Although Islamic State monopolizes media coverage, terrorism is a widespread phenomenon that affects all regions of the globe. Unfortunately, covering every act of modern terrorism or every group engaged in the practice is out of the scope of this book. It is worthwhile, nonetheless, to briefly examine global trends and the ideological components of its current manifestation before delving into the bigger battlefields—namely, Yemen, Libya, and Afghanistan.
Before beginning, it is important to note that modern terrorism is largely an Islamic phenomenon. For reasons explained before in this book, secessionist and leftist terror groups have lost much of their appeal, as their animating ideologies no longer carry legitimacy. In Latin America, the only extant terror group of any note is the FARC in Colombia, but even they have come to sign a peace deal with the government. Some wish to make the case for Mexican cartels and Central American drug gangs to be considered terrorist organizations, but they lack any coherent political objective to suggest their violence has any end beyond personal enrichment. Definitions of terrorism abound, but the key facet is the use of violence and the fear generated from it to force some sort of political change within a society. In this sense, the activities by cartels and gangs remain a purely criminal problem that does not threaten the complete upheaval of the system and only precludes economic development. Likewise, in Peru, there is the perennial worry that Sendero Luminoso will take up arms again, but at this point in its history, the group is at best a glorified cartel. Lacking a charismatic leader to resuscitate the organization, not to mention any mass popular appeal as Peru continues modernizing, the group will most likely continue banking off its legacy from the 1980s until it becomes wholly irrelevant. The economic conditions that gave rise to the group in the 1970s no longer exist, and even if they did, their Maoist ideology was rendered quite repugnant by their wholesale violence at the peak of their insurgency.
These trends hold up for much of the rest of the world as well. Most groups are too weak, maintain parochial interests that curtail their potential for violence, adhere to an ideology that few people will buy into, or have eschewed violence in favor of the opportunity to participate in democratic governance. There are certainly violent non-Islamic groups in Africa and Asia with some semblance of political goals, but oftentimes, this rhetoric masks the real end goal of accumulating wealth. Take the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), for example. It captured the world’s attention in 2012 after a social media awareness campaign went viral, yet in practice, the LRA is a fraction of its size in the 1990s. Some estimates suggest their numbers dropped from several thousand to perhaps as few as two hundred fighters. At this point, most of its activity is consigned to banditry and is only one of the many problems affecting Uganda. Similarly, in Asia, the Tamil Tigers (or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [LTTE]) have largely collapsed following the brutal scorched-earth campaign waged by the Sri Lankan government in 2009. After being one of the most lethal terrorist groups and taking credit for killing two heads of state, the LTTE is largely decimated. This does not mean that another group like it cannot arise or that it cannot rebuild, as the political conditions in Sri Lanka still make it fertile for a similar group to emerge, but it will be a different entity from the one constructed by its main leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.
In Europe, with the exception of Anders Breivik, most acts of terrorism have been inspired by Islamic entities. Both the IRA and the ETA have opted to forgo violence in favor of the democratic electoral system, which their political constituencies regard as a more legitimate manner for achieving systemic change than threatening violence. The Basque case is telling. After four decades of violence, Basque society has largely turned on the ETA. This is in part because of the great level of prosperity the Basque country has experienced since Spain democratized, but also because they have seen the example of Catalonia, which is close to seceding largely through the power of the ballot. Elsewhere in Europe, prior to the rise of Islamic terrorism, Germany suffered a string of assassinations linked to the National Socialist Underground, a rightist terror group that was dismantled in 2011. However, despite these examples of sporadic right-wing violence, which appear from time to time in the news, there is a lack of coordinated terror campaigns waged by non-Islamic groups on the continent.
The one anomalous country is perhaps the United States, but even then, this is a product of the country’s peculiar legal system. Since 9/11, numerous Islamic-inspired attacks have affected the country, including the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 and the San Bernardino attacks in December 2015. At the same time, though, it has seen an increase in various right-wing militia groups that threaten violence against the government for perceived violations of the Constitution. More worrisome has been the proliferation of white supremacist groups, especially following Donald Trump’s announcement of his candidacy for president of the United States in June 2015. At this point, these groups have yet to act violently in a coordinated fashion against minority groups or government targets, but there have been some worrying events. In June 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. In April 2014, Cliven Bundy triggered a standoff with federal law enforcement over unpaid fees for grazing land in Nevada. The incident ended without any deaths in May but nonetheless inspired the subsequent Malheur standoff that occurred between January and February 2016 that led to the death of one of the occupiers. In both cases, the people involved belonged to a coterie of right-wing militia groups and the sovereign citizen movement, which worries about government overreach and wishes to fight back. Yet this does not compare to the spate of violence committed by militia members in the 1990s that culminated with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Furthermore, at the same time these events have transpired, the country has seen a significant decrease in levels of violent crime and homicides. The one problem that seems to affect the country is the spate of mass shootings that occur in a nearly clockwork fashion every couple of days. These, though, with a few exceptions, tend to be apolitical and a product of the country’s stance on guns. Bloody headlines aside, the country is safer than it has been in a long time when looking at raw statistics.
