 He was the author, of course, of the new book, Anatomy of Perot, which was published and was a subject of a 60-minute piece very recently. Ali, as many of you know, worked for the FBI. He was the lead investigator on the cold investigation in Yemen back in October of 2000. He was also one of the lead investigators of the 9-11 attacks. He famously interrogated Abid Zabeda, who was really the first person in the al-Qaeda circle that was captured. He's written another book, Black Banners, which was a New York Times bestseller. And he's going to talk a little bit about the big themes and stories in his book, and then we'll open up to a Q&A. And he also runs the Sioux Fan Group, which produces what I regard as a must-read every morning, which is morning grief. If you haven't subscribed, you should, which is produced in collaboration with Ford and University. So Ali, thanks for doing this, and we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Thank you, Peter. I joined the FBI back in 1997, and immediately I started to work terrorism. I worked this shadowy, unknown organization at the time, al-Qaeda, and tried to focus on its leader, Usama bin Laden. The East Africa Embassy bombings happened, USS Cole, many plots were disrupted in between, and I found myself kind of like forest gump in the middle of a lot of events that's happening so quickly, which gave me some insight and also gave me some front row seat to see history unfolding. I left the FBI back in 2005, and since then I'm still work in the field of national security with kind of like my fingers still on the pulse of the things that I know the most, which is terrorism and counter-terrorism. After 9-11, we responded swiftly to the threat of al-Qaeda. The organization that attacked us on 9-11 was basically dismantled in Afghanistan. Many of their leaders were arrested or were killed. Few of them found retirement in a Caribbean island in Guantanamo. Bin Laden was on the run, and it seems everything was getting a lot better, and then suddenly we decided to do exactly what al-Qaeda was anticipating us to do, basically invading Iraq. I remember early on, I remember early on when I was, just to see everyone, I remember early on when I was in Afghanistan and were really getting people on the battlefield, and they used to ask, did you invade Iraq yet? Did you invade Iraq yet? Why are we gonna invade Iraq? Because the Prophet predicted that a long time ago, you know, that the Armageddon battle between good and evil happened because there will be an invasion of Iraq where the nations fight over Iraq because they fight over the mountains of black gold that is under the rivers. So we did exactly, and actually some people really believed in that, really believed in that hadith, but that's gonna happen. That actually escaped Afghanistan and did not go towards Pakistan. They actually went towards Iraq to set up cells in Iraq. Abu Musab Zarqawi and a couple of his people were one of the first terrorists who made it all the way from Afghanistan. 16 years after 9-11, we still don't know the enemy. We don't know our enemy on a deep level. You know, Sun Tzu across the ages tells us that if you know your enemy and know yourself, you will win 100 times in 100 battles. But if you look at our political leaders today, if you look at our media today, look at even the academic discourse today, we always fight and argue among each other. Who is the enemy? What do we call them? Do we call them radical Islam? Are they Islamists? Are they just terrorists? We still did not delve deeply into the personality, into the characters of those people who are creating so much bloodshed and so much suffering around the world. And we always, every time we see a disaster, even the 9-11 itself, we hear people saying we could not imagine. Well, we could not imagine planes flying into buildings. You cannot imagine it's gonna take more troops to secure Iraq after the invasion than it's gonna take to defeat Saddam Hussein and his security services. This is something actually, Paul Wolfow said in Congress. And the 9-11 commission stated that, or found that the 9-11 attack was a failure of imagination. And that is actually, that's something we hear about all the time. We cannot wrap our hand around it. We cannot imagine what happened because our imagination is always limited. It's limited by our own knowledge. It's limited by our own expertise. It's limited by our own prejudices. It's limited by our own knowledge of history and how we view it. Which prism are we looking at events? I think we need to expand our imagination to include empathy. And I mean empathy, not sympathy. I separate them. Empathy, when I talk about empathy here, I talk empathy in the clinical sense, not in the colloquial sense. In the clinical sense to understand the enemy on this deep level, to understand their motivation, to understand how they view history, how they view religion, how they view current events, and how did they react to it in the past, and how they will possibly react to it in the future. So I decided to write a book, but I did not want the book to be like all the other terrorism books. One of them I wrote, The Black Banners. And there's a lot of other books outside. Some of them are really great. But we see ourselves every time we're reading a terrorism book. We read about policies. We read about history of organizations. We read about blaming each other. Who messed up here and who did what? We read mostly about politics, not about the people, the men and women who want us harmed. So I decided to write this book as a novel. And this novel have actually real characters. And each character is like a mule, a mule that carries a narrative. So Bin Laden is the first character, but rather than carrying the narrative from the time, he was kicked out of from Torah Bora until the Navy SEALs took him down, right? And everything that happened in between, his relationship with his commander, his relationship with his family members, his views of events, his views not only on 9-11, but how Al-Qaeda need to mutate after 9-11. His micromanagement style, when it deals with the organization, the brand, dealing with affiliates, sometimes he's even micromanaging a hostage negotiation in Algeria out of all places. He's telling the people Shabab in Somalia what type of crops they should plant. He's telling his commanders in Waziristan how to deal with global warming and how to store wheat just in case something happened. So you know a lot about his personalities, his views, and especially how his views shifted dramatically when he was watching the Arab Spring unfolding. He actually wrote his commanders and he told them, look, forget everything I told you before. I always told you the United States is the number one enemy. I always told you the West is the number one enemy. It is the head of the snake. You destroy the head of the snake, all these dictators will fall. I changed my mind now on this and I changed my mind because what we're witnessing today in the Middle East is something we did not see since the time of Saladin. He believed that what he called the blessed attacks on 9-11 made the United States so weak to come and support its puppets in Egypt, or in Libya, or in Tunisia. He believed that they accomplished their phase one of the fight against America. Now they have to create a situation where no other dictator can come and fill the vacuum and God forbid no democratic system will be established in order for the people to have the right to vote because in Sharia, this is the worst thing you can do. You're giving a Muslim and a non-Muslim a believer and a non-believer the same way in selecting what kind of government you're gonna have. So what happened here, he wanted to capitalize on this vacuum and he wanted Al-Qaeda and the affiliates to start embedding themselves in these local conflicts and take part of it and benefit from the geopolitical conflicts that's gonna happen in order who's gonna fill the vacuum. And what he did was actually very successful. That order that he gave before the bullets of the Navy SEALs took him down changed the whole power structures in the Middle East and gave Al-Qaeda a totally different future than the future that he was experiencing at the time. Bin Laden on the eve of 9-11 had 400 members. Today, Al-Qaeda in Syria alone under Hayat-Tahrir-Isham and al-Nusra and all the different affiliates that operates under Al-Qaeda's banner have almost 20,000. