I'm inaugurating a new series of in my informal analysis of complete jihadi works. The series includes my notes on Issa al-Hindi's The Army of Madinah in Kashmir, Hassan al-Banna's "Toward the Light," and "On Jihad." This time it's a book called "Martyrs in a Time of Alienation."
In January 2008, Al-Fajr Media Center, an al-Qaida affiliated media group, released an extensive issue in its series, "Biographies of the Martyrs in the Land of Khorasan." Khorasan is a traditional word used for the region of central Asia that covers Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The book consists of 120 biographies of men who died in the insurgency against Coalition forces and regional governments.
The publicly available translation analyzed here is only a summary translation. Though most biographies in the collection include only a name, an explanation of how they arrived in the region, and how they eventually died, there's some benefit in studying the document in its entirety. Insights gleaned from such small details can help improve the picture of the character and make-up of Al Qaida and its regional affiliates by offering details about the timing, training, and movement of men through the region, and shedding light on their motivations and affiliations.
My summary translation is a World News Connection (WNC via Dialog) record from March 2008; its accession number is 17YT16E7 20080308. I intend to analyze between four and five individuals in a post.
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Note: I made a few edits to this post on 07/06/08, and added a sentence or two to accurately reflect the content of the WNC document.
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