THE FAILURE OF al-Qaeda’s top-down strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq sounded the death knell of the “vertical” model with its focus on fighting the distant enemy. Al-Zarqawi and his accomplices likely had pledged allegiance to bin Laden because of the power of his brand at the time, which assured immediate notoriety for anyone who claimed it and instant publicity for any attack carried out in his name. The Iraqi activists, however, wasted no time in making the “heretical” Shiites their priority targets. The sect seemed much more dangerous in the long run to their project of a Sunni caliphate than the Western occupying armies that eventually would pull out. Al-Zarqawi’s dissent led to an exchange of bitter communications with al-Zawahiri, who stuck to the al-Qaeda orthodoxy he had expressed in Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. Al-Zarqawi argued back that “we have to reserve nine bullets for the apostates [Shiites] for every one for the infidels [Westerners].” We know this, because their correspondence was intercepted and made public.
In 2004 and 2005, as this mutation of jihadism played out on its principal front in Iraq, the West started to see a change in the attacks carried out on its soil. In 2002–2003, al-Qaeda had still dispatched activists to hit targets from Bali to Mombasa. In Casablanca, all the victims of the attacks of May 16, 2003 were Moroccans and Muslims. Then the year 2004 started with what could be considered a “remake” of 9/11 on European soil. On March 11, in Madrid, four commuter trains rolling toward Atocha station blew up almost simultaneously. Had they not been running behind schedule and arrived on time in the station, the hall would have been leveled and thousands would have been killed. (As it were, 191 people died.)
The symmetry with the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was deliberate, including the choice of the date—911 days (off by one) after “9/11”—and the four trains mimicking the four hijacked airliners. The entire Iberian peninsula now found itself challenged in a communiqué justifying the attack as “the settling of ancient accounts with Islam.” This allusion to the Reconquista of Muslim Andalusia by the fifteenth-century Catholic kings meant that Spanish territory was considered a “land of Islam usurped by the infidels.” In Islamist doctrine, this justified “a jihad of defense” obligating every Muslim to help retake the lost lands, thus rendering “halal” the blood of all infidels killed in this “blessed raid.” More prosaically, with the Spanish legislative election in full swing, the communiqué sought to pressure the new government into pulling its troops out of Iraq—which the Socialist majority that emerged from the vote count quickly complied with.
The Madrid attack was part and parcel of the jihad strategy against “the distant enemy,” and it chalked up a victory after the Spanish withdrawal from Iraq. However, the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam the following November would already follow a different logic: a young Islamist originally from Morocco shot and stabbed van Gogh for having “blasphemed” with his short film Submission. The clip denounced the condition of women under Islam by projecting incriminating Koranic verses on a naked female body.
Van Gogh’s killer had not been trained directly by al-Qaeda; socialized in Dutch jihadist circles, he committed the act following an obscure process of doctrinal brainwashing. It was not a vertical, top-down logic, but one that started by being part of a network and implanted in a territory—a very different configuration from the attacks on 9/11 and March 11 in Madrid. The pattern was simple: identify a local “enemy of Allah,” in this instance the famed painter’s great-grandnephew, and then kill him. The ultimate objective was to spread fear among the victim’s peers while firing up the Muslim masses supposedly “avenged” by this gesture. This “punishing blasphemers” approach was taken later in the campaign launched against the Prophet cartoons (published in September 2005 by a Danish daily in response to the van Gogh affair). It also applied to the massacre committed by the Kuachi brothers in the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015. The original inspiration for avenging sacrilege in this way may be traceable to Khomeini’s infamous February 14, 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, but here it was executed in typical Sunni jihadist fashion.
The attacks in London of July 7, 2005 reflected the quest for refining the model theorized in the Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner manifesto, but still always under the explicit control of al-Qaeda, with al-Zawahiri running the show. That particular day had been chosen symbolically in the same way as with previous operations. What mattered was the date, when “the leader of the crusader empire [Prime Minister Tony Blair]” presided over the G8 summit. It was also the first day of the British assuming the presidency of the European Union, and on which the choice of London as the site of the next Olympics was announced. In addition, it met operational mode requirements involving the use of the underground and a bus, in lieu of the planes used in the United States and the trains in Madrid.
