The New Threat From Islamic Militancy

The expert guide to Islamic militancy today from the bestselling author of Al-Qaeda

This is the book for which anyone bewildered by nature of Islamic militancy, and longing for a primer, has been waiting … this is history written directly from the front line ... If it is journalists who write the first draft of history, then historians of the early 21st century will be lucky in having Jason Burke as a source

Important and impressive ... the most accessible and up-to-date analysis of the development of Islamic militancy ... a clear and convincing account ... consistently fascinating

An excellent account ... The idea of home-grown extremism is not new. But Burke argues - convincingly - that its nature has changed

To understand Islamic State, there can be few better books to read … a magisterial account of the fast-changing world of Islamist militancy … a remarkably clear roadmap for understanding the seemingly chaotic world of contemporary jihad … Burke’s clear-eyed analysis, based on remarkably wide-ranging research, should be mandatory reading for anyone seeking to understand the globalisation of jihad and to avoid repeating past mistakes

A masterful exploration ... an essential and often gripping read

Professor Theo Farrell, Head of the Department of War Studies, Kings College London

One of the best reporters and analysts writing in the West about militant Islam analyses all the big questions

Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt: the Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad

Compelling and meticulously researched

How much ought the West to fear the self-styled “caliphate”? Perhaps not as greatly as politicians make out, according to Jason Burke … comprehensive

Scrupulously researched ... compellingly told ... His analysis has the weight of considerable on-the-ground experience, rather than the lofty theorising of an armchair academic ... unpicks lazy, commonly held opinion

A major authority on the politics and organisation of Islamic extremism

Tells us with clarity and insight who Islamic extremists are, why they kill and what they are likely to do going forward … For all the horror, reading Burke is relatively reassuring. He shows that this clash of civilizations, along with the jihadis-are-everywhere posture, is terribly misleading … Thankfully, we have Burke to explain what’s really going on … Burke’s book carefully spells out with courageous modesty who civilization’s enemies really are, and shows us that we need not embrace their fanaticism and their barbarity to defeat them. It is a lesson some of our would-be leaders need to learn

A fascinating reminder of how the entire Asian militant factions came about… Well written, extremely factual, historically interesting.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2016 
 
In The New Threat renowned expert and prize-winning reporter Jason Burke provides the clearest and most comprehensive guide to Islamic militancy today. 
 
From Syria to Somalia, from Libya to Indonesia, from Yemen to the capitals of Europe, Islamic militancy appears stronger, more widespread and more threatening than ever. ISIS and other groups, such as Boko Haram, together command significant military power, rule millions and control extensive territories. Elsewhere Al-Qaeda remains potent and is rapidly evolving. Factions and subsidiaries proliferate worldwide, and a new generation of Western Jihadists are emerging, joining conflicts abroad and attacking at home. Who are these groups and what do they actually want? What connects them and how do they differ? How are we to understand their tactics of online activism and grotesque violence? 
 
Drawing on almost two decades of frontline reporting as well as a vast range of sources, from intelligence officials to the militants themselves, renowned expert Jason Burke cuts through the mass of opinion and misinformation to explain dispassionately and with total clarity the nature of the threat we now face. He shows that Islamic militancy has changed dramatically in recent years. Far from being a ‘medieval’ throwback, it is modern, dynamic and resilient. Despite everything, it is entirely comprehensible. 
 
The New Threat is essential reading if we are to understand our fears rather than succumb to them, to act rationally and effectively, and to address successfully one of the most urgent problems of our time.

The 9/11 Wars

From the author of Al-Qaeda, Jason Burke's The 9/11 Wars is an essential book for understanding the dangerous and unstable world of the twenty-first century. 
 
 On September 11th 2001, in a series of coordinated suicide attacks, terrorists destroyed New York's World Trade Center and a substantial portion of the Pentagon. Since the Twin Towers fell, the world has seen the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the downfall of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, bombings, battles and riots. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the 'war on terror'. 
 
