Sunday, September 05, 2004

My Brother Assassins

This review of Mohamed Sifaoui's expose of life inside an Al Qaeda cell, by Camille Pecastaing in Foreign Affairs, provides some international context for Russia's tragedy:

"Sifaoui warns, nonetheless, that European cities still harbor many who could contract the Islamist fever and take up arms in Chechnya, Kashmir, or Iraq. Having probed the world of al Qaeda sympathizers in Paris and in London's Finsbury Park mosque, he sounds the alarm in defense of democracy and liberalism -- perhaps too violently. Sifaoui's book leaves no hope of ever narrowing the fault line that separates Muslims who reject the West from those, like him, who embrace it."

Sifaoui's book has been translated into English by George Miller, as Inside Al Qaeda: How I Infiltrated the World's Deadliest Terrorist Organization.