It’s Time to Stop Talking About Terrorists As If They’re Diabolical Geniuses
The video, shot from a respectful distance, shows the two brothers embracing one last time, somewhere on the Yemeni side of the border. They had crossed this same border three years earlier, fleeing from Saudi authorities and looking for a jihad to join. Now the younger brother was heading back to Saudi Arabia on a suicide mission, carrying a bomb his brother had built for him.
At the time the video was filmed in the summer of 2009, the world didn’t yet know the name Ibrahim al-Asiri, but it soon would.
He has been called al-Qaeda’s “master bombmaker” and an “.” He is the reason we pass through labeled him “the most dangerous terrorist in the world,” and this week the United States said it is .But Asiri has been declared dead before. In 2011, the United States said that he was that took out Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American radical imam; in 2013 he was said to be , and in 2014 he was .
