TWO

The Onset of International Jihad

Taking on the Near Enemy (1980–1987)

The Struggle to Control Islamization in the 1980s

Besides the Afghan jihad, the 1980s saw both the constantly progressing Islamization of the Middle Eastern political order and the sharpening of antagonisms between the Shiite and Sunni camps intent on controlling it. The main conflict was the Iran-Iraq war that lasted from 1980 to August 1988. Unleashed by Saddam Hussein and supported by Western powers to contain an expansionist Iranian Revolution, it caused an estimated one million deaths. It was also a chance for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) and Basij (“the mobilized”) to test the tactic of suicide attacks, called “martyr operations” by their silent sponsors. These methods would spread, first to Lebanon and Israel, then throughout the Middle East, Europe, America, and around the world.

Teheran opened secondary fronts via the Lebanese civil war and Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which were no less important. The ensuing hostility set Iran both against the West and its allies, and against most Sunni organizations—except for Hamas, as we shall see. In effect, the Islamic Republic led a proxy war in the Levant to defend itself against the coalition of its enemies and relieve the pressure on its own borders with Iraq and on the Persian Gulf seaboard. It then opened a third front in Europe (which was intrinsically linked to Lebanon due to a hostage situation that occurred there) where the attacks skyrocketed. Until Khomeini’s death in June 1989, the country he guided totally discarded the rules of conventional warfare and international law while it probed for chinks in its adversaries’ armor. It hit them with the Rushdie fatwa, suicide attacks, and the taking of hostages to force acquiescence and dissuade them from direct military threats. Once Iran had regained a sense of security with the end of the Iraq war, it began to draw closer again to the community of nations. It felt compelled to emerge from an isolation that had threatened the regime’s continued existence. Meanwhile, Iran’s operating mode had found imitators in Sunni jihadist circles. They perpetuated throughout the world an Iran-style terrorism that the Republic had invented. Indeed, unlike the Shiite version, Sunni terrorism did not rely on the centralized apparatus of a state that would end up reintegrating to some extent with the international institutional order.

The Sunni containment of the Iranian Revolution thus proceeded along two principal axes: Afghan and Iraqi, which relied on jihad and Saddam Hussein respectively. Both benefited from unswerving Western support—which, in hindsight, appears to have been a rather shortsighted strategy.

In the Afghan jihad, mainly directed against the USSR, the objective was to build a “Great Narrative” as an alternative to the imagined Third Worlder, belligerent and revolutionary, that was at the heart of Teheran’s propaganda. Saudi Arabia and its allies wanted to show that they could respond better to the principal contemporary challenge posed to Islam, i.e., the invasion of its territory by the Soviet atheists. In the Islamic imagination, it was parallel to the occupation of Palestine by Israel, and remained the cause of a decaying Arab nationalism—until it was Islamized in turn by the emergence of Hamas toward the decade’s end. Hence, the call went out for the world’s Muslims to mobilize and rescue their Afghan coreligionists. The Salafists of the Arabian Peninsula and the Muslim Brotherhood joined in a chorus that soon swelled with all the political tendencies of Sunni Islam. It called for challenging the Shiites for hegemony over this global-scale religion.

The principal ideologue of Sunni jihad in the 1980s was, in fact, a Palestinian Muslim Brother, Abdullah Azzam, who was living in Peshawar, the Pakistani frontier town converted into a staging point for operations in Afghanistan. That made it the gateway into the battlefield for military supplies, as well as a hub for jihadists who came from everywhere to set up their base camps (Qaeda in Arabic—from which the main jihadist organization took its name). In his manifesto titled Join the caravan!, Azzam outlined the obligation incumbent on Muslims the world over to fight in Afghanistan. He claimed they were required to do so in the name of “defensive jihad,” which called on every believer to mobilize for the reconquest of the land of Islam under attack by infidels. This duty takes precedence over everything; neither a state, nor a husband, wife, father, or slave’s master could stand in the way of one performing it. Every believer had to act within his or her capabilities “by the hand, the tongue or the heart,” which could mean taking part in battle, financing, exhorting or preaching, or, at the very least, praying. Azzam asserted that this duty is an “individual obligation” (fard ʿayn) based on the Holy Scriptures; the worst punishment would be meted out in the hereafter to those who ignored it. The text and the many articles he penned in the ad hoc review Al-Jihad echoed a fatwa by the senior Sunni ulemas of the Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood movements calling on the world’s Muslims to join the fight. Recruiting offices were opened not only in Muslim countries but also in the West, including in the United States. Azzam was on good terms with the CIA, which, in fact, organized his tour of American Islamic centers. He set up the Bureau of Services (Maktab al-Khidamat—MAK) to coordinate the recruitment, funding, and routing of foreign jihadists. His main office in the United States in Brooklyn would later be a hangout for many Islamists, including the blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was eventually sentenced to life in prison for the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. As for MAK, it would be taken over by Osama bin Laden after Azzam’s assassination in November 1989 and incorporated into the al-Qaeda organization.

Financing the ten-year Afghan jihad is estimated to have cost the United States four billion dollars, and a matching sum in Arabian Peninsula petrodollars. At the time, it seemed a paltry price to pay for finishing off the USSR. But, in hindsight, the ultimate cost of this deal with the devil was incalculable, for it included the second attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The crucial military ground combat operations were carried out by Afghans called “mujahideen”—the active past participle of an Arab term that means “fighters of jihad.” Some colleagues and I (in my 2000 book Jihad) then coined the new word “jihadists” by adding a Greco-Latin suffix to the Arab root. It served to distinguish some forty thousand foreigners who flocked to the ranks of the native guerrilla fighters from the latter. They came from North Africa—especially Algeria, Libya, and Egypt—and from the Arabian Peninsula, Pakistan, and as far away as Malaysia and the south Philippines. Among them were Muslims who had emigrated to the United States, and a few dozen had already come from the European banlieues. They were trained and equipped by the CIA, but did relatively little fighting in-country. Those jihadists returning to their homes would recycle their training during the following decade to wage jihads, especially in Algeria and Egypt, or they would enlist in the shadowy al-Qaeda complex.

Algeria and Egypt in particular had to deal with strong Islamist agitation—Sadat had been assassinated on October 6, 1981—and their leaders, anxious to get rid of troublemakers, made it easy for local activists they could not keep in jail to leave the country. (This was the case with the Egyptian physician, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s right-hand man and later successor, who left his Cairo prison cell for Peshawar via Saudi Arabia.) Several years later, this myopic strategy backfired when the jihadists returned home, spoiling for a fight. But during the 1980s it fostered the illusion that Islamist activism under the Saudi aegis could be channeled against the USSR and that any eventual disruptions would be mere trifles.

This worldview was held in particular by President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the prime architect of American support for the Afghan jihad. He defended his approach in an interview with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur on January 15, 1998:

You have no regrets today?

Regret what? This secret operation was an excellent idea. It was effective in drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you want to know if I regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the frontier, I wrote President Carter, saying in essence: “We now have a chance to give the USSR its Vietnam war.” In fact, Moscow for nearly ten years had to pursue a war the regime could not afford, a conflict that brought the demoralization and finally the break-up of the Soviet empire.

You do not regret having fostered Islamist fundamentalism, having armed and advised future terrorists?

What is more important for world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet empire? A few hot-headed Islamists or the liberations of Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War?

A few hotheads? But let us say it once more: Islamic fundamentalism today represents a global threat.

Nonsense. They say that the West ought to have a global policy for dealing with Islamism. That’s stupid: there is no global Islamism.

Freeing Poland from the Russian yoke understandably would have had priority for the Warsaw-born squire turned presidential aide. But Brzezinski’s inability as late as 1998 to conceive of “global Islam” sheds light on how America’s leaders saw the world. As the 1980s dawned, they failed to comprehend either the significance of the Sunni policy of Islamization, driven by the Saudi monarchy, or its modalities. And the United States had even less of a notion as to how Iran would respond to the strategy of financially exhausting the USSR with the war in Afghanistan, because intellectually they remained prisoners of the Cold War legacy.

The Soviets pulled out of Kabul on February 15, 1989 under pressure from the mujahideen, who had devastated Soviet air power with Stinger ground-to-air missiles supplied by the CIA. In effect, the Soviets’ retreat prefigured the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 of that year, which, in turn, presaged the collapse of the Communist world. For the international jihadists in-country, who had read the history of the world in the light of the prophetic revelation and conquests of Islam (Futuhat), there was no doubt that they had reincarnated the deeds of the Prophet and his Companions and immediate successors. This was the “new Koranic generation” (jîl qurʾani jadid), which Sayyid Qutb had termed the fulfillment of his vows to destroy the jahiliyya—the impious “barbarity” of secular societies. Just like the knights riding under the Prophet’s banner had defeated the Sassanid empire at the battle of Qadisiyyah in 636, so had the jihadists beaten the Soviet superpower at Kabul. (It would later come to light that Saddam Hussein had also named his September 1980 offensive against Iran “Qadisiyyah.”) Bin Laden and his followers then carried the parallel further. Like the Arabs and Ottomans stepped up their raids against Byzantium, their era’s other formidable empire, until it fell in 1453, al-Qaeda escalated their anti-American attacks to climax in the “blessed double raid” against New York and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001. This sort of trans­historical telescoping is furthered here by the numerology that the Islamist movement is partial to. Seen through that lens, 11/9 (November 9, 1989), the date the Berlin Wall fell, is emblematic of the end of communism and the East-West split. Its reverse, 9/11 (September 11, 2001), heralds the dawn of the new Christian century. In the eyes of the jihadists, on this day the sun rose on the triumphal, salvational Islamist millennium over the rubble of the impious West.

