubayda, through which would-be mujahidin are vetted for security risks and then shuttled into one of several Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Mr. Nasiris street smarts, quick thinking, and acting ability beats the vetting process, and he enters the training program at Khaldan Camp, one of Al Qaedas premier training facilities. It is worth pausing for a moment to note several points detailed in the book that contradict the common wisdom of Western terrorism experts. First, Mr. Nasiri worked his way into Al Qaeda, he was not recruited. This fact suggests that we may be mistaken in looking for major Islamist recruiting stations in Western mosques; the self-recruitment of individuals traveling alone or in pairs to regions where a jihad is being waged may be far more common. Second, Mr. Nasiri achieved his success from 1995 to 1996, six years after the USSRs defeat in Afghanistan and four years after Osama bin Laden left that country for the Sudan. And yet, Mr. Nasiri found that the defeat of the Red Army and the Afghan communist regime and the temporary departure of Al Qaedas chief had sapped neither the martial motivation of the Islamists nor their ability to elicit sufficient funds from donors to keep the camps humming. In his book, Mr. Nasiri shows that Al Qaedas camps operated with great efficiency throughout the period between 1989 and bin Ladens return to Afghanistan in May 1996; Nasiri also shows that Al Qaedas body of trained fighters steadily expanded during this period. Finally, Mr. Nasiri encountered a range of nationalities training at the campsincluding Kashmiris, Chechens, Central Asians, and Eritreansthat was broader than many in the West believed at the time, suggesting that the Islamists jihad had gone global more than a decade ago.

Once inside Khaldan Camp, and later at Darunta Camp, Mr. Nasiri provides a riveting, and what for Westerners should be a profoundly unsettling description of the quality military training he received, as well as the type of quick-learning individuals he trained with. From Makarov pistols, AK-47 assault rifles, and heavy machine guns to rocket-propelled grenade launchers, plastic explosives, land mines, and Soviet T55 tanks, Mr. Nasiri and his classmates had hands-on training with virtually every item in the inventory of small arms and explosives produced by the former Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies. And there was never any lack of ammunition for training purposes; the reader will find no ammunition shortages in Nasiris account and will read about what at times seems like profligate expenditures of explosives such as TNT, Semtex, and C4, and assorted munitions. We never had to conserve ammunition, Mr. Nasiri joyously writes, and there was always something new [in terms of weaponry] to try. Mr. Nasiri and his class also were given hands-on training with a number of U.S.- and Western-made weapons, and he received detailed classroom lectures on how to use the weapons that were not available in the camps.

In addition to weapons training, Mr. Nasiri and his classmates were subjected to physical training that for the Western reader will resemble the rigorous training received by the U.S. Marines and U.S. and British Special Forces. Everyone in the camp runs everywhere. Carrying weapons, ammunition, and rockets to build strength and endurance, they run up and down mountains, through rock-strewn valleys, and across icy rivers. They train in sweltering heat and frigid temperatures; moving at times barefoot, at others shod; and they work in both daylight and the dead of night. In short, the novice