INTRODUCTION: TERRORISM AND ITS FUTURE
After the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, President Obama declared that al-Qaeda no longer posed a threat to the United States and that the danger of terrorism was receding. Yet within three years, his words became hollow with the rise of Islamic State (IS; known as ISIS but referred to throughout this book as IS) and continued plotting by al-Qaeda. Since that fateful day in May, both IS and AQ have expanded their reach across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, inspired thousands to travel to join their fight, and executed violent atrocities like the November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels Airport bombing, and the August 2017 vehicle attacks in Barcelona. The public wants to know, of course, why this is happening and when it is likely to end. There has been a deluge of literature published in the past decade that has tried to answer these two questions, but much of it is incomplete in its analysis, fails to explore the structure of terrorism, or approaches the topic with specifics that are too technical for a general audience.
The fact is that terrorism is a phenomenon rife with inconsistencies, conspiracies, mixed ideologies, and the ability to generate immense fear, which is exploited by both politicians and terrorists alike. This has made giving an objective accounting of the subject nigh impossible largely because in the public sphere, there is no common ground in terms of a definition, modality, or strategic purpose. All that people understand is that seemingly chaotic events conspire to bring about tragedies and death, and that victims and perpetrators launch accusations and counteraccusations about responsibility and guilt. Little effort is made to help the public understand what distinguishes terrorism from other forms of political violence waged by nonstate actors, such as guerrilla warfare or insurgency, especially when terrorists often obfuscate the distinctions in their propaganda and their justifications for violence. Adding to this confusion is the way terrorism portrays itself. Until recently, few terrorist groups ever identified as such, and even fewer would argue that their violence was not justified either from a humanitarian perspective or from a strictly moral view. In addition, for most of the time it has been in use as a tactic, terrorism has seen groups emerge from all over the ideological spectrum: the violent left-wing intellectuals of Europe, the brutal fascists in Germany and Italy prior to World War II, and various groups from all the world’s major religions. Not surprisingly, given its persistence and variability in structure and ideology, the use of the word terrorism often degenerates into an ad hominem used by political rivals to sully their opponents and their policies.
Today, terrorism has the ability, more than ever, to upend the global political order. IS’s advance across northern Iraq not only left thousands dead through horrific acts of violence but also sought to challenge the very concept of the nation-state by erasing the borders between Iraq and Syria and establishing a pan-Islamic political entity that claimed sovereignty over the world’s entire Muslim population. In the West, brazen plots by IS and al-Qaeda helped usher in populists in both Europe and North America with decidedly Islamophobic messages. In the United States and the United Kingdom, politicians offered extreme and radical solutions to the problem of terrorism that threatened to upend their liberal-democratic political charters. In both instances, these individuals were elected. Claiming terrorism is a violent act inextricably linked to a particular religion or part of the world is not enough. One needs to learn its historical background to understand what terrorism actually is and how to define it. Only then can we contextualize modern terrorism, because we will have a paradigm for evaluating brazen new acts committed by any future terrorist entity. Aside from history, there is a critical need for explorations and explanations of the actors as well as the jargon associated with the modern terrorist threat. This includes terms like lone-wolf terrorism, the idea of the caliphate, propaganda of the deed, the various branches of both IS and al-Qaeda, and even the terrorist groups unassociated with these movements. Finally, it is imperative to understand the rationale and reasoning for terrorism. The scary truth, despite what the media suggests, is that terrorism is not the product of psychosis or irrationality; if anything, it is an extremely logical and reasonable form of political violence that produces results. Yet despite this and the way terrorists portray themselves to the world, in the final analysis, they are nonstate actors that commit violence against nonmilitary targets outside of war zones to fuel an emotional response that will affect the politics of a group, society, nation, or even continent. This, by every extant legal convention, is both illegal and without justification.
