Osama bin Laden and the Creation of al-Qaeda
After fleeing Saudi Arabia in 1991, bin Laden hid out at first in Afghanistan. But the violent feuds between mujahideen commanders there proved too dangerous for him, and he decamped the following year to Sudan. The Islamists had taken power there in June 1989, with General Omar al-Bashir and his éminence grise Hassan al-Turabi running the show. A mass of jihadists who had fought in Afghanistan and were unable to return to their native countries joined bin Laden in exile there. His first priority, meanwhile, was to make an explicit final break with Saudi Arabia and organize the autonomous movement that would become “Salafist jihadism.” It would be distinct from the “Salafist sheikhism” that owed allegiance to the Riyadh monarchy.
This internal schism in Sunni Salafism would resolve the ambiguities on which the alliances of the Afghan jihad had been built. Back then, a wide spectrum of “strange bedfellows” had collaborated, running the gamut from the CIA and the oil kingdoms to al-Qaeda. Subsequently, the jihads in Algeria, Egypt, and Bosnia would not get one iota of American support. And, in Algeria, the military leaders even solicited fatwas from the Saudi senior ulema, who would certify them as good Muslims. This would yank the rug of legitimacy out from under the Islamic Armed Group (GIA), who, inspired by both the war of independence against the French and the Afghan jihad, had intended to lead a jihad against the generals. In Bosnia, the Western armies and intelligence services got involved directly in evicting the jihadist “foreign volunteers” from Bosnian soil, starting in 1995.
The distilled jihadism of the 1990s thus proceeded to substitute the United States for the USSR, now on the ash heap of history, as its major enemy. However, acquiring this new target necessitated the forging of different alliances. The timing of bin Laden’s Sudanese exile—from 1992 to 1996—was propitious for effecting this major reversal. On April 25, 1991, al-Turabi, who had praised Saddam Hussein, convened the first of four “Arab and Islamic popular conferences.” These provided a venue until 1995 where all the losers and outcasts from Operation Desert Storm could meet and commiserate. The Salafist jihadis would no longer be rubbing shoulders with CIA agents, but with anti-Zionist Arab nationalists, anti-imperialists, and other Third World militants instead. In the resulting petri dish would grow the radical “Islamic Leftism” of the coming decades. It would let Islamist terrorism in its various forms take advantage of being indulged by part of the extreme left. The Venezuelan-born Illitch Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos, the former leftist terrorist forced into retirement by the loss of his sources of support in the Soviet world, embodied this new, paradoxical alliance. He converted to Islam and lived in obscurity in Khartoum in 1993 before being abducted the following year by French intelligence. Sitting out a life sentence in his prison cell in the Paris region, he watched the jihadists work toward actualizing the cause he had fought for in the name of Marx and Lenin.
The anti-American swing of the jihadism pendulum manifested itself in the opening of two fronts simultaneously. Whether or not they were coordinated or simply coincidental has not been determined to date for want of access to relevant classified information. In December 1992, with growing chaos in Somalia, the United Nations sent a military contingent made up mostly of American troops to restore order and alleviate famine. The Islamist movement perceived this operation, initially named “Restore Hope,” as a pretext for establishing a bridgehead on the Horn of Africa for a future attack on Sudan. A number of jihadists training in Afghanistan joined the Somali faction led by General Mohamed Farrah Aidid in firefights with the American troops. Following an attack on two helicopters on October 3 and 4 which left seventeen American soldiers dead, President Clinton responded by recalling his troops. At the time, he was confronting a so-called “Vietmalia” syndrome (fears of another Vietnam war) on the home front.
This was the first armed jihadist engagement against the United States in an East African theater of operations, and a prelude to the attacks against the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. It had, however, been preceded by the first attack on the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, a complex affair still shrouded in mystery, despite the consecutive trial and life sentence of the key defendant, the jihadist Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (who died in 2017, imprisoned in the United States). He was one of the major imams of radical Egyptian Islamism in the 1970 and 1980s, having authored a fatwa declaring anyone sinless who looted and spilled the blood of Copts.
Imprisoned until 1984 after Sadat’s assassination in October 1981, Abdel Rahman had been granted an American visa at the CIA’s behest. Traveling between the United States and Peshawar, he became one of the great charismatic Islamist figures, recruiting fighters across the globe for the Afghan jihad. He then returned to his country, but the Mubarak regime had him in its sights because he was the emir of the Egyptian gamʾa islamiyya. He fled to al-Turabi’s Sudan in April 1990, where he once more was issued an American visa. He returned to the United States on July 18, where he obtained his green card with exceptional speed the following April, as the minister of religion in the Jersey City mosque. However, starting in June 1991 when he made his pilgrimage to Mecca, among many other international trips, his residency status came under scrutiny. The grounds: failure to declare his bigamy. To avoid deportation, he filed an application for political asylum in June 1992.
The troubled circumstances behind the deterioration of the Sheikh’s relationship with the American intelligence universe remain unclear to this day. But they lead back to the origins of the project to attack the World Trade Center—these manifested in the first instance as a milieu of Egyptian immigrants infiltrated by undercover agents. In the second instance, on February 26, 1993 in the garage beneath the Twin Towers, an explosive-laden van exploded. The ringleader, a close associate of the Sheikh by the name of Ramzi Yousef and holder of an Iraqi passport, would ultimately be arrested in Pakistan, extradited to the United States, and sentenced without all the facts against him laid out in court, giving rise to myriad conspiracy theories. Looking back (all the more so after the main attack on 9/11 would target the World Trade Center again), the operation of February 26, 1993 was unquestionably the last straw. It signaled the final, operative rupture of the alliance between jihadists and the American intelligence services that had made the Afghanistan operation possible.
Bin Laden, for his part, did not feel entirely secure in Khartoum either. The regime of General al-Bashir and his mentor Hassan al-Turabi was subjected to multiple international pressures. These intensified after an assassination attempt on Mubarak during the June 1995 Addis Ababa summit was traced to Egyptian jihadists based in neighboring Sudan. Another forboding event was the capture of Carlos the previous year by the French secret services, with the discreet assent of the Sudanese authorities.
On November 13, 1995, a car bomb exploded in Riyadh in front of a National Guard building, killing five American military advisors. And on June 25, 1996, the blast from a truck packed with explosives killed nineteen members of the United States military in Khobar, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil fields. Bin Laden did not claim credit for these attacks—as with 9/11, this was a tactic designed for maximizing the panic effect among his enemies, making it harder for them to retaliate. The second attack ultimately would be attributed by American law enforcement to a “Saudi Hezbollah” instigated by Iran. The principal suspect, Ahmed al-Mughassil, was arrested in Beirut and extradited to Saudi Arabia in August 2015.