 Whether reporting on the riots in France or the attack on Mumbai, suicide bombers in Iraq or British troops fighting in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, Jason Burke's The 9/11 Wars, named 2011 Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Economist and Independent, tells the story of a world that changed forever when the hijacked planes flew out of the brilliant blue sky above Manhattan on September 11th. 
 
 'The best overview of the 9/11 decade so far in print' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Economist 
 
 'A magisterial history of the last decade' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Pankaj Mishra, Guardian 
 
 'At a time when there are more books out on terrorism than ever before ... this is likely to be among the best' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Potent ... journalism of a high order ... essential for understanding the past decade' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sherard Cowper-Coles, Sunday Times 
 
 Jason Burke is the South Asia correspondent for the Guardian. He has reported around the world for both the Guardian and the Observer. He is the author of two other widely praised books, both published by Penguin: Al-Qaeda and On the Road to Kandahar. He lives in New Delhi.

The best overview of the 9/11 decade so far in print

A magisterial history of the last decade ... The long patient sentences of The 9/11 Wars are suffused with the melancholy of a man who has learned a great deal from long exposure to atrocity and folly

A comprehensive summing up of the past decade's violent events ... The 9/11 Wars warrants great respect

Pacy, well-researched, and packed with telling anecdotes, this book's strength is in its detailed, balanced overview ... At a time when there are more books out on terrorism than ever before ... this is likely to be among the best

[Burke] is one of the most respected and experienced foreign correspondents in the business ... A major authority on the politics and organisation of Islamic extremism and ... a talented writer with the rare gift of joining effortless prose to challenging scholarship ... [The 9/11 Wars] is a magnificent achievement

A reader wanting a more dispassionate survey of how 9/11, and the response to it, may have shaped parts of the world will do no better than invest in [this] brilliant book

This remarkably balanced, well-sourced and very well-written book ... will be turned to in the future ... [Burke] has demonstrated impressive expertise as a historian who has had the advantage of having been present on many of the battlefields he describes

[A] lucid, sane account ... taut, careful reporting ... Remarkable

Making sense of the aftermath of 9/11 ... is a monumental task - but Burke is up to the job. The 9/11 Wars is insightful, thorough, and at times fascinating

Potent ... journalism of a high order. Like all good reporters, Burke is something of a scholar, drawing meticulously on interview notes years old, and on extensive background reading. He excels, too, in describing the experiences of ordinary Muslims; such insights make this book essential for understanding the past decade

Jason Burke is the South Asia correspondent for the Guardian. He has reported around the world for both the Guardian and the Observer. He is the author of two other widely praised books, both published by Penguin: Al-Qaeda and On the Road to Kandahar. He lives in New Delhi.

Travels through conflict in the Islamic world

On the Road to Kandahar

'I have drunk beer with Iraqi poets and whisky with Indian bankers, Mecca Cola with Kashmiri militants and tea with (aspirant or failed) suicide bombers ... "Islam", I came to realize, is a label that can be applied to many things and adequately describes none of them.'

From the bestselling author of Al-Qaeda, Jason Burke's On the Road to Kandahar reveals the true face of Islam in an age of global conflict. 
 
 In the summer of 1991 Jason Burke set off to join Kurdish guerillas fighting in Iraq. It was the start of a remarkable journey that would take him from the sands of the Sahara to the highest peaks of the Himalayas, revealing the true complexity and variety of the 'Islamic world'. 
 
 Describing encounters with hundreds of people ranging from destitute refugees to senior government ministers, from American snipers to hardened 'mujahideen', this extraordinary work of reportage is a vivid account of life and death, war and peace, bigotry and ignorance, hate and tolerance. 
 
 'Fast-paced ... fascinating' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Times 
 
 'A personal odyssey shot through with vivid description and human sympathy' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;New Statesman 
 
 'A beautifully written account of a decade spent in Muslim societies ... intensely personal ... absorbing and illuminating' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Daily Mail 
 
 'Makes mainstream coverage seem like a caricature ... by refusing to generalize, this illuminating first-hand exploration ... makes it clear the subject is far more complex than most Western commentators like to make out' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Metro 
 
 Jason Burke is the South Asia correspondent for the Guardian. He has reported around the world for both the Guardian and the Observer. He is the author of two other widely praised books, both published by Penguin: Al-Qaeda and The 9/11 Wars. He lives in New Delhi.