As one of the authors of this present effort, I, Walter Laqueur, first wrote of terrorism more than forty years ago, when the field was quite inchoate and few had bothered to give a systematic accounting of the phenomenon. In my book Terrorism, I noted that terrorism was one of the most widely discussed issues of the time but also one of the least understood. In the years that have passed, interest has not waned but rather has grown exponentially as other great dangers seem to have receded. More than a quarter century after the Cold War’s conclusion, with new risks of conflict between world powers and permanent ecological disaster on the horizon, is the enormous amount of publicity for terrorism justified, or is its importance and prevalence exaggerated? We shall return to this question later.
Recent manifestations of terrorism have been described in countless books, monographs, articles, plays, novels, and movies, with varying degrees of sophistication. Terror has fascinated metaphysicians and popular novelists alike. The causes of terrorism, its financial sources, the distinction between terrorism and guerrilla warfare—these and many other issues have been debated and commented upon in many quarters and in various languages. It is perhaps noteworthy that there is little about this subject written in Arabic (other than publications created by IS and other such organizations) or in Russian, even though it can be taken for granted that the phenomenon has not escaped the attention of the Russian policy makers and secret services. But what could be the reason for the neglect of terrorism in Arab literature?
What has been very seldom discussed with the general public is the efficacy of terrorism in changing the very structure of government. An example would be 9/11. Historians, political scientists, and others have written at length in their technical journals about how it shaped the political character of the United States, its allies, and other countries—giving voice to hawkish leaders and restrictive legislation—but rarely is the public fully briefed on domestic or international structural changes. The attacks on New York and Washington had an enormous impact on public opinion and on policy makers, especially in the United States, but also in other countries. The attacks led to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, and according to The Washington Post, the employment of “about 200,000 contractors and about 188,000 federal employees,” not including “uniformed members of the Coast Guard.”1 This is a larger staff than most other U.S. government agencies. Following the attacks, NATO activated Article V of its charter in a show of solidarity with the United States, enmeshing member states into the prolonged conflict that is Afghanistan. But in what way have the events of 9/11 changed the international balance of power? This is hard to measure. Since that morning, the United States has prioritized conflicts in the Middle East and has diverted resources it would have used to counter or, at the very least, accommodate the rise of China in the western Pacific. This focus on the Middle East has meant that would-be terrorist leaders have been in the United States’ crosshairs, undoubtedly hastening their deaths. Indeed, given how skilled the United States has become at killing terrorists, there was a joke for a while that the surest way to die was to become al-Qaeda’s third in command, given how frequently American drone strikes targeted them. Not surprisingly, this gave space for China to assert itself and work toward asserting hegemony in the Pacific, knowing that the United States was too immersed in conflicts of choice to bother responding. It is doubtful that this was al-Qaeda’s objective. China both opposes the group’s long-term ambitions of a caliphate that rules the world and represses its Uighur population, a minority Muslim sect in the western part of the country.
To what extent have those attacks and their aftermath promoted the aims of those who initiated and carried them out? It precipitated the wars in Iraq and the subsequent rise of IS, but it is debatable to what extent the war was the result of al-Qaeda’s brilliance or miscalculations on the part of the governments of the United States and Iraq. For all the influence of these terror groups, they cannot outmaneuver an organized and well-formed government capable of enacting reform to deprive terrorist groups of further victories and, with them, new recruits. This seems to be the reason why, in the seventeen years since 9/11, no operation of similar magnitude has been carried out, despite the worldwide networks of al-Qaeda and IS. This is not to predict that similar attacks will not happen in the future but only to say that it seems unlikely.
Indeed, the most recent indications are that IS’s push to establish a new caliphate has been a failure. By trying to “liberate” territory, IS exposed itself to counterattacks by superior forces and was driven from many of the regions it had previously captured. This happened despite the fact that those in the fight to counter IS never used their full strength en masse when seeking to uproot it. The battle for Aleppo started in July 2012 and ended in December 2016. If there had been a truly determined effort to dislodge the conquerors, it could have ended in a matter of months, if not weeks. Aleppo was fought by the corrupt and weakened Assad regime, facing serious defections and other international constraints, and it still managed to withstand the pressure. If anything, Assad held back because an overwhelming attack killing even more civilians would truly bring the wrath of the international community, which, unlike IS, is capable of removing him from power. If Assad can hold off a protracted terrorist insurgency waged by multiple actors and claim victory, can al-Qaeda and IS really pose a threat to strong and stable Western governments?
