In the book's introduction, The Wolves of Islam author Paul Murphy cautions, "The graphic description of terror, acts of torture, and human cruelty in this book will disturb the reader." Unfortunately, those ultra-bothersome selections provide the only fleeting pulse for a book that is otherwise so dryly constructed and monotonously scribed that a reader would do well to snooze but for the inevitable nightmares such bone-chilling terrorist accounts will surely furnish.
To be sure, the book does serve as a thorough assemblage of the case against Chechen rebels, and earns a place in the rapidly-evolving canon of terror literature consequently. But Mr. Murphy requires the reader to watch a great deal of paint dry in order to catch those compelling occasional drops that suggest perversely intricate relations between the Chechen rebels, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and, yes, Iraq. The rare and oftentimes brushed aside nature of these damning statements suggests that the author is likely so entrenched in the world of Russian/Chechen politics on which he has ascertained expert status that he has fallen out of touch with a readership more concerned with American politics and how these events in the old Red block affect the United States.
The Wolves of Islam finds its historical subjects almost entirely in the past decade, taking care the intricately explain the progression of Russian/Chechen tensions, paying close attention to the rebel leaders and their terrorist tactics. Aslan Maskhadov, Khattab, Salman Salmanovich Raduyev, Arbi Aloudinovich Barayev and Shamil Basayev are the figures with whom the book is chiefly concerned. Messrs Khattab, Raduyev and Barayev are classically villainous terror leaders. At one point, The Wolves of Islam notes of Mr. Maskhadov, the Chechen president, "…Maskhadov played Arafat's role by denying any responsibility for the pair of attacks," an apt description of the similarities between the bloody dishonesty of the former Palestinian head and the Chechen leader. And of Mr. Basayev, the book twice notes him as "the most famous, ferocious, and, so far, invincible fighter in contemporary Chechen history." (That this description is repeated verbatim — occurring once in the introduction and resurfacing in the book's first chapter — is a symbolic indictment of the author's knack for regurgitation and the book's poor copy editing as further evidenced by the misspelling of at least one word and several awkward or outright improper grammatical junctions.)
Mr. Murphy's hyper-attention to detail, though lending the book a truly expert ethos, is oftentimes obtusely long-winded. It is the sort of meticulous reconstruction famously sported by Civil War buffs, with Mr. Murphy rivaling Michael Shaara's landmark novel, The Killer Angels, in The Wolves of Islam. But whereas Mr. Shaara dedicated his attention to battle figures, Mr. Murphy too often lends his to more inanimate objects, "The strength of the enemy numbered one hundred soldiers, one battle tank, three armored fighting vehicles, one truck, and an assortment of weapons including RPGs and machine guns. From four o'clock in the evening until just before midnight, Khattab and thirty-nine of his fighters armed with their personal weapons and one 82 mm Hound Russian mortar, two AT-3 Fagot wire-guided missiles, three PK machine guns, and five rocket-propelled grenade launchers attacked." With all of the pawns and knights, Garry Kasparov might be a wise choice to translate the book into a language where people would likely care more.
Fortunately, select portions of The Wolves of Islam are more interesting thanks to their pertinence to the world-wide War on Terror. At one point Mr. Murphy notes that Chechen Wolves (terrorists) "…may have received special chemical weapons training in Iraq. Yossef Bodansky told a U.S.-Russian public forum on terrorism in Washington, D.C., in September 2002 that Chechens had recently trained with al Qaeda in Iraq on chemical weapons."
Such rare yet pertinent references to the War on Terror emerge as The Wolves of Islam's high point, with only the aforementioned acts of graphic barbarianism also managing to stand out amidst the otherwise detail-overwhelmed book. Most notable of these horrors is a forward description of the slow and meticulous murder of a prisoner using "a two-handed log saw to cut through his spine at the back of the neck and sever his head" and a brief comment on the severing of a pre-teen's fingertips so that they might accompany a ransom note.
The Wolves of Islam concludes with an epilogue and "chronology of terror" that each work as fairly raw regurgitations of events, untreated by the author. This date-book-esque conclusion is indicative of the work as a whole, and while there are certainly gems to be discovered within, the overall experience seems little more rewarding than reading a criminal's day planner.