Jason Burke is the prize-winning Chief Reporter for the Observer. He has covered the Middle East and Southwest Asia for a decade, and saw many of the key events described in this book at first hand. He is the author of Al-Qaeda (Penguin, 2004).

A brilliant, fearless journalist who knows huge areas of the Islamic world intimately, Burke now turns to the wider question of how we are to get to grips with radical Islam and what it really means. Burke has travelled all over the great arc of Islamic land, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, and he uses this in his new book to great effect to show how various and completely unmonolithic Islam really is and how the sort of standard Western generalizations about it are both stupid and dangerous.

Jason Burke

Brilliant, beautifully researched, observed and written. An astonishing window not just into the origins of modern terrorism but also into our own age

Rory Stewart, author of Politics on the Edge

A dazzling exploration of the radical politics of the 1970s… a fabulously gripping read

A kaleidoscopic sweep through an extraordinary era told with cool authority and a novelist's eye for detail. Burke is a master in the field

If journalism is the first draft of history, then this is its second draft. A book that historians will be consulting and profiting from for many decades to come

Tom Holland, author of Rubicon and host of The Rest Is History

Riveting … [The Revolutionists] is an absorbing history of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East … A deeply researched, ambitious and elegantly written book

As irresistible and unputdownable as it is astonishing and relevant

Magisterial … The Revolutionists [is] such an engaging, intelligible guide through a dense geopolitical period

A detailed and sweeping account of the origins of modern international terrorism

A deeply researched account of hijackings, hostage-takings and other terrorist activity in the 1970s, told with verve

In a gripping book Jason Burke, the Guardian's international security correspondent, draws on decades of research as well as interviews with terrorists . . . It is the character portraits that make this book a page-turner

[A] huge, roving and painstakingly researched account of the rise of modern terrorism

Jason Burke's meticulously researched book is peopled by an array of colourful characters from terrorists to idealists and double agents. By melding eye-witness accounts with a deep understanding of politics and modern history, he shows how the hijackings and political murders of the late twentieth century led to the turbulence of the 21st. It makes for a riveting read

Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor, Channel 4 News

Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages . . . a flair for period detail . . . impressive

Fascinating . . . Burke [who] has reported thoughtfully on political violence for several decades . . . brings considerable experience to this detailed chronicle of hostage-taking, bombings, assassinations and other adventures. Full of vivid, intriguing detail . . . Though many of his characters have been villainized elsewhere, Burke treats them as complex human beings rather than caricatured monsters . . . Burke’s compellingly readable account . . . ranges widely . . . Burke’s rich narrative offers an abundance of evidence that, in terrorism and counterterrorism alike, far too many actors have exaggerated what violence will achieve

The Revolutionists is an incisive account of the rise of modern terrorism following the founding of the State of Israel. It manages to be both scholarly and engaging. A wonderful book for any reader interested in the Middle East and the curse of terror that has haunted the region - and the world - for too many years

Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower

Superb. In this deeply researched and grippingly told account of the ... radicals who held a gun to the head of Western governments in the 1970s, Burke confirms his credentials as our foremost commentator on modern terrorism

A deeply researched, original and immersive book that shines a light on the forces of radicalism and violence that shape our modern world

Gordon Corera, former BBC security correspondent and host of The Rest Is Classified

A captivating account of the origins of modern international terrorism with fascinating insights into the terrorists and their opponents. A must read to understand the contemporary Middle East and more

Bruce Riedel, author of Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States since FDR

For this moment of political wildness and ideological extremism, Jason Burke, a distinguished foreign correspondent, has written a chillingly cautionary global history of political terrorism in the late Cold War. Deeply researched and engagingly written, this is a vivid, engrossing, and disturbing study of violent transnational attacks against innocent civilians in the name of leftist revolution, Palestinian nationalism, and Islamist radicalism