Regardless, the world’s leading terrorist organizations are bound to continue. The parts of the world hardly touched by the impact of terrorism in the last fifteen years will likely become targets in the near future. Militants are mobilizing in Southeast Asia. Attacks there were common shortly after 9/11, but slowed down following a concerted counterterrorism policy by the various countries in the region. This appears to be a temporary lull, as militants in the Philippines are emerging once more, undoubtedly inspired by successes experienced by terrorist groups in other parts of the world. Above all else, though, the United States and Europe are experiencing greater threats by terrorists than before. In these latter two theaters, the fighters are often returning from the battlefields of the Middle East, but local supporters who have been radicalized in recent years will soon join the action as well. The sheer multiplicity of threats has left security services in Europe overwhelmed and the United States seeking new measures to monitor the challenge posed by latent militants.
The issue of winning over new supporters through radicalization is an interesting and important one, and it has not yet been studied sufficiently. In the public discourse, the tendency has been to impute a more deterministic role to religion or to poverty, without taking into account the full universe of terrorist operations throughout time. Moreover, it highlights two relatively new features of terrorist operations: the lone-wolf phenomenon and internet indoctrination. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech, but should those protections be extended to include advocacy for and the dissemination of terrorist propaganda? These freedoms are not as protected in Europe and other parts of the world, making the United States a curious case study. There is a similar problem with the mobilization of recruits for any terrorist operation. While Europe has taken steps to criminalize this behavior, in the United States, the right to assembly gives a degree of protection, as long as the goal is not the commission of a crime. What differentiates between student groups exercising their freedom of speech and individuals organizing to further the actions of a terrorist group? One need look no further than the various American organizations that provided aid to the Irish Republican Army during “the Troubles,” which the American government failed to criminalize and prosecute.
Maintaining this temporal awareness is necessary. It is far too easy to imbue the current era with a brand of uniqueness that it does not possess or, in the other extreme, turning it into a skeleton key for understanding all terrorism throughout history. In fact, a just chronology of terrorism begins in antiquity and most likely dates back further into prehistory. It precedes the political structures and institutions that animate this form of political violence. Even looking solely at modern terrorism, which dates back to the eighteenth century, there are stark generational differences that make it hard to generalize about terrorism. Professor David Rapoport, the retired UCLA political scientist, popularized the idea of modern terrorism occurring in waves. To the current moment, he has divided these waves into four distinct periods. The first covers the time before the First World War. He claims that it began in Russia in the 1880s, with the anarchists, before spreading elsewhere. There were a great many terrorist attacks, primarily in Europe, many of which were carried out by those drawing inspiration from the Russian example, targeting kings, prime ministers, generals, and other important figures. The second wave followed the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and was marked by a push for decolonization waged by nationalist movements around the world. This lasted until shortly before the start of the Vietnam War. The third wave emerged from those taking cues from the Vietcong and its ability to stymie the American war machine in Indochina. As such, it comprises mostly left-wing terrorism in Europe and elsewhere, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This wave is commonly referred to as the New Left. The fourth and current period covers the attacks carried out by radical Islamists and other religious groups. It began during the 1970s in several Arab countries, with the deposition of the shah in Iran as the pivotal moment. In the beginning, it centered mainly on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In later years, terrible conflicts in a variety of Muslim countries came to the fore. The four-wave categorization is neither neat nor discrete. There certainly was overlap between decolonization movements and the emergence of the New Left. In fact, the third wave in many ways continued well into the early years of the current millennium, as the Tamil Tigers were not defeated until 2009. There is utility, nonetheless, in this ordinal classification, as it helps isolate the gradual evolutionary process that makes terrorism deadly.
