Jihad's Road Warriors

At the Lawfare Podcast, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Dan Byman, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Studies and Lawfare's foreign policy editor, to discuss his new book, "Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad." Recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by foreign fighters of the Islamic State have highlighted the urgent need to address this phenomenon. In his book, Byman traces the history of the jihadist foreign fighter movement, beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, through the wars in Chechnya and Bosnia, its role in terrorism throughout the 1990s, 9/11, and the wars since. The book also discusses how the United States and European nations have worked to counter the effects of this movement, and how states might combat the problem of foreign fighters moving forward.