Joshua Sinai offers a good review in the Washington Times of
Aimen Dean’s Nine Lives: My Times as the West’s Top Spy Inside Al-Qaeda
This is a dramatic account by a young Muslim from Saudi
Arabia who had become so radicalized into Islamist extremism that he decided in
1994 (at the age 16) to travel to Bosnia and join a group of al
Qaeda-affiliated foreign fighters who were fighting on behalf of Bosnia’s
Muslims against their adversary Croatian and Serbian Christian militias.
What makes this account so interesting and important (and
how it became a CNN documentary) is that Bosnia was the first of many jihadi
battlegrounds in Asia and the Middle East that Aimen Dean (a pseudonym) was
involved as a fighter and a member of an elite bomb-making team (including
attempting to build a chemical weapon) during al Qaeda’s formative pre-9/11
period in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
It was there where he interacted with a “Who’s Who” of its
top operatives, including Osama bin Laden (to whom he pledged personal
allegiance), Khaled Sheikh Muhammad (9/11’s mastermind), Abu Zubaydah (the group’s
logistical manager) and Abu Khabab (the group’s top bomb-maker).
Even more compelling, eventually, in 1998, Mr. Dean became
so disillusioned with al Qaeda’s mass killings of innocent victims in the
August 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and elsewhere, which were part of
what he considered its hypocritical ideology and self-destructive warfare and
political strategy, that he defected and became a double agent on behalf of
MI6, the British intelligence service.
You can read the rest of the review via the below link:
No comments:
Post a Comment