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the most effective organization and the most dangerous organization for the West because they were the closest to Bin Laden's narrative during a time period where Al-Qaeda Central was very weakened. You remember it was established by a person who was the chief of staff of Abu Bakr-e-Yemen, who was the chief of staff of Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, a person that I had the pleasure to put in jail in Yemen until he dug a tunnel, him and 20 other people and escaped from a high security jail. Those were the closest but they started to give Al-Awlaki, Anwar Al-Awlaki a platform to basically distribute the message of Al-Qaeda in the English language. They started Inspire magazine. They had a very good bomb maker that was involved in so many terrorist plots like the underwear bombing, for example, the cartage, the printer bombing and so forth. So this organization used to be a few hundreds before the Saudi war in Yemen. Today they have four to 5,000. In Somalia, Shabab is now about 7,000. An organization that were never able to, an affiliate that was never able to put its act together, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghrib. Finally, they were able to put their tribal differences, their ethnic differences aside. So now affiliates who were Hulani's or who were Tawaric or who were Arabs decided to pledge allegiance to the Arab leader or the Arab manager of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib, Abu Musab Abdul Wadood and through him to Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda Central. So we see the organization is growing because it's benefiting of all these regional chaotic situation and civil wars that exists actually in places like Syria, in places like Yemen, in places like Libya, in places like Assad. So Bin Laden with his last order literally changed the dynamic of the power structure in the Middle East and by shifting, by mutating the threat from just a terror threat to a threat that's embedded in the geopolitical conflict that's happening in the Middle East today. So then after Bin Laden, we have, after the Seals killed him, we have a situation where they needed to elect a new leader and they put an interim leader. The interim leader was Saif al-Adil, very well-known figure of Al-Qaeda, unlike many other members, many other Egyptians in the leadership, he did not have an out of allegiance to any other group but Al-Qaeda. He wasn't a member of the Islamic, Egyptian Islamic jihad, he wasn't a member of Islamic Gamma. He was with Bin Laden from the very beginning and he was virtually involved in every terrorist plot that took place against anyone in the world, to include the United States. He was involved in leading Al-Qaeda against US troops in Somalia, for example, with Black Hawk down. He was involved in the East Africa Embassy bombing. He was involved in the USS Cole and he was involved in the planning of 9-11 even though he was totally against the operation of 9-11, he thought it's gonna be disastrous and most of the traditional leaders of Al-Qaeda voted against the operation. It was Bin Laden and Zawahiri and some of the people that Zawahiri brought to Al-Qaeda with him after the merger of May 2001 who agreed with Bin Laden and Bin Laden actually did not get the vote in the Shura Council for the operation of 9-11 but he decided to go with it anyway. So Saif Al-Adil is an interesting character and through him, I introduced Al-Qaeda from day one. From the time they were just Arab Mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and they had no idea what they wanna do before they even established the organization until he was taken all the bayat from all the different affiliates to give it to Zawahiri who was already decided by Bin Laden to be the second in command so he's going to be the leader of the organization and then we go to the characters of the leaders of each one of the affiliates, how they join, what is their views. Some of these leaders did not wanna give bayat to Ayman Zawahiri. For example, the head of the Al-Qaeda in East Africa in the Horn of Africa, Haroon, he was involved in also many terrorist attacks to include the East Africa Embassy bombing. He basically told Saif Al-Adil, he used to be the chief of staff of Saif Al-Adil at one point, he told him that Ayman Zawahiri is a free loader. We don't consider him a member of Al-Qaeda just because he fooled the shake, it doesn't mean that he can fool us. Who the heck is Ayman Zawahiri to be our leader? And later on Haroon was killed at a security checkpoint and the leader who took over gave his bayat to Ayman Zawahiri. I don't make any judgments about any of these kind of things. I just want the reader to make the judgment. Was Zawahiri involved in the killing? Wasn't he involved in the killing? Did they leak something about him? That's not, I don't know it, I'm not gonna let the reader make their own judgment about these kind of things. But then the most rogue of all these affiliates was Al-Qaeda in Iraq, that created so many headaches, not only for Zawahiri, but also for Osama bin Laden himself. To the point that Osama bin Laden established a committee to deal just with the affiliate in Iraq. And they were mad because of few things. First of all, Zarqawi, without taking their permission, he didn't attack against weddings in Jordan. And that really annoyed them to the point that the chief of staff of Osama bin Laden wrote a letter and he said, before you start doing all these things, you know, without any permission, focus on the stuff that we're telling you about. And that's not a joke, we're serious about that. And then Ayman Zawahiri sent a letter in 2005, basically trying to put some sense into Zarqawi. His attacks against the Shia were really hurting the brand of Al-Qaeda. But also the way that he was conducting terrorism in Iraq, bin Laden felt it's hurting their brand. So Zawahiri tells him, why do you behead someone when a bullet can do the job? But they are not fighting about the killing, they are just fighting about how it will look if people are watching television. So they are mostly worried about the brand of it, not about the act of killing itself. Zarqawi was not a member of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. So he had his own views of how to do things, and his views were basically Taqfiri views. That means if you don't agree with me, I will kill you. You're already an infidel regardless if you're a Muslim or non-Muslim. And he told bin Laden, he said, so if this guy have a blonde hair, he's gonna be, you know, I can kill him, but if he has a black hair and dark skin, I cannot kill him, even though they are doing the same things against the Mujahideen, what are you guys talking about? So you can see that division that started to take root as early as Al-Qaeda in Iraq was established. Another point that made Al-Qaeda central very annoyed and very upset with Zarqawi is the letters and the people that were Qaeda supporters who came to Afghanistan or sent letters to Afghanistan, to Zawahiri and to bin Laden, telling them that this guy is killing so many people unjustly using your name. Anbar province alone, which is a big Sunni province in Iraq, Zarqawi and his henchmen mostly were from Tunisia, even at the time, mostly from Tunisia and Libya. They killed more than 250 Sunni scholars, 250 Sunni scholars. They evacuated the Sunni towns and the Sunni cities and the Sunni neighborhoods in Al-Anbar from any religious, you know, from all the religious, the real religious establishments. So that actually put a lot of pressure on Osama bin Laden, but at the same time, they needed Zawahiri, they needed Zarqawi because this is the biggest front of Jihad at the time and they cannot just say, no, they tried to advise him, but they were actually, I think, a little bit relieved, I believe, by his death. But then you see the roots of the Islamic State starting at that time. And then, you know, we get to Zawahiri, who basically now, say, Phil Adan, get all the affiliates to pledge their allegiance, get the members of the Shura councils to pledge their allegiance, and then Zawahiri is the leader. And Zawahiri is a very interesting character. He has full of contradictions. He's a guy who is a doctor, he's a surgeon, but also at the same time, he orders