It has already been twenty years since the World Trade Center towers came crashing down. Who would have believed that, two decades later, the global war on terrorism continues without an end in sight? From the sands of the Sahara to the jungles of southeast Asia and from the Iraqi plains to the Afghani mountains, the West and its allies are still chasing down the jihadist movement with faultless determination. The threat is not limited to far-off countries; Europe, and especially France, have paid a high price for this long conflict.

Al-Qaeda has shown remarkable resilience, and several new groups, like ISIS, have since appeared. The fall of the so-called “caliphate” as proclaimed by ISIS does not signal the end to the organization, much less to its deadly ideology. There are now two to three times more jihadist fighters in the world than at the start of the twenty-first century. This discouraging figure from an endless war begs the question: what have we done in the last twenty years? Despite hundreds of thousands of human lives lost and considerable sums spent in the war on terrorism, why is the threat still so high?

This exceptional book, the fruit of several years of field investigations, offers the first history of the war on terrorism from 2001 to today. The authors decipher the strategic dynamics of this conflict by explaining why it is so difficult to break the spiral of violence and look back over these two decades of fighting in order to find essential lessons for the future.

La Guerre de vingt ans. Djihadisme et contre-terrorisme au XXIe siècle [The Twenty Years' War. Jihadism and Counter-terrorism in the 21st Century], Robert Laffont, 448 pages, 29 avril 2021.

Foreign rights enquiries: [email protected]