Bin Laden’s departure for a safer haven in Taliban territory helped cover his tracks when, in the summer of 1996, he returned to Afghanistan. There, he settled under the protection of Mullah Mohammed Omar, whose movement controlled the entire southern part of the country in the run up to retaking the capital city of Kabul in September. Also, unlike the authorities in Sudan, Mullah Omar lacked any kind of relationship with the international community. Taliban officials ultimately confirmed that bin Laden’s move had been facilitated by an agreement between the Americans and the Sudanese. His former American protectors did not want him to be captured and tried in the United States, like Carlos had been in France. The fear was that information would come to light during his trial that could prove embarrassing to them. The Sudanese wanted just as much to get rid of this global public enemy number one and obstacle to normalizing relations with the West. Moreover, Washington would have figured that this personage would pose a minimal threat bottled up and isolated inside Afghanistan.
Instead, starting on August 26, bin Laden would disseminate a “Declaration of Jihad against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques [Mecca and Medina].” It became better known by its subtitle taken from the celebrated saying (hadith) attributed to the Prophet: “Expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.” These eleven pages make up the inaugural manifesto of what would ultimately develop into the al-Qaeda organization. As indicated by the title, at this stage the objective was still the “liberation” of Saudi Arabia. In it, bin Laden praised the Khobar attack two months earlier, but also rejoiced over the “victory” in Somalia—two operations he had not explicitly claimed to be his. In this way, he positioned himself as actually continuing the Afghan jihad. He could now effectively argue that the Saudi kingdom was being occupied by the unbeliever armies of the United States, just as Afghanistan had been by the USSR. Then he took up again, word for word, the appeal by Abdullah Azzam calling on the world’s Muslims to fulfill their individual duty (fard ‘ayn) by taking part in a “defensive jihad” for liberating the usurped land of Islam. As it turned out, his declaration had no effect; in contrast to the call to jihad in Afghanistan, bin Laden could only muster feeble support for it. The Afghanistan jihad had enjoyed a broad consensus among Salafist ulemas and Muslim Brothers, as well as support from a majority of the Organization for the Islamic Conference’s member states. Now, bin Laden only had in his corner Azzam (killed in 1989); Ahmed Yassin, the Palestinian sheikh who founded Hamas; his Egyptian colleague Omar Abdel Rahman, imprisoned in the United States; and the Saudi sheikhs Salman al-Audah and Safar al-Hawali, also sitting behind bars in their own country. Nevertheless, the American troops were eventually withdrawn from Saudi bases and moved to Qatar—but not until seven years later, in the summer of 2003.
On February 23, 1998, a new line was crossed in transitioning to the al-Qaeda global brand of international jihadism. On this date, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri co-signed, with some relatively unknown jihadists from Egypt and the Indian subcontinent, the founding charter of a “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” Since bin Laden’s “Declaration” of August 26, 1996, the state of jihadism inspired by Afghanistan had deteriorated considerably: in the fall of 1997, the jihads in Algeria and Egypt had ended with a whimper after five years of fighting. To prevent this from happening again, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri included a fatwa in their charter specifying that “every Muslim capable of carrying it out has the individual duty [fard ʿayn] to kill Americans and their civilian and military allies, in all countries where this is possible.”
This call to arms reaped results: on August 7, 1998, two simultaneous attacks destroyed the American embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), causing, respectively, 213 dead (twelve of them Americans) and more than 4,500 wounded, and 11 dead (none of them Americans) with 85 wounded. The modus operandi of this terrorist operation bore what would become the al-Qaeda signature: do not mention the name, pick a symbolic date, and stage a series of simultaneous attacks in various places. In this case, the date was the seventh anniversary of the appeal by King Fahd for the stationing of American troops in Saudi territory to deter Saddam Hussein. And although he celebrated the operations in follow-up press interviews, bin Laden did not credit them to al-Qaeda. The conspicuous timing of the attacks was enough to signal a causality, making an explicit claim of responsibility unnecessary. The primary object was to boost the shock effect on the enemy, by creating the impression that they were beset from all sides, thus maximizing the sense of dread.
The United States responded quickly: on August 20, a salvo of cruise missiles fired from an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean destroyed a chemical products factory in Khartoum. They also hit a camp for Pakistani jihadists in Afghanistan training to fight in Indian Kashmir. None of them touched bin Laden or anyone close to him. In fact, his solidarity with the “martyrs” elevated him to veritable cult figure status in Pakistan. In the following months, everywhere in the bazaars I saw t-shirts for sale emblazoned with the image of the soon-to-be world-famous Saudi.
Now champion of the Islamist cause, bin Laden had invented a new style of asymmetrical warfare against the West. While it featured elements borrowed from Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, like the embassy attacks and suicide bombings, it transformed their finality. This type of terrorism was not carried out in fine by a state striving for identifiable outcomes geared to circumstances, as, for example, Iran, anxious to loosen the military vise grip on its territory, did during the Iran-Iraq war. The masterminds formed a complex network not precisely categorizable or identifiable with certainty, whose contours shifted, whose objectives were maximalist and non-negotiable. It ran circles around Western military arrays. This applied especially to the operations designed to strike “hard” targets such as cities and infrastructures geared to a now obsolete conflict with the USSR. The U.S. cruise missile strike of August 20 may have been remarkably precise in ballistic terms, but politically it was a dud. In October 2000, al-Qaeda attacked again. This time, an inflatable dinghy loaded to the gunwales with explosives rammed the side of the American destroyer USS Cole refueling at Aden. The explosion killed seventeen sailors. From now on, the enemy would be supple and elusive; it would take years to reverse engineer al-Qaeda’s “software” and take a different approach to the misnamed “War against Terror”—with the aim of finding and neutralizing bin Laden. On May 2, 2011, an American Special Forces troop tracked him to his compound in Pakistan and killed him—thirteen years after he had proclaimed the “World Islamic Front.”
Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner
On December 2, 2001, three months after the “blessed double raid” of September 11, 2001 against New York and Washington D.C., an Arab daily paper serialized extracts from a work by Ayman al-Zawahiri titled Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. Even if the provenance of the text remains somewhat controversial, al-Zawahiri and his associates have never disavowed it. References in the opening paragraphs to Afghanistan and Chechnya as two countries liberated in the name of jihad make it likely that the work had been written between 1997 and 1999. This would date it after the election of Aslan Maskhadov as the Chechen president, and before Grozny was retaken by Russian troops in January 2000.
During those three years, jihadist groups had ruled large swaths of Chechen territory. These dates also bracket al-Zawahiri’s sojourn at bin Laden’s side with the Taliban in Afghanistan—the other territory “liberated by jihad.” In a sense, his book is the Islamist reflection of Samuel Huntington’s 1996 bestseller The Clash of Civilizations. Liberal Western intellectuals were unsparing in their criticism of a work that seemed to reduce “civilizations” to their supposed essences, while negating the hybridization of postmodern societies. Al-Zawahiri, on the contrary, approved of the Harvard professor’s logic, as did most Islamists. He viewed it as a fair demonstration by an adversary of the radical incompatibility of Islam, as seen through the jihadist prism, and the West. Al-Zawahiri was content to simply invert the positives and negatives assigned to these two contexts of meaning in the original book and point out what it would take for Islam’s inevitable triumph over the planet.
