Why would a group of young Middle Eastern Muslims, many of them with good educations, promising futures and the opportunity to benefit in their travels from much that is best in the life of the West, want to leave such a terrible mark in history? What passion so great, what commitment of faith and unreason so immutable, what cast of mind so hostile to gentleness and compassion, could drive 19 young men to commit such appalling acts of mass murder, extinguishing their own lives in the process?
Millions of words have been written in search of answers since that day, and the days of extremist horror that have followed in Baghdad, Bali, Istanbul, Kabul, London, Madrid and elsewhere; so many that I fear that there is little new or insightful anyone can contribute at this remove to the understanding of Islamic extremism that is now so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of the West. As a reporter, I, like so many others, have had personal exposure to the world of violence and intolerance engendered by the extremists, through a decade and more of assignments to places where their hatred of the West took its most dramatic form – the rise of the Talibanin Afghanistan in the mid-1990’s, and the miseries they imposed on the Afghan people until their overthrow after 9/11; a period of many months in Yemen, before and after the October 2000 attack by a bomb-laden skiff that killed 17 sailors on the USS Cole, the last major al Qaeda attack before the Twin Towers; after 9/11, assignment to Pakistan, and later Afghanistan, during the campaign to topple the Taliban and its aftermath; from there, on to Iraq for five years during the run-up to the invasion of 2003, and through the years of insurgency and civil conflict that followed.
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5:45 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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