The Revolutionists is the authoritative true story of the encounter between leftist and Islamist radicalism, capturing in gripping and granular detail the events and ideas that elevated terrorism as a tool for political transformation. It is the culmination of years of masterful research ... The narrative is exciting, pacy and propelled forward by a cast of characters whose actions would defy all credulity if they were fictitious. By turns fascinating and heart-stopping, it is an addictive read and an extraordinary intellectual achievement

Alia Brahimi, scholar and host of Guns for Hire podcast

This is Jason Burke’s magnum opus, a hugely ambitious book that greatly benefits from his three decades of reporting on revolutionary violence. Burke seems to have read everything that is relevant about terrorism in multiple languages and talked to anybody who mattered on all sides of the conflicts he writes about. The book is propulsively written and is not only an account of the rise of leftist and Islamist terrorism in the 1960s and the decades that followed, but also a wonderfully evocative history of an era that reverberates today

Peter Bergen, author of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden

Burke masterfully connects the dots, capturing the precise the moment the world shifted - subtly, profoundly and in ways we are only beginning to grasp. His book doesn't just illuminate the past, it brings clarity to the present

Peter Neumann, Professor of Security Studies at King's College London

Burke is an experienced journalist, and he uses sources written in English, French, Arabic, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Serbo-Croat and Hebrew to explain the motives, organisations and endless internecine disputes of the terrorist movements. The most arresting parts of his work, though, do not come from such careful analysis but from brief vignettes that are beyond easy explanation, and which remind us that behind the slogans, rituals and violence, terrorists might be human beings

A compelling new book that traces the history of international terrorism

Written with the sensibility of a journalist and fastidiously empirical, Burke’s history is an eloquent tour de force that will become an essential work of reference

The Revolutionists is a brilliantly told story with many dimensions

The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s

Immersive, globe-spanning and full of detail and drama, The Revolutionists is an unprecedented account of a seismic decade that transformed the modern world. 
 
In the 1970s, a network of radical extremists terrorised the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage-takings. Among them were the glamorous young Leila Khaled with her jewellery made from grenade rings, the hard-drinking Carlos the Jackal in shades and designer suits, and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. United by their hatred of Israel, capitalism and ‘Western imperialism’, they unleashed a series of audacious attacks that brought governments to their knees and glued the world to their televisions in morbid fascination. 
 
Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, spies, witnesses and victims, Jason Burke takes us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these often-deadly operations. Through their eyes – and the eyes of the unrelenting agents who hunted them down – he uncovers a dark, complex world of loyalty, betrayal and commitment to radical change at any cost. 
 
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and packed with revelations about iconic events such as the deadly attack on the Munich Olympic, Israel’s raid on Entebbe, the Iranian revolution and the rise of Islamic extremism, this is a sweeping, scrupulously reported historical narrative with the pace and suspense of a thriller. 
 
The Revolutionists pitches the reader into these tumultuous times. Ultimately, it shows how a campaign led by secular, leftist revolutionaries gave way to a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism that would dominate the decades to come. It is impossible to understand the world today without reading this history.

Jason Burke

Praise for The Revolutionists

Brilliant, beautifully researched, observed and written. An astonishing window not just into the origins of modern terrorism but also into our own age

A dazzling exploration of the radical politics of the 1970s… a fabulously gripping read

A kaleidoscopic sweep through an extraordinary era told with cool authority and a novelist's eye for detail. Burke is a master in the field

Brilliant, beautifully researched, observed and written. An astonishing window not just into the origins of modern terrorism but also into our own age

A dazzling exploration of the radical politics of the 1970s… a fabulously gripping read

A kaleidoscopic sweep through an extraordinary era told with cool authority and a novelist's eye for detail. Burke is a master in the field

Brilliant, beautifully researched, observed and written. An astonishing window not just into the origins of modern terrorism but also into our own age

A dazzling exploration of the radical politics of the 1970s… a fabulously gripping read

A kaleidoscopic sweep through an extraordinary era told with cool authority and a novelist's eye for detail. Burke is a master in the field

Books by Jason Burke

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