On February 15, 1989, the world barely paid attention to the Soviet withdrawal from Kabul, robbing the Sunni axis of its moment of glory as Islam’s global jihad champion awash in petrodollars from the Arabian Peninsula. The day before, Khomeini had issued his fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death for having “blasphemed the Prophet” with his novel The Satanic Verses. In one masterstroke, the ayatollah stole the thunder of his rivals’ very real geopolitical victory, transferring the fight to the media battlefield. This was in effect the Islamic Republic demonstrating to the planet’s billion Muslims that it could issue a fatwa with global reach for the Indian-born British author. By doing so, Khomeini claimed to be standing up for them against the “humiliation inflicted on Mohammed.”

This maneuver constituted a symbolic rupture, with effects on several levels. The scandal bewildered the West and garnered massive media attention, so that the Soviet Army’s pull-out from Kabul the next day was covered as a mere sidestory. The campaign against Rushdie’s novel had actually started six months earlier in the United Kingdom’s Indo-Pakistani Sunni Islamist circles. It had already reverberated so much in the Indian subcontinent’s Muslim networks that even the secular New Delhi government censored the book. In London, demonstrations demanding similar measures under the anti-blasphemy law had been organized. (The law, since abrogated, only applied to the Anglican Church.)

In January, the rundown industrial city of Bradford in the Midlands, which had a considerable unemployed immigrant Muslim population, had seen the novel burned. Assorted mullahs and association leaders had fed copies of the book affixed to sticks into a bonfire. A furious crowd of believers, gathered on the grandiose square in front of the Gothic Venetian–style city hall, a witness to the bygone splendor of the Industrial Age, cheered them on. Saudi Arabia, who had allied with the United Kingdom and the United States in Afghanistan, had hoped to keep the situation from escalating to avoid offending Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government, which was livid over the affair. This provided an exceptional political opening for Teheran. By taking over the “defense of the Prophet” mantle from a Saudi Arabia shirking its duty, Teheran enhanced its standing with the Sunni masses. As an Iranian ayatollah creating an unprecedented scandal in the West by mocking its cherished freedom of speech, Khomeini succeeded in diverting everyone’s attention from the joint American-Saudi success in Kabul.

In retrospect, the Rushdie fatwa set several precedents. First, it turned the entire planet into a “land of Islam,” the Muslim designation of a territory where sharia applies. If a fatwa could sentence a British citizen and resident to death, it therefore covered the United Kingdom, the West, and the rest of the world. Khomeini’s coup in the global mass-media era erased the traditional boundaries of Muslim cosmography and annexed the entire universe to his own juridico-religious enterprise. At the time, there was not sufficient perspective to understand the considerable symbolic importance of this tilt in the Islamization of global norms and values. Even today, after three decades, it is still underestimated. Still, it set a precedent that would be replicated during subsequent “blasphemy” affairs. First, there was the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, shot and stabbed by a Dutch Moroccan youth in Amsterdam on November 2, 2004 for his ten-minute video Submission. Then came the campaign against the publication of the “Muhammad cartoons” by the Danish daily Jyllands Posten on September 30, 2005. It was followed by the massacre in the Charlie Hebdo editorial offices in Paris on January 7, 2015 by the Kuachi brothers, who shouted, “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed!” The Shiites may have initiated the tactic, but the standard they set exploded beyond its initial limits when the Sunnis began turning it to their own ends.

The fatwa had another effect on the Sunni jihadists: it convinced them that the media battlefield was essential and that they had neglected it during the Afghan jihad. Ayman al-Zawahiri, in his al-Qaeda strategic manifesto, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, published online in the late 1990s, underscored its central importance. He also drew up a qualified balance sheet of the jihads in Bosnia, Algeria, and Egypt, critiquing them as too localized, which kept them from setting off the worldwide reverberations that might have galvanized them and brought victory. In this sense, the lessons derived from the fatwa of February 14, 1989, as modus operandi, had another decisive influence. It set the mold for the Hollywoodesque staging of 9/11 in the era of satellite TV transmission, specifically by Al Jazeera. It would also do so—particularly in the social media era to come—for the Islamic State’s graphic footage of hostage executions.

Complementing the Afghan jihad, three great conflicts shook the 1980s. They bore witness, on the one hand, to political Islamization joining the major world narratives; on the other hand, they reflected the gamesmanship between Shiites and Sunni as they vied for hegemony over the process.

The Iraq-Iran war was started in September 1980 by Saddam Hussein, a native of Tikrit in Iraq’s “Sunni Arab triangle.” The conflict forced the Baath party to sideline the secularism that was one of its founding principles and in its place operationalize the precepts of the region’s ideological Islamization, in doing so usurping the place of a secular Arab nationalism that was on its last legs. The slogan of Allahu Akbar (“Allah is the Greatest”) was added to the Iraqi flag in 1990. Saddam had himself filmed everywhere at prayer. The female leaders in the party’s hierarchy, who proudly wore their hair like modern militants emancipated from all outdated traditions, had to carefully veil themselves again.

As we saw earlier, the offensive against the Islamic Republic had been baptized “Saddam’s Qadisiyyah,” thus resurrecting the name of the decisive battle waged in 636 by the forces of Caliph Omar, the Prophet’s second successor, who destroyed the Persian empire and annexed it to the land of Islam. Saddam Hussein tried to wrap himself in the Islamic referent. He wanted to deprive his adversary of it, reducing Iran to its ancient Sassanide and Zoroastrian territorial origins, thus hamstringing its claim to represent all of Islam. Not to be outdone, Teheran roundly denounced Baathist secularism for making a sham of the religion. For internal use, the Iranian military offensives were named “Karbala” (numbered from one in 1981 to six in 1988) to rally its soldiers with the Shiite ideology as updated by Khomeini. State propaganda routinely depicted Saddam as a reincarnation of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid, the slayer of Imam Hussein at the battle of Karbala in the year 680. Internationally, i.e., for the world’s Muslims at large, other campaigns were called “Badr,” the name of the first battle won by the Prophet in 624 against the kuffar (“unbelievers”) of the Quraysh tribe—another stand-in for the “unbelieving” Baathists.

Saddam’s motivations were twofold, domestic and international. At home, his bloody dictatorial regime was becoming fabulously rich from the rise in the price of crude oil. Iraq at the time was the second-largest exporter in the world after Saudi Arabia. Beyond the Baathist window dressing, he relied on one of Iraq’s minorities, the Sunni Arabs. Confronting them was a Shiite majority (the principal holy places of that sect, Karbala and Najaf, are located in Iraq) and the irredentist Kurds dwelling in the mountains in the country’s north where they waged a low-level guerrilla war. Saddam had two key tasks: first, counter the potential attraction that the political Shiism of the Islamic Republic held for the majority of his own people. The other was to profit from the revolutionary disorder in the neighboring country by expanding into the east. He wanted to lengthen the 36-mile Iraqi coastline fronting the Persian Gulf and planned to accomplish this by annexing the Arab-speaking Iranian maritime province of Khuzestan.

In regional and international terms, Iraq was the secular fist of all those who wanted to block the Khomeinist expansion and proselytizing. This included the Sunni oil monarchies on the Arabian Peninsula that united against Iran in 1981 in a Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (better known as the Gulf Cooperation Council or GCC). Then there were the Western powers, foremost the United States and France. Ignoring Saddam’s abysmal record of human rights violations, the political and oil elites of both countries held him in high esteem. He had established close relations with Jacques Chirac as well as parts of the French secular left. He benefited from highly sophisticated American and French weapons in his war against Iran, including the loan of the French Navy’s “Super Étendard” fighter-bombers. This military assistance is one of the reasons Iran cited for their retaliating by taking Western hostages, operations carried out by Teheran’s proxies in Lebanon. But these operations failed to offset Iraq’s arms advantage, which eventually tilted the fortunes of war in Baghdad’s favor.

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To avoid a debacle, Ayatollah Khomeini was forced to “drink from the poisoned chalice,” that is, accept a ceasefire between the two countries, both bled dry by the fighting, effective August 20, 1988. He tried to divert attention from this failure by “moving ahead” with the fatwa against Rushdie the following February 14, before dying on June 3, 1989 at nearly 87 years of age. The charismatic imam’s death created the necessary condition for the Islamic Republic to gradually rejoin the community of nations. As for Saddam Hussein, his victory by default left him at the head of a ravaged country, ruined and deeply in debt to the Arab petromonarchies. This is why he gambled on attacking his Kuwaiti creditor in August 1990, plunging Iraq into the first Gulf war. For both Iraq and Iran, the oil revenues had fed an exorbitant war-making capacity, especially in Saddam’s case, with the stockpiling of weapons facilitated by the Western powers. It had also widened the split between Shiites and Sunnis to extremes that went beyond even the military confrontation between Persians and Arabs.

Simultaneously, the Islamic Republic, bent on loosening the stranglehold on its borders and airspace, spread the conflict to the Levant by proxy. It penetrated weak spots that both the ongoing Lebanese civil war and the evolution of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities had revealed. The 1980s, in effect, were marked as much by the Islamization of the vocabulary of these two conflicts as by Iran infiltrating them with its interests, conspicuously in Lebanon and gradually, below the radar, in Palestine. This provided Teheran with unexpected, potent leverage for pressuring the Western camp.

In Lebanon, this strategy first played out in hostage taking. It was paralleled by Hezbollah’s mobilizing of Lebanon’s Shiite community, demographically in the majority but marginalized politically, now transformed into a dominant force. The Shiite community succeeded in uniting around itself all the minorities making up the Levantine mosaic. This included the Eastern Christians who faced extermination from the propagation of jihadist Salafism, of which Islamic State would become the most extreme expression. And, operating from the Shiite districts in South Lebanon, Hezbollah de facto replaced the Palestinian resistance against Israel with its own “Resistance” (Muqawama). It combined this with support for Hamas in a rare example of a Sunni Islamist movement linked to the Muslim Brotherhood aligning with Teheran.

