The 1997 Luxor Massacre was an attack in Egypt in which sixty tourists were killed, dealing a severe blow to the country’s tourism industry. The book cites it as one example of the continuing violence carried out by militant groups whose activities it connects to the wars of the late 1980s and to a wider political history.

The Attack and Its Immediate Consequence

The account gives a concise measure of the attack’s human and economic consequences: sixty tourists were killed, and Egypt’s local tourism industry suffered a disastrous blow. It does not supply further details about the attack’s perpetrators, planning, or circumstances, so the massacre appears here through its reported scale and its impact on tourism.

A Wider Network of Violence

The massacre is placed among the activities of groups that, the book says, emerged from the wars of the late 1980s. Their operations extended across North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, western China, Southeast Asia, and the United States. The account also notes that Zbigniew Brzezinski traced the groups’ history further back, to the strategy described as the “Afghan trap.”

The book situates these groups’ recruitment in a broad pool of despair, anger, and frustration that included both wealthy and poor people, secular adherents, and radical Islamists. It argues that United States policy contributed substantially to the conditions from which such groups drew support. In that framing, the Luxor attack is not treated as an isolated incident: it is one episode in an account linking militant violence to the longer aftermath of regional wars and political choices.