Certainly, all this can change under President Trump. Before and after his election, there was a surge in membership for organizations identifying as alt-right. These groups, who on the whole support President Trump, maintain a decidedly racist and nationalist outlook, resurrecting many of the white supremacist tropes previously considered as too extreme and racist for mainstream consumption. The alt-right has the potential to mobilize and organize people into violence, as was demonstrated during the August 2017 Charlottesville protests, and President Trump has gone a long way toward legitimizing these groups both in his language and with the people he surrounds himself. This subject will be explored further later in this book.
RELIGION AND A GLOBALIZED DECENTRALIZED IDEOLOGY
All of this can change. Known and unknown chaos always produces new winners and losers in political systems that might encourage new violent movements. However, the main truth about the current state of terrorism is that it is largely concentrated in the Middle East and places with strong Islamic influence. The epicenter is currently in Iraq and Syria, but violence plagues Yemen, many parts of North Africa, Nigeria, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and affects various regions with large Muslim populations, including Europe, Russia, North America, Australia, China, and other parts of Asia. Despite its indelible Islamic character, terrorism in each of these places is motivated by contextual reasons independent of religion or ethnicity. As has been the case historically with terrorist groups, the animating ideology is often a pretext to justify the underlying causes for violence. On a micro level, motivators for terrorism can range from psychological disturbances, personal greed, or the desire to follow the path taken by family members. On a macro scale, terrorism can be caused by power disputes between rival groups, secessionist desires, or revolutionary aims.
These caveats aside, the religious aspect of contemporary terrorism makes it more potent than any secessionist or revolutionary ideology of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Even if it is a pretext, it is a powerful one that attracts recruits from across the globe, giving a shared sense of kinship that transcends language and culture. This holds true for Islamic State and others like it. As noted by experts like David C. Rapoport and Bruce Hoffman, unlike its secular counterparts, religiously motivated terrorism advances a coherent framework for understanding the individual and the state, which puts it at odds with the notion of the dominant nation-state and most other secular political orders. According to most religious doctrines, the notion of a temporal secular order is anathema, as the only law that matters is that of a god. In this sense, where revolutionary forces such as the Sendero Luminoso wished to reorder the laws of society in the twentieth century according to a human scale, religious groups deny these laws any legitimacy. This reading too means that the obvious limits on violence are lacking. In the past, insurgent and terrorist groups had to proscribe excessive violence to avoid alienating their base and source of recruits. As was the case with various groups in the past, too much violence could make a group seem repugnant and make it difficult for an organization to acquire funding, find recruits, or maintain the necessary passive support of their communities to avoid capture or arrest by authorities. Brian Jenkins said it best in the 1970s when he noted that the terrorists of that age “wanted many people watching, not many people dead.”
In contrast, going back to the Zealots in the first century and extending to the Thuggee cult in India, religiously inspired violence has always maintained an indelible apocalyptic flair to it. Regardless of the spiritual faith behind it, this type of terrorism regards the present as a prologue to the rewards found in heaven, or at the very least, it hastens the eventual end of the world. With religion sanctioning their violence, these groups have no limits in the scope and expanse of their terror, as long as the intention behind it accords to a notion of advancing the interests of their spiritual order. Not surprisingly, since the 1990s, scholars such as Bruce Hoffman and others have feared that religious terrorists are the ones most likely to use weapons of mass destruction if given the opportunity. Aum Shinrikyo demonstrated this vividly when it committed the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo’s subway system in 1995, and the world has been fortunate that this has been the only vivid instance until now. Various reports from the late 1990s and early 2000s note that al-Qaeda sought to purchase materials to create its own weapons of mass destruction. As the Harvard professor Graham Allison noted, the world has been quite fortunate that organizational and technical mishaps have prevented tragedies much worse than 9/11.