In a bruised and divided Lebanon, heavily influenced by Damascus since the Syrian troops arrived in June 1976, the Palestinians settled in the south were in the habit of launching rocket barrages at Israel’s Galilee. To put a stop to it, in June 1982 the Israeli army invaded, in an operation codenamed “Peace for Galilee.” Penetrating as far as the Beirut suburbs, it evicted the armed Palestinian groups from the country’s south, then from Lebanon itself. The Palestinians departed on French ships headed for Tunisia, but would later come back to Tripoli in Lebanon’s north, only to be chased from there too, this time by the Syrians and their local allies, in December 1983. The Shiite populace at first gladly welcomed the Israeli invaders who had rid them of the Palestinian fedayeen. But the military presence, which had linked up with the pro-Western Christian militias, changed the balance of power against Damascus and its Iranian ally. The assassination of the new Lebanese President Bachir Gemayel was avenged by the massacre in the Palestinian camps at Sabra and Chatila in September 1982. It was carried out by Maronite Phalangist militias quite openly, with the Israeli army present.

The new president Amine Gemayel, brother of his late predecessor, signed a treaty with Israel with the aim of bringing about the latter’s withdrawal from Lebanon and peace between the two countries, but this project was sabotaged by the joint action of Syria and Iran. The Islamic Republic deployed several hundred Revolutionary Guards (pasdaran) in the Bekaa, a majority Shiite region. This direct intervention on Lebanese territory was a prelude to setting up the “Party of God” or Hezbollah, which had recognized Khomeini as its guide and mentor. (Starting on December 15, 1981, Lebanon had already turned into an echo chamber of the Shiite-Sunni confrontation as incarnated by the Iran-Iraq war, with a first suicide attack directed at the Iraqi embassy.)

In September 1982 an American-French-Italian Multinational Force (MNF) arrived, charged with separating the combatants. Another suicide attack, this time against the United States embassy in April 1983, killed three. It was followed by two more on October 23 against the barracks of the American and French multinational force contingents, resulting in 256 and fifty-eight dead, respectively. No one took credit, but clearly these attacks had evolved from Iranian suicide tactics on the Iraqi front, now deployed against the conventional forces of the big powers. It was an asymmetric warfare that later jihadism would draw on for inspiration, since it succeeded in forcing the MNF out of Lebanon in 1984. Gradually, the Syria-Iran axis started running the show there, through the innumerable secondary twists and turns that three decades of conflict would bring.

This strategy’s second strand consisted of taking hostages, which started on March 22, 1985. Ultimately, twelve French nationals, eight Americans, and seven individuals from other countries hostile to Iran were taken. The kidnapping of Jean-Paul Kauffman and Michel Seurat two months later was claimed by a Shiite ad hoc “Organization of Islamic Jihad,” who demanded an end to France’s aid to Baghdad. This came just as Paris had loaned Iraq the Super Étendard fighter-bombers. Additional context was that Iran wanted to obtain restitution of the shah’s investment in the European nuclear authority, EURODIF, still blocked by France. This kidnapping spree, widely covered by public television, one of whose film crews was also kidnapped, was a national tragedy in France, culminating in the news that the academic researcher Michel Seurat had died in captivity. An accord was reached when minister of foreign affairs Roland Dumas visited Teheran in 1989, followed by the freeing and expelling of terrorists jailed in France. Among them was a Lebanese Shiite who had tried to assassinate Shapour Bakhtiar, the shah’s former prime minister and opponent of the Islamic Republic, in a Paris suburb in 1980.

In this way, Lebanese territory became a staging ground for Iran’s anti-Western activities. South Lebanon, which gradually came under Hezbollah’s total control, turned into a stronghold of the Resistance against Israel. The point of the spear was now the Shiite party; by making itself the champion of the battle against the “Zionist entity,” it replaced the Arab nationalism of which the PLO had been the symbol par excellence. Hezbollah’s popularity, and that of Iran, grew considerably as a result, even in the massively Sunni Arab world. It would culminate in the “33-Day War,” spanning from July 12 to August 14, 2006, between Israel and Hezbollah. It went badly for the Israeli army and made Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of the “Party of God,” a genuine hero in the Arab world. He would even be celebrated on the satellite TV channels of the thoroughly Sunni Arabian Peninsula. This was a first for a Shiite who had pledged allegiance to Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Republic.

Even inside Lebanon, by embodying the Resistance (muqawama), Hezbollah acquired an immense legitimacy that extended beyond just the Shiite community. This enabled it to keep its weapons even while the other militias had to disarm. Starting in the late 1980s, Hezbollah came to wield a growing influence in Lebanon. The Taif agreement, signed October 22, 1989 in the Saudi resort town of that name, proved to be pivotal in this. The accord put an end to fifteen years of civil war, in essence ratifying the Christian defeat for the benefit of the Sunni. In effect, the Maronite president of the Republic lost his basic political prerogatives to the Sunni Muslim prime minister. This symbolically affirmed the victory of Saudi Islamization carried on a tide of petrodollars, incarnated in the person of the Lebanese-Saudi Sunni billionaire and politician Rafik Hariri. In reality, this accord would be overtaken in the ensuing years by the rapid evolution of forces on the ground, which saw the Sunni community marginalized, to Hezbollah’s advantage. Below, we will examine how this affected the 2000s and the 2010s.

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The Islamization of the Palestinian conflict, preceded and followed by the Sunnis and Shiites competing for leadership in the region, constituted one of the major transformations of political symbolism in the Middle East during the 1980s. After 1979, following the successful Iranian Revolution, Fathi Shaqaqi, a Palestinian M.D. with a Muslim Brotherhood background living in exile in Egypt, published a book titled Khomeini: the alternative Islamic solution. He dedicated the work to Khomeini (“the revolutionary imam”) and to the Brotherhood’s founder Hassan al-Banna (“the martyred imam”). In its pages, the author gave voice to the intellectual closeness of the most radical of the Brothers, the disciples of Sayyid Qutb, with the Shiite activists of political Islam as transcending sectarian allegiances. Shaqaqi founded the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an armed movement that, from 1983 onward, carried out the first violent actions against Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories. They were designed to show that the Jewish state was not invincible, at a time when the PLO was in disarray in Lebanon and the moderate branch of the Palestinian Brotherhood confined itself to charity work. During these years, the mystique of Palestinian training camps, which were being eliminated from Lebanon, was supplanted by that of the jihadist camps—the “Qaeda”—between Peshawar and the Afghan frontier. Abdullah Azzam, jihad’s principal ideologue, was a Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood radical himself, for that matter. In his writings, he recalled that the liberation and Islamization of his native land was still his paramount objective—even if under present circumstances the focus had to be on Afghanistan as the best opportunity for armed jihad.

The combination of Shaqaqi’s and Azzam’s influence was the leaven in the radicalization of the Palestinian Brotherhood. It was baked into the first Intifada (“uprising”), or “revolt of the stones,” starting in December 1987. It moved the resistance against Israel from outside to inside Palestine. Thus, it spread to the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, and then to the territory of the Jewish state itself. In the decade that followed, it was paralleled by the birth of the “Islamic Resistance Movement,” whose Arabic acronym spells Hamas (the word itself means “zeal”). As the Intifada grew, Hamas challenged the leadership monopoly of the Palestinian cause by Arafat’s PLO by publishing its own calendar of the mandatory strike days. On August 18, 1988, Hamas also published a charter that differed from the PLO’s, which until then had been the sole official reference. The Hamas charter stated that the jihad for liberating the Islamic territory of Palestine was an “individual obligation” (fard ʿayn), echoing the term used by Azzam to describe the Afghan jihad when it was about to checkmate the Soviet Army. If the PLO at the end of the 1980s still retained its capacity for political maneuver, it was shaken by the Islamization of its cause. Hamas would grow in the following years thanks to a flood of petrodollars from the Arabian Peninsula. In 1990, for example, Kuwait gave Hamas sixty million U.S. dollars but the PLO only twenty-seven million. In August of that year, Arafat supported Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded the Emirate, as we will see below.

1989: Islamization on the Ruins of Communism

As the year 1989 came to a close, the Islamic context had become a true part of the international system. Whereas the confrontation of the free world led by Washington and the socialist world directed from Moscow had served, since Yalta in 1945, as the prime engine of global history’s dialectic, 1989 constituted a watershed in more ways than one. The emergence of Islamization supported by a gush of oil revenue took on all the more meaning as a profound cultural break in a year that also marked the bicentennial of the French Revolution, secularism’s midwife par excellence.

In France, the celebrations were marked by the first incident of students wearing the veil in a public middle school in Creil, near Paris. This would begin fifteen years of multiple court proceedings that pitted Islamist associations against the state. It only ended in March 2004, with the passage of a law that definitively forbade the wearing of “ostentatious religious symbols” in educational institutions financed by taxpayer money. After the jolt of the Rushdie affair across the Channel at the start of the year, these two dominant concepts emerged, however differentiated, of multicultural British secularism and French republican secularism. Each school of thought was born from the European humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment, and both countries were hit equally hard by the Islamization of social and moral values, by revolutionary Shiism on the one hand and conservative Sunnism on the other.