“Allah the Most High,” explained al-Zawahiri in the video claiming responsibility for the attacks, “Sent the knights of the Islamic anger to strike at the heart of London in a blessed raid.” He was referring to the attackers, three young men of Pakistani origin and a Jamaican convert, at least one of whom had been trained in an al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan. Their London “martyr operation” resulted in fifty-six dead and 700 wounded. Although al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility, the terrorists, unlike the 9/11 perpetrators, were no strangers to the United Kingdom. They were native-born, educated there—to the point of speaking English with a strong Midlands working-class accent—and therefore had acted in their home environment. Despite al-Zawahiri’s unchanged rhetoric, the jihadist model had mutated: it now relied on human resources embedded in the Western target that al-Qaeda had in its crosshairs. This metamorphosis to a new mode of terrorism outstripped the first two phases, as well as the distinction between “near enemy” and “distant enemy.” It would also put its stamp on the next decade.
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The two “fathers” of this third-generation jihadism had the same kunya (Islamic surname) of Abu Musab, after a companion of the Prophet named Musab ibn Omayr, martyred in the Battle of Uhud in 625. The first of the pair, Mustapha Sitt Mariam Nassar, called Abu Musab al-Suri (“the Syrian”), a blue-eyed redhead, was born in 1957 to a good family in Aleppo. He started his political engagement in the Muslim Brotherhood ranks, then joined the jihad in Afghanistan before spending the 1990s in Europe. He studied engineering in France, married a Spanish woman, and acquired her nationality. While living in “Londonistan,” he became known especially for supporting the GIA by editing its international bulletin Al-Ansar. He joined bin Laden in Afghanistan after the autumn of 1996 to serve as his liaison officer with Arab and European media.
After the American and allied offensive against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11, al-Suri fled and wandered through the region until his capture in early 2005 by Baluchis. They sold him to the United States, because he was on a list of wanted people with a price on his head. After American intelligence was through with him, they turned him over to the Bashar al-Assad regime, then still coddled by the West, in the rendition policy framework. His trail went cold after the outbreak of the Syrian insurrection in 2011, as we shall see below. His major contribution to the history of jihadism is a work of some 2,000 pages, A Call for a Global Islamic Resistance, that he penned during his wanderings and published online in Arabic shortly before his 2005 capture. The poorly written, longish and repetitive book suffers from the adverse conditions under which it was written. In its most original passages, a critical retrospective of al-Qaeda’s strategy, he calls the organization a wholesale failure.
Al-Suri argued that 9/11 testified to bin Laden’s hubris and immoderation. By overestimating his powers and carrying out his badly calibrated provocation against the United States, he drew a reaction that destroyed the organization. The fault lay in a misbegotten strategy prioritizing the fight against the “distant enemy.” Even if the Muslim masses were enthusiastic about the destruction of the World Trade Center, it was not enough to make them rush to al-Qaeda’s banner, because it was not something they could identify with in their daily lives. It was necessary to abandon the “top-down” strategy of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, embodied in a Leninist, pyramidal organization that issued orders to be executed. The preferable alternative was a “bottom up” strategy based on mutual knowledge and imitation. It would be both molecular and virtual, and would let potential jihadists easily self-identify relative to issues they had experienced in their daily lives.
This reversal al-Suri summed up in A Call for a Global Islamic Resistance with a single slogan: “A system, not an organization (nizam, la tanzim).” This is the matrix model, which recalls the theory of the “revolutionary rhizome” popularized by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze during the 1980s when al-Suri was studying in France. In effect, it was a call to overtake, in the sense of the third movement in the Hegelian dialectic (Aufhebung), the two prior jihadism phases whose dynamics it synthesized and fused in a new context. For the too-distant target of America, al-Suri in effect substituted a Europe easily accessible from the Middle East and North Africa by plane or ferry. Living in Europe were millions of young people of Muslim immigrant lineage as well as converts. A percentage were unhappy with the cards society had dealt them. They were poorly integrated culturally and socially, living in districts that had been left behind and were dominated by the drug economy and delinquency. Al-Suri hoped to put these same youths in direct contact with their peers in the southern and eastern Mediterranean, train them as fighters, and indoctrinate them. That was where the territories of jihad were being born in the aftermath of Iraq, or where Europeans had been drawn to the Sunni insurrection since 2003. Alternatively, they might train and fight in the Iran-Pakistan tribal zones—more remote, but the Taliban jihad was still live there.