THE CHANGES WROUGHT BY THE FOURTH WAVE
The fourth wave identified by Professor Rapoport continues unabatedly to the present day, and the concept has been widely accepted. It has been rightly remarked that a terrorist wave seems to last for about one generation, which suggests first and foremost that further research into the generational issue is necessary. Why were certain generations radicalized while others were not? These questions have been neglected perhaps because most of the research in modern terrorism has been conducted in English-speaking countries, and America and Britain were largely spared violent youth revolts. The attacks on 9/11 energized a surge of American and British scholars to consider terrorism from a modern perspective, which of course meant focusing on the Middle East. This created an academic environment in which many young scholars were driven to deduce universal explanations for a problem while studying cultures with which they were not intimately familiar. Their conclusions were marked by myopia, bound as they were by time, place, and their own cultural biases.
This is not to discredit their research. It nevertheless raises a question. Are we inhabiting a parallel historical situation to those who wrote the volume of scientific literature about the geocentric model of the universe, only for Copernicus to come along? Is it possible that even now terrorism is one of the least understood phenomena of our time? The number of articles and studies has now grown a hundredfold since the idea of the fourth wave was first postulated, and included in this body of work have been many contributions that greatly add to our collective knowledge. However, as mentioned earlier, some central issues for one reason or another have not been the subject of research and comment. Yet it is also true that in this immense collection of literature, there is much that is obviously untrue, and nonspecialist readers will experience considerable difficulty finding their way through the maze of claims and counterclaims. Above all, terrorism tends to change and, quite often, change beyond recognition.
For perspective, consider the introduction to my book Terrorism, dated April 1977. At that time, Anwar Sadat was still in power in Egypt, as was the shah in Iran. The Middle East was relatively quiet but for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which had been going on for thirty years. The “recent manifestations” of terrorism were scattered all over the globe; in Latin America, for instance, but most prominently in Europe. The Basque ETA figured prominently in the media, and so did the Italian Red Brigades and the German terrorist groups of the extreme left. The Soviet Union still existed. In brief, it was a very different world from that of the year 2001, let alone that of today.
The introduction to The New Terrorism, a follow-up volume written in the last year of the previous century, begins as follows:
Four hundred twelve men, women, and children were hacked to death by terrorists on the night of December 29, 1997, in three isolated villages in Algeria’s Elizane region. Four hundred perished when a group of the Shah’s opponents burned a cinema in Abadan during the last phase of the monarchy in Iran. There were 328 victims when an Air India aircraft was exploded by Sikh terrorists in 1985, and 278 were killed in the Lockerbie disaster in Scotland in 1988 which was commissioned by Libya’s Colonel Khadafi and carried out by terrorists. Two hundred forty-one U.S. marines lost their lives when their barracks were attacked by suicide bombers in Beirut in 1983; 171 were killed when Libyan emissaries put a bomb on a French UTA plane in 1985. The largest toll in human life on American soil was paid when 169 men, women, and children died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
The world’s situation has changed since 2000, and the Middle East has transformed even more dramatically. Colonel Qaddafi (then transliterated as Khadafi) is dead, but the danger of terrorism in Libya has by no means vanished. The experts at the turn of the century mentioned the possibility of Libya becoming a new Syria, the danger of southern Libya becoming the focus of a new attack, and the fears of a new terrorist drive from the south of this country toward the north.
These facts and figures of the last year of the last century, most of them forgotten today, seem less alarming when compared with the happenings since. Many more people perished in the attack on the World Trade Center than in all the events just mentioned. True, The New Terrorism included a chapter entitled, “Terrorist Motives: Marx, Muhammad, and Armageddon,” and also sections that discussed the far right and exotic terrorism, but it was not yet clear that the age of jihadism had already dawned. The terrorist movements that preoccupied politicians and the media alike (such as Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades, and ETA) had either disappeared or were on the way out. It was an interregnum for terror worldwide. Having invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Soviet Union withdrew its armed forces a decade later. American forces would not enter the country until late 2001.