So in the context of Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other groups linked to them, what do they believe exactly? Generally, they begin from the Salafist tradition, which emerged in the eighteenth century and called for a return to the practices of the earliest Muslims. In practice, this translates into an ultraconservative worldview that promotes a strict interpretation of sharia law and rejects religious innovation, but it does not necessarily imply violence. IS and AQ take it further by combining Salafism with the ideas of Sayyid Qutb and Ibn Taymiyyah. The former, in his book Milestones, argued for an extreme rejection of secular law in favor of sharia and the importance of offensive jihad to bring about the restoration of Islam. The latter, a medieval theologian, is most notable for writing about jihad against fellow Muslims, serving as an inspiration for takfirism, the idea of declaring Muslims as apostates to justify their execution. These paramount ideas elevate groups like IS and AQ from mere Salafist organizations to what scholars call Salafi jihadists or simply jihadists. Other themes central to jihadist ideology are the importance of regime change to create purer Islamic polities, the retaking of lands seen as occupied Muslim territories, and the necessity of defending Muslims from non-Muslims.
Unfettered in this way by religion, modern Islamic terrorists maintain the hallmark of their confessional predecessors from history but have built on it with ambitious state-building projects. Islamic State’s success in Syria and Iraq is the best-known example, but it is certainly not the only case. Similar programs have been attempted by its affiliates in Libya and Afghanistan, by al-Qaeda in Yemen and Syria, and by other groups linked to the global jihadist movements. That being said, this indelible religious character does not mean that the current wave of terrorism is monolithic or carries a unified agenda applicable to every jihadist organization out there, in the same manner that Communist insurgents were not fighting under the same banner or cause. For example, takfirism is a core tenet of IS, especially against Shiite Muslims, but it is something that al-Qaeda has only adopted reluctantly in specific situations and in fact was one of the causes of the eventual schism between both organizations in 2014. This problem plagues Boko Haram in Nigeria too, with various groups splintering off, most notably Ansaru, because of its penchant for violence against fellow Muslims.
Similarly, even within affiliated groups, there are differences in objectives, strategies, and tactics. AQ has always prioritized attacking what it regards as the far enemy, meaning the United States and its Western allies, because it believes that as long as they support the local apostate regimes in the Middle East, it will not be able to establish the caliphate. Yet when it comes to al-Qaeda’s franchises in Yemen, in the Islamic Maghreb, and elsewhere, although they might attack Western targets in their area of operations, normally they seek to undermine the local government instead. In this regard, their strategic focus resembles that of an insurgency deploying a coordinated political-military campaign replete with information operations, its own sustained rhythm and tempo, control of territory, and uniforms worn when the group engages military targets in pitched battles. This spectrum of strategies makes it hard to argue that there is a centralized or definable characteristic that permeates throughout all modern terrorism. Even then, just because an organization is affiliated with a terrorist group like AQ or IS does not mean that the group is engaged in terrorism.
This is reflected in how AQ and IS target North America and Europe too. In these areas, they tend to rely on their networks of returning foreign fighters, vocal supporters and recruiters, financiers, and so-called lone-wolf terrorists to execute attacks. Generally speaking, most plots involve some degree of command and control or instruction from leaders and usually seek to advance the parochial interests of the group that ordered or planned a plot. Rarely are there ever truly lone-wolf individuals that were not in contact or had training from some individual linked to an organization like al-Qaeda or Islamic State. Interestingly enough, in this arena is where opportunistic behavior among jihadist entities emerges, as seen in the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, when individuals linked to IS and AQ’s affiliate in Yemen worked together. In the final analysis, the end result is normally the same, meaning casualties and deaths, but again reflects the decentralized character of jihadist terrorism and belies the notion of a unified jihadist movement fighting for the same cause. And more important, it demonstrates how the classical distinctions for violent nonstate actors have collapsed onto themselves, with organizations mixing their modi operandi depending on circumstance and opportunity, begging greater analytical rigor when it comes to assessing modern terrorism.
Where this issue becomes extremely important is when it comes to defining who is a terrorist. Given the contemporary wave of Islamophobia affecting the polities in the West, it is worth exploring what terrorists look like and what defines a terrorist. A common analytical mistake is to prejudge all Muslims as potential terrorists, arguing that the religion inherently justifies and advocates terrorism because of language within the Qur’an, as if other religious texts have never been used before to justify violence against other religions. Another common mistake is claiming that terrorism from the Middle East is a direct by-product of poverty and the legacy of imperialism without taking note that there are many poor formerly colonized countries that do not experience terrorism. It also denies countries the ability, and the responsibility, to dictate their own affairs, making them perpetual victims of events that happened a long time ago. Both of these views are found wanting empirically for a variety of reasons that are explained later in this book, and failing to address them adequately creates policy imbroglios that are easily avoidable.
