1. Welcome to Rukmini’s On-Again Off-Again Book Club. Since the arrival of bébé, I’ve not been reading as much as I used to, so I’ve started my own Twitter book club to get myself to read more & share what I’ve learned. First up, @azelin’s book about Tunisian jihadists: 
2. Those little pieces of paper are all the places I marked because I didn’t want to lose the spot. @azelin’s book took 9 yrs to write, and it’s rich in detail for those studying the phenomenon of jihadi terrorism. Here are my some my favorite takeaways:
3. We tend to think of terror groups as static in terms of their commitment to violence. Why else would we call it a terror group if it’s raison d’être isn’t violence? But in Tunisia for several years, Ansar al-Sharia spent most of its time handing out food/medicine to the needy:
4. Ansar al-Shariah’s members were heavily represented in ISIS, and were tied to sattacks including on the Bardo Museum in Tunis & on a resort in Sousse. But along the way, the group carried out 870 activities in Tunisia, from handing out backpacks to kids to giving out blankets:
5. We tend to poo-poo social services provided by terrorists. Yet over and over, we’re seeing that groups carrying out acts of brutality are able to win support by stepping in where the state has failed. Ansar al Shariah focused on rural areas. A list of all their do-gooding:
6. The other way in which we tend to think of terrorist groups as static is in terms of the degree of violence. We see them as very violent all the time. But @azelin shows the amount of soul-searching that Ansar al-Shariah did & how it drew lessons from the mistakes of the past.
7. High among the things Ansar al-Shariah was contemplating were the mistakes of the Iraqi jihad under Zarqawi and the GIA’s excessive brutality in Algeria. Here is al-Qaeda leader Attiya al-Libi’s assessment of the GIA - “They destroyed themselves with their own hand”:
8. Libi advises fellow jihadists “to not be quiet about our mistakes, especially the exorbitant mistakes. Indeed it’s necessary to try & rapidly treat & rectify them.” Does this sound like a terrorist group to you? @azelin shows steps Tunisian jihadists took to right their wrongs
9. The group crisscrossed the country, carrying out charitable acts under the slogan, “Hear From Us, Not About Us.” It worked. They created a grassroots movement. Tunisians became one of the largest contingents of foreign fighters inside ISIS. People often ask me why Tunisia?
10. @azelin’s book sheds light on why. One of the images he archived is telling. On the left is one of Ansar al-Shariah’s aid caravans, heading off to help the needy. Walking alongside? The group’s cameraman. It’s not just do-gooding. It’s do-gooding + publicizing the do-gooding:
11. Fast forward to ISIS in Iraq and Syria, where several of their departments were headed by ex-Ansar al-Shariah members, and where every ISIS dude who was filling in a pothole had a camera crew documenting the ISIS dude fillIing in a pothole.
12. Ansar al-Shariah’s true colors became apparent in 2012 when they overran part of the US embassy in Tunis. @azelin breaks news here: According to one embassy official he interviewed, around 100 people in the embassy’s safe room began to fall sick from the smoke:
13. Everyone remembers the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi by Ansar al-Shariah’s sister organization. But according to @azelin’s reporting, if help didn’t come when it did the Benghazi death toll would have “paled” in comparison to Tunis where many were about to asphyxiate
14. The group’s members who attacked the embassy were chanting “Obama, Obama, we are all Osama,” (as in Osama Bin Laden). This brings us to the issue of nomenclature. The evidence @azelin marshals indicates that at a minimum Ansar al-Shariah was a shadow branch of al-Qaeda
15. For example, Ansar al-Shariah’s leader Abu Iyad was regularly writing and receiving letters from Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda. Getting in touch with the reclusive leader is not exactly easy. Abu Iyad also sat on the Shariah Committee of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa
16. And most recently he was in Mali traveling alongside al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb when he was killed. As someone that’s tried for years to contact AQIM (succeeding only through phone and encrypted apps) that shows they saw him as one of their own.
17. There is now a body of evidence including letters from al-Qaeda leaders that indicates that al-Qaeda realized that baptizing an affiliate with the al-Qaeda name made them an immediate target. And so they purposely began to hide behind names that made the group appear local.
18. This is the case for Ansar al-Shariah in Tunisia, and for the similarly-named Ansar al-Shariah in Yemen. Another key example: Ansar Dine in Mali, which made a show of appearing separate from al-Qaeda’s North African branch. Documents I found in Timbuktu proved otherwise.