Everything seems to be different today because it truly is different. Not only has the geography of terrorism changed, but in most ways its character has too, along with its aims and the way it manifests itself. Most of the terrorist groups of the past no longer exist or they have gone dormant; and the different terrorist groups that are more prominent now did not even exist two decades ago or were insignificant. The Middle East, and the Muslim world in general, has never been entirely free of terrorism, but its prevalence there now when compared to other regions is staggering. To mention this fact has been deemed inappropriate or tactless, and why this should be the case will be discussed further on in some detail. The differences between terrorism in ancient times and now, or even between the nineteenth century and now, are so profound that a number of basic questions arise.
How can the study of the past help us forecast the future of terrorism? When terrorist groups of the past claimed to be enacting struggles against tyranny, were they justified in a way that today’s groups would not be if they made such claims? The prophets of the new caliphate seem to have nothing in common with the age of Ali Baba and Harun al-Rashid. The leaders of the new terrorism, including self-appointed caliphs, do not belong to the camp of freedom fighters in the contemporary world, but the word terrorism implies a lineage between them and Gerry Adams, Renato Curcio, or, going further back, the idealist youths in the Narodnaya Volya. An attempt to provide answers to these and similar questions will be undertaken in the present study.
Likewise, the majority of the literature on terrorism from the 1970s is correct, but this is because it refers almost entirely to descriptive accounts of individual terrorist movements such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). A group that dates back to the late eighteenth century in various forms, the IRA is an offshoot of the Irish movement for national independence. This motivation for terrorism is unique to Ireland, although it shares similarities with other separatist groups in Europe that found themselves enthralled with the notion of nationhood following the French Revolution. How applicable is this to cases where such fervent nationalism is not at stake? When this form of terrorism abounded, there was very little scholarship on the topic, nor was there for many years after. Even if the acts of terrorism remained outside the bounds of scholarly research, were the causes of terrorism the subject of research? Have historians investigated why it occurred in some countries, during certain periods, and not others? There have been a multitude of theories on these lines, but none of them satisfactory. Why was there terrorism in Uruguay, one of the most developed countries of Latin America, in the 1970s, but none in Honduras, one of the poorest? The connection between economic trouble and terrorism was commonly cited, but subsequent (and more meticulous) research has shown that such a connection did not exist and still does not exist.
With greater justification, one could point to a connection between failed states and the spread of terrorism. Terrorism has occurred during the last two decades quite frequently in Africa, but not always in the very poorest nations. When nation-states fail, the reasons are usually manifold. Terrorism is unlikely to be the sole, or even the primary, cause. Years of inept governance, corruption, and other forms of political violence are much more likely culprits. There is a correlation between failed states and terrorism, but it seems to be a post hoc situation where terror groups take advantage of the de facto sanctuary offered by ungoverned spaces. Again, though, this follows after a state has collapsed and not before, as was the case in Somalia.
Another theory places the blame for the rise of terrorism on the occupation of sovereign territory by foreign countries. This was certainly the case in Afghanistan and some other highly publicized cases, but this theory does not apply to most. Few theories are entirely wrong (usually a few examples can be found to confirm just about any theory), but this idea has been discredited by the tendency to stretch the meaning of occupation. In the universe of terrorist campaigns, the association between occupation and terrorist violence is of such limited scope that it is questionable this idea has much purchase outside of narrow academic circles.
Psychopathology has been presented as a crucial factor in some particularly outrageous instances of contemporary terrorism, especially with regard to sadistic actions, including throat cutting, rape, the abduction of young girls for purposes of prostitution, burning people alive, and slavery. Atrocities of this and other kinds were not uncommon in Europe in antiquity and during the Middle Ages. It was also common throughout the conquest of the Americas and much of the early modern period, until the Enlightenment and its elevation of widespread legal constraints proscribed such cruelty. Such practices have occurred more recently; mainly in Africa, but also in other continents. Recent outbursts of violence seem to be a continuation of these practices and the undying idea that one’s enemies should not only be eliminated but must also suffer grievous bodily harm in the process. