Dan Byman on 'Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad'
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2019
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Benjamin Wittes sat down with Dan Byman, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Studies and Lawfare's foreign policy editor, to discuss his new book, "Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad." Recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by foreign fighters of the Islamic State have highlighted the urgent need to address this phenomenon. In his book, Byman traces the history of the jihadist foreign fighter movement, beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, through the wars in Chechnya and Bosnia, its role in terrorism throughout the 1990s, 9/11, and the wars since. The book also discusses how the United States and European nations have worked to counter the effects of this movement, and how states might combat the problem of foreign fighters moving forward.
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Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | They also spread the idea that jihad is cool, that you can be a hero, you can be larger |
| 0:38.2 | than life. |
| 0:39.7 | In addition, you have a number of people who stay in Afghanistan or nearby in Pakistan |
| 0:44.2 | who effectively can't go home. |
| 0:46.2 | They're wanted by their security services, they have for whatever reason are not able |
| 0:51.1 | to return to a normal country and they're somewhat professional jihadis so they're |
| 0:55.7 | looking for the next fight. |
| 0:57.8 | So when Bosnia breaks out and you have a lot of killing Muslims there, a lot of people |
| 1:03.2 | in Afghanistan have never heard of Bosnia, no idea where it is or what the conflict is |
| 1:07.6 | about. |
| 1:08.6 | But it sounds familiar to them. |
| 1:11.3 | You have Slavs, Christians who are killing Muslims and they feel they can help. |
| 1:17.3 | And so the idea was born and then vindicated by the fall of the Soviet Union and that |
| 1:21.6 | idea proved powerful even though those involved themselves were actually not that important. |
| 1:27.3 | I'm Mikhail Fogel and this is the LawFair podcast July 6th, 2019. |
| 1:33.6 | Benjamin Widis sat down with Dan Byman, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center |
| 1:38.5 | for Middle East Policy and LawFair's Foreign Policy Editor to discuss his new book Road |
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