The “affair of the veil” at Creil, a working-class area in the Paris banlieues, started on September 18, 1989 when three Muslim girls attending middle school refused to remove their hijabs in class. By a significant coincidence, this happened a few weeks before the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, and the French press and public opinion were more excited and divided about the former event than the latter. The uproar triggered by an adolescent’s fabric headscarf, despite its apparent triviality, preoccupied the public more than the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR, and the dissolution of communism. This paralleled how Khomeini’s fatwa condemning the author of The Satanic Verses earlier that year had totally blown away the news of the Soviets surrendering Kabul the next day. While Anglo-Saxon observers ridiculed the veil affair and the public’s response as typical French insanity, the situation was more complicated than that. It signaled the onset in society of an insidious type of cultural fracturing brought on by the process of Islamization of France’s disenfranchised banlieues. This cultural break would replace the social fracture translated politically by the confrontations between the left and the right. In this respect, it mirrored the end of the global face-off between East and West, between Communism and Free World. It also inaugurated a reading of contemporary history as the opposition of the two binary entities of the West and Islam, as Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington argued in his bestselling book, The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1996.

Three decades later, this cultural fracture has widened considerably. In France, exacerbated by jihadist terrorism, it has developed into a fissure running through French society (as it has for the rest of the world). In 1989, France saw the same phenomenon crop up close to home, with Islamization taking hold in the heart of Algeria’s political space. This mattered, not only because France was linked to Algeria by the vexatious legacy of 132 years of colonial history, but because France has several million residents primarily of Algerian origin, the majority of whom already had obtained French citizenship or would be naturalized.

Indeed, in March 1989, an Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was formed in the Ben Badis mosque in Algiers by a conglomerate of Islamic activists and preachers, Salafists, and jihadists of various backgrounds. At the same time, fighters were trickling back from Afghanistan, crowned with glory from their victory over the USSR the previous month. As it happened, the USSR was a key supporter of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the party in power in Algeria. Moscow had trained many of the regime’s cadres, mentored it on its disastrous march into socialism, and equipped its army. Algeria had “built socialism” thanks to oil and gas income that the military oligarchy controlled, using it to buy peace in the streets while destroying civil society and wiping out what was left of the entrepreneurial class. This strategy disempowered a population whose considerable demographic growth had been encouraged by a fierce competition with Morocco for hegemony over the Maghreb. Algeria was left highly exposed to fluctuations in the price of hydrocarbons, which subsidized the entire economy. The 1986 economic downturn led to cutting the state budget in half, resulting in a declining standard of living. This dire situation was aggravated by mismanagement, corruption, and the mainstreaming of the trabendo (black market).

Little wonder, then, that in this downbeat context furious riots broke out on October 4, 1988, which took several hundred lives before they were put down. Over the course of the riots, impoverished urban youths vilified the police as “Jews” while state television broadcast images denouncing how the Israelis were repressing the Palestinian Intifada. Like Iran in 1978, the Algerian uprising initially did not have an Islamic imprint. It was the strongman, President Chadli Bendjedid, who ultimately called in Islamic preachers to meet and calm a situation that had deteriorated into looting.

The Islamist movement in Algeria grew substantially during the 1980s, as it did elsewhere in the Sunni world. In 1982, Mustapha Buyali, at the head of the Armed Islamic Movement (MIA) and inspired by reading Sayyid Qutb, went underground, imitating the FLN during the war of independence against France from 1954 to 1962. His goal was to see sharia implemented in the country through armed jihad, but MIA had a limited impact, and Buyali was killed five years later. Meanwhile, the regime got rid of anyone intent on following in his footsteps by letting them depart unhindered for Afghanistan.

At the same time, conservative movements fought the leftist students at the university, demanding generalized use of Arabic, less French, and implementation of sharia in legislation. Led by Abbassi Madani (future president of the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS) in mass prayers, these conservative movements were also targeted for repression. The dominant political powers were careful to kneecap any Islamization not controlled by the state, as Sadat had done in Egypt the previous decade. A regime-sponsored, Islam-inspired family code was adopted by parliament, the country was covered with mosques, and literature and cassettes by Wahhabi preachers flooded the Algiers book market, crowding out works in French. Egyptian sheikh Yussef al-Qaradawi, a major public face of the Muslim Brotherhood, was invited by the government to help nurture the country’s “Islamic revival.” He would later come to host the main religious broadcast on the Al Jazeera network and become a key player in Islamizing the Arab uprisings of 2011.

In Algeria, an Islamist counter-elite had thus constituted itself within the framework of the general Islamization of politics which had been inspired by that of the oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula since 1973. Only now, with a few years’ lag behind the Middle East, was it impacting North Africa. And it was to this bearded elite that President Chadli, deprived of the traditional go-betweens of the sole party—the decaying FLN—and targeted by protests, turned to help reestablish calm. To this end, on October 10 he summoned the preacher Sahnoun, Buyali’s former disciple; Ali Belhadj, the impassioned tribune of jihad; and Mahfud Nahnah, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. After they issued their appeal, the looting stopped, a testament to their influence. In return, Chadli authorized a multi­party system, paving the way for the creation of the FIS in 1989.

FIS experienced meteoric growth when it cracked the code on how to bring two antagonistic social classes together; under the umbrella of an Islamist intelligentsia, it organized the impoverished urban youth—called hittistes in the local dialect (“those who stand against the wall,” a euphemism for being unemployed)—and the pious middle classes. It was a revolutionary process reminiscent, at least initially, of the Iranian Revolution. The FIS grew in popularity when it demanded the release of MIA jihadists, imprisoned under “unbeliever” justice, by organizing incessant marches and sit-ins, and when it stepped in for a state slow to react to the earthquake in Tipasa, a coastal city in Western Algeria, in September. FIS triumphed in the local elections of June 1990, which gave it a network of “Islamic municipalities.” It found success again in the parliamentary elections of December 1991. However, the army shut them down, depriving the party of its victory and, as we will see below, paving the way for a jihad that would spill over onto French soil.

The Islamists in Algeria, despite their initial successes, were thus blocked from taking power. However, elsewhere in the Sunni Arab world, the year 1989 saw a regime led by a personality with Islamist sympathies installed in Sudan for the first time. Hassan al-Turabi was a charismatic intellectual from a religious background, later educated in England and France. Close to Third World circles, like Ali Shariati in the Shiite world, he favored “top-down” Islamization. He preferred to address himself to the Sudanese intelligentsia (in large part former members of the Communist Party), which, for an Arab country, was exceptionally powerful.

Released from a seven-year prison sentence, al-Turabi adopted a pragmatic approach of infiltrating the state apparatus, the army, and the Islamic banking system that Saudi Arabia was setting up throughout the country. He had exerted his influence during the last years of the regime of General Nimeyri in the early 1980s, when the latter took steps to ban alcohol and establish sharia. In January 1985, the general also had an intellectual, Mohammed Mahmud Taha, hanged for proposing a critical rereading of the Koran. After Nimeyri’s regime fell later that year, al-Turabi called the National Islamic Front into being, while the civil war between the Muslim North and the Animist and Christian South ravaged the country. He provided the army with Islamic legitimization for its actions. When the military setback at Khartoum in the South led to the coup d’état by General Omar al-Bashir on June 30, 1989, al-Turabi became the new regime’s éminence grise.

Even while the Soviet system and communist ideology were foundering in late 1989, the Islamist movement racked up some weighty achievements beyond its role in the Soviet Army’s rout from Kabul and the successful power grab in Khartoum. Through the Rushdie affair in the United Kingdom and the Islamic veil dispute in France, the Islamic movement gained a niche foothold in the cultural politics of these two European democracies. Then there was the Taif agreement that effectively cemented Muslim predominance in Lebanon, as well as the creation of the FIS and Hamas, whose effects would be felt long-term. But foremost, it was the jihad launched in Algeria, in reaction to the army stopping the election just before the FIS’s impending surefire victory, that would characterize the last decade of the twentieth century. It would be joined by two other jihads, one in Egypt and the other in Bosnia.

The First Phase of Jihadism in Check: The 1990s

The 1990s were marked above all by the opening of three jihad fronts in Egypt, Algeria, and Bosnia that were modeled on that of Afghanistan during the 1980s. Algeria and Bosnia are linked or contiguous with Europe, foreshadowing the waves of attacks on the continent in the following two decades. In stretches of fighting lasting from three to five years, the jihadists failed to make headway, but learned from these failures. Bin Laden and Zawahiri would draw on these lessons in preparing jihadism’s second phase, which culminated in the “blessed dual raid” of September 11, 2001 on New York and Washington.

The 1990s would, however, open with an internal conflict in the rentier system of the Sunni oil-producing countries, which would fracture the Islamization pursued by the petromonarchies. This conflict was set off by jihadists turning against the regime in Riyadh. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was punished by a military coalition led by the United States, jumping off from bases on Saudi territory, with the goal of liberating the Emirate. This provoked a violent Islamist protest in Saudi Arabia, ten years after the Mecca uprising. Osama bin Laden became its supreme exponent, thereby making his split with the powers in his native country explicit. The attack on Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s army on August 2, 1990 was a paradoxical consequence of the Iran-Iraq war. Like the other oil kingdoms in the Gulf Cooperation Council, Kuwait was haunted by fear of the Khomeinist revolution spreading to the Arabian Peninsula. They had therefore generously financed “Saddam’s Qadisiyyah ” with loans. The danger averted after the conflict ended in the summer of 1988, Baghdad, ruined and with its oil fields out of commission, was unable to meet its debt obligations. The escalating tensions ended in the “attack on the bank” by its debtor, as the saying went at the time.

