Doctor In the House

After much speculation about European Muslims heading to Iraq for jihad, the first piece of hard, cold (or actually, just cold) evidence has surfaced: 19-year-old Redouane el-Hakim, a French national born of Tunisian immigrants, killed July 17 during an American bombardment of Fallujah. The Scotsman has some interesting details about el-Hakim's brother Boubakeur's sad-sack journey in search of either jihad or Islamic education in the Levant. (He is now in prison in Syria.)

Le Figaro says the Salafist group the brothers belonged to was broken up by the cops in July 15.

David Ignatius recently checked in on Gilles Kepel's argument that these and other recent glorious martyrdom operations are really indications that it's twilight for the jihadists, in Europe and elsewhere (which I find fairly persuasive, both because I want to believe it's true and because Kepel knows a great deal about the subject).