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Al-Qa'ida's Doctrine for Insurgency: Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin's "A Practical Course for Guerrilla War" by Norman Cigar Washington: Potomac Books, 2009 224 pages $55.00 ($26.95 paper)
Sun Tzu is famous for his admonition to know your enemy; this book is another step toward knowing modern Islamist terrorists. Norman Cigar, a research fellow with a strong Arabic background, and former professor at the Marine Corps University, has translated and analyzed one of several extant texts intended as doctrine for the jihadist movement. This one is by Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin, who was a lifelong terrorist and briefly head of Al-Qa'ida of the Arabian Peninsula (QAP), the branch organization for Al-Qa'ida in Saudi Arabia, until Saudi security forces killed him in June 2004. Al-Muqrin wrote his text A Practical Course for Guerrilla War as a training manual for his QAP forces. The book was published both in pamphlet form and serialized on QAP's website. The impact of the work on overall terrorist doctrine or the degree of authority attributed to it is unknown, although it is still available in Arabic on various terrorist websites. This is the first English translation to be published. This reviewer cannot comment on the quality of the translation, but Cigar's extensive analysis (about half of the book) is very well done.
A Practical Course for Guerrilla War is a...