Although this book has covered this issue in previous sections, it is worth noting that depending on the circumstance, the people fighting for AQ, IS, or other organizations might vary in individual motivations and demographics. For example, the leadership of AQ on 9/11 belied the traditional image of terrorists being poor and oppressed. Around 75 percent of the organization came from a middle- or upper-class family, 90 percent came from intact families in contrast to broken homes, and around 63 percent had gone to college. Many of these individuals had gone to university at some point in their lives, had actually completed their university degrees, or even had some sort of advanced degree beyond a bachelor’s degree. Osama bin Laden was a civil engineer, Mohamed Atta—one of the ringleaders of 9/11—was an architect, and the current leader of the organization, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a physician. Notably, most were married, and only a few had received training in conservative religious institutions like madrassas. As we look holistically at the phenomenon, the only factor that seems to have influenced whether an individual became a terrorist was whether he or she had friends or family that were already part of a terrorist organization. Curiously enough, this phenomenon extends back to other terrorist groups, such as the Italian Red Brigades. In some regards, these individuals reflected the best and brightest of their societies given their educational backgrounds and trade, but for some reason they found themselves isolated and alienated from their home countries. This is not surprising when one considers that traditional terrorist acts involve a high degree of planning and strategizing and require strong organizational skills to accomplish. Building bombs or planning ways to successfully attack highly protected targets, such as airplanes, requires cognitive processes that are normally associated with people that are highly educated or at least had some sort of training. In contrast, there are numerous reports of lone-wolf terrorists attempting to make homemade bombs using recipes found online or through publicly available resources and failing in their attempts. This pattern is not unique to the current generation of terrorists either, as the Russian anarchists of the nineteenth century and many left-wing terrorists of the twentieth century had similar backgrounds.
This, however, describes the leadership of terrorist organizations and does not necessarily capture foot soldiers who do not engage in traditional terrorist activities. In places where AQ, IS, and others operate more like an insurgency, the armed individuals tend to come from displaced populations seeking alternatives. The stereotype of the poor, the hungry, and the ones lacking opportunity is a better descriptor of those engaged in this type of conflict rather than the typical image of contemporary jihadist terrorists planning attacks in secret. This is neatly reflected in Afghanistan, where many Pashtuns joined the Taliban in the mid-1990s after it managed to establish order and pushed out some vicious warlords that had been terrorizing the population. By promoting an agenda of governance based around their interpretation of Islam, the Taliban was able to recruit individuals by feeding and paying them. This also explains why it so successfully co-opted poppy growers, as it sought to present itself as an organization capable of bestowing economic opportunities with the condition that people cooperated with it. In other words, this pattern of radicalization is quite different from the path of radicalization for individuals like al-Zawahiri or Osama bin Laden. In practice, then, recruiting from this pool makes sense for insurgent organizations, as training an individual to shoot a gun and to follow instructions is a much simpler task than more complex acts of terror, which might require greater planning and operational security. These attributes, though, are normally associated with guerrillas fighting for defense of their homeland and do not necessarily mean that an individual is radicalized or trained enough to turn into a terrorist. This explains why al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan before 9/11 were so dangerous. With a large pool of fighters, many from across the world, AQ needed only to train them to turn them into lethal terrorists, a step beyond simple guerrillas. Again, though, this type of recruitment and radicalization is not exclusive to Muslim countries. The respective histories of Latin American and Southeast Asian insurgent movements demonstrate that given a sufficient wellspring of grievances and a compelling political narrative, any person can become a guerrilla or an insurgent.
Looking outside of the Middle East, radicalization processes are even more diverse and complex than those described above. In spite of the wave of Islamophobia affecting both Europe and North America, religiosity is a poor indicator for why individuals turn toward violence. Multiple security agencies from both continents have noted that religiosity is oftentimes a spurious indicator of when someone is evolving into a terrorist. An MI5 report from 2008 noted that most jihadist terrorists in Britain had only a superficial understanding of religion and rarely practiced the tenets of their religion. A 2011 Brennan Center report expanded on these findings by noting that there is no deterministic explanation for radicalization in Western societies and that it is generally an individual journey. The report goes further and explains that the fluidity in radicalization pathways makes it impossible to place the blame on religion alone, making it a nonbinary variable. A person can adopt some of the beliefs and reject others, or he or she might commit to a radical program but vary in degree of commitment to those ideas, making radicalization a spectrum rather than a binary condition. In fact, it is important to keep in mind that the constellation of beliefs necessary for an individual to become a radical does not necessarily mean a person will act upon those ideas. Lorenzo Vidino and others have written extensively on the difference between cognitive radicalization, which is the process of adopting the beliefs that go against the mainstream, and violent radicalization, which is the belief that one must commit violence to advance the cause of those views.
This is critical when considering how terrorism occurs in both Europe and the United States. Who becomes a terrorist differs from country to country, and there is no monolithic trait or variable that explains who joins. None of the countries with the highest absolute or relative Muslim populations rank among the top exporters of foreign fighters. If we look at individuals who traveled to Syria from Europe to join Islamic State or al-Qaeda since 2013, the countries most affected are those with large second-generation populations. Whether a country follows a strict assimilationist policy or a multicultural approach does not seem to explain the flow of fighters, nor do socioeconomic variables. In essence, then, what is affecting Europe is not so much a political failure of assimilation driven by refugees and immigrants or the reaction to an interventionist foreign policy but rather a continental identity crisis affecting the youths of specific religious communities. In contrast, in places where Muslim populations are well established, such as Bulgaria, very few individuals have joined AQ or IS. This suggests that individuals in these countries have been able to reconcile their secular, political, and religious identities. In fact, this is the general pattern for foreign fighters from the continent writ large, as it is the second generation, which is still trying to come to terms with its connection to its parents’ homeland, with its identity in a secular society.
Taken together, what this reflects about contemporary jihadist terrorism is that, to paraphrase Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares, it is a polymorphous threat that changes depending on context, circumstance, and opportunity. This is important to keep in mind given the heated rhetoric surrounding the role Islam plays in current debates about terrorism. While radical interpretations of Islam do serve an important recruiting tool for individuals in a variety of social milieus, it is incorrect to claim that the religion is inherently more prone to terrorism than others. If this were the case, it would not explain why the largely secular LTTE was one of the most lethal terrorist organizations in history, not only in terms of capacity but also in its use of suicide bombings. Given the historical information presented in previous chapters and some of the structural features concerning terrorism today, it becomes imperative to be judicious in assessing the causes for terrorism.
AL-QAEDA AND ISLAMIC STATE: BATTLE OF EGOS IN THE PROCESS OF FINAL VICTORY
The schism between al-Qaeda and Islamic State is the other major characteristic of the current international terrorist threat, and it is misunderstood by the general public. Regardless of the infighting between both organizations, ideologically, both groups are grounded in the same doctrine. They share the same goal of wanting to establish a caliphate and believe all Muslims have an obligation to wage jihad in advance of this objective. In fact, they both are following the same seven-step strategy first articulated by AQ back in 2005 with minor tweaks to the original timeline. If anything, what separates these organizations is how their leaders have interpreted this common blueprint. According to the original plan, al-Qaeda intended to declare the establishment of the caliphate between 2013 and 2016 after provoking the United States and its allies into a protracted war in the Middle East, which would both destroy the American economy and serve as an inspiration for other jihadists to join AQ’s cause. After a series of setbacks, AQ became strategically patient, building its resources in key theaters. However, IS stole its thunder in 2014, thereby fulfilling the narrative AQ first articulated ten years prior.
This strategic difference is a product of the respective personalities of Ayman al-Zawahiri, AQ’s leader, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of IS. Al-Zawahiri is viewed as soft-spoken and scholarly, unable to make inspiring speeches but well versed theologically. In contrast, al-Baghdadi claims direct lineage to the Prophet Muhammad and is known to be brash and egotistical. In this sense, the schism between AQ and IS emerged more from al-Baghdadi’s insubordination than his violent proclivities. As Bruce Hoffman maintains, their shared traits outnumber their differences, making it extremely likely that they will eventually reconcile. This is already happening at the tactical level. In Libya, there have been reports of IS and AQ cooperation against the nationalist government in Tobruk, and if this collaboration is maintained, it will pave the way for a strategic reunification down the road. Depending on how the situation in Syria progresses, there might be room for collaboration there as well, given the value of pooling resources together.