The interplay of oil, war, and Islamization was immediately evident, because the invasion kicked off while the members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), chaired the previous year by Kuwait, were meeting that morning in Cairo. At the opening hour of the conference, with the mission of propagating Islam around the world under Saudi leadership on the agenda, one of the OIC’s member states had been attacked, defeated, and annexed by another. Saddam’s troops, after making short work of the Emirate, henceforward to be known as Iraq’s “nineteenth province,” advanced to the Saudi border, putting the Hasa oilfields within striking distance.

A thoroughly panicked King Fahd, self-titled the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” appealed on August 7 to the Americans for troops to safeguard the kingdom’s territorial integrity. However, this invitation to the “infidels” to trample on the country’s holy ground, prompted the jihadists, abundantly financed previously by Riyadh in Afghanistan, to accuse the Wahhabite king of denying Islam. They based this accusation on one of the Prophet’s sayings (hadith) cited by the monarchy itself as a justification for barring any faith but Islam from its territory: “Expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.” In its strictest interpretation, this hadith explicitly forbade relying on “crusader” soldiers, who would sow sedition among Muslims. This ideological split in the Salafist Sunni camp would persist for decades.

Saddam Hussein in the same way had weaponized Islam’s symbolic register against Teheran during the war to dispute Iran’s hegemony over Islam by calling his offensive “Qaddisiya.” He now justified his raid on Kuwait and the coming conflict with Saudi Arabia by hoisting the banner of jihad against the dynasties that he called vassals of the West. However, Saddam’s apparatus for Islamic legitimization was relatively weak in the face of the well-oiled machinery of the Saudi Council of Senior Ulemas—after all, it was he who had ordered many Iraqi clerics to be hanged, assassinated, or imprisoned. To compensate, he now embellished his jihad with populist accents. When the first contingent of an eventual half-million American soldiers landed in Saudi Arabia, he doubled down his rhetoric on hatred of the West, crusaders, colonialism, imperialism, and so on. His supporters across the Arab world chimed in with the same enthusiasm as the nationalists who regarded him as Nasser reincarnated, and the Islamist radicals who dreamed of seeing the House of Saud come tumbling down.

The “Arab street”—an expression that flourished about this time—further ignited Saddam’s popularity on January 15, 1991, when the Desert Storm operation commenced. It first pushed the Iraqi troops out of Kuwait toward Iraq, then back across the border. By launching a few Scud missiles that landed in Israeli territory, Saddam further galvanized the masses by rekindling their anti-Zionism. Arafat lent his support, a move that would reduce the PLO’s subsidies from the Gulf after Saddam’s defeat while increasing subsidies to his rival Hamas. The mythmaking about the Scuds was especially pronounced in the Maghreb, where mobilization took an anti-French turn after President Mitterrand joined the coalition on the side of the United States.

In Morocco, I heard the following story: “Morocco decided to launch a Scud against France. But, at the last moment, it failed to launch. They discovered that a dozen people were clinging to it in hopes of getting to France without needing a visa.” This canard amply illustrates the ambiguity of the postcolonial relationship between France and the Maghreb. In Algeria, support for Saddam was rallied by the most radical fringe of the FIS, the Islamist party that had just been formed and had carried the June 1990 municipal elections. The preacher Ali Belhadj marched in combat fatigues at the head of immense processions, chanting, “Strike, Saddam!” These masses turned into voters that cast ballots en masse for the FIS, which therefore won the first round of parliamentary elections in December that year.

The Saudi king Fahd thus found his teaching authority over the global Islamization process imperiled by a one-upmanship that turned Islamization’s own discourse back on him. At first, the Saudi liberal circles had tried to benefit from the Western military presence by pushing reforms. With American female soldiers driving vehicles in plain view, sixty-six Saudi women got behind the wheel in public on November 6, 1990. This attracted an immediate, violent response from the authorities, who gave free rein to the most conservative circles that reviled the women as “communist whores.” (Saudi women would have to wait until September 2017 for a decree to finally be published permitting women to drive, effective with Ramadan in June 2018.)

The Islamist current also manifested itself with a gradually increasing virulence against King Fahd. It did not help that the monarch had already burned his fingers on the takeover of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, at the dawn of the new Hegirian century ten years earlier. In a first, in May 1991, on the initiative of a young imam named Salman al-ʿAuda—who would be alternately imprisoned and co-opted by the monarchy over the course of the next decade—109 preachers and activists addressed a “letter of complaints” (khitab al-matalib) to the king. It implored him to keep the kingdom true to the strictest Wahhabism and expel the nefarious influence of Christians and Jews. In veiled terms, it critiqued the royal family’s monopoly on power, its religious legitimacy having been damaged by the arrival of “crusader” troops on Saudi territory. The petitioners asked for the creation of a “consultative council.”

King Fahd first had the oldest ulemas reprimand the initiative’s promoters on the grounds that, by going public with their complaints, they risked sowing sedition (fitna) among believers. Then he moved to adopt their idea of a council, but appointed members of the great tribes, most of whom were Western educated. Some of the letter signers then published a no-holds barred “memorandum of admonition” (mudhakirat an-nasiha) attacking the regime to its core: it demanded independence for clerics, as well as total Islamization of the law and the banking system, then went on to criticize the weakness of the Saudi army, the inviting into the kingdom of the American military, and so on.

On May 3, 1993, some of the memorandum authors formed an anti-establishment Islamist organization—an intolerable, incongruous precedent for a kingdom positioning itself as promoter of a total Islamization aiming to saturate the religious landscape. The new group’s Arabic logo, “Committee for the Defense of Sharia Rights,” translated into English as “Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights.” It was a play on the ambiguity of the Arabic word in order to mobilize support in the West from liberals and defenders of human rights not versed in Arabic. In the event, the signatories were quickly jailed but were soon released under pressure from Amnesty International. Their leader, Muhammad al-Massʾari, was allowed to emigrate to London in April 1994. For two years, he railed against the Saudi regime from there, exposing its wickedness via fax. (As this was before the Internet, his fax bill grew so large that British Telecom suspended his line for non-payment in 1996.)

While King Fahd was jailing the main players in this protester Islamist movement known as sahwa (“awakening”), Massʾari stepped back in 1996, letting Osama bin Laden take his place. Linked to the memorandum’s authors, bin Laden had fled Saudi Arabia in 1991 to Afghanistan, then relocated to al-Turabi’s Sudan where he lived from 1992–1996. His first slogan was “Chase the Americans out of the Arabian Peninsula.” During the invasion of Kuwait, he had offered to deploy his jihadist brigades against Saddam’s troops. Scorning his offer, on August 7, 1990, the king appealed instead to the Americans to come to the rescue. This affront would be avenged, as we will argue further on, with the attacks against the United States embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, on the eighth anniversary of the Kuwaiti king’s appeal.

The Algerian Jihad (1992–1997)—Terror on Europe’s Doorstep

After the Soviet Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, the foreign jihadists able to do so trickled back home. Many were determined to duplicate the Afghan experience by overturning what they considered to be “apostate” regimes and replacing them with Islamic states. Chechnya, for example, was rife with Saudi jihadi veterans of Afghanistan. But, aside from unrest in some Muslim countries as the USSR split apart, three main areas of jihad marked the decade: Algeria, Egypt, and Bosnia. In the first two, the fighters were homegrown; in Bosnia, the bulk of the jihadi contingent consisted of Saudis, Egyptians, and some European converts. Hardly any Bosnians had been to Afghanistan.

In Algeria, the return of the “Afghans,” beginning in 1989, coincided with social unrest that had its roots in the uprisings and looting of October 1988, the disintegration of the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN), and the debut of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). The mosque where these Afghan-war veterans congregated in the rundown Algiers working-class neighborhood of Belcourt (whose previous claim to fame was as the place where Nobel Prize–winning novelist Albert Camus spent his youth in the 1920s) was aptly nicknamed “Kabul.” Joining with the veterans of Mustapha Buyali’s Islamic Armed Movement, they stormed a military post in the town of Guemmar on November 28, 1991. Here they decapitated the draftees to commemorate the impending anniversary of the “martyrdom” of Abdullah Azzam, the ideologue of jihad.

This invasion of the Guemmar military post was also their way of registering disapproval of the Islamic Salvation Front’s electoral strategy. After its tidal wave victory in the municipal elections of June 1990, the FIS found itself caught in a tug-of-war. On one side was the conservative wing, consisting of middle-class believers represented by ʿAbbassi Madani, intent on Islamizing the state structure put in place by the FLN. Pulling it the other way were the poor urban youth, eager to do battle and overturn the social order. As a result, the FIS adopted a dual power structure in 1991. It paralyzed the country with an insurrectional strike that translated into the arrest of the party’s two principal leaders, Madani and Belhadj, who would spend the entire civil war in prison. But, for the most part, the FIS carried the first round of parliamentary elections on December 26—even with a million fewer votes than in the previous municipal elections. This relative success meant it would still achieve an absolute majority in the second round of voting set for mid January 1992.

President Chadli’s strategy of holding on to power by co-opting a minority FIS was thwarted by the party’s absolute domination at the ballot box. On January 11, 1992, the military top-brass dismissed the president and “suspended” the elections. It arrested most of the FIS’s leaders and cadres on March 4. Far from the situation in Iran, where one organized, hierarchized clergy unified and successfully managed the process of taking power, the FIS had failed in its attempted coup. Because of its multiple tendencies and personalities, it could not channel its immense popularity into the machinery of a victorious revolutionary party. It never recovered from this violent repression by the army—which, in turn, would have to deal with five years of civil war. The ensuing jihad waged against the generals and their allies resulted in an estimated 100,000 dead at least.

