In Journey of the Jihadist Fawaz Gerges amplifies and gives a human face to many of the themes of his 2005 book The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge), a well researched account of how the global jihadist movement is riven by internecine ideological disputes and petty feuds. I thought The Far Enemy was one of the best books of last year. Journey of the Jihadist introduces the reader to several jihadists foremost the Egyptian Kamal Habib who over the past two decades has gone from militant to something of a peacenik and back to semi-militancy as the result of the Iraq war. Through the interviews with those like Kamal Habib Gerges shows how fractured the jihadist world is with competing agendas, philosophies, tactics and strategies.

As Fawaz notes these fissures became especially pronounced after 9/11. I also came to that somewhat counterintuitive conclusion as I was researching my book The Osama bin Laden I Know. Surprisingly, the harshest critics of the 9/11 attacks are al Qaeda insiders and veterans of the jihadist movement. Abu Walid al Misri, an Egyptian journalist who was one of the first members of al Qaeda, wrote a book serialized in Al Sharq al Awsat newspaper in December 2004 that was harshly critical of bin Laden’s strategic misconceptions:

Bin Laden's extremism reached the point where he believed that the United States was much weaker than some of those around him thought. He stated this at several meetings and as evidence he referred to what happened to the United States in Beirut when the bombing of the Marines headquarters led them to flee from Lebanon [in 1983]. Some young Saudi followers confirmed to Bin Laden his delusions from the gist of the experiences they had gained from their visits to the United States, namely, that the country was falling and could bear only few strikes. Relying on what apparently he liked to hear and what he had repeatedly asserted, they in fact stressed to him that the United States could not bear two or three strong strikes. This view was basically wrong and dangerous.

Muntassir al Zayyat, a spokesman for Egypt’s jihadists wrote in his 2002 autobiography, “Bin Laden’s desire to take revenge heedless of the American and international response, and its effect on the future of the Islamic movements in the world, has given the Americans and other government the power to destroy the Islamists before our eyes.” Noman Benotman, a Libyan jihadist who fought with al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the early ‘90s and now lives in London, told me, “9/11 destroyed 95 percent of the existing [al Qaeda] organization. The United States of America is involved directly in this war. The organization doesn’t exist anymore.”