suicide bombing and killed little children in Egypt. He is a guy that suffered in Egyptian jails, but he has no problem torturing people if they were in Al-Qaeda's custody. He was considered a doctor for many, a wise man for some, a traitor for the Islamic State later on. So through Zawahiri, Zawahiri is the donkey, kind of like, you know, in a literally sense that carries the narrative of the Middle East, understanding the Arab Spring, understanding the Middle East. He has been active since the 60s with all these kind of things that's happening. So we'll have a better understanding of the modern Middle East. But throughout all these characters when I'm talking about them, you see us, you see us, you know, kind of discussing religion, discussing history, because it's important, because this message that they have is rooted in history, this message that they have is rooted in culture, it's rooted even in theological interpretation that existed since the death of the Prophet and continued to exist until today. And then you have the war in Syria that gave a new life, not only for Al-Qaeda, but for even the Islamic State. At the time, the Islamic State of Iraq where most of the leaders were just hiding in the Western desert. The surge worked. Al-Qaeda was a dying breed. But then the war in Syria and the amount of money and the amount of funding and the amount of resources that was poured into Syria in order to get rid of Assad in a few months played directly into the hand of these extremists. Most of the people, you know, to include, frankly, Turkey, at the time they did not care who's coming. They did not care who's receiving the aid and who's receiving the money. They had one goal and one goal only to get rid of Assad. And at the time they used to say, hey, by September, Assad won't be there. And then we will deal with these people. But, you know, everybody has a different agenda here. And it seems the bad guys prevailed. And that created a big division in the global jihadi movement. So now you have the Islamic State that sends their fighters to include the current leader of al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Muhammad Al-Jilani. He used to be one of the commanders of Al-Baghdadi in the head of ISIS. And they were able to be very effective fighting group, especially in the north against the Assad regime. At that time, Al-Baghdadi realized that Al-Jilani might be doing something on his own. He was worried that Al-Jilani might try to establish his own affiliate independent of the Islamic State in Iraq. So they mentioned, he put an audio tape and he said, we established the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And our brothers in al-Nusra, they are my soldiers and all of us, you know, we don't believe in Saik Spicao and it's one, one jihad. Al-Jilani actually did something so unexpected. He put his own tape, responding to Baghdadi, say, well, our brothers in Iraq didn't coordinate with us. We have no idea what they are talking about. The jihad in Syria, I'm paraphrasing a lot, but the jihad in Syria is very different than the jihad in Iraq. They had a sharia judge, they did not agree on the results. So they went to Zawahiri and Zawahiri sided with Al-Jilani against Baghdadi. So Baghdadi and ISIS said, okay, you know what? We really don't care about you. Who the heck are you? You have a ba'a to a guy named Mullah Omar, nobody who know who he is. We established the state, we have a state. You have to give a ba'a. We don't have to give you ba'a. We are the real followers of bin Laden. We are the real Al-Qaeda, you're nothing. And then the group separated. So now you have the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria, which they don't call themselves that anymore. They call themselves a caliphate, because according to them, they reestablished the caliphate and you have that big division that happened. But that division is rooted in the chapter that you will read about the war in Iraq, which is not called the war in Iraq, it's called the Zarkawi chapter. You will see the ideological differences, the impact of bathists and how the bathists and the jihadis get together in Buka camp and created that French-time monster that's called ISIS today, that's half bin Laden, half Saddam. So we go from there to understanding the geopolitical crisis or chaos that it created the Syria civil war. And without understanding the interests of some of these countries that's involved in Syria, I think it will be very difficult to wrap our hands around it. So Erdogan is a very important character. What's his views? What is his politics? What was he trying to accomplish in joining the Syria war? And how can we talk about Syria without talking about Iran? So Qasem Soleimani is a very good character to understand not only the influence of the Shi'ite militias in Iraq and in Syria, but also the influence of Al-Quds force. Qasem Soleimani today literally can drive his car all the way from Tehran to southern Lebanon in areas all controlled by people who operates under his command. And this is really interesting, but who is he as a person and how does his personality reflect Iranian interests in the region? Even in the war in Syria, characters like Abu Qadadi Suri, that's a fascinating character. There was a guy that was with Al-Qaeda but never pledged by us. He was always with Abu Mus'ab Suri and they had their own thing in Afghanistan. And frankly, they did not like Al-Qaeda much a couple of times because Al-Qaeda had their training camps, but then he became the spokesperson, he became the personal representative for Ayman Zawahiri in Syria. And he was killed by ISIS out of all people, but he was released from jail by the Assad regime. He was able to establish with people who left jail with him, all former jihadis, Ahra Al-Sham. And Ahra Al-Sham was being marketed as like a brotherhood type moderate. They are not involved with Al-Qaeda. They are not involved with ISIS. And they got a lot of support from countries in the region, Gulf countries and even Turkey. Turkey continued to support them. But then we found out that all this money that's going to Ahra Al-Sham, all the money and the funding that's going to Ahra Al-Sham, Abu Qadadi Suri was actually funneling it to al-Nusra, to Al-Qaeda. And the treasury department put a note on him saying exactly that. When al-Nusra and of ISIS separated and these two Qaeda affiliates start fighting with each other, we finally heard Zawahiri saying, he is my representative in Syria. You negotiate with him. And he sided with the Syrian side of Al-Qaeda so he was killed by ISIS. So I hope that that book in a small little way to create that sort of empathy that we need in order to understand our enemy on a deeper level so we can defeat them. I hope that we understand where they are coming from and what are the issues that can be used against them and what are the incubating factors that's feeding into terrorism, that's feeding into extremism today. We've seen what happened in Manchester. We've seen what happened in New York and Chelsea. We've seen what happened in San Bernardino. We've seen what happened in Orlando, in Nice. Today, more and more we're moving away from an organizational threat to a message. The boundaries, ideological boundaries is basically dimming day after day. ISIS is dwindling. They are losing their caliphate. They are going back to an underground terrorist organization but in the same time, Al-Qaeda and the message of Al-Qaeda is getting to come back because it's becoming a message not really an organization. And I hope with this book, I hope by writing it the way I did, I can contribute to better understanding of the threat because until today, we still have no idea what we're fighting. We still fight with each other about what we call that threat. So hopefully, hopefully, by delving into the personalities, by delving into the characters of people who wanna do us harm, we can finally answer the call of Sun Tzu and know our enemy. So we can win a thousand times in a thousand battles. Six years ago, we killed Osama bin Laden. But I think we can all agree that Al-Qaeda lives. We can all agree that his message lives. So how do we counter that message? And hopefully, I'll stop here and somebody will ask these questions and we'll talk about it. Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you Ali, that was brilliant. Do you think Al-Qaeda and ISIS can get together? Yes. What would it take? Would it require some of the personalities to no longer be with us? Absolutely, so that's what happened. I mean, we know that ISIS is actually a branch of Al-Qaeda's poisonous tree. ISIS hates Aiman Zawahiri. They cannot stand him, right? He's a hateable guy. And he's a very hateable guy. I mean, my God, try to watch as a wafer he takes. Five minutes into it, you wanna blow yourself up, right? The guy is the most boring human being you can ever imagine. First of all, I think Al-Qaeda is looking at it this way. Let's focus on the affiliates. Let's keep our heads down and let these idiots of ISIS take over, right? We're good. And every now and then, if the threat is going down, we can issue statements for Mujahideen in the West, like the statement issued by Bin Laden's son Saturdays ago, to do terrorist attack and to kill the enemy. So what's gonna happen is, when there is no caliphate anymore, the Bayad that most of these jihadis gave to Baghdadi seems to exist, because there is no state. A lot of people talk, oh, we'll do a cyber caliphate. The caliphate is a land, okay? The title, the motto of the caliphate, baqia wa tatham adad, remaining and expanding. So now, it's definitely not expanding and definitely it does not seem to be remaining. So what's gonna happen when they lose in Iraq, what's gonna happen, they lose in Syria. They lose the state, but they did not lose a message. They did not lose a narrative. So if Al-Qaeda, and I believe that's their trump card and I talked, you know, no pun intended here, that's their trump card and I talk about it in the book. So what happened here is, what Al-Qaeda will do, you will see Ayman Zawahiri move it, either retiring or whatever a head of terrorist organization does when he's not the head of the terrorist organization. And I think Hamza bin Laden will take over. And Hamza bin Laden is a really interesting character. But Hamza bin Laden, he put so far five messages and the five message, five or six actually, last Saturday was the sixth one. And in none of these messages he attacked ISIS. None of these messages he attacked the caliphate. That is a job Al-Qaeda put in Zawahiri's hands. Zawahiri, every time he put a message he attacked ISIS. Hamza bin Laden talked about the narrative of his father. Talk about all these people who follow his father. And he mentions Iraq, he mentions Syria, he mentions Yemen, he mentions Somalia, he mentions Libya, he mentions Algeria. He mentions everywhere, right? So he is being presented by Al-Qaeda as the person who inherited the Samab bin Laden, not only his name, not only his name, but also his message. And Hamza, if you listen to his states, he tried to do two things. He tried to have the tone of his dad copying the same tone as the Samab bin Laden, calm, quiet, collected. But in the same time, he is using his message, his father's terminology, exact sentences that Osama bin Laden used to say in his speeches or in his tracks, Hamza is repeating them today. Which is really interesting. Another thing that Hamza is doing is going back to the root cause of the whole thing. The declaration of Jihad of 1996. In his very recent message, he said, look, when you do terrorist attack in the West, try to kill a lot of people. So he's basically telling ISIS, stop with this stupid thing, some guy with a knife. Try to kill a lot of people, try to create a lot of damage. Do suicide attacks, march to them operation. Remember all the brothers and what they did before. But also in the same time, he said, always leave a message of why you did what you did. And I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna give you commandments. What is the message going to be? It's going to be about the land of the two holy places is occupied. Well, we didn't hear that since 9-11. That's something bin Laden used. That's a title of the declaration of Jihad of 1996. Expelled the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula. And that was the sole reason behind the Fatwa of 1998 that started all the religious justification of all the terrorism attacked by Al-Qaeda. Number two, Gaza and Palestine. So the West need to know that they will never live in peace until we live in peace in Palestine. And that's a statement actually taken exactly from his dad, right? Number three, they are stealing our wealth and stealing our money in order to protect, to take it away and the United States will protect all these dictators in the region. Guess what? That's exactly from the 1996 Declaration of Jihad. There's only one thing that he added that wasn't in his dad's terminology early on. And Peter knows about his dad's terminology. He interviewed his dad about these issues. One thing, and it's Syria. So now he said, what's happening in Asham, which is Syria, the atrocities of the Assad regime and what Russia is doing make them a target. That is the only thing that he added to his father because Syria now is a big thing, especially among these people. So I think in a situation where there is no caliphate, in a situation where Zawahiri is not the leader, and Hamza is suddenly the leader of Al-Qaeda, I think many people will go back to Hamza because he is a bin Laden. Remember, bin Laden is the godfather of this message. Bin Laden is the person who planted that poisonous tree and now it's big with many different branches. It's bin Laden, so it means a lot. And bin Laden was plotting, actually, to put Hamza, I believe, on that path. I'll give you an example. Hamza was, when bin Laden last saw Hamza, it was in Jalalabad under an olive tree. And bin Laden was trying to escape to Pakistan at the time. And he was with Hamza, his son Khalid, also at that time, who was about 13, 14 years old, exactly like Hamza. He was with Bakr and I think Khalid and Bakr and Hamza. And bin Laden said goodbye to them. He gave each one of them a Masbaha, a praying bead. And Hamza, that image remained imprinted in his conscience. He actually talked to his dad, wrote to his dad about it. He said, that is the thing that I think about all the time. He said, I cannot, I said, I felt at the time, me and my brother, that somebody pulled our livers from our body and just dropped them there. And they saw his dad, their dad walk away. And that was the last time Hamza saw his dad. Hamza went to Iran with his mother. In Iran, he was arrested with so many other members of al-Qaeda. They went from some sort of jails to house arrest, to compound arrest. And the compound was divided into three different sections. The top leaders and the family of Osama bin Laden was in one camp and the tier two were another camp and tier three were in the third camp. And in his camp, he had his mother with him, Khairiyah. And Khairiyah had a lot of influence on Osama bin Laden. She was more than a wife. She was actually an advisor. She was a consulier. Osama bin Laden, when Khairiyah was released in jail just before he was killed, he really wanted her to come and join him in a barabad. And- Korea has a PhD. Korea has a PhD. She's actually older than Osama bin Laden. And she- So she went to- He really wanted her to come and join him. And his commander, since Althea Alibi at the time who was his chief of staff, he was like a shake. You know, we have to do it in a secure way. And he told him that, look, if you don't bring her, I will come and pick her up. So you can imagine Althea was like, this guy lost his mind. Then we know later when he understood how important it is to just wait. But we understand why he wanted her to come. Because bin Laden was preparing for a message for the 10th anniversary of Mani Laden. And he needed Khairiyah to help him out with that message. He actually told her in a letter. He said, do you understand how this important to us? It seems like something from House of Cards when they are talking to each other. You know, it's like, this is so important to us. And I need your eyes and I need your judgment on it. And I told Althea to buy you a computer and USB card so start please working on that message. It's extremely important. And then Khairiyah made it, but her son did not come with her. And Usama at the time had other sons after they were released from jail in Iran just before he was killed based on a negotiation that took place to release some hostages. After he came, he wanted Hamza to come over. And he actually took the driver's, the fraudulent