Reeve's thesis is that a group of several thousand men who fought against the Soviets during the Afghan War of the 1980s would later dominate international terrorism. He warned that many of these men, known as the "Afghan Arabs", had become the core of Al-Qaeda and constituted a new breed of terrorist, militants with no restrictions on mass killing. Reeve concluded that, by 1998, the world was entering a new age of apocalyptic terrorism, and predicted that Al-Qaeda would launch massive attacks on Western targets.