OxBlog

Thursday, May 29, 2003

# Posted 12:03 PM by Patrick Belton  

TERRORISM BOOK REC: For those of you who are at all interested in terrorist organizations and operations, I can't recommend highly enough Rohan Gunaratna's Inside Al Qaeda. Among Gunaratna's principal themes is the fantastic success of Osama as a diplomat, who succeeded in weaving together previously feuding operatives from Hezbollah, Iranian intelligence, and Sunni ethnoreligious groups around common goals, rather than religious or ideological doctrines. In terms of his dedication to detail and evidence, quiet analytical tone, and breadth and quality of contacts among those who labor quietly in the shadows, Rohan's text is insuperable.

Gunaratna moves peripatetically among several of the leading centers of counterterror analysis, including his principal affiliation at St Andrew's Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, Israel's International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, and the US-based RAND Corporation. If you can't find the book, you're lying - it's in a library within two miles of you - but here are two of his interviews in Singapore and PBS's Newshour.
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