The scattering of the Islamist movement’s leadership would rapidly alienate the masses that had followed the FIS. In particular, the party’s conflicting social memberships would cause its electoral base to splinter. It tried to offset this with religious slogans pitting “good Muslims” against “unbelievers and apostates” in a binary, doctrinal manner. The movement’s “moderate” leadership believed in the electoral process for Islamizing the country without the need to revamp the political structure in depth. But the army stopping the elections between rounds dealt the moderate branch a major, strategic defeat. This coup d’état therefore strengthened the party’s most “extremist” faction. In effect, the Afghan jihad model was transposed to Algeria, where it was crossbred with the homegrown guerrillas, dating back to the “mujahideen” of the war of independence (1954–1962) and to Mustapha Buyali’s Islamic Armed Movement (MIA) (1982–1987).

While FIS leadership was fragmenting, local jihadists and Afghanistan veterans joined forces in founding the Islamic Armed Group (GIA) in October 1992. Its first “emir,” Abdelhaq Layada, an erstwhile auto-body repairer, excommunicated the FIS leaders as “unbelievers.” He also declared that spilling their blood would be lawful, the same as that of all agents of the state and other “children of France.” In a long text attributed to Layada that appeared in March 1993—whether he authored it is not certain—he appropriated the Afghan jihad. Like the Algerian jihad that he intended to lead, he decreed it to be every believer’s “individual obligation” (fard ʿayn), as Abdullah Azzam had done. He also subscribed to the Buyali epic. In 1993–1994, GIA started a phase of large-scale massacres, concentrating on “soft targets.” These included the despised Francophone intellectuals, members of civil society, doctors, and journalists—all easier to get to than the army brass. And, because these targeted individuals were rich in the cultural capital needed for social climbing, the GIA focused on harnessing the frustration and rage of the “hittistes.” They had missed out on accumulating this kind of capital when the FLN arabized the schools. Furthermore, because many of the GIA’s victims were national or international celebrities, their symbolic slaughter gave rise to a general panic. The working-class districts and rural areas came under GIA control, escaping the authority of the state, which isolated them in retaliation but did not enter them. At first, local Islamist notables financed such GIA enclaves but gradually they also found themselves victimized by the predation and rackets of the youth gangs claiming to wage jihad. After three years, the GIA’s supporters had had enough and cut them off.

From July 1993, the Algerian jihadists who had emigrated to “Londonistan” (where the British authorities welcomed Islamists of all stripes, thinking they could control and appease them) published the Al-Ansar bulletin. Faxed urbi et orbi on Fridays when the mosques let out, it supported the GIA in the name of international jihadism. It was managed most prominently by Abu Mussab al-Suri, the Syrian activist and French-educated engineer who would play a major role in the later history of jihadism in ISIS years until the 2010s.

The GIA’s heady rise to “fame” persuaded several FIS leaders to join their cause during a clandestine meeting on May 13, 1994. This forced the FIS Executive Instance Abroad (IEFE) to set up a rival armed group, the Islamic Army of Salvation (AIS), on July 18. It was conceived to be the military pole that eventually would enter into negotiations with the Algerian generals. The GIA rejected any perspective of the kind. Instead, it demanded that the earth be purified of “unbelievers” and the Islamic state they longed for be established through jihad. The two factions fought each other in bloody battles, weakening them both vis-à-vis the dominant political powers. Killed off in quick succession, emir followed emir as head of the GIA.

On October 27, 1994, it was Djamel Zituni’s turn. He began by exporting jihad with the hijacking of an Air France Airbus set to depart from Algiers on Christmas, the Christian holy day (making it a highly symbolic act), and then went on fomenting bloody attacks in France through 1995. These operations in effect reignited the struggle against the former colonial power to GIA’s greater glory at home. The tactical objective was to have France suspend all aid to the Algerian powers. However, these efforts would backfire because the stepped-up jihadist violence, accompanied by internal purges and executions, was also being visited on society in general. Suspected of being an agent provocateur working for the regime, Zituni found himself repudiated by the editors of the Al-Ansar bulletin. Middle-class believers were terrified and repulsed when the violence culminated in the bloodbaths of the Algiers banlieues Raïs and Bentalha in August and September 1997 respectively. With the GIA having massacred several hundred people, once again there was suspicion of manipulation by undercover agents. This caused the GIA to fold on September 27 of that year, the occasion marked by a final communiqué from the last emir. As for AIS, it had called a unilateral truce six days earlier: the powers-that-be promised to pardon AIS members, so long as they abided by the compromise negotiated.

Despite several years of persistent but sporadic localized violence, by the autumn of 1997, armed jihad had lost the battle for Algeria. In return for concessions by the new “national concord” regime that Abdelaziz Bouteflika was called on to lead in 1999, many “moderate Islamists” were co-opted into the machinery of state—where they would presumably promote Algeria’s Islamization. Even with a very strong popular mobilization in its early days, the FIS had not been capable of uniting its militants and followers in a revolution that would topple the government, as had occurred in Iran in 1978–1979. The diverging sociopolitical strategies of the middle-class faithful and the poor urban youth were beyond reconciling by an insufficiently organized Islamist intelligentsia. If anything, these schisms worsened during the civil war, whose escalating violence played into the hands of the dominant powers. But, as we shall see, the international Islamist movement that grouped behind bin Laden would draw strategic lessons from this failure, as well as from the fruitless contemporaneous Egyptian and Bosnian jihads.

Looking beyond its failure, however, the Algerian jihad had heralded and prototyped another phenomenon that would manifest itself on an immense scale after 2011—the spillover into French territory (i.e. on European soil) of Islamist terrorism. It began with the Christmas 1994 diversion of the Airbus from Algiers. The hijacking ended at the Marseille airport, with the French national gendarmerie SWAT team (GIGN, the same intervention force called in at Mecca in November 1979) neutralizing the four hijackers who had killed three hostages in Algiers. Next, between July 11 and October 17, 1995, the GIA launched a series of attacks in France that caused a dozen deaths and over 175 wounded. They were masterminded by Khaled Kelkal, a young Algerian born in 1971 who had grown up in the Lyon area in central France. After growing up alienated in school, he rediscovered Islam while in prison—from 2000 and onward, this was a typical route taken by hundreds of jihadists. While in full jihad mode in Algeria in 1993, Kelkal became immersed in the GIA and, upon his return to France, received his mission. On July 11, 1995, he killed Imam Abdelbaki Sahraui, a founder of FIS, who had found refuge in the Paris working-class district of Barbès, an area with high levels of North African immigration, where he preached in a mosque. Sahraui, whom French Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua considered to be the FIS spokesman, was the guarantor that France would remain a sanctuary from the events in Algeria.

Sahraui’s death made France and its roughly two million Algerian nationals or residents hostages of a jihad that had crossed the Mediterranean and established a European bridgehead. It would inspire the next generation of jihadists to concentrate on targets there. Local Islamist associations, like the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF, which was close to the Muslim Brotherhood) treated France as a land of Islam (dar al-islam) for the Muslims living there (thus proscribing any act of war on its soil). But the GIA activists turned it into a “land of war” (dar al-harb) where jihad and spilling the blood of unbelievers and other apostates was lawful. The attacks, including those on transportation networks (methods which would be replicated by al-Qaeda in Madrid in March 2004, and in London in July 2005), targeted travelers randomly. However, none of the expected larger impacts materialized. The vast majority of Algerians in France did not fall in line. The “darons” (heads of families), who then still exerted a strong influence in community affairs, distanced themselves from the troublemakers who were endangering the social integration they had achieved at great cost. Kelkal, with nowhere to hide, was tracked down in a forest by police and killed.

The French government hardened its position on Islamist terrorism, and the significant resources allocated to its intelligence services boosted their effectiveness. France then would go sixteen years without an attack on its soil (with the sole exception of the Roubaix affair, see below), thanks to good intelligence on the terrorist networks. Then the jihadist program mutated, while the French intelligence world, closed in on itself, rested on its laurels. And jihad would thrive anew as of March 19, 2012 when Algerian-French petty criminal Mohamed Merah shot soldiers and butchered Jewish students in Toulouse in the name of Allah.

The Abortive Jihads in Egypt (1992–1997) and Bosnia (1992–1995)

1992, the same year that saw the start of the Algerian jihad, also saw Egypt and Bosnia descend into this kind of civil war. However, circumstances differed in these two nations: Egypt, a Muslim country since the earliest days of Islam, harbored a Christian community, the Copts. They had survived, if shrunken, for centuries, but jihadist violence and Salafist denunciations aimed at them had crescendoed in the past half-century. Cairo also boasted the prestigious Al-Azhar Islamic University, even if its aura was dimmed by the control the state wielded over it. The financial heft of Salafism, subsidized by millions of petrodollars from the Arabian Peninsula, made the university reliant to a degree on this imported ideology, to which a number of its students and teachers had gravitated.

In contrast, Bosnians had converted to Islam only recently by historical standards, when the Ottoman Empire invaded the Balkans beginning in the sixteenth century CE. Muslims were always in the minority there. Few of the world’s Muslims even realized that a population of coreligionists, European natives of Slavic ethnicity at that, lived in that region. This would change when civil war started to tear the former Yugoslavia apart in 1991, on its way once more to becoming “balkanized” by the ensuing violence. The sudden formulation of a political “Islamity” within a fairly secularized population was construed by the Bosnians’ Serb enemies as a stigma. On the other hand, the international entrepreneurs of Islamization ostentatiously turned their attention to it. In effect, Bosnia would be taken hostage by the Iran-Saudi conflict.