The title Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner refers to the victories won by the armies of Mahomet (Mohammed) and the first caliphs in spreading “the religion of Allah” across the world until it “submitted completely.” It aligned the objectives of the jihadists with the same trajectory as Sayyid Qutb’s manifesto Signposts (1965) and Abdullah Azzam’s Join the Caravan (about 1985). The real significance of this text, however, resides in the strategy it crafted for the armed Islamist movement at the pivotal juncture of the final years of the 1990s. It constructed a critical balance sheet, drew lessons from it, and effected a major strategic redirection for projecting jihad “to the land of the enemy” in the future. This change of objective was executed at the same time as al-Zawahiri wrote his text. First came the warning shots: the attacks on the American forces stationed on Saudi Arabia’s “Land of the two Holy Mosques” in Riyadh in late 1995. Next came the three attacks aimed at the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, and on the Cole in Aden harbor on October 12, 2000. The message was clear, to be repeated emphatically on 9/11.
Al-Zawahiri’s reflections were based on specific, recent elements. Most notably, he dwelled on the failure of Algerian Islamism, beaten in fine by soldiers of the “party of France.” He was well informed about the movement’s development, via groups of supporters who had taken refuge in “Londonistan” under the wing of Abu Musab al-Suri, editor of the Al-Ansar bulletin. Al-Zawahiri blamed the failure of the Algerian experiment on the inability to mobilize the masses on a concept of struggle that was too elitist. A way had to be found, therefore, to stir the people up by appealing to emotions that would let them find a common cause with the jihadists. However, the Arab and Muslim masses were stoked primarily about the Palestinian cause, which the nationalists had monopolized for too long. Islamizing it via Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the multiplying “martyr operations” generated precious symbolic capital. The political economics of suicide attacks were optimal, in effect, as measured by the ratio between their low costs and the media reverberations that they set off.
Ultimately, the war had to be taken into the heart of the United States in imitation of the martyr operations carried out in Israel. This created an explicit parallel between the territory of the Jewish state as a legitimate target of jihad and that of the West, for which Israel so far had been a stand-in. It was captured operatively by the phrase “Zionist-Crusader” (sahiou-salibi), improvised by al-Zawahiri for designating and circumscribing the enemy. Below, we will discuss the raising of the second Palestinian Intifada from September 2000 on, whose mounting violence resulted in several thousand Palestinians and Israelis dead. As we shall see, it proved to be an extremely favorable context for projecting a jihad globally. It would eventually execute its tactical weapon of “martyrdom operations” practiced on Jewish soil against the Pentagon and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
Al-Zawahiri also got in the middle of an ongoing debate within the Islamist movement on whether the fight against the “near enemy” (al-ʿadou al-qarib) or against the “distant enemy” (al-ʿadou al-baʿid) should have priority. Choosing Israel to fight had made sense for the nationalist adversaries of the Islamists. Nasser, for example, had instrumentalized this climate of an anti-Zionist Sacred Union to reinforce his absolute rule and violently repress the Islamists. The jihadist awakening of the 1980s had targeted the near enemy instead—from Sadat’s assassination in 1981 to jihad in Algeria—but the masses had failed to follow. Al-Zawahiri therefore hoped to resume the fight against the distant enemy, that is, Israel and the West. He made himself no illusions about destroying them immediately. Instead, he wanted to galvanize the masses so they would look to the jihadists as their champions and enlist under their banner to help overturn the “apostate” regimes of the Muslim world later. This dialectical detour by the author, which sidesteps the contrast between the two enemies in order to subrogate one to the other, is the key to interpreting 9/11.
Looking back, we can date the transition between the first and second phases of contemporary jihadism from February 23, 1998, with the publication of the charter of the “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” Instead of prioritizing the “near enemy” regimes in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., the target of choice from now on would be a “distant enemy:” the United States. This shift, theorized in Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, was soon translated on the ground. This occurred during the months between the end of the Algerian and Egyptian jihads (in September and November 1997, respectively) and the two United States embassy attacks on the symbolic date of August 7, 1998. At the time, there lacked the necessary context to think of this rupture as strategic, for al-Zawahiri’s text had not yet been disseminated. It was far-fetched to think that a band of individuals signing the charter on February 23, isolated deep in the Hindu Kush mountains under Taliban “emirate” protection, would be capable of mounting an operation as audacious and improbable as 9/11.
The Addition of the Second Intifada
On September 28, 2000, General Ariel Sharon, the Likud party’s candidate for prime minister of Israel, went for an ostentatious “stroll” on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Politically, the site was off-limits for Israelis, since it also holds the Noble Sanctuary (al masjid al aqsa and the Dome of the Rock), which is holy to Muslims. This deliberate thumb in the eye of Muslims, which Sharon’s partisans hailed as a success, occurred two months before the American presidential election that would see Bill Clinton, the godfather of the Oslo Accords, exit the White House. The objective of the stunt, pure and simple, was to undermine the peace logic that had emerged from those difficult negotiations. It had the intended effect immediately, because the demonstrations that erupted the next day were put down with tear gas and rubber bullets, ultimately resulting in bloodshed. This caused Arafat to call for a second uprising, known as the Al-Aqsa (the Arab name of the principal mosque in the Sanctuary) Intifada. Filmed as it happened, the death of twelve-year-old Mohammed al-Durah, killed on September 30 in Gaza in his father’s arms, was televised around the world. The intense feeling it aroused quickly inflamed both the Intifada’s mobilization and its repression. Arafat, for his part, also needed to shore up his legitimacy after seven years of setbacks. Israeli settlements had continued, legal sanctions designed to strangle the Palestinian economy had multiplied, statehood had repeatedly been postponed, and so on. He needed to provide an outlet for Gaza and West Bank youth, especially those in the camps, who derived no benefit from autonomy. They might at any moment desert the PLO and line up en masse behind Hamas and the Islamic Jihad instead.
