A riveting, panoramic look at “homegrown” Islamist terrorism from 9/11 to the present

Since 9/11, a lot more than three hundred Americans-born and elevated in Minnesota, Alabama, New Jersey, and elsewhere-have been indicted or convicted of terrorism charges. Some took the fight overseas: an American was among those that planned the attacks in Mumbai, and a lot more than eighty U.S. residents have been charged with ISIS-related offences. Others have acted on American ground, as with the episodes at Fort about USA of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists Hood, the Boston Marathon, and in San Bernardino. What motivates them, how are they trained, and what do we sacrifice inside our efforts to monitor them?

Paced like a detective story, United States of Jihad tells the entwined stories of the main element actors over the American front. Among the perpetrators are Anwar al-Awlaki, the brand new Mexico-born radical cleric who became the initial American citizen killed by a CIA drone and who mentored the Charlie Hebdo shooters; Samir Khan, whose Inspire webzine has rallied terrorists around the world, including the Tsarnaev brothers; and Omar Hammami, an Alabama native and hiphop fan who became a fixture in al Shabaab’s propaganda video clips until fatally displeasing his superiors.

Drawing on his intensive network of cleverness contacts, through the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the FBI to the NYPD, Peter Bergen offers an inside look at the controversial strategies of the organizations tracking potential terrorists-from infiltrating mosques to substantial surveillance; in the bias experienced by innocent observant Muslims at the hands of law enforcement; in the critics and defenders of U.S. policies on terrorism; and at how social media offers revolutionized terrorism.

Lucid and rigorously researched, United States of Jihad can be an essential new analysis of the Americans who’ve embraced militant Islam both here and abroad.

– Washington Post, Notable nonfiction Books in 2016