Although Yemen is far from being the last sanctuary of the ever-mutating and elusive al-Qaida network, The Last Refuge carefully charts the role that country-a small, complex state on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula-has played in terrorism since the 1980s. Starting at the anti-Soviet jihad and concluding with modern-day suicide bombers, Johnsen unravels the operational narrative of al-Qaida in Yemen, subsequently retitled al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), offering new insights into an often misconstrued and poorly reported sequence of historical events. He achieves this by providing perceptive descriptions of keystone personalities, beliefs, wider motivations, corruption, and organizational structure. He also links this together with accounts of hidden training camps, safe houses, and abundant plots to attack nonbelievers, infidels, and the wider establishment. All told, this is an impressive study by an authority on Yemen and the region.
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