At first, the tanzim, the Fatah militia organization, limited the Intifada to violence toward the military and the settlements. The aim was to pressure the Israeli electorate into renouncing the settlement policy in return for having peace restored. Arab opinion at the time was convinced that Israel, whose army had just abandoned South Lebanon after occupying it since 1978, had been forced to retreat by a series of Hezbollah suicide attacks. The thought was that similar pressure in Israeli territory would be that much more effective. At Camp David in July 2000, during Bill Clinton’s lame-duck presidency, the last time Arafat met Prime Minister Ehud Barak, he therefore insisted again on the right of return for all Palestinians. Just affirming this principle—even if prospects for implementing it were nil—drove most of Israeli society away from their support of the peace talks. This made a rightward shift easier for Jewish voters, who saw in Arafat a lethal menace to the survival of the Jewish state. Ariel Sharon thus triumphed in the elections of February 2001. He was further comforted by the arrival of George W. Bush to the White House, whose neoconservative advisors were in sync with Likud’s positions—with a mandate to get rid of Arafat. When he smashed the tanzim apparatus, Sharon facilitated the rise to power of Hamas and of the Islamic Jihad group. Far from restricting violence to Israeli military and settlements, these organizations launched indiscriminate, spectacular attacks on buses and markets to raise the number of civilian casualties.
In the Sunni world, the lawfulness of suicide bombings had been controversial among the ulema going back to 1996. In that year, when bin Laden published his “Declaration of Jihad,” Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite TV started broadcasting. From the start, it gave immense public exposure to the attacks as “martyrdom operations” by broadcasting the images around the world. However, the Saudi senior ulema, with one eye on the threat bin Laden posed for the monarchy, unequivocally condemned them. They ruled that Allah alone can decide to take back the life he has given, and that suicides are punished in hell.
The opposite view was broadcast by the top Al Jazeera “TV Koranist,” the Egyptian-born sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a naturalized Qatari and leading international Muslim Brotherhood figure. He fully supported the attacks, especially in light of the fact that Hamas represented the Palestinian branch of his movement. In a well-reasoned fatwa that appeared in March 1996 and would be republished and completed at the time of the Second Intifada, the sheikh depicted these operations as “the most glorious form of jihad in the way of Allah.” He saw them as forming part of the “legitimate terrorism” provided for by the words of the Almighty in the Koran (al-irhab al-mashruʿ):
And prepare against [the unbelievers] whatever you are able of power and steeds of war by which you may terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy.
[Surah 8 “The Bounties,” verse: 60]
This literal interpretation of the verb “to terrorize” takes it out of context in a history-distorting logic that is unique to the fallacious arguments of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. It serves to justify terrorism by calling it legitimate, as a “mode of defense of the disinherited so that they can resist the omnipotence of the mighty and the arrogant.” By stating it this way, Yusuf al-Qaradawi took up the vocabulary of the Iranian revolution for the occasion. As for killing Israeli civilians, it was lawful because all Israelis, male and female, served in uniform; in reality, the Jewish state was only made up of soldiers who ipso facto constituted just targets.
Al-Qaradawi’s fatwa, because of its author’s notoriety, was the most important one issued by a Sunni religious authority, and it came to inspire many emulations. Thus, it served an organizing function for the Great Narrative of terror and of martyrdom. Thereafter, in the Muslim world, and foremost for the Al Jazeera TV audience, it became the reference grid for all the conflicts that could happen anywhere on the planet. Martyred Palestine, the victim of Zionist oppression in the face of Western indifference, would always feature in the resistance as a symbol of Islamic struggle par excellence—but from now on, it had been captured by jihad whose favored mode of attack was suicide bombing.
The toll taken by the Second Intifada reached more than 4,000 dead over five years of clashes—and, for the first time, a quarter of the total were Israelis. The Intifada came to a close with the construction of an impassable wall to separate the Jewish state from the Palestinian territories, but left the latter mired in economic and social decline. Arafat’s death in a French hospital on November 11, 2004, signaled the end of an era: in January 2006, Hamas carried the Palestinian elections, and, after a face-off with Fatah, in June 2007 it took full powers in Gaza. It would hold on to them for a decade until the Palestinian Authority partially returned to the territory in October 2017, though it would remain the inexpugnable stronghold of the Palestinian Islamist movement.
The 9/11 Cataclysm
A number of warning signs preceded this, the most spectacular event of the nascent twenty-first century—and third millennium—which foisted the jihadism conceived by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri as a key narrative in the chaotic post–Cold War world. But it also impinged on the juncture of far vaster symbolic meanings, giving it an unprecedented resonance. While it profoundly changed the geopolitics of the Middle East by fanning the West’s “War against Terror” that led to the fall of Saddam Hussein, it also had the perverse effect of tilting Iraq into the Shiite camp and moving it closer to Teheran. This was a defeat ironically shared by both Sunni jihadists and the United States to the benefit of their mutual enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, there was a bright side: after 9/11, despite the multiplying, smaller-scale attacks modeled on it, whose targets ranged from Bali to Madrid to London, the realization dawned that “jihad against the distant enemy” had failed to rally the Muslim masses to al-Qaeda’s banner. Failure to achieve this goal paved the way for yet another new phase of jihadism, which would call into question the very strategy of which the spectacular 9/11 was the linchpin.
As the world soon learned, nineteen kamikaze jihadists carried out the attack on board four airliners hijacked and diverted to New York and Washington to crash into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol. Only a revolt by the passengers on board the aircraft aimed at the Capitol kept it from being hit. Above all, the attack implemented the objective specified in the charter of the “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders” in February 1998: bring the war to the West. The theoretical grounding was found in al-Zawahiri’s Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. But it also registered in continuity with the Palestinian Second Intifada, which was then crystalizing the political feelings of the Arab and Muslim worlds. The 9/11 attack was to be its global projection.
Whereas Hamas and the Islamic Jihad killed bus passengers, market shoppers, and customers of cafés and pizzerias in Israel by the dozens, al-Qaeda massacred occupants of the Twin Towers in the United States by the thousands. However, this projection did not suit all actors or supporters of the Palestinian cause, who suddenly found themselves taken hostage by a fight in which they were outmatched. Starting on September 12, Arafat had himself filmed and photographed giving blood for the victims in the United States. Even Sheikh al-Qaradawi strove to delink Israel’s status—a Muslim territory occupied by infidels where the defensive jihad had been lawful—from the American continent, which had never been a “land of Islam.” From this followed that the nineteen kamikazes could not invoke martyr status and had to be treated as suicides—so he maintained. He had to, unless he wanted to cut all lines of communication between the Muslim Brotherhood and Washington (that would later prove so functional during Obama’s presidency).
Why choose the World Trade Center as the most emblematic place for a second attack when it had already been done in 1993, which had earned Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman prison for life? It let al-Qaeda perpetuate the action that the blind Egyptian referent of the “Declaration of Jihad” of 1996 had been charged with, and to exact a kind of revenge for his life sentence in a United States prison. Also, by making the attack look like a rationally planned part of a continuing sequence, the gesture made an even stronger impact. But there was more to it still. While the 1993 attack’s significance lay in its dramatizing the divorce between the United States intelligence services and the jihadist parties of the 1980s after they had been comrades in arms against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, it had not been finalized. Bin Laden and his confidants, by razing the Twin Towers, marked the break with their erstwhile American ally as definitive. It symbolically erased all traces of their earlier marriage of convenience and reconfigured their semantics.