driver's license of Khaled because they are at the same age. And he sent it to Atiyah. And he said, I want Hamza to come. But you have also your sons, Muhammad and Osman and their family. He said, I put them in a shower, but I want Hamza to come. And then Khairiyah wrote a letter to Hamza just before they took the laden down, we took the laden down, the seals did. She basically said, your brother has a lot of big plans for you and he wanted to teach you personally. So he wants you to come. Hamza was really excited about his accomplishment when he was in jail in Iran. He told his father that he studied religion, the way bin Laden sees religion. What kind of books you read? He said, I am now forged like steel and I am ready to march with the Mujahideen. He told his father that in the letter. And basically Hamza had around him more brain thrust of al-Qaeda than bin Laden had when he was escaping. Hamza had three or four members of the Shura council founding members of al-Qaeda with him in the same compound. So imagine for about eight years, those guys are with you every day, training you, guiding you, but also in the same time, your mother pushing you because Khairiyah seems to be like words in bin Laden, pushing you towards that path. And he actually told that to his father. And his father was very proud. And then he told him, by the way, I wanna tell you something. I'm a father now. And I get married to the daughter of Abu Muhammad al-Masri who's a leader of al-Qaeda. He has been with al-Qaeda from the very beginning. He was a member of the Shura. He is actually, he's still alive. He's still in the leadership. We believe that he is the number two now in the organization. He was at one point in charge of all the trainings in Afghanistan. He is known as Saleh, the mastermind of the East Africa Embassy bombing. So he did what his father wanted to do before with his brother Muhammad and the daughter of Abu Hafs al-Masri. They married the Egyptian with the non-Egyptians together. He actually married the daughter of Abu Muhammad al-Masri. And he told his father, now I have a boy and a girl. I named the boy Osama after you and I named the girl Hariyah after my mom and God only created them to serve you. And he signed the letter Abu Usama which I'm sure will not have been very proud of. And let me ask you Adi because so we, everything, almost everything you've just said to us is based on the letters that came out of the compound. So tell us, give us your assessment of how useful those letters were. What are the highlights of these? What are the things we learned from them? Not all of them have been released. We've had four releases so far. There's a narrative on the right that the Obama administration kind of kept some stuff back because it didn't fit with their narrative that Al Qaeda was on the right. I'm wondering what you think about that. So just give us your overall assessment of the letter. Well, you know, the letters were important in so many different ways to piece together some of the missing puzzles. But the letters were not the only documents that helped me put that story together. There is the letters. There is the messages of the Latin. There is the messages of his commanders. There is events that took a place in, for example, what we were talking about, the negotiation. Well, there was French hostages and there was negotiations with AQIM. Was the Senate Intelligence Committee report useful as well, but it seems to me there was a lot of information. Well, yeah, absolutely. All these declassified stuff were, but all the declassified stuff to include the letters were probably about 10% of the book. In order to have a better idea of what's happening, you need to go and not only listen to the statements of these guys, but see events. See how events unfolded in Iraq, for example. See what the different Sunni groups were saying at the time. And that definitely helped when you find a letter in Bin Laden's house, basically saying the same thing. So you know that these guys actually made it all, that message made it all the way to Osama Bin Laden. And the great thing about the letters also is Bin Laden had no expectations that the Navy Seals were gonna pay him a visit, right? So they're, this is unfiltered. This is not, this is for private consumption. Right, and he never thought that anyone, you know, like in some of the letters he tells how to, yeah, this is only for you. Not even the Shura Council members can look at this letter. This is only for you. And here I am reading it on my computer from dna.gov, right? So it's really interesting to see this. But there are, as you know, thousands of pages that has been released for different releases. But these releases are not enough. If you're not connecting it to events, if not connected it to unfolding circumstances that's happening in different places, but it's in the context. The letters are very hard to interpret often if you don't know a lot about what's going on because, you know, almost everybody's referred to by a student name, right? Yeah, like he didn't say Abu Muhammad al-Masri in his name. You know, he calls him, for example, a zayyad or he calls him, like every time he calls him something else, but you know, a person that was working him during the East Africa Embassy bombing, I know exactly who he was talking about. Even Osama bin Laden, frankly, was confused in one letter, he said, look, don't confuse me with all these aliases. Use the original alias. I have no idea how many times you change these guys' aliases. He said, you can use a different alias, a different Abu name, if it's extremely important. But I have no idea who you're talking about here. So it's interesting to see that internal dynamics. Yeah, the letters were probably, they contributed probably about 10% to some of the conclusion of the book because it's important to know how they are thinking. And remember, this book is about delving into their personality. So it's not about us, it's not about what we did and we didn't do. Sometimes these issues come, like the invasion of Iraq come. Let the reader make their conclusion. I don't wanna make any conclusion about was it good or was it bad. Torture come. Let the reader make their conclusion. Was it good or was it bad, and so forth. Well, let's open up the question. If you have a question, can you wait for the mic and identify yourself? We'll start with this lady over here. Hi there. Hi. So how can these, Did you identify yourself? Susanna Seltzer, Carnegie Mellon University. How can these stories and understanding the motivations of the leaders help us handle, let's say, foreign fighters who return from ISIS and potentially al-Qaeda as well, today, who return to the West. And as a follow up, I mean, what's your take on Manchester right now? Given what we now know. I think by understanding, this book is not about the leaders. This book about showing how the message morphed and how the terror threatened over the years. And I think, you know, I wanted to write a terrorism book like Michael Lewis will write, you know, a Wall Street book. You know, it makes it interesting so people can read it, people can understand it, and people can kind of like relate to what's going on, have a better understanding. And this is why it's important, because it shows the importance of the message now. It shows that the message is exactly the real threat. Organizations might change. Today we have ISIS, tomorrow we'll have ISIS. Who knows? They'll name it something else. But the message will continue. And we need to combat the message. And then we need to combat today the incubating factors that feed into the message. So yes, foreign fighters. Why do we have foreign fighters? There are so many different reasons. I mean, the French will have different reasons and the Belgians will have different reasons in both of them. But towards the end, there's one thing in common. There's a conflict zone that's attracting all the foreign fighters to go to Iraq and Syria. So these civil wars that exist in places like Iraq, in places like Yemen, in places like Syria, this is one of the number one magnet that's attracting these kind of folks and giving them the imagery that they need in order to be inspired and in order to go crazy. So one of these things that we need to do is we need to find diplomatic and political solutions for these conflicts. There is no zero sum war here, right? So you will get that by reading about these characters and reading about their stories. You'll know how all these things get together. So towards the end, the last chapter called slaying the hydra. I consider this message as a hydra. Every time we chop off a head, including the laden's head, two grows up, right? So how do we slay the hydra? So let's deal with the incubating factors that's feeding the message today. Civil wars is one of them. Sectarianism, as long as you have regional countries in the Middle East using sectarianism to gain geopolitical influence and to battle each other, these groups will benefit tremendously. Narrative, how do we counter the narrative? I'm not saying about the narrative here, theology, that comes, but the narrative of these groups saying the West is at war with Islam. The United States is at war with Islam. 