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During the same period, the Iraqi insurrection changed its nature under the leadership of the second Abu Musab—al-Zarqawi, that is—and that of his local successors after he was killed in June 2006. Born in October 1966 in the Jordanian town of Zarqa, a stronghold of jihadist Salafism after having been one of the PLO’s citadels, al-Zarqawi left school without getting his diploma. Influenced by a local imam, he traveled to Peshawar in 1989 to join the Afghanistan jihad. There, he spent time with one of the principal jihadist ideologues, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, and enlisted as a fighter with the most radical Afghan factions.
Al-Zarqawi returned to Jordan in 1993, and the following year he was sentenced to a five-year prison term. Pardoned when King Abdullah II ascended to the throne in 1999, al-Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan to take charge of a camp for training Arab and Kurdish terrorists. He achieved international notoriety when Colin Powell denounced him from the UN podium in February 2003 in the same breath as his organization in Kurdistan, Ansar al-Islam. But he had also carried out attacks and assassinations in Jordan. After the American invasion of Iraq the following month, al-Zarqawi played a lead role in organizing the Sunni jihadist resistance. He became notorious, most notably for the decapitation on May 7, 2004 of the American hostage Nicholas Berg. Even if his exact role in the beheading was unclear, the broadcast of its video furnished the template for numerous staged hostage executions. The Islamic State turned beheading videos into the weapon of choice for its media propaganda offensive during the next decade, as we shall see in what follows.
Further, in giving priority to the extermination of Shiites over fighting the American army, al-Zarqawi diverged from the strategy of fighting the “distant enemy” extolled by al-Zawahiri. As such, the local branch, “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” deviated from the jihadist ideology of the second generation. The linking of the two territories of jihad, Europe and Iraq—which would be enlarged to the entire Levant after the insurrection against Bashar al-Assad started in 2011, coincided with the maturing of the third phase of jihad. It would be expressed as much by the posting online of al-Suri’s Call as by the new forms of Iraqi Sunni guerrilla warfare under al-Zarqawi’s leadership. These territories were interlinked, not only by the comings and goings of the jihadists, but by proliferating social networks online. On February 14, 2005, YouTube in California obtained its operating license. In short order, it revolutionized the broadcasting of images, putting them within everyone’s reach without the need of television, a stark difference from the 9/11 era. This allowed an in-depth renewal of the forms of jihadist mobilization, thanks to the virtual juncture between localized terrorism and global jihad.
However, this third phase, whose principles had been set in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, would take a few years to incubate before it could be deployed full force. In Europe, it found an especially fertile ground in the prisons. Here, the young jihadists, imprisoned either returning from Iraq or trying to get there, busied themselves with massive conversions of common criminals from the disenfranchised banlieues. Simultaneously, Salafism was expanding in these same districts just as the first generation born of immigrants and educated in Europe reached adulthood only to be profoundly alienated by the social situation—in some cases alienated enough to incite jihadism.
In the Arab world, the uprisings of the years 2010–2013, after giving rise to immense hopes of democratization, ended either in restored authoritarianism, as in Egypt, or in civil war, as in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Meanwhile, the Sunni-Shiite conflict that obsessed al-Zarqawi became the Middle East’s principal fault line. It is in this new context that the jihadism of the third generation would continue to develop until it converged in its most monstrous outcome: the Islamic State “caliphate.” It was proclaimed with its attendant horrors and massacres in Mosul in June 2014, while series of attacks perpetrated at the same time in Europe would drench the continent in blood. It is this new environment born out of the failed hopes of the “Arab Spring” that we shall now turn to.