From now on, jihad would fit into a long-term Islamic eschatology expressed in the phrase “blessed double raid” (al-ghazwatayn al-moubarakatayn), the terminology for the operation that al-Qaeda would use in all subsequent documents. By having the raids symbolize the audacity of knights fighting “under the Prophet’s banner,” this designation summoned up a Muslim fantasy that spanned the history of Islam. It harked back to Islam’s earliest times, when the Prophet conquered empires that wielded vastly superior armies but were mired in ineffective bureaucracies. The fantasy also fit the fates of New York and Washington into the history of Constantinople: the American empire would inevitably fall under the blows of jihad like its Byzantine predecessor did in 1453, even if it took centuries. Invoking this grand narrative of finality, as we have seen, is consistent with the parallel drawn between the Soviet Union, defeated after the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Kabul on February 15 1989 (leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9), and the destruction of the Sassanid empire in 636 at the battle of Qadisiyya.
Jihadism wanted to affirm itself as nothing less than the key actor in the international system, like seventh-century Islam was in the aftermath of the Prophecy. It would do so by reviving the religion’s conquering mission, grown stale over fourteen centuries of decadence and compromises. And the jihadists slipped contemporary challenges into this sacred history by substituting this new confrontation with “Zionist-Crusader” godlessness for the confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact (which vanished with the USSR). They went on to set up this battle as the new organizing principle of the world—their way of referencing Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.
This pretense of linking the Islamic finality doctrine with the end of the Cold War, as we saw earlier, ultimately feeds on the jihadists’ numerological obsession that has them detecting the expression of divine providence in dates. In this instance, it relates 11/9/1989, the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall, symbolizing the end of the former Communist order, to that of the “blessed double raid” on 9/11/2001 as heralding the advent of the new Islamic order. These two events bracket the change of the Christian millennium and prefigure time shifting toward the Hegiric calendar. Finally, there is the choice of the nationality of the kamikazes, fifteen of which were subjects of Saudi Arabia. This was a deliberate choice, done to remind us of the aim of the jihadist saga that bin Laden extended to the entire planet: the fight against both the sacrilegious Saudi dynasty, which, on August 7, 1990, sullied the land “of the two Holy Mosques” with American troops, and simultaneously the one against the United States defiler. The prelude to 9/11 had played out fairly well on August 7, 1998, with the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania occurring on the eighth anniversary of the day King Fahd had appealed to the United States for protection against Saddam Hussein’s army—the first coinciding dates with value as a providential sign.
The conflict mode inaugurated on 9/11 hinges on three interlinked elements. First, there is the asymmetric dimension. It discards standard practices of armed combat between states by transmuting terrorism from an act of sedition into a true act of global warfare whose instruments and targets are civilians, as seen with the four airlines hijacked, the thousands of victims. Next, there is the staging, designed to maximize the media reverberations, to multiply to the nth degree the global effect of shocking the enemy and galvanizing potential supporters. In France, we had a telling example of the importance of media impact at the “Merah trial” in October 2017. It involved Abdelkader and Mohammed Merah, one-time ordinary delinquents in a working-class housing estate in the southwestern city of Toulouse. On September 12, the day after they’d watched the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, their eyes glued to the television in admiration, the brothers had gone out into the streets and shouted, “Long live bin Laden!”. They gradually drifted into Salafist jihadism and, in Mohammed’s case, graduated in March 2012 to murdering “apostate” French soldiers of Muslim descent and Jews.
The 9/11 display is something straight out of a Hollywood disaster film. It combines grand spectacle and explosions, adopting the conventions of action film blockbusters in a way that appealed to the public en masse. The sensational images screamed for coverage on the television news channels, but they still exposed an event that occurred squarely within the bounds of reality. Global retransmission is made possible by the proliferation of the satellite television channels dating to the mid-1990s onward, most notably Al Jazeera. More than any other, it would become the vector for broadcasting the images produced by al-Qaeda. This last element, the combination of terrorism as an act of war and its media staging, is deliberately provocative. It was designed to draw the Western armies into Afghanistan to be ambushed and beaten like the Soviets a dozen years earlier. Bin Laden and his entourage did not believe that 9/11 alone would destroy the United States, but that it would set in motion a process that would ultimately be devastating to the West.
In his manifesto, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, al-Zawahiri devotes several passages to the media battlefield. Although he never mentions the mastery displayed in this domain by the Islamic Republic of Iran—the Shiite competitor for Islamist hegemony—the influence of its techniques is obvious. The Sunni jihadists had been robbed of their glory when the Soviet retreat from Kabul went practically unnoticed due to Khomeini’s shrewdly issuing a fatwa condemning Rushdie to death the day before, on February 14, 1989. Al-Qaeda had clearly absorbed those techniques and applied them to 9/11. The staging of the terrorist act, and its translation into the formatted language of the media, are essential preconditions for its publicity value, and thus its efficacy. In the end, this faith in the mobilizing virtue of the image, which still had to be televised during the opening years of the twenty-first century, as this was before the social media era, would rapidly founder on its limitations and make the al-Qaeda model obsolete.
Jihadist Mirror Image: “Neocons” and the “War on Terror”
9/11 occurred during the first year in the presidency of George W. Bush, the previous governor of the oil state of Texas who had surrounded himself by advisors, many of a neoconservative bent. These “neocons” were now faced with having to craft a response to al-Qaeda’s provocation. Like the jihadists, Bush’s neocons had felt vindicated by the final victory over the USSR in 1989. In their view, it was due to the “hard line” they consistently took against anyone tempted to appease Moscow under the conceit of “peaceful coexistence.”
Like their Islamist adversaries, the neocons had a finality narrative. But in their case it was The End of History, as set out in the book of the same title by Francis Fukuyama, published in 1992. Fukuyama argued that Western liberal democracy is humanity’s Hegelian, inevitable destiny. His theory finds its application first in the former Soviet “people’s democracies” in central and eastern Europe. Once liberated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, they very quickly embraced liberalism, and most of them joined the European Union. For the neocons, this historical precedent could be applied globally, in particular to the Muslim world; all they needed was to field the means necessary to force this mutation. Four years later, Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations seemed to take the opposite tack to Fukuyama’s work. In it, he stressed the specificity of civilizations hostile to those of the West—for which Islam (followed by Confucianism) constituted the model. The neocons synthesized these two theories, giving greater weight to a politico-military engagement that would set the stage, as they saw it, for transforming the Muslim world and setting it on the road to Western-style democracy.
