The Terror Years
From Al Qaeda to the Islamic State
Event
Kevin Yatarola
Over the decade and a half since the 9/11 attacks al Qaeda has morphed and even spawned a rival
terrorist organization, the Islamic State. Lawrence
Wright, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, is one
of the foremost reporters on the topic of al Qaeda and jihadist terrorism. In
his new collection The Terror Years: From
Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, Wright draws on articles he wrote while
researching The Looming Tower as well
as articles he has written since to follow where and how al-Qaeda and its core
cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread. They include an indelible impression
of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom of silence under the control of the religious
police; the Syrian film industry, then compliant at the edges but already
exuding a feeling of the barely masked fury that erupted into civil war; and
the 2006-11 Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, a study in disparate values
of human lives.
Lawrence Wright
is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New
Yorker magazine. He
is the author among many other books of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the
Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), was published to immediate and widespread
acclaim, spending eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. It
won the Lionel Gelber Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Award for
History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the New York Public Library Helen
Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prize for
General Nonfiction. Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and
the Society of American Historians.
New America is pleased to welcome Mr. Wright for a discussion of his
book, al Qaeda, and the rise of the Islamic State.
Follow the discussion online using
#TerrorYears and following @NewAmericaISP.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Participant:
Lawrence WrightAuthor, The Terror Years: From Al Qaeda to the Islamic State
Staff Writer, The New Yorker
Moderator:
Peter Bergen @peterbergencnnDirector, New America International Security Program