FIRST AIRED: 29/04/2020.
We speak to Dr. Thomas Hegghammer, author of ‘The Caravan: Abdullah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad’.
He discusses the threat jihadism poses today in a pandemic world after the defeat of ISIS and the death of Osama Bin Laden, how the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the springboard for the rise of jihadism, over-simplifications of the US-Taliban blowback theory, why jihadists and Islamists hated communism, causing the West to de-facto ally with them against the Soviet Union, who Abdullah Azzam was and why he has a key role in the rise of global jihad which led to the 9/11 attacks among many other terrorist attacks around the world.