To begin with, these radical right-wing intellectuals, many of them Jews, and also extreme leftists of the Trotskyite stripe in their youth, were preoccupied with the security of Israel threatened by Intifada. They were wary of the Oslo Accords. They suspected President George Bush Senior had put Israel in a position of weakness, and they faulted Bill Clinton for having strong-armed the Jewish state into signing the accords. This made the neocons natural supporters of the Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu came to power in 1996, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist and during a wave of suicide bombings claimed by Hamas. In a paper that appeared the same year under the title “A clean break”, the most influential neocons advocated a general redrawing of the Middle Eastern map. It would mean toppling the oligarchies and dictatorships of the region, which, along with their failing economic policies, only survived thanks to their embracing of populist anti-Israeli rhetoric. This was the “preventive” strategy at the core of the American foreign policy agenda for the region.
Its principal advocate was Paul Wolfowitz, who would later become assistant secretary of defense for George W. Bush. In 1998, the neocon think-tanker backed up this strategy with an open letter addressed to President Clinton titled, “Project for a New American Century.” Among the signatories were a majority of the individuals who would fill prominent posts two years later in the Bush White House. The text called for eliminating Saddam Hussein, on the grounds that he had failed to respect the embargo imposed on him in 1991 in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and that he had accumulated “weapons of mass destruction.” They had convinced themselves, in unison with a number of Iraqi Shiite exiles living in the United States and hangers-on in their circles, that eliminating the dictator would let a civil society emerge in Mesopotamia. On that foundation, they would build a democratic Middle East that was pro-American and at peace with Israel. The events of 9/11 would birth this conceptual framework by a forceps delivery—by means of a concrete military offensive.
Once past the shock and the grief, Americans responded to the jihadist attack on New York and Washington in two stages. The first aimed at treating the symptom of the evil by destroying the organization directly responsible for it. This stage kicked off on October 7, 2001, with the United States invading territory controlled by the Taliban in Afghanistan where bin Laden was taking refuge. It destroyed the regime of Mullah Omar but left the al-Qaeda chieftain unscathed. The objective of the second stage was to eradicate this same evil by changing the context that, in the neocon view, had caused it to emerge in the Middle East. This translated at first into the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies on March 20, 2003. The motives driving it were the elimination of Saddam Hussein and the democratization of Iraq. Ironically, after a Sunni insurrection spearheaded by al-Qaeda had ended, majority-Shiite Iraq passed into the orbit of its Iranian neighbor. The Sunni reaction ultimately would morph into “The Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (the Levant),” the entity also known by the acronym ISIS (ISIL), DAESH—from the Arabic acronym—or the Islamic State. It would constitute itself along the lines of the new international jihadism and, from 2014 to 2017, would turn Mosul and Raqqa into the capitals of a novel, shocking reign of in-your-face terror.
The offensive against Afghanistan showcased the mismatch between the kind of challenge thrown down by the 9/11 “blessed double raid” and the retaliatory capabilities of the United States and its allies. Indeed, their military arrays were superbly equipped for eliminating a regime entrenched on a territory with barracks, palaces, and infrastructures. But, in this case, their firepower came up short in attempts to destroy what was in reality a diffuse terrorist network. As its Arabic name signifying “the base” suggests, al-Qaeda was more of a computer database that knit the members of an organization together in digital space than a centralized base vulnerable to bombardments and attacks by Special Forces.
Initially at least, the invasion of Afghanistan also did not live up to the expectations of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. They had been sure that the American response would result in the expeditionary force getting bogged down quickly only to end up being routed, like the USSR. Moreover, they thought that al-Qaeda would profit by taking the lead in a jihad that would mobilize the world’s Muslim masses against the invasion of this “land of Islam” by unbeliever armies. However, the troops that took Kabul were proper Muslims recruited from among the “Northern Alliance,” a pro-Western coalition of tribes and ethnic groups hostile to the Taliban. The images of the Arab jihadists they captured and bound with barbed wire aroused little compassion in the Islamic world, which, at all events, was hardly eager to start a new jihad at this point.
If al-Qaeda was deceived in this hope, its network proved highly resilient in the face of the military offensive. On October 7 when the invasion began, Al Jazeera broadcast a video that made a huge impact. There, in a mountain cave in Afghanistan, sat bin Laden with al-Zawahiri and two jihadist leaders. First, the al-Qaeda chief extolled “the blessed vanguard of the Muslims” that had bruised the arrogance of the United States. He then swore “by Allah, who raised the heavens without columns, that neither America nor the people that live there can dream of security before we can experience it in Palestine, and before all infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad [Saudi Arabia]—peace be unto Him.” The medium was the message: four men sitting on the ground, turbaned and dressed in traditional Muslim garb, Kalashnikovs posed at their sides, threatening the global superpower from a mountain cave. At the same time, cruise missiles and fighter jets were smashing Taliban strongholds under a rain of bombs.
The video had a great effect. For one, it evoked a parallel to the exiled Prophet with a handful of companions preparing the conquest of Medina and establishing Islam throughout the world. But it registered in a larger context than just that of Islam—it was also about David battling Goliath, the struggle of the weak and destitute against the powerful. Bin Laden’s remarks put the number of deaths on 9/11, and from various attacks inflicted on the United States by jihadists, into perspective. He pointed to the immense crimes blamed on the West, from Hiroshima to Palestine. This positioned the terrorist attacks in a logic of legitimate reprisal—an eye for an eye. This communications mode would create a veritable standard for al-Qaeda’s video messages in the coming years. They became its principal media signature and showy proof of its survival in an inerasable cyberspace. The style would be copied by later-stage jihadists; for example, a video posted online in January 2015 by one Amedy Culibaly, Kalashnikov by his side, invoking a similar context of meaning, claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher supermarket massacres in Paris.
While the most powerful army in the world and its allies steamrollered over Afghanistan, a steady stream of video clips of this type continued to be broadcast during the fall of 2001 and the years 2002–2003. Over time, they concocted a heroic, indomitable image for bin Laden and his minions. However, with the passage of time, the reality, skewed by both sides by emotion and propaganda, became more nuanced. On the one hand, al-Qaeda’s infrastructures on the ground were severely degraded, and the organization lost a number of mid- and high-ranking cadres. Among them were the 9/11 organizers who ended up imprisoned in Guantanamo. This American offshore prison would become a ready-made foil for building a Great Narrative of victimized jihadists that dogged the invasion of Iraq, as we will analyze further on.
These setbacks, however, did not keep al-Qaeda from pursuing its strategy of attacking from all directions. And yet, it did not manage to mobilize the Muslim masses under its banner, as we will also see. In hindsight, there is every indication that eliminating bin Laden was not a priority objective for the White House strategists. Relative to the push for regime change in Baghdad, capturing him had been put on the back burner. The al-Qaeda chieftain was simply secondary to the neocons’ grand project of remodeling the Middle East by installing a new regime in Baghdad that was compatible with the United States and able to coexist peacefully with Israel. From this perspective, the evident resilience of jihadist terrorism during the year 2002 conveniently allowed a deliberate blurring of the roles played by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Substituting one for the other helped hatch the improbable “War on Terror” as the way to a tangible victory.