Both jihads, one on the banks of the Nile and the other in the Balkans, proved unsuccessful, but they would have important repercussions. Egyptian Islamism, despite the defeat of its armed branch in 1997, became a principal opponent of the Mubarak regime. It proceeded to win the first presidential election following the 2010–2012 uprising, before being crushed in the repression that followed. Bosnian Islamism lost its symbolic centrality after hostilities ended in December 1995. However, in the jihadist imagination, Bosnia would powerfully reinforce the idea that Europe was Islamic territory on which the battle to end all battles would be fought. The last attack planned in France after the death of Khaled Kelkal in the 1990s, in the Lille-Roubaix metropolis, was the work of jihadist converts who had returned from Bosnia.

After Kabul fell to the mujahideen led by Commander Massud in April 1992, most Egyptian jihadists returned home. There they joined two activist movements that had grown out of the Sadat assassination, whose members had been freed by Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s successor, from the second half of the previous decade onward. The first, the Organization of Gihad, which had carried out the head of state’s assassination, targeted the institutions and agents of the dominant political powers. However, it was careful to avoid any kind of “excommunication” (takfir) of society. The second, the gama‘a islamiyya (“Islamic Association”) was headed by the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who, quite the contrary, sought to take society hostage. This was the same sheikh who would be convicted in the United States for the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and who would die in a U.S. prison in February 2017. His theory was that by relentlessly attacking civilians he would provoke an outsize, indiscriminate repression that would deprive the state of popular support.

This strategy was reminiscent of the one GIA tried in Algeria. In Egypt, Abdel Rahman’s victims of choice were Copts, foreign tourists, and “Westernized” intellectuals. The five years of jihadist violence that followed started with the assassination of the secular essayist Farag Foda on June 8, 1992. Foda, who was born a Muslim, promoted secularism instead of sharia. This made him an apostate whose blood could be spilled without sin. At least, this was the defense offered in court by Mohammed al-Ghazali, a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood, at the trial of Foda’s killers. He argued that the assassins could not be blamed for having applied Islamic law, since the state had failed to do so. In the same spirit, university professor Nasr Abu Zeid who, having written a book titled Critique of religious discourse, was also declared an “apostate.” He was automatically divorced from his Muslim wife (who did not want to) on the grounds that an apostate could not stay married to a Muslim. The couple had to flee to Holland to continue their married life in exile there. And, in October 1994 in Cairo, Nagib Mahfuz, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, was stabbed by a gamʾa islamiyya activist for his “licentious” novels.

This poisonous atmosphere testified to the permeability between jihadists and so-called moderate Islamists, even judges. It also revealed a congruence in the radical opposition to Mubarak’s power that some members of the pious middle class shared with the young urban poor. But, unlike in Algeria, Egypt had no place for a unifying, FIS-like Islamist party capable of saturating the religious space without facing any serious competition. On the banks of the Nile, the Al-Azhar institution endured, despite its weakening and partial permeability to Salafism. For one thing, the network of Sufi brotherhoods remained tight-knit enough to prevent an Islamist party from establishing hegemony over the Muslim religious field. This explains in part why the Egyptian jihad’s death toll, at about a thousand, was approximately a hundred times lower than in Algeria. Also, it did not gain much on the ground; the Egyptian state gave up only a few scattered stretches of territory to the jihadists, and then only temporarily.

This ceded territory included some strongholds in Upper Egypt, in the governorates where Copts made up as much as 20 percent of the population. Here, the hatred directed against the Christians had a social dimension. It was a time of massive unemployment, resulting from a transient drop in oil prices and reduced emigration flows to the Arabian Peninsula (where Egyptian degrees had been devalued by the collapse of the Egyptian educational system and Egyptian immigration reduced as a consequence). It all translated into people flocking to the Islamist ideology of rupture. Attacks on “arrogant” Copt pharmacists, goldsmiths, and merchants multiplied, justified by fanatical sheikhs as the welcome looting of infidels, as did the torching of churches.

The jihadists had saturated Cairo’s disinherited suburb of Embaba, primarily inhabited by rural migrants from Upper Egypt, so heavily with patrols that the sheikh of its main mosque in an interview with Reuters proclaimed the enclave the “Islamic Republic of Embaba.” He also asserted that sharia was applied 100 percent on its territory. In 1992, Mubarak, made skittish by the Algerian precedent, sent 14,000 police and soldiers to occupy the place and eradicate the jihadists. Moves like these kept the diverse social components of the Islamist movement from fusing into a coherent whole. In addition to this, on October 12 an earthquake caused a thousand deaths and ten times that number of injured in Cairo. The manifold Islamist movements—as they had in Algeria at Tipasa the previous year—developed impressive charitable activities to aid the victims (utilizing tents originally destined for Bosnian Muslims). Their actions contrasted sharply with the government’s laggard response.

Still, the repression by the state had not kept the Muslim Brotherhood from winning elections in all the professional unions, from doctors and engineers to attorneys. This demonstrated their doctrinal influence over the degree holders and the liberal professions. The state—spooked by the Algerian example—sought compromises with them in an attempt to divide the Islamist movement. But the confrontation intensified from 1993 on. Mubarak himself barely escaped an assassination attempt instigated by Egyptian jihadists at an African summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in June 1995. From there, gamʾa islamiyya switched to targeting tourists, one of Egypt’s fiscal mainstays, in March 1996 massacring eighteen Greeks in Cairo, having mistaken them for Israelis.

The jihadists expected that the collapse of this crucial, hard-currency earning sector would hasten the fall of the Mubarak regime, but they were disappointed in that hope. The primary victims of the breakdown in security were the millions of Egyptians making their living, directly or indirectly, in the tourist industry. In short, this tactic cost the activists in Upper Egypt—between Aswan and Luxor, where most of the tourist attractions are located—their popular support. On December 17, 1997, two months after the massacres in the Algiers suburbs attributed to the GIA, the gamʾa islamiyya massacred sixty tourists in the Temple of Hatshepsut at Luxor. This slaughter sounded the death knell of the Egyptian jihad of the 1990s, forcing even some Islamist groups to dissociate themselves from it. The activists’ military failure was a clear, if temporary, setback for the Islamist movement. This setback did nothing to defuse the movement’s social causes, or the striking features of an Islamization of popular culture promoted with petrodollars from the Arabian Peninsula. However, as we will soon discover, it forced a major strategic shift in Islamist ideology, shifting its focus from localized conflicts to global terrorism.

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The jihad in Bosnia found its cause in the Serb aggression against Sarajevo after Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence in March 1992. This fit into the larger framework of a new “Balkan war,” only this time it came at the end of the twentieth century as the old Yugoslavia disintegrated along historical fault lines of ethnicity and religion. Unlike Algeria and Egypt, Bosnia’s jihad did not stem from a historic process of Islamization from within that had deeply penetrated the society. It resulted, instead, from an outside stimulus with the motive of portraying Muslims, among others, as victims of persecution and of ethnic cleansing. This allowed for the prolongment of the international jihadist movement born in Afghanistan that ended in April of 1992, when Kabul finally fell to the mujahideen after the dictator Najibullah, the Soviets’ former vassal, was eliminated.

In 1936, a pan-Islamism movement had surfaced in some Bosnian intellectual circles in reaction to the abolition of the Istanbul caliphate in 1924. Modeled on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, it called itself Al-Hidaje (from the Arabic hidaya: the guide toward Islam). Some of its militants joined the SS Handjar (“Dagger”) Division, raised among Bosnian Muslims by Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and ally of the Third Reich. A youth group, under the name Mladi Muslimani (Young Muslims), was organized in 1941, with the region in the throes of the Second World War. Following liberation, the Titoist authorities dissolved Al-Hidaje, as they were in league with the Nazis. In 1949, Mladi Muslimani’s luck also ran out, when four of its leaders were condemned to death and its members arrested. The parallel with the fate of the Egyptian Brotherhood during this epoch continued when one of those jailed in 1949, Alija Izetbegović, published a manifesto titled Islamic declaration in 1970—the year Nasser died. It addressed some of the topics in the Signposts of Sayyid Qutb, which had been published in Egypt five years earlier. After Nasser and Tito became allies in the Non-Aligned Movement, a few Bosnian Muslims went to Cairo, where some of them learned Arabic. They also discreetly familiarized themselves with the Brotherhood’s clandestine networks on the banks of the Nile.

In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and Tito’s death in 1983, Izetbegović was imprisoned again as one of thirteen individuals tried for “Islamic fundamentalism.” In 1990, with Yugoslavia falling apart, he founded the SDA (Democratic Action Party) whose original name, Muslim Party of Yugoslavia, the authorities vetoed. Immediately afterward, he would be elected president of the Bosnia-Herzegovina entity. He did not run on an Islamist platform, but as a politician of the Muslim faith. In a context of heightened communitarian identities, Izetbegović won the votes of his fellow Muslims, who, while for the most part fairly secularized, were besieged by Serb and Croatian militias. As the elaborate certainties of Titoism melted away, Izetbegović benefited from his aura of having been persecuted. He came to incarnate the identity of the threatened Bosnian Muslims, but, unlike Algeria’s FIS, his party did not amalgamate any social movement of an Islamist character. The SDA was mostly implanted in the medium-sized towns and rural areas, while the most secularized Sarajevo elites formerly educated in Titoism did not vote for him. The SDA had no notions of implementing sharia, but its leader had a history of friendships in the Middle East’s Islamist movement. Faced with Serb atrocities and the genocidal pressure of ethnic cleansing, Izetbegović accepted urgently needed military and financial aid from the international Islamization players. These attempted to turn the last Balkan war of the twentieth century into a jihad, with Sunni and Shiites vying for control. It was a process not unlike the one at work in the Syrian civil war from 2011 onwards, as we shall see below.

