The death of Arab secularism is the story of a country that no longer exists and a world almost impossible to imagine. That world can be glimpsed in old newsreels from the Arab cities of the 1950s and 1960s. The cities of the post-war period - Cairo, Beirut and Damascus, Baghdad and Aden - look much the same as many developing countries of the time: American-built cars, European-style suits, a certain easy mingling of men and women...
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"Shephard has followed the stories of several prisoners after they were released, including Salim Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's personal driver, and Canadian Omar Khadr, the youngest Guantanamo prisoner. Recently, she traveled to Albania to meet with Abu Bakr Qassim, one of several Muslims belonging to China's Uighur minority who were captured in Pakistan and mistakenly detained at Guantanamo."
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"In early summer, Abu Ismael, a six-year veteran of al-Qaida, left the insurgency still blazing in his homeland of Iraq and travelled to what he believes is the start of the apocalypse. He secured cash from a benefactor in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, then approached a weapons dealer in Anbar province, a desolate corner of the country that was not long ago a staging point for jihadis arriving from Syria and is now a gateway for those going the other way.
"It was easy," he said, in the sitting room of a house in the Syrian city of Aleppo. "The money was no problem, neither was the weapon, or the motivation. This will be a fight against the great enemy."
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