95% of the people they kill are Muslims. Look at the hypocrisy. They justify doing an attack in Manchester because Muslim kids and Muslim little girls and little boys are being killed in the Middle East. But in the same time, you see ISIS and you see Al-Qaeda and you see the slaughter and the killing and what they are doing to different people to include Muslims, to include Sunnis who don't believe in what they believe in. It's blowing up markets in Baghdad or in Istanbul or blowing up mosques in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to include a terrorist attack on the mosque of the prophet himself where the prophet is buried. I mean, and you say the West and the United States is at war with Islam, so let's expose the hypocrisy. So there's a lot of things in that chapter points out what we need to do. But to summarize them all, we need to develop a strategy. So far, we have tactics. So far, we think the military can do everything and we have the best military in the world, so let them deal with it. No, the military, there is time for the military approach and it's important and I believe in it, but also at the same time, there is diplomats who needs to do their job. Aid programs that need to focus on what we need to do, not to help some other people that would like to help under the cover of aid. So there are a lot of things. We need to have a comprehensive strategy. Unfortunately, since 9-11, we never had a comprehensive strategy. We have series of tactics and these tactics work, right? But collectively, if you put them all together over the years, they basically accumulate a strategic disaster. Drone is a tactic, drone is not strategy. So how can we fit drones into a wider strategy? These are the things that we need to do because the foreign fighters and the threat of foreign fighters that we have around the world, not only in the West. Yes, from the West, we have about 5,000. From the United States, we have about 150. But from Tunisia, you have about 6,000. From the former Soviet republics, you have about 7,000. So it's a global problem and my group is only the very first group that's not talking about these things early on, the threat of foreign fighters. And we put a couple of studies about that. And the reason we were very intrigued by it is because of what we've seen with the foreign fighters during the Soviet jihad. And how that led to the 1993 bombing in the World Trade Center, to terrorist stop, and to the threat of al-Qaeda. And everybody knows what al-Qaeda did. So these are the things, this is why it's really important to understand the enemy, understand their narratives, understand their motivation, understand the lenses that they see the world through. And then based on that, you can start developing strategy to counter their narrative, counter their message. And there are people that, the military solution is the only solution. There are people that we need to kill. People who are inside these groups, and I say that all the time and I always get attacked, but there's only two ways out, the bullet or the cuffs. But then in the same time, we have to prevent more people from joining. Because if we keep killing them, but they have more recruits, this war will never end. So Salman Abedi appears to be a foreign fighter. And we don't, I mean, he certainly was in Libya recently. His brother may be a member of ISIS, according to the military. So what do you make, I mean obviously it's a developing story, but what do you make of, what does this look like? Well, it's just another example of that threat that has been growing in Western society, with people who are, for a reason or another, alienated, disenfranchised, whatever you want to call them. And then groups like ISIS or groups like Al-Qaeda come and brainwash them. I think the story in Manchester, I'm not a quick, I'm not there yet to make a judgment. There are so many different factors in it. First of all, the father, Ramadan Abedi, appeared to be a member of the Libyan Fighting Group. He was in Manchester as part of the cell of the Libyan Fighting Group cell over there. I was involved in countering that cell back in, I think 1999. We were trying to catch Anif Liby at the time he was there. And this is where we found the Manchester manual. So I work with our partners both in Manchester and at the time it was SO-13 before they combined SO-12 and SO-13 together as the SO-13, the counterterrorism, anti-terrorism branch. So we know that there were a cell over there. He worked in the same group with Ali Balha, who's now head of the militia, I think the militia, the rest of the sun. So there are a lot of questions, kind of weird. His father appeared to be very sympathetic if not a member of Al-Qaeda. We don't know yet. This is just allegations out there that's coming from different sources in Libya and in the Middle East. But then the sun appeared to be maybe connected to people or supporters of the so-called Islamic State. And I think this is what I'm talking about, how the threat is warping and how we're gonna start seeing cross-pollination. Because towards the end, it is a message. Now ISIS claims responsibility for anything. So if somebody fell down the stairs and there's a Muslim guy behind him, they will say, hey, ISIS, we did it. We inspired the guy to push him. And we've seen that. But usually, what was interesting about, what's interesting about ISIS, usually they listen to, even if they have nothing to do with the threat, they listen to the media reports. We've seen that in San Bernardino. We've seen that in Orlando. They wait to see, did we inspire that guy in any shape or form? So if he said the caliphate, I pledge by ISIS, then they will say, okay, we were behind it. We consider him a soldier of the caliphate. But that raises an interesting question. Because when we think about terrorist groups taking responsibility for actions in a previous era, we would have thought, if the IRA took responsibility for bombing, because the IRA trained and directed. Now, so should we broaden our sense of what responsibility means? Because from ISIS's point of view, it doesn't matter if they're inspired, directed, enabled, or trained. So, and the fact is, they did inspire the people in San Bernardino and in Orlando. So, and if you're the victim of one of these attacks, I mean, or the family, if ISIS inspired it, does it make any difference really whether? I mean, so, because I actually think that when ISIS takes responsibility for something, they usually, there is usually some merit to it, right? They will take responsibility things that they are not directly involved with, but I haven't seen them take responsibility to something that they have absolutely nothing to do with in terms of inspiration. Well, there's two different things. Yeah, in terms of inspiration. But now they believe they inspired Muslims around the world because of their social media and everything. So, for example, there is no operational relationship whatsoever between them and between Rahimi in New York and Chelsea Baumer. But Rahimi mentioned in his notes the message of Al-Adnani. But he also mentioned- He also mentioned Al-Aulaki. Al-Aulaki, but they claimed it anyway, even though there is no connection whatsoever. But him mentioning Adnani by itself was enough for them to claim it. So, if somebody mentions any, and that's what I was talking about. I agree with you. That's what I was talking about before that we have to think less about the organization and more about the message. I 100% agree. But you've said something. So, just going