Philip Sessarego

Philip Anthony Sessarego (31 December 1952 – November 2008), also known by the pen-name Tom Carew, was a British soldier, adventurer and author, who published the best-selling book ''Jihad! – The Secret War in Afghanistan''. His reputation and credibility were damaged by the revelation of false claims in the book, after which he retired from the public spotlight.

Early life

Sessarego was born in Hereford, Herefordshire, England, to a farming family.

Military career

In 1971 at the age of 18 he enlisted into the British Army as a Gunner in the Royal Artillery. After two years' service in 1973 he applied to join the Special Air Service Regiment at the age of 21, which was approved by the Royal Artillery. During aptitude trials for the S.A.S. he narrowly failed to pass through injury, and was held over in Regiment's training cadre pending physical recovery to try again. After several months with the Regiment's training cadre, he chose to abandon his application to join it, and left the British Army in December 1975.

After the army he worked on the family farm, but grew restless, and subsequently found employment using his military training as a mercenary soldier, with ex-members of the SAS, seeing service as an advisor to the Sri Lankan Army in counter-insurgency warfare in 1979, and in Afghanistan/Pakistan in the early 1980s with the United States Government's Defense Intelligence Agency, training the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union. During the 1980s-1990's he was involved in conflicts in the Balkans during the Bosnia War, South America and South Africa.

In 1991, he faked his own death to give the impression that he had been killed by a car bomb in Croatia, possibly trying to get out of paying maintenance to his estranged wife at their family home in Hereford, afterwards breaking off all contact with his family to maintain the ruse and relocating to Belgium, living under the assumed name of "Philip Stevenson". (Sessarego's family continued to believe that he was dead until one evening in late 2001 they saw him being interviewed as a published author and military expert on a British national television evening news show under the pseudonym of "Tom Carew").

''Jihad!'' (2000)

In 1999, with the assistance of a ghost writer ( Adrian Weale) Sessarego wrote an account of his military experiences in the Afghan-Soviet War entitled ''Jihad! – The Secret War in Afghanistan'', which was published in 2000, stating erroneously in its text that he had been in that theatre of operations as a trooper in the Special Air Service. The book sold reasonably well, being serialized in ''The Sunday Times'', with print-runs in several European countries, as well as Australia. A paperback edition was published in 2001. On 11 September 2001 Arab jihadists staged an attack within the continental United States of America, hi-jacking several commercial air-liners and suicidally crashing them into key commercial and governmental landmark buildings, and the aftermath of the event created an immense demand for information on the nature and motivation of the attackers, which transferred into a surge in sales of ''Jihad!'' in excess of 50,000 copies, making it a best-seller, and Sessarego (using the pen-name of "Tom Carew") an in-demand figure in the British media for expert comment on Jihadism.

Journalists interviewing him regularly referred to his SAS trooper background in line with the book's text, which Sessarego played along with, until being exposed by the British Broadcasting Corporation
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