In early December 2001, the Israeli government led by Ariel Sharon started to raise the wall dividing the Jewish state from the Palestinian territories, which would throw a decisive roadblock in the way of the Second Intifada. A contemporaneous attack on Israeli tourists in Kenya by al-Qaeda mostly failed. To downplay the fallout from this failure, a long communiqué from a “political office of the Qaidat al-Jihad” inventoried all the attacks claimed by the organization dating back to the August 7, 1998 twin explosions at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Such a listing seemed unlikely to compensate for the unmobilized “Muslim masses” around the world that were supposed to have jumped at making common cause with the hunted jihadists.
The second stage of the American response to 9/11 opened on March 20, 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. It was supposed to be decisive. On the operational side, it allowed the full exercise of the American superpower to achieve its objective—the destruction of Saddam’s regime. It was a mission better adapted to the military capabilities of the United States than tracking down the elusive bin Laden. It was, moreover, just the thing to fire up the world’s television viewers. In Washington’s enemies it inspired a feeling of “shock and awe,” and it reassured its allies by producing an image-laden(!), Hollywoodesque narrative. In the eyes of television viewers everywhere, it even managed to counterbalance the shock images of the kamikaze aircraft slamming into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
The way had been prepared for the offensive by an important communications campaign headlined by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Between them they made a case for the peril posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD) supposedly stockpiled by Saddam Hussein, as well as for his organic links with al-Qaeda. Its climax was a show-and-tell by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN on February 5, 2003, during which he brandished an aluminum tube to underline the lethality of Saddam’s WMDs. However, his stunt failed to sway the skepticism of Security Council members France and Russia, whose subsequent vetoes deprived the offensive of the UN’s stamp of approval. It had to make do with a “coalition of the willing” composed of allies and clients of the United States. Proof came within weeks after the start of the offensive that the WMD business had been overhyped, knowingly “sexed up” to get Congress to appropriate funds for the military. With this funding, an offensive could be launched whose immense human, material, and financial costs a mere “regime change” could never have legitimized.
Baghdad fell on April 9, symbolized by the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s immense statue on Paradise Square (pulled down like the Lenin and Stalin statues in the former Soviet Union). George W. Bush celebrated aboard an aircraft carrier under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. In reality, the very serious difficulties that the occupation of Iraq would create for the United States and its allies had only just begun. Fulfilling the neocon ideological premise that Saddam’s elimination would spark a virtuous cycle of Middle East democratization would have to wait. Expectations of seeing liberal transatlantic norms take hold that would end the Clash of Civilizations and prove that the End of History had arrived were confronted by structural realities highly resistant to realizing this simplistic utopia.
In fact, by striking down Saddam, the United States hoped to achieve other ends. First on the list was weakening the Sunni axis, because it blamed 9/11 on the complacent Saudi regime’s incompetence in handling al-Qaeda. Second, the Americans wanted a takeover by the Iraqi Shiite majority, expecting that their empowerment would spawn imitators among their Iranian fellow believers. Pentagon strategists convinced themselves that Iranian society, in which were manifest cultural dissident behaviors critical of the established order, would rise up against the mullahs. In the process, they would make common cause with the many Iranians living in California and elsewhere in the West since the shah had fallen.
This strategy was wrong on two principal counts. First, it marginalized Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. In effect, the occupiers punished them collectively for the support many but not all had given to Saddam. This pushed some Sunni into insurrection—all the more worrisome because of the key positions they previously held in the military and intelligence apparatus. With no other prospects for survival, these Baathist nationalists brought their talents to the local jihadists. Once opponents, now they were all in the same boat as a Sunni Arab minority facing the Shiite majority and the Kurds, both aided by the invader. This natural alliance was reinforced by links between the Sunni Arabs and al-Qaeda, to which the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a veteran Afghanistan jihadist, had sworn allegiance. He unified this network by creating the local branch of that organization, which he named “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” Its name in Arabic, al-Qaʿida fi bilad al-rafidayn (literally: al-Qaeda “in the land of two rivers”), was taken from the traditional Islamic place name system. It let him avoid using the modern term Iraq, now associated with a national entity whose very existence had been dissolved. After various metamorphoses, the world would see this offshoot of al-Qaeda’s ultimate incarnation during the ensuing decade, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the “Islamic State” at the start of Ramadan on June 29, 2014 with himself as caliph. We shall return to this in greater detail below.
The neocon dream of democratizing the region by transforming occupied Iraq ran headlong into a hard reality that bore little resemblance to the mechanistic geopolitical schemes contrived inside the Beltway. The fall of the totalitarian regime in Baghdad was regarded in Washington as a variation on the fall of the Soviet system in Prague and Warsaw in 1989. The American occupation would last eight years until President Obama, fulfilling a campaign pledge, ended it in October 2011. It cost the lives of 4,488 American military personnel and at least 190,000 others, mostly civilians, who perished during combat operations and in terrorist attacks. Much energy and resources went into political engineering designed to build democratic institutions representative of the country’s diverse ethnoreligious components. However, the situation on the ground was marred by the recurring violence of the Sunni insurrection. It was visited on Baghdad as much as on the majority Sunni zones. The United States scored a few successes, such as killing al-Zarqawi on June 7, 2006, or enlisting specific Sunni tribes in the fight against the jihadists (the so-called “Sunni Awakening” devised by two American generals, David Petraeus and John Allen). But, in the end, the American policy was branded by two moral wrongs that alienated many otherwise sympathetic Sunni: the human rights abuses at the detention camps at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Guantanamo opened in January 2002 on an American offshore base not subject to United States laws. This meant that these “enemy combatants” suspected of ties to al-Qaeda captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere could be held there without trial. The indignities visited on the prisoners helped create an image of victimization, which Sunni jihadists turned back against the United States’s Great Narrative of the War on Terror. The cases against many of the prisoners were weak, which led to some being released—newly radicalized by the treatment they had undergone inside the camp. Thus, the orange overalls that the detainees wore became a symbol of arbitrary imprisonment and injustice, and the jihadists would make their hostages put them on before being beheaded. Clips of these atrocities were broadcast on video-sharing sites, starting with al-Zarqawi’s execution of the American entrepreneur Nicholas Berg in May 2004. It would be followed by a morbid series that climaxed with videos of mass killings posted on social networks. The message addressed to enemies of the United States and the West justified these executions as an eye for an eye, in an effort to fend off the accusation of terrorism with moral relativism. This practice only came to an end when the “ISIS caliphate” fell in the autumn of 2017, as we shall see below.
In the second camp, Abu Ghraib, one of Saddam’s old prisons located west of Baghdad and infamous for the atrocities committed there in his name, American soldiers physically and sexually abused Sunni prisoners. Uncovered by the press in April 2004, these practices caused a huge scandal in the United States, undermining the moral justification for their having invaded Iraq to restore law and rights after the criminal Baathist regime. Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities, like Camp Buqa, became superb incubators for the Iraqi jihadist movement, reinforcing the networks from which the Islamic State would emerge.