back to something you said. Obviously, if there's an Iraqi civil war and a Syrian civil war that continues and sectarianism that continues. So, I don't think the Syrian civil war is going to be settled in my professional lifetime. The Iraqi civil war maybe there's a little bit more hope. And sectarianism seems to be gathering strength, not receding. And go back to the thing you said about Hamza, and Gaza, and Palestine. Look, he's the only guy talking about this. Most of these people are talking about Iran, and Shias, and that's what's driving this now. So, if that's all true, I mean, we're going to be looking at a son of ISIS, a grandson of ISIS, this is not going away. Because the political accommodation is necessary, they're not happening. I agree. So, this is the kind of Iraqi depressing for the Middle East, this is terrible. You know, and I am not really optimistic. However, I think if we start putting the pressure on regional countries, to start at least stopping the funding that we know is going towards funding extremist and terrorist groups, both on the Shias side and the Sunni side, I think this one, this is going to expand. Well, let me ask you a direct question about that. You, when David Bradley is on the channel of the board here, is a board member here, and widely well understood that you and David went to the Qataris to get, not Austin Pikes, to have had North out. Work in progress. Yeah, but so what is the role with the Qataris and Nusra, and how do you assess all that? Well, I think when you want to talk about, to be frank, when you want to talk about the Qataris role in Syria, you have to look into Turkey, because Qatar and Turkey was very close to each other. Yes, they are more towards Qarisham and other groups, but they are also, like for example, the example that you gave, the group that helped us tremendously, pressure, or the Qataris used them to pressure on Nusra to release the hostages of Al-Qa'an group. Who were they? Al-Qa'an is kind of like a Muslim brotherhood side to the group at the beginning, that was, you know, the Islamic extremists, but they were from the approved list, I believe. Okay. So a lot of these groups were working very closely with Al-Qa'an anyway, you know, and they continue to work very closely with them. I mean, the Syrian opposition publicly disagreed with the United States to put on Nusra as a terrorist organization. And Nusra has a lot of legitimacy in Syria. In Syria, absolutely, and this is what makes it... What is the source of their legitimacy? Well, at the beginning, I think they didn't have it as much. I think they, the opposition, the opposition were weak. And then Nusra and Al-Qa'i, they brought a lot of expertise in fighting urban warfare, in providing suicide bombers of something that did not exist in Syria. That's what's known to the Syrian people. And it gave them, it gave them some legitimacy. And frankly, most of the people who were real, kind of like rebels who wanted democracy and everything, let's be frank about it, they laughed. They went to Turkey, they went to Europe. They're just like, we're out of here. And the people who remained are all Islamists. And I don't wanna say all, but the majority of the people who left are Islamists. So what you're dealing with today in Syria, you're not dealing in a situation of black and white. You're dealing with different shades of gray and we just have to choose which gray we're gonna live with. The question I started back to is a former senior police officer in Pakistan, now a professor of National Defense University, a fellow at New America, an expert on Shia's unique issues and writing a book about it. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. For context. Yeah, great. I appreciate that. Thank you for your outstanding contribution. Looking forward to reading your book. One quick question is about Hamza. If he was in Iran for so long, Iranian intelligence must have tried to recruit him. Were they talking to him? Do we know anything? And one is a broader question. You're right about historical context and empathy. There's a debate among the academics of policy as well, whether should we frame this whole religious extremism in the Islamic context in a Shia Sunni thing? Or is it more in a contemporary sense Saudi versus Iran? Well, when we talk about the use of sectarianism, and I mentioned Saudi and Iran, they are using sectarianism. They are using religion. And they are putting it over the fire of politics. So towards the end, does it really matter to Sunnis and Shia who are killing each other because the Iranians and the Saudis are funding them and pushing them to do so? So Saudi can have more regional influence in the region, or Iran can have more regional influence in the region. It's kind of like trying to debate was the war in Northern Ireland a sectarian war or political war? Was it a war between the Protestant and Catholic? Or was it a war between something else? Towards the end, I agree it's all about politics. But the people who are killing themselves and killing each other in Iraq and in Syria and in Yemen, they are not looking at it also as politics. I think that part is becoming part of it. And frankly, I see it on the Sunni side more than I see it on the Shia side. With Hamza, we don't know. But it was very obvious that when he came out of jail, at least from the letters that were found, and that's everything that we know about the letters when it comes to this question. He had a lot of animosity against the Shia and against the Raqidah and against the Iranians because he was in jail. Even though he was able to get married, he was able to have two children being scalded by some of the top leaders of al-Qaeda, his mother with him, he feels that he was treated horribly by Iranian al-Iraq. Did you book the exile? Yeah, I didn't have a chance to read it yet. And I stepped into it. But I mean, the al-Qaeda people were treated very badly by the Iranians, it seems. I mean, they really would give it an article. Yeah, but at the same time, when I read in an article with bin Laden's daughter who used to go on a shopping spree with the Iranians and put them back. And then they say, oh, they treated us horribly. Yeah, well, I think we need to have them visited one time all day. Yeah, that Caribbean got away. Let me ask you just one more question about that. Why did the Iranians think he was thinking about, they kept these bin Laden family members, leaders of al-Qaeda for almost a decade, right? Right. And they were under house arrest. They were weak in debate whether it was nice house arrest or what was, and then again, you said they were released because of this hostage swap. So what was the motivation of the Iranians? Because after all, they must have been concerned that the United States sees these al-Qaeda members in Iran. George Bush says the axis of evil invades Iraq. You know, might the United States use this as sort of a casus belly or some reason to really kind of attack them. So what was their, why did they do that? I think leverage, when you have the family of bin Laden and some of the top leaders, it gives them a leverage. And you see that leverage in a totally different context when Zawahiri sent a letter to Zarkawi and said, calm down, dude. We have a lot of prisoners with the Iranians. So that gives you an idea about this. This is one, and I'm sure they have many different things that they are thinking about, but a leverage against al-Qaeda from doing any operations in Sunni areas in Iran or to have better control of what they do in places like Iraq, for example. A leverage against Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was really frustrated to the point that he had a long, long letter to Zawahiri, telling Zawahiri to send a letter to the Iranian and basically he wrote the letter to him. And he's basically saying, hey, Hassan Nasrallah, the Israeli skiktar Hassan Nasrallah from Lebanon and he escaped to Iran. Will you put him in jail? So why are you putting our people in jail? Is it because they are Sunnis? That's your problem? It's a long, long fuming message. But I think it kept the Qaeda rhetoric when it comes to sectarianism at bay. Did the Red Cross get, I mean, how were the letters getting from al-Qaeda or bin Laden, family matters too, bin Laden? Were there any letters that were coming when they were in the Iranians? From the members? No. I think the only