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Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad 1st Edition
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In Road Warriors, Daniel Byman provides a sweeping history of the jihadist foreign fighter movement. He begins by chronicling the movement's birth in Afghanistan, its growing pains in Bosnia and Chechnya, and its emergence as a major source of terrorism in the West in the 1990s, culminating in the 9/11 attacks. Since that bloody day, the foreign fighter movement has seen major ups and downs. It rode high after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, when the ultra-violent Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) attracted thousands of foreign fighters. AQI overreached, however, and suffered a crushing defeat. Demonstrating the resilience of the movement, however, AQI reemerged anew during the Syrian civil war as the Islamic State, attracting tens of thousands of fighters from around the world and spawning the bloody 2015 attacks in Paris among hundreds of other strikes. Although casualty rates are usually high, the survivors of Afghanistan, Syria, and other fields of jihad often became skilled professional warriors, going from one war to the next. Still others returned to their home countries, some to peaceful retirement but a deadly few to conduct terrorist attacks.
Over time, both the United States and Europe have learned to adapt. Before 9/11, volunteers went to and fro to Afghanistan and other hotspots with little interference. Today, the United States and its allies have developed a global program to identify, arrest, and kill foreign fighters. Much remains to be done, however-jihadist ideas and networks are by now deeply embedded, even as groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State rise and fall. And as Byman makes abundantly clear, the problem is not likely to go away any time soon.
- ISBN-100190646519
- ISBN-13978-0190646516
- Edition1st
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication dateJune 4, 2019
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions9.3 x 1.2 x 6.2 inches
- Print length392 pages
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- Publisher : Oxford University Press; 1st edition (June 4, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 392 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0190646519
- ISBN-13 : 978-0190646516
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.3 x 1.2 x 6.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,316,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #634 in Political Ideologies
- #851 in Military History (Books)
- #922 in Radical Political Thought
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About the author
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Daniel Byman is Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has served on the 9/11 Commission staff and as an analyst with the U.S. government.
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2019Great
- Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2019Readers interested in the phenomena of violent Islamic extremism and who haven’t settled on a tautological “one root cause” theory will find Road Warriors a thorough and enlightening examination of transnational jihadism and the foreign fighters who travel to other countries to join with jihadi groups.
The book has many strengths starting with the impressive amount of research and documentation, including jihadist memoirs and interviews, that provide the foundation for the analysis as well as a series of exceptionally well told stories. Unlike much of the discussion about jihadists in the media, Road Warriors provides a clearer understanding of the participants and their actions. This, of course, is a critical first step in developing an effective program for dissuading people from becoming foreign fighters.
Another strength is the book’s historical and geographical range. Road Warriors looks at more than al Qaeda and Islamic State and their networks. As might be expected, it provides a solid background on the rise of the jihadist forces in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, but it also explores the development of the foreign fighter movement in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Somalia along with the more widely covered extremist violence in Iraq and Syria.
Another strong point of the book is that I found it to be appropriately even-handed in describing the threat posed by the foreign fighters as well as the problems these road warriors often create for the jihadi groups they join.
Finally, readers will benefit from the final chapters’ discussion of ongoing US and allied efforts to undermine the ideological support for the jihadi groups as well as create an international environment that is unsympathetic toward all terrorists. Rather that succumb to the attraction of identifying and combating a single root cause, Road Warriors recognizes that, despite decades of experience in combatting jihadists, the United States and its allies genuinely still lack a strong understanding of why individuals join terrorist groups. Its recommended approaches seek to avoid applying too broad a brush that targets Muslim or other religious communities as a whole, which, experience has shown, often can make things worse.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2019Foreign jihadist fighters rose to prominence through the attacks on September 11, 2001. Although we are now in the year 2019, they still are in the news.
Is it not ironic that we could put men on the moon, but have yet to figure out why so many Muslims are getting radicalized, unlike people of any other belief system?
The United States has run out of ideas. The Chinese are trying something.
What does this book offer, and more importantly, what we can we learn from this book?
I am going to provide a perspective of a physicist who has published on the topic of Islamist extremism. Hopefully, it is an eye-opener.
The author is a leading American academic political scientist specializing in terrorism. Under his watch, the United States has spent a great deal to battle this threat globally but failed to drain the swamp that is creating jihadists. Islamist extremism has destabilized large swaths of the planet and is in the process of creating new zones of instability. It has also generated backlash in the form of reprisal attacks against Muslims.
On page 9, the author declares: “all [jihadists] would say that they are fighting for their faith and God smiles on their actions.” The author has failed to explain why the Muslim community is particularly susceptible to religious radicalization, other than to state on page 252 that, “As the earlier chapters make clear, no single factor explains why someone radicalizes.” On this page, the author outlines a flow-chart that vaguely defines the start of the radicalization process as, “learn radical ideas, get angry.”
In the end, the author asserts (page 267): “The long-term hope is that transnational jihadism, like international anarchism and communism before it, will burn itself out . . .”
The real question the author failed to explore is the possibility that there could be a Muslim-community specific root cause and that once radicalism takes root, it can take advantage of local factors to grow.
In fact, we can understand how Muslims get radicalized by studying the onset of radicalization in the formerly secular Kosovo and in other communities. I have proposed the following theory of Muslim radicalization: Backed by the prestige and resources of Saudi Arabia, religious leaders have popularized the appealing theme of sharia as all-encompassing “divine law” to advance radical Islamist agendas. In case one doesn’t know: al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, and the Taliban – all were either founded or led by religious leaders.
Heard of the jihadist attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka recently? The single factor, mentioned above, neatly explains it.
Byman’s misdiagnosis of Islamist extremism represents a consensus view, which raises troubling questions about the discipline of political science. Especially vis-à-vis terrorism, most scholars have resorted to conducting polls after polls to unearth (mostly useless) correlations using statistical analysis, rather than develop scientific theories. The former inevitably leads to the idea that “no single factor explains” the Islamist phenomenon. Thus, phony science has come to dominate terrorism research. I know because I learned science through physics graduate education.
The results of such research have left nations still blindsided by Islamist extremism and whose footprints can be seen in Daniel Byman’s new book.
Once we understand the root cause, we should be able to drain the swamp. After all, there were no global jihadists 60 years ago. One can do more than just hope.
Top reviews from other countries
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Julian K.Reviewed in Germany on October 13, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars Tolles Buch, dass auch historische Zusammenhänge beleuchtet.
Ich kannte Byman aus dem Studium, daher hat mich das Buch interessiert. Ich finde es gelungen, denn es beleuchtet neben dem Problem der Road Warriors auch den geschichtlichen Zusammenhang und gibt viel Hintergrundinformation über die Konflikte. Dabei ist es auch spannend und gut zu lesen, ich kann es daher nur empfehlen.