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Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement. Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan, he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologues of all time. Here, in the first in-depth biography of Azzam, Thomas Hegghammer explains how Azzam came to play this role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. It traces Azzam's extraordinary life journey from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan, telling the story of a man who knew all the leading Islamists of his time and frequented presidents, CIA agents, and Cat Stevens the pop star. It is, however, also a story of displacement, exclusion, and repression that suggests that jihadism went global for fundamentally local reasons.

How do terrorists recruit? We know much about the profiles and pathways of recruits, but little about the strategies and tactics of recruiters. Such procedures matter because they help determine who joins. I highlight a key determinant of recruiter tactics, namely, the tension between personnel needs and infiltration risks. Drawing on signalling theory, I present an analytical framework that conceptualizes recruitment as a trust game between recruiter and recruit. I argue that the central logic shaping recruiter tactics is the search for cost-discriminating signs of trustworthiness. Due to the context-specificity of signal costs and the room for tactical innovation, optimal recruitment tactics vary in space and time, but the underlying logic is the same for most groups facing a high threat of infiltration. I apply the framework to an al-Qaeda recruitment campaign in early 2000s Saudi Arabia, where it helps explain tactical preferences (why recruiters favoured some recruitment arenas over others) and differential network activation (why recruiters preferred war veterans over radical candidates from other networks). The trust dilemma also accounts for unexpected recruiter choices, such as their reluctance to solicit on the Internet and in mosques, and their preference for recruits who knew poetry or wept during prayer. Thus the signalling framework does not challenge, but provides a useful micro-level complement to, existing theories of recruitment.

This article studies variation in conflict theater choice by Western jihadists in an effort to understand their motivations. Some militants attack at home, whereas others join insurgencies abroad, but few scholars have asked why they make these different choices. Using open-source data, I estimate recruit supply for each theater, foreign fighter return rates, and returnee impact on domestic terrorist activity. The tentative data indicate that jihadists prefer foreign fighting, but a minority attacks at home after being radicalized, most often through foreign fighting or contact with a veteran. Most foreign fighters do not return for domestic operations, but those who do return are more effective operatives than nonveterans. The findings have implications for our understanding of the motivations of jihadists, for assessments of the terrorist threat posed by foreign fighters, and for counterterrorism policy.

Why has transnational war volunteering increased so dramatically in the Muslim world since 1980? Standard explanations, which emphasize U.S.-Saudi support for the 1980s Afghan mujahideen, the growth of Islamism, or the spread of Wahhabism are insufficient. The increase in transnational war volunteering is better explained as the product of a pan-Islamic identity movement that grew strong in the 1970s Arab world from elite competition among exiled Islamists in international Islamic organizations and Muslim regimes. Seeking political relevance and increased budgets, Hijaz-based international activists propagated an alarmist discourse about external threats to the Muslim nation and established a global network of Islamic charities. This "soft" pan-Islamic discourse and network enabled Arabs invested in the 1980s Afghanistan war to recruit fighters in the name of inter-Muslim solidarity. The Arab-Afghan mobilization in turn produced a foreign fighter movement that still exists today, as a phenomenon partly distinct from al-Qaida. The analysis relies on a new data set on foreign fighter mobilizations, rare sources in Arabic, and interviews with former activists.