All this is often lost in the popular narrative. Islamic State’s stunning string of victories in 2014 made many people believe that al-Qaeda had been defanged, making it a bit player in the global jihadist movement. The ironic thing is that such proclamations have been made before by the United States at various moments since 9/11, and each time it has been proven wrong. After Osama bin Laden’s death in May 2011, the Obama administration claimed that al-Qaeda was on its deathbed and no longer posed a strategic threat. Although AQ ceded the limelight to IS in 2014, it has remained active in terms of expanding its presence and plotting attacks against the West. As IS continues to decline, AQ will capitalize on that group’s losses, consolidate its territorial gains across the Muslim world, and assert itself as the most dangerous jihadist group in the world.
AQ can do all this because it is a truly resilient organization with a potent ideology that will attract like-minded followers for generations to come. Unlike other groups whose coherence revolves around the presence of a charismatic leader articulating an ideology and directing plots, AQ is but the hub of a movement that has seen the most brilliant and violent theologians espouse a unified worldview and provide various strategies and tactical guidance that can be modified and deployed in various operational contexts. AQ is also a learning organization that has researched and studied the most successful insurgencies and terrorist groups of the past. When the United States pushed it out of Afghanistan in 2001, American soldiers discovered a copy of The Revolt by Menachem Begin, the great Jewish statesman who bombed the King David Hotel and helped establish the modern state of Israel. AQ has undoubtedly learned from the mistakes IS committed in Iraq and has pushed its regional affiliates to lessen the violence against Shiite Muslims in order to forge broad cultural bonds and to help maintain its image as the vanguard of a global Islamic insurgency.
This type of flexibility allows AQ to continually adapt to changing circumstances, expand its presence to new territories, fund plots and activities of faraway groups, and maintain a globalized bureaucracy that enables it to replenish and be reborn. Soon after IS declared its caliphate, al-Zawahiri announced the establishment of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), demonstrating its ambitions. This is not only true of AQ’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jabhat al-Nusra showed this strategic flexibility when it transformed into Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and sought to moderate its ideology to win over Syrians to its cause. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula followed a similar approach, lessening its violence, assuming a governance role, and attempting to position itself as a defender of Yemen against Iranian aggression.
Its most important accomplishment in the past half decade is convincing the world that it is a moderate alternative to IS, which has given its brand of Salafist jihadism a degree of legitimacy among rebels in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. All of this in spite of being the parent organization that birthed IS in the first place and also killed thousands of innocent civilians, many of them Muslims, in various terrorist attacks since the 1990s. Make no mistake, AQ is just as violent and dangerous as IS, but it has learned how to use violence more selectively to enable alliance formation and the establishment of governance. Although it opposes the Westphalian state system and the world it created, it has learned the secrets of the rule of law and how service provision goes a long way towards earning a community’s trust. Already this approach is paying rich dividends in Yemen, and it has helped it poach away IS supporters in Afghanistan and Nigeria.
With Islamic State receding, al-Zawahiri’s gradualist approach has been validated, as his organization continues growing and consolidating ground. The continued weakness of the state system in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere means that AQ has room to grow in multiple theaters. This is especially true in the context of the Arab Spring’s failure to bring stability and legitimate governments through democracy following the coup in Egypt and the ongoing crises in North Africa and the Levant. Moreover, it has seemingly found the successor to Osama bin Laden through his son Hamza. Throughout 2017, Hamza bin Laden has taken center stage in AQ propaganda, with the group trying to position him as the true successor of his father in order to delegitimize al-Baghdadi’s position. Hamza has both the panache and rhetoric to appeal to would-be jihadists, and he is young enough that he can lead the organization for years to come.
THE (NOT) FOREVER WAR: WHAT IS BEYOND ISLAMIC STATE?
The following chapters will provide an overview of the main battlefields outside of Iraq and Syria. Although terrorism differs depending on the context, there are some structural features that define all the places that will be analyzed briefly. Largely what will emerge is the importance of governance and a society’s ability to deal with the social alienation that animates jihadists. While the following subject may strike a note of pessimism, what is important to keep in mind is that this violence is mostly a product of weak states. In other words, rather than facing a clash of civilizations with all the implications of a forever war, what the world faces is the technocratic dilemma of establishing strong, legitimate, and capable states with the ability to enforce the rule of law. This is not to say that this is easy, but the global community has experience doing this. More important, it completely undermines the fallacious notion that this is a war against Islam or that most of this terrorism cannot be contained or defeated.