Maqdisi's Minions (DW)

West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a fascinating study this week. The 382-page report, titled “The Militant Ideology Atlas,” examines the most widely read texts among the thousands of tracts in Al Qaeda’s online library.

It concludes that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, have had a relatively minor influence on the movement’s intellectual foundation.  And while the two Qaeda leaders have released a flurry of video and audio messages to their followers over the past year, the study found that the scholarly work of a group of Saudi and Jordanian clerics — most notably Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian — seems more likely to influence the next generation of Islamic militants.

For more on Maqdisi, see my piece for The Daily Standard here.