Iran, which had been one of the targets, along with the former USSR, of the jihad waged under Sunni leadership in Afghanistan, now detected an opportunity in Bosnia. By devising a Bosnian jihad and its internationaliza­tion under the aegis of Teheran, Iran figured on recapturing a leading role in the global Islamization process from which the Shiites had been excluded. What was more, the Iranian Revolution, with its “modern” character, had resonated more favorably in the SDA ranks than archaic Wahhabism, as was reflected in the 1983 trial. Thus, from 1992 on, Iranian weaponry was shipped to Sarajevo via Croatia; several hundred pasdaran—or Iranian Revolutionary Guards—were deployed to Bosnia, just as in Lebanon in 1982; and Iranian cultural centers opened in the main Bosnian or mixed-ethnicity towns, Mostar among them. Teheran became more active in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, shaking up the Saudi leadership it accused of rendering aid half-heartedly to the persecuted Muslims in Bosnia. Riyadh had a reason for holding back: it was reluctant to engage on European territory. As for the Sunni capitals, they now cast a much more critical eye than they did in the Afghan era on mounting a new worldwide jihad. Ten years earlier, by contrast, they were eager to get rid of their homegrown jihadists by shipping them off to Afghanistan. Ever since, the “Arab Afghans,” upon their return home to Algeria and Egypt, had spearheaded resurgent jihadist violence against the state. Aid to Bosnia was thus strictly limited and confined to tightly rationed humanitarian assistance to avoid any sort of ideological contagion. No appeal to global jihad was launched under the authority of the Saudi senior ulema, nor was massive incentive financing provided. The CIA furnished even less support. Saudi aid to Bosnia was estimated at 150 million U.S. dollars, a pittance compared with the four billion dollars minimum spent on Afghanistan during the preceding decade.

On the other hand, some two thousand veteran Salafist jihadis converged on Bosnia, most of them natives of the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt. They were integrated into the “Al-Mudzahidun” brigade of the Bosnian army that fought fiercely against the Serb militias. The propaganda images of the two sides rivaled each other in savagery (in a way that would be replicated, only worse, in the Islamic State’s videos twenty years later) as they paraded in some cases with the cut-off heads of their enemies. The jihadists presented themselves as saviors standing between their Bosnian fellow Muslims and extermination by the “crusaders.” However, the jihad did not transplant well to the Balkans, despite aggressive Salafist proselytizing by the fighters. They conceived of themselves as fighting on conquered territory and having been called upon to “straighten out” a Balkan Islam steeped in mysticism and syncretism, but they managed to convert few Bosnians. Another factor in the failure of jihad to take root were the Dayton accords, which re-established peace. Signed December 15, 1995 on the initiative of the United States and Europe, they provided for the departure of “foreign volunteers.” Nevertheless, despite its failure, the Bosnian jihad would act as an unprecedented example: in parallel with the spillover of the Algerian jihad to French soil, it indicated that Europe could serve as a battlefield of the Islamization process, with weapons in hand and terrorism as the vector. On March 29, 1996, jihadist returnees from Bosnia, in the act of planning an attack, were rousted from a hideout in the northern French town of Roubaix on the Belgian border. Several were killed in the building, and another was killed by Belgian gendarmes as he tried to escape. For the next twenty years, their jailed ringleader would keep in contact with the new generation of jihadists in Northern France. The Franco-Belgian axis would be behind the killings in 2015, in particular the massacre of November 13 at the Bataclan and the Stade de France.

The Jihadization of the Palestinian Conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian confrontation was another conflict that would be substantially “jihadized” during the 1990s. Despite appearances created by Palestinian autonomy and the return of Yasser Arafat, Hamas was rising. Aligned with Lebanese Hezbollah and its Iranian mentor, it captured the imagination linked to the main “Arab cause” by fitting it into the Islamization of politics. Hamas escalated the vocabulary of radicalism with a spasm of suicide attacks to counter Netanyahu’s tightening of Israeli policies and stepped-up settlement. This would furnish the model that al-Qaeda later perfected as its favored mode of action with regards to international jihadism.

The 1990–1991 Gulf War had weakened both the PLO and Israel, forcing the adversaries to sit down at the negotiating table. It so happened that Saddam Hussein, in lofting Scud missiles at the Jewish state, had jolted awake a “Palestinian street” dejected by the inertia on the part of Arab leaders. Suddenly, they could imagine a return to the grand Nasserite narrative of eliminating the Zionist enemy by military force. By annexing Kuwait, Saddam could pose as a new Arab oil giant who would use his immense fortune to that end. It earned him Arafat’s enthusiastic backing. The defeat of Saddam’s armies had weakened the dictator considerably, notably by making the Kurdish areas autonomous. Nevertheless, the international coalition of Operation Desert Storm had allowed him to remain in power in Baghdad. The rationale was to keep the Shiite majority from controlling Iraq (which it would end up doing anyway a decade later, after the United States and allies invaded the country in 2003).

The Kuwait disaster impacted the PLO severely; its subsidies were abruptly cut as the Gulf petromonarchies retaliated by showering their largesse on Hamas instead. And the PLO’s ally of last resort, the USSR, no longer had superpower status since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. As for the state of Israel, it was dissuaded from retaliating for the Iraqi Scuds, for fear of the Arabs overcoming their division to stand with Baghdad against a “Zionist” offensive and complicate the coalition’s task. The United States under George H. W. Bush, the “oilman” of American presidents, thus took the wind out of Israel’s sails and sent it to the negotiating table holding a weak hand.

For the United States, all this combined into an enticing perspective. First of all, Washington hoped it would put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian irritant. The petromonarchies, saved in extremis from the Iraqi threat by American soldiers in stark contrast to the 1973 war, were forced to stow their oil weapons and toe the line set by the White House. After Jimmy Carter had presided over the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1979 and taken Cairo off the battlefield, the entourage around President Bush senior expected him to neutralize the PLO as a nuisance factor. At the same time, the expectation grew that he would relativize the influence of pro-Israel elements in the U.S. Congress. (His attempts to do so would earn him their hostility and cost him the 1992 election.) Hence, he had exceptional leverage for reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. This hope was distilled into the Madrid Conference in December 1991, in which a Palestinian representative with unofficial links to the PLO participated as part of the Jordanian delegation. Meanwhile Arafat’s organization kept losing ground to an up-and-coming Hamas.

The Islamist movement was consolidating its inroads into the pious middle classes, most notably through elections to chambers of commerce. But it also provided an outlet for the poor urban youth radicalized by an Intifada that had come up short. This led to an increase in assassinations of Israeli civilians and soldiers. On December 13, 1992, an Israeli non-commissioned officer was kidnapped at Lod. When he was found two days later in the West Bank, stabbed to death with his hands tied, it triggered the arrest of 417 Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and activists. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had them deported to South Lebanon, to the mountain village of Marj az Zuhor, where, standing in the snow, they received the international press. Islamist engineers, medical doctors, and professors gave interviews in fluent English denouncing Israel’s policy and the compromises made by the PLO. In their makeshift camp, they had organized an “Ibn Taimiyya University” (named after the most rigorous ulema in the Sunni tradition, an inspiration for contemporary Islamist radicals), and had established especially fruitful relations with Hezbollah, whose roots ran deep in this Shiite zone. Hamas would draw inspiration from the strategy of the “Party of God,” and would become persuaded of the effectiveness of suicide attacks and strengthened ties with the Islamic Republic.

The resulting international scandal culminated in a resolution in the UN Security Council demanding repatriation of the deportees. It also set in motion the symbolic shift that let Hamas achieve parity with, if not primacy over, the PLO in embodying the Palestinian cause and, consequently, the Islamization of its Arab and global image. To save the game, the PLO that same December entered into direct, secret talks with Israel. These would conclude in the so-called Oslo Accords, whose “declaration of principles” was signed on September 13, 1993 by Arafat and Rabin at the White House with U.S. President Bill Clinton’s blessing. By embodying the Palestinian dream of regaining an autonomous territory on the West Bank and in Gaza, the nationalist organization counted on deriving considerable political benefit from the accords. Instead, the PLO ended up weakened by the one-sided conditions imposed by Israel, the many obstacles to complying with them, and the settlements sprawl on the West Bank. On February 25, 1994, when a Jewish settler massacred more than thirty Muslims at prayer in the Hebron mosque, Hamas turned vengeance for the victims into a populist blank check. In the ensuing months, the first suicide attacks on the Jewish population resulted in more than ten dead, setting off a new cycle of repression. But, Palestine having achieved autonomy in July, it now fell to the Palestinian security forces performing police duties in the Autonomous Territories in Israel’s stead to counter the Hamas activists. The first clash occurred on November 18, when the PLO riot squads opened fire on Gaza demonstrators as they emerged from the mosque. Arafat’s moral status with the Arab masses suffered considerably because of this incident.

Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995 by a Jewish activist opposed to the Oslo Accords deprived the PLO chief of his principal Israeli political partner. The following January, the Hamas bomb maker, “The Engineer” Yahia Ayyach, founder of the Ezzedin al-Qassam brigades and suicide-attack strategizer, was killed. His cell phone exploded, a hit attributed to Israeli intelligence. Retaliation took the form of spectacular new attacks that killed sixty-three Israelis. The result was a Likud Party electoral victory in May 1996, bringing to power Benjamin Netanyahu with his discourse of toughness against the Palestinians and an accelerated settlement program. The suicide attacks increased into 1998, resuming even more forcefully when the second Intifada started in 2000. Beyond the political twists and turns on Palestinian terrain, this jihadist terror strategy hinged on the “martyr operation.” It was valued from now on as the supreme weapon for bringing high visibility and absolute legitimacy to anyone who wanted to battle Israel first and the West second. It was left to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to raise this type of Islamic terrorism to a global scale. And, on September 11, 2001, they did so by projecting it from the territory of the “Zionist enemy” to the United States itself.