The Guardian

7 May 2005, Saturday

GHOST AND GHOULS

Steven Poole on Dining with Terrorists

Dining with Terrorists, by Phil Rees (Macmillan, £18.99)

This outstanding book recounts a hair-raising odyssey by an experienced reporter and documentary film-maker. Rees takes a secret nocturnal journey to meet members of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Army; discovers how homosexual love bonds members of the Afghan mujahedin; hangs out in the forest with Colombian guerrillas, whose women members sport sparkly nail varnish; takes tea with a scholarly elder of Hizbollah; drinks in a Basque nightclub with young ETA activists; and has a chillingly surreal meeting with a laughing Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" in the Khmer Rouge.

They have all been called "terrorists", and Rees's simple but powerful framework for the book is to ask them what they themselves understand by that term, and how they justify the killing of civilians. The normal answer, of course, is that they consider themselves at war; one of the functions of the official appellation "terrorist", by contrast, is to deny them the status of soldiers. Thus Rees conducts a philological investigation into the word "terrorism" itself, while the vivid writing links his interviews with smiling killers into a kind of globe-trotting adventure story, as readable as it is informative.

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