More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In some neighborhoods, grocers were threatened with punishment if they displayed cucumbers and tomatoes in the same stall. The jihadists maintained that the vegetables resembled male and female body parts and should not be permitted to mingle.
Had it not been for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Islamic State’s greatest butcher would likely have lived out his years as a college professor. Until 2003, life was steering him toward a quiet career of teaching Islamic jurisprudence to twenty-year-olds, rather than strapping bombs to their chests.
From Western Europe came hundreds, then thousands of young men, most of them Muslims, and all of them bearing passports allowing them to travel freely throughout the European Union and North America.
“We weren’t convinced that al-Nusra was coming for us next week, but we were worried about all these trained jihadis coming back to Europe and having a passport,”