message that came out was when Saad was able to escape and came over but then Saad was killed in a drone attack and a lot of information about what's happening in the jail came. And bin Laden, he knew the details about what happened during that time is when Anas al-Libi was released from jail. So he sent this very, very long letter describing the details of what happened when they were in jail and that letter has been really, right, it's not a hit. Anas al-Farsak, a leadership trainer. In fact, I focus on Arab youth and the use of narrative in constructed positive change. My question has to do more with what we're talking about, the alternative narrative, right, there's an attraction to the competence of Hezbollah or the competence of ISIS and them achieving results and the dismal record of Arab regimes, right? Right. In your opinion, from that empathy, right? What would be an alternative narrative? What would be an alternative? What alternative needs to be out there to be more attractive than to let somebody like the famous Egyptian activist who was very active in the revolution in Egypt to lose faith and just go fight and die in Syria. And related to that, do you see the symbolism of in fact Hamza being the leader, again, I'm taking from your suggestion of empathy for the Arab youth to see Hamza, especially with Hamza's symbolism in Islam, right? Like he was the warrior, right? That when the Muslim, he converted to Islam, that was a big boon, right? And the same time, Khairi, being the son of Khairi, who's playing the role like Khadija, right? Is that kind of symbolism very strong, do you think? I think, frankly, most of the people have no idea that Hamza is the uncle of the Prophet. He was the very first martyr in Islam, Khadija, I mean. People know about it. We think that every Muslim knows so much about their religion and so deep into it. I think they will look at Hamza, wow, bin Laden is son, bin Laden is back, right? I think this is, so we can make a lot of, some people, I'm sure, they will make some symbolism. You know, their academics, they will make that symbolism like, you know, like we will make these symbolism. So I'm sure this is something, an interesting thing to talk about. However, the narrative, I'm, look, I'm really pessimistic, frankly, about this for a few reasons. Number one, we can do as many counter narrative as we can, but as long as there is these wars going on that's attracting these people, it's creating the images that's inspiring people. It's trying, you know, pointing that narrative will be like trying to put down a big fire in a kitchen when the stove is still open using a small little towel. Right, so this is a problem. Second, it is not the job of governments to counter that narrative because governments, even in the Muslim world, have no credibility whatsoever. Right, so imagine, they, this is a fifth time they open another center, at least a fifth time, they open another center. We have CeCe and Abdullah and Trump putting their head on the spore of whatever it is. Like, okay, now terrorism is gonna, and... I went to Riyadh in 2005 when they opened the first center, which was obviously very effective. And the Emiratis, yeah, the Emiratis had a couple of centers, Sa'wab and other centers, I would just have centers, everybody has centers. Governments have no credibility when it comes to this, right? So civil organizations, civil society have the credibility of this. Unfortunately, civil society in the country that matters the most to stand up is not allowed to function, right? So if you tweet something against the king or against a leader that you will be put in jail or you'll be beaten up in the street. I mean, this is a problem. So how are we gonna fight this narrative if there is no competent and credible voices allowed to speak up? And this is going to be a problem. I think in the West, we need to, in the United States, for example, and that's something we started to do here when we started to put a group together, we need to counter the narrative, but we need to create and use space, an American space, remind people what it means to be an American, what it means to live in that shining city on the hill, what it means to be a melting pot. Not the CVE that's targeting only one specific community. So you need to give them a platform of a campaign against hate, against extremism, against religious fantasism, and then you can use that platform to stand up against ISIS, al-Qaeda, jihadis, or white supremacists, or whatever kind of hate group you are dealing with in your society. So the more we talk about blacks and whites and Muslims and Jews and non-Muslims, we're playing into the identity politics which is feeding these groups in the first place, even if we have great intentions, right? So this is one of the things that we have to keep on going. So we're starting a campaign, we're gonna be launching it soon, that includes people from Madison Avenue and includes people from Silicon Valley in putting a program called UNDEX, and Extremism, to give this platform because in the United States, we don't have the problems that they have in Europe. In Europe, you have face-to-face recruitment, you have a simulation problem. In the United States, the threat comes from social media, from people who get inspired watching videos and just becoming more crazy than they really are. That's a totally different situation. So when you see them orbiting that planet of extremism and you wanna pull them away from it, how do you pull them away? And to where? Because the good people don't have a space, so we need to start creating good spaces in order to help people to come into terms with identity and that cannot be a government program, period. The lady over here in fact, that's gonna be the final question. Good morning, my name is Allison Johnson with Metamorphosis Global Advisor here in Washington, D.C. And I wanna thank you so much for bringing up the issue around this juxtaposition of what we stand for as a society because interestingly enough, A1, which is here at WAMU in Washington, D.C., had a program on it yesterday morning and was really asking how we have a different message for the world if our own USA society doesn't reflect that inclusivity, right? So there was a gentleman who called in who had been working for USA Army Intelligence in the Middle East because someone had suggested, well, they just need to be educated and he countered and said most of the people who are involved in these movements are overeducated in the West, in European societies and North American societies. So I wanted to ask beyond just creating this new ecosystem which I'm very impressive that you're speaking to, what about the collective strategy that you referred to for the first questioner for the USA government? Because I understand there's no role for governments, they have lost credibility. But as a USA government, what is the collective strategy that you see could be effective to be able to broadcast a different message? And since 2000, we haven't seemed to have one. So what did you see in the USA government was missing that no matter what was in the White House, who was in the White House, the strategy was never collective and it was always disparate. Thank you. Good question. I will just go one after the other. First of all, diplomacy, political engagements to find political solutions for these civil wars that's happening. Number two, don't put more oil on the fires by selling more weapons to a region that does not need more weapons. Number three, use the law enforcement tool. It's extremely important because there are a lot of criminality from smuggling refugees to flags to one of al-Qaeda leaders in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Muqtar, al-Muqtar, he's known as Mr. Marlboro because he's the number one smuggler in the region. So there is an element for criminality here that we need to combat, force our allies before our enemies, not to use religion and sectarianism to score points against each other. And most importantly, let's not jump in the middle of a war that has been going on for 1400 years. We can't accomplish a thing. We've seen that in Iraq, we've seen that in Afghanistan. We need to basically try to solve these problems to the best interest of the United States and not to take sides where people just want us to do their wars for them. Oh, thank you very much, Ali. Thank you.