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Close ties were also cemented by marriage alliances within the emerging group, so that Mohammed Atef’s daughter married one of bin Laden’s sons, while Al Qaeda’s treasurer married bin Laden’s niece. That is true of other terrorist groups. Jemaah Islamiyah’s Mohammed Noordin Top has two wives, both sisters of fellow jihadists. The next cluster that would become important in Al Qaeda, especially after the false dawning of the Islamic Salvation Front, consisted of Arabs from the North African Maghreb, that is Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and a separate group from South Asia, most graduates of two boarding schools run by Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia and Malaysia, with the occasional Uighur from China’s westerly Xinjiang province.31 The Maghreb Arabs were the only ones to have prior records for petty criminality such as handbag snatching and credit-card fraud. Those who were not represented in Sageman’s sample are no less interesting. There were virtually no Afghans, except for two friends of bin Laden’s, and no representatives of the vast Muslim populations of Bangladesh, India, Turkey or Pakistan, although radicalised second - and third-generation Anglo-Pakistani jihadists would make up the deficit. Contrary to expectations, only 17 per cent of these men had received an Islamic education; the majority were products of secular schooling, with over 60 per cent having received some tertiary-level education, and many spoke several languages. Their learning was overwhelmingly in scientific and technical disciplines, such as computer science, engineering and medicine, which in other religious traditions too seem to correlate with fundamentalist religious beliefs born of a desire to extrapolate knowledge from authority. Of course, this could also simply reflect the prestige of utilitarian disciplines in developing societies, although that would not explain why so many engineers and mathematicians are Christian fundamentalists. Unlike other types of terrorist group, some 83 per cent were married men, although only a few—above all bin Laden and al-Zawahiri—insisted on imperilling their wives and children. Marriage for the rest was simply a preliminary to having a child before consigning both wife and offspring to a separate existence.

The Afghan civil war, and the heterogeneous backgrounds of the leaders, led to visceral—and often personal—splits over how Al Qaeda should be deployed. One conspicuous casualty of these was Azzam, who in addition to trying to avoid Arabs fighting Afghans had identified the Lion of the Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a minority Tajik, as the most impressive mujaheddin commander, at a time when most Arabs were backing the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatayar. That sealed Azzam’s fate, as al-Zawahiri had been spreading lies that he was a CIA agent, and Massoud had been one of the CIA’s main clients. On 24 November 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed by a roadside bomb as they went to a mosque. Al-Zawahiri spoke sweetly at his funeral.

Having destroyed the Soviets, as he pretentiously viewed it, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia as the prodigal become all-conquering hero. The manner began to resemble those self-righteous superannuated rock stars with delusions of grandeur who harangue world leaders about Africa. He tried to interest the Saudi regime in his plans to destroy the Marxist government of the newly minted Republic of Yemen. Yemeni pressure resulted in the confiscation of bin Laden’s passport. He warned Riyadh of the threat posed by the secular dictatorship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, even as the latter was fabricating tensions in order to invade neighbouring Kuwait. When this took place, unleashing a reign of Iraqi terror on the inoffensive little emirate, the desperate Saudis immediately availed themselves of US offers of assistance to prevent Saddam from extending his campaign towards their oilfields. Despite their binge-purchasing of Western armaments, for which the ruling clique were rewarded with