My Share of the Task(251)

                twenty other groups: Commission Members, 9/11 Commission Report, 470, note 80.

                bin Laden attempted to bring: Leah Farrall, “How Al Qaeda Works,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2011).

                ten thousand and twenty thousand: 9/11 Commission Report, 67. This figure is also cited by Thomas Hegghammer (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” Middle East Journal [Winter 2006], 14) and Wright (Looming Tower, 341).

                as high as seventy thousand: Bruce Hoffman, “Leadership Secrets of Osama bin Laden,” Atlantic, April 2003.

                hard, poor lives: Coll, Ghost Wars, 474–75.

                science and engineering degrees: Wright notes the “strong bias” toward these specific academic disciplines (Looming Tower, 340–41).

                physical training alongside indoctrination: Behavior we witnessed on the battlefield validated Norwegian terrorism scholar Thomas Hegghammer’s assessment: “Here lies the key to understanding the extremism and the internal cohesion of the so-called ‘al-Qa’ida network.’ The training camps generated an ultra-masculine culture of violence which brutalized the volunteers and broke down their barriers to the use of violence. . . . [T]he harsh camp life built strong personal relationships between them. Last but not least, they fell under the ideological influence of Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who generated a feeling among the recruits of being part of a global vanguard of holy warriors, whose mission was to defend the Islamic world against attacks by the Jewish-Crusader alliance” (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 14).

                invited attendees to brainstorm: “Overview of the Enemy,” 9.

                an Al Qaeda trademark: Wright, Looming Tower, 211.

                prestige of such “martyrdom operations”: “Overview of the Enemy,” 10.

                graduating to advanced training: Ibid.

                endorsed the same strategy: Hegghammer writes of the “ideological unity” among men who had passed through the camps (“Global Jihadism After the Iraq War,” 14).

                across sixty countries: Coll, Ghost Wars, 474.

                control over the disparate network: “The eviction from Afghanistan in 2001 made al Qaeda Central more dependent on franchises to maintain operational reach, while local groups were attracted by the strength of the al Qaeda brand name.” Thomas Hegghammer, “The Ideological Hybridization of Jihadi Groups,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, November 18, 2009.

                under orders from bin Laden: Farrall, “How Al Qaeda Works.”

                “In no class of warfare”: C. E. Caldwell, Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice, 3rd ed. (Bison Books, 1996 [1906]), 143.

                “We have recently seen”: J. B. L. J. Rousseau, quoted in Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia (Saqi Books, 1998), 97.

                conquer the peninsula: Vassiliev, History of Saudi Arabia, 98. The state established by Saud and Wahhab’s army briefly united most of Arabia but flamed out ten years later, in 1815, following an Egyptian invasion.

                “12,000 Wahhabis suddenly attacked”: J. B. L. J. Rousseau, quoted in ibid., 97.

                too passive or too compromising: On understanding how historical Salafisim and Wahhabism have given rise to the more global and violent modern Salafisim of figures like Zarqawi, I found useful Roel Meijer’s introduction to the volume he edited, Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (Columbia University Press, 2009).