Richard Beeston

In 1988 I arrived in Pakistan a few hours after the assassination of Zia ul-Huq, the military dictator whose aircraft had been blown to pieces by a bomb. In most countries the violent death of a leader, who had dominated politics for more than a decade, would trigger soul-searching, or at the very least a determination to find out who had killed him and why. But within days of the assassination it was clear that there was little appetite to probe the latest chapter in Pakistan’s violent history. Zia was given a state funeral and quickly forgotten by his countrymen. Twenty years after his murder, the circumstances of his death remain a mystery.

Abu Suleiman looks back on his time in al-Qaeda as a reformed drug addict in Britain might consider his past life as a junkie. Speaking English, learnt from his American jailers at Guantanamo Bay, the young Saudi is now a respectable member of society and has a wife and a job as a stock market analyst in Riyadh to prove it. Like other Muslim men recruited by militant Islam to the cause of jihad, he knows that he is lucky to be alive, and fortunate to be given a second chance. Most others who made the trek to join Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan or his associates in Iraq have been captured, killed or ended their lives as suicide bombers. The story of what happened to his generation of young Muslim men across the world over the past decade and a half is only now being told.

For three years Moazzam Begg, former DHSS officer, one-time Birmingham estate agent and top al-Qaida suspect, survived at the sharp end of America’s war on terror. Seized in the middle of the night from his home in Pakistan, Begg was taken through grim makeshift prisons, endured hundreds of hours of interrogation and ended up one of the faceless caged figures in Guantanamo Bay, the US detention facility in Cuba. Thanks to a campaign by Western human rights lawyers and the fact that he is a British citizen, Begg emerged from captivity last year to be reunited with his family. He has now produced the first authoritative version of conditions in Guantanamo and the legal no-man’s-land where hundreds of terrorist suspects are trapped.

Eavesdrop on any gathering of Middle East correspondents huddled by the poolside of the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad or enjoying a late supper at Cairo’s Greek Club and the name Robert Fisk will inevitably enter the conversation. For three decades the reporter and author has energetically criss-crossed the Arab world and beyond, generating respect and loathing in equal measure from his colleagues and readers. For some Fisk is the apologist for every dictator and fanatic from Belgrade to Bagram, a prophet of doom with a giant ego who blames all the region’s ills on American arrogance, Israeli conspiracies and Western meddling.