Fountainhead of Jihad

Drawing upon a wealth of previously unresearched primary sources in many languages, the authors shed much new light on a group frequently described as the most lethal actor in the current Afghan insurgency, and shown here to have been for decades at the centre of a nexus of transnational Islamist militancy, fostering the development of jihadi organisations from Southeast Asia to East Africa. Addressing the abundant new evidence documenting the Haqqani network s pivotal role in the birth and evolution of the global jihadi movement, the book also represents a significant advance in our knowledge of the history of al-Qaeda, fundamentally altering the picture painted by the existing literature on the subject.