The consequences of the Sunni insurrection confronting the American forces would reverberate until the end of the next decade. Furthermore, the Shiite trap the American strategists of the Iraq invasion thought they had set to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran went off the rails. Here, they made their second major strategic error. In effect, the jihadist terror conducted by al-Zarqawi had a stridently anti-Shiite dimension, at least as much as an anti-Western one. He vowed to bring death to the “heretics” (rafida) even more surely than to the “unbelievers” (kuffar).
As early as August 2003, one of the top Iraqi ayatollahs, Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, died in a Sunni jihadist suicide attack in Najaf, one of the major sacred Shiite towns. Killed on al-Zarqawi’s order, he had been one of the principal Shiite opponents of Saddam Hussein. He had fled to Iran in 1980, where he founded the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, as well as the Badr brigades that fought Saddam on Iran’s side. Even though al-Hakim aligned with the Islamic Republic, and was of an anti-American mindset, he returned to his country on May 12, 2003, the day after the Saddam regime fell. He showed himself open to a certain amount of compromise with the occupier, his brother Abdul Aziz al-Hakim being part of the interim government.
Al-Hakim’s immense popularity with the Shiite masses made him a natural target, but he was still the second Shiite religious personage open to dialogue with the Americans who was assassinated. The first, the Ayatollah Abdul Majid al-Khoei, was also slain in the Najaf sanctuary, after the fall of Baghdad on April 10, by the henchmen of a young, radical, and stridently anti-American Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr was descended from a line of prestigious ayatollahs, including Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, who, at the end of his life, had been Ayatollah Khomeini’s personal representative in Iraq.
Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister had been massacred ignominiously at the end of a macabre scene staged by Saddam’s agents on April 9, 1980. This happened twenty-three years to the day before the Americans rolled into Baghdad, and the cleric’s disciples saw in this fateful date Allah’s intervening to avenge His martyr (unbeknownst to the American generals who were unaware of this divine manifestation). And, for an even more immediate genealogy, Muqtada is also the son of Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr, killed by the regime in 1999. The father was an extremely charismatic figure in the popular resistance to the fallen despot. For the al-Sadrs, as for Khomeini, the Shiite clergy had to fight the fight daily (hawza natiqa) with an activist attitude. That meant not confining themselves to theological issues (hawza samita), as a quietist tradition would have preferred, in counterpoint to which the Islamic Republic was formed.
Despite his youth, Muqtada threw himself into politics, with Iranian backing, to exploit the social capital of his prestigious lineage. He called on his fellow Shiites to walk to Karbala, Shiism’s Golgotha. Located a three-day walk from Baghdad, Karbala is where Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, the Imam Husayn ibn Ali, was assassinated on October 10, 680, by soldiers of the Sunni caliph of Damascus, thereby founding the martyrdom characteristic of the Shiite creed. Four million faithful participated in this commemoration (almost double the number at Mecca, which received slightly more than two million pilgrims that year). This helped create, soon after the invasion, a balance of power tilted toward radical Shiism favoring Iran.
Muqtada was also dead set against the neocon pipe dream of a harmonious relationship between the United States and the Islamic world. In 2004, his followers banded together in an “Army of the Mahdi” and opened a second front against the Americans, allying with Sunni insurgents in the town of Fallujah. It was not until 2005, and especially after February 22, 2006, that they threw themselves overtly into the battle against the Sunni in the quest for political hegemony. On that day, al-Zarqawi had the dome of the Golden Mosque in the town of Samarra, which sheltered the tomb of one of Shiism’s imams, dynamited. The same fate met the entry to the cave where the Mahdi or Messiah had vanished, who, tradition held, would come back in the end times to bring light and justice to the world. This sacrilege against one of the most revered sanctuaries of Shiite worship roused a massive number of followers into a mobilization that spawned interdenominational violence. Shiite demographic supremacy over the Sunni allowed them to break al-Qaeda’s insurrection, which the American army had proved unable to do on its own.
This turning of the tide, which would ultimately win the ongoing Iraqi civil war for the Shiites, also coincided with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of their backer Iran in August 2005. His predecessor Mohammad Khatami had pursued multiple openings to the West in the name of a “dialogue of civilizations.” The goal was to present the image of an affable Iran at a time when 9/11 had pushed the needle of the global terrorism meter over to the Sunni side. Teheran even supported the offensive against the Taliban—despite President Bush lumping Iran in with the “axis of evil” during his State of the Union address in January 2002.
In electing as president an extremist whose first statements called for “wiping Israel from the map,” the Iranian establishment had created a great stir. It now monetized its position of strength by supporting, through the interposed Iraqi Shiites, the quashing of the Sunni insurrection in Iraq. This happened at a time when the political cost of doing so was becoming increasingly intolerable to the United States electorate. The massive deployment of Shiite militias against the jihadists came after the latter had already considerably “bloodied” the contingents of Americans and their allies, and when Washington found itself in a weakened position. This also favorably positioned the Islamic Republic of Iran to engage in nuclear blackmail by enriching uranium. An agreement with the United States and Europe freezing the program would only be negotiated in 2013, after the election of Ahmadinejad’s successor, Hassan Rouhani.
The American project for remodeling the Middle East, touted as the best way to deal with the causes of jihadist terrorism after 9/11, did not bear the fruit expected by its neocon designers. It ought to have promoted the emergence of an Iraqi civil society tied to the United States, at peace with Israel. It was intended to have furnished a virtuous model of a liberal democracy straight out of The End of History that would radiate throughout the region. Then, so went the scenario, the mullahs’ regime in Iran would fall and the oil markets, thanks to hydrocarbon exports from Iraq’s Bassorah, Kirkuk, or Mosul, would be under control, to the detriment of a Saudi Arabia suspected to have been complicit with the 9/11 kamikaze. The whole package failed. Ironically, it was the support by their Iranian enemy, rendered via the local Shiite militias, that finally helped the Americans snuff out the Sunni insurrection piloted by al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Only then could the United States troops leave the country in 2011 and still save face.
Yet, ironically, suppressing the Iraqi Sunni uprising promoted the mutation of jihadism into an even higher threat. It signaled the end both of the pyramidal, global organization developed by bin Laden, and of al-Zawahiri’s strategic concept of fighting the “distant enemy.” They were replaced by a matrix-like, horizontal system encompassing all the ethnic, confessional, or social tensions of the regions it took hold in. It spread everywhere, especially to Europe—with a focus on France—and to the Levant. Focusing on Syria and Iraq, in 2014 it ended up declaring where the two countries touched as the “caliphate” of the Islamic State. From there, it would metastasize into the biggest challenge of the coming decade.