LAST WEEK the Washington Post featured a story on Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, the Spanish-Syrian al Qaeda strategist who wrote the 1,600 page Call for a Global Islamic Resistance. The Post story provided a revealing look at Nasar who, despite his capture, remains the leading ideological architect of al Qaeda’s war against the United States. But the Post also missed a number of important points in Nasar’s career.

The Post describes Nasar as having been “born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958 and studied engineering. In the early 1980s, he took part in a failed revolt by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood against Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad. According to his own written accounts, he fled the country after that, then trained in camps in Jordan and Egypt. Later, he said, he moved to Europe when it became clear that Assad was firmly entrenched in power.”