Almost before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was being led down the steps of Northwest Airlines flight 253 he had been linked to al-Qaida. He himself has apparently claimed he was trained and commissioned by an al‑Qaida master bomb-maker in Yemen. Whatever the eventual conclusion about his alleged international mission – a Nigerian living in London, trained in Yemen to blow up US planes – his case should not distract us from the fact that modern Islamic militancy is primarily a local phenomenon, not a global one.
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