Last Refuge Excerpt: The Bomber and His Brother

This weekend the Toronto Star published an excerpt from The Last Refuge entitled: “The Bomber and His Brother,” which looks at Ibrahim and Abdullah Asiri.

The piece opens:

A decade ago, in the months after Sept. 11, the boy who would become one of Al Qaeda’s most famous suicide bombers turned 16. Skinny and frail, Abdullah Asiri was starting to question the assumptions that had guided much of his young life in Saudi Arabia. His older brother and best friend, Ibrahim, a man now described as an “evil genius” by U.S. officials for his cleverly made bombs, had just left home to pursue a degree in chemistry at Riyadh’s King Saud University across town. But the brothers’ days as bomber and bomb maker were all years in the future. In 2002, they were just teenagers, a questioning young boy and a college freshman.

Read the rest at the Toronto Star’s website here.