An Arabian Journey Quotes

“A lot of the people who joined ISIS were the same mercenaries who were in al-Qaeda fighting with bin Laden. And guess where they came from? Most of them were soldiers in the Iraqi army, who had to throw away their uniforms when they lost to the Americans and our military was abolished; what do you expect to happen when you destroy a country and you don’t let them have an army?’ He went on, ‘If you try and dismantle the military, then all you’re left with are a lot of hot-blooded young men with nothing to do. Of course they’re going to fight. Most of the time they don’t even know who or what they’re fighting for, but sooner or later they’ll get their hands on a gun and join a cause. Call them gangsters, mafia, criminals, tribes, ISIS or whatever, they’re all the same. They’re just gangs of young men looking for a fight.”
― Levison Wood, Arabia: A Journey Through The Heart of the Middle East

“It was a scary prospect indeed, not least for the many millions of Muslims around the world who had no desire whatsoever to be ruled by a mad mullah in Syria. Rarely a day went by without the news of the civil war in that country, the daily murders and executions, or of atrocities committed by these Wahhabi psychopaths. Having already travelled widely in the Islamic world, I was more intrigued than ever to find out more about what made presumably normal young men and women leave their homes to go and fight for a barbaric organisation, hell bent on the destruction of the Western world.”
― Levison Wood, Arabia: A Journey Through The Heart of the Middle East

“That’s the point of terrorism; it’s not only the tragedy of those killed and injured, it’s the deep-rooted anxiety that is born of fear, and how it causes fractures in society. It reinforces divisions and creates an atmosphere of distrust. That was the intention of ISIS all along: to generate isolationism among the Muslim communities of the West. To stop them being accepted by the rest of society and to create a sense of us and them. In doing so, Muslims everywhere would be forced to choose between integration into their host communities, or going over to the side of extremism”
― Levison Wood, Arabia: A Journey Through The Heart of the Middle East

“standing on its northern fringes, embedded with the Kurdish Peshmerga, looking on as ISIS caused havoc and destruction across the country. I’d gone to see for myself the devastation they had wrought, and the scenes were beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The stories of mass executions, rape and torture were heartbreaking and incomprehensible. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing: entire towns destroyed, bombs everywhere, relics smashed and museums looted; women and children sold into slavery; an entire civilisation imploding.”
― Levison Wood, Arabia: A Journey Through The Heart of the Middle East