programming. Marketing. Finance. The sciences. Perhaps most important was a young documentary filmmaker who had spent the last year working for Al Jazeera. The only common thread was that all had been educated in the West. It was something he now required of his inner circle.
While a far cry from the brutal and fanatical forces Halabi had once commanded, these men had the potential to be much more dangerous.
“There was a time when I believed that the movement had lost its way,” Halabi said in English, his heavily accented words being transmitted over a secure satellite link. “But now I understand that there was never a path to victory. Osama bin Laden expected his actions in New York to begin the collapse of a society already faltering under the weight of its own moral decay. But what was really accomplished? Punishing but ultimately indecisive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A handful of minor follow-up attacks that were lost in America’s culture of violence and mass murder. Bin Laden spent his final years bleating like a sheep and waiting for the Americans to find him.”
Halabi paused and examined the faces on the screens before him. While these men were indeed different from the ones he’d commanded before, the fire in their eyes burned just as intensely. The movement was everything to them. It gave them purpose. It gave them a target for their fury, hate, and frustration. And it gave them peace.
“Al Qaeda failed because their leadership grew old and forgot what motivates young men,” Halabi said flatly.
Osama bin Laden had feared the rise in brutality throughout the region, seeing it as counterproductive to recruitment. Unfortunately, he hadn’t lived to see the truth. To see the slickly produced videos of chaotic, merciless victories. To hear the pumping music that accompanied them and the computer-generated imagery that enhanced them. To see thousands of young men, motivated by this propaganda, flood into the Middle East. Ready to fight. Ready to die.
“And ISIS did no better,” Halabi continued. “I and my predecessors became intoxicated by the vision of a new caliphate. The Middle East was fractured and the West was tired of fighting wars that couldn’t be decisively won. We deluded ourselves into believing that we were ready to come out of the shadows and stand against the U.S. military.”
He paused, considering how much he wanted to say. In the end, though, this was the age of information. Withholding it from his inner circle would lead only to another defeat.
“It was all a waste of time and martyrs. The moment for that kind of action had not yet arrived.”
“Has it arrived now?” one of the men said, his youthful impatience audible even over the cheap computer speakers. “America is as weak as it has been in a hundred and fifty years. Its people are consumed with hatred for each other. They see themselves as having been cheated by the rest of the world. Stolen from. Taken advantage of. The twenty-four-hour news cycle continues to reinforce these attitudes, as do the Russians’ Internet propaganda efforts. And the upcoming presidential election is amplifying those divisions to the point that the country is being torn apart.”
“It’s not enough,” Halabi said. “The Americans are people of extremes, prone to fits of rage and self-destructiveness, but also in possession of an inner strength that no one in history has been able to overcome.”
The faces on the screens looked vaguely stunned at what they saw as adulation for their enemy. It was one of many lessons Halabi had learned in his time confined to a hospital bed deep underground: not to let hatred blind one to the strengths and virtues of one’s enemies.
“If no one has been able to overcome it,” the British man said, “how can we?”
It was the question that Halabi had been asking for almost his entire life. The question that God had finally answered.
“We’ll continue to distract them by fanning the flames of their fear and division,” he said.
“And after that?” the man pressed.
“After that we’ll strike at them in a way that no one in history has ever even conceived of.”
CHAPTER 3
AL HUDAYDAH
YEMEN
THE port city still had more than two million residents, but at this point it was just because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. Some buildings remained untouched, but others had taken hits from the Saudi air force and were now in various states of ruin. Almost nightly, bombing runs rewrote the map of Al Hudaydah, strewing tons of rubble across some