By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
Former FBI Agent Ali Soufan wrote a new book, “Anatomy of Terror,” that compares Al Qaeda and ISIS to a cancer that multiplies.
“The cancer of bin Ladenism has metastasized across the Middle East and North Africa and beyond, carried by even more virulent vectors,” he wrote in a book that the New York Times calls “revealing and timely.”
Soufan, who also wrote the 2011 best-selling book, “The Black Banners,” has a plethora of experience with terrorism. He was the supervisor of the investigation of events surrounding Sept. 11 and was key to identifying the hijackers.
In a book review, the New York Times wrote:
Soufan underscores the disastrous role that the United States invasion of Iraq and its bungled occupation played in fueling terrorism, creating chaos and a power vacuum in Iraq — the perfect incubator for insurgent violence and bloodshed. Two calamitous decisions made by the Americans (dissolving the Iraqi Army and banning members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from positions of authority) would prove fateful. Soufan writes that embittered and unemployed “former Baathists soon became the backbone of the new Islamic State of Iraq.” He adds, “With their governmental, intelligence, and military experience, these men made themselves essential both to ISI’s battlefield achievements and to the terror tactics it has deployed against ordinary citizens.”
He lucidly describes the nefarious modus operandi (borrowed, in part, from Hussein’s regime) by which ISI — which would be renamed ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) or ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), and later simply IS, the Islamic State — began aggressively conquering territory in Iraq and Syria in 2013. It would start, in each town, by opening what appeared to be a religious community center, then selecting fervent young men “to inform on their neighbors and spy on any rival rebel groups in the area.”
Soufan also writes in detail about Al Qaeda’s bureaucratic operation and Osama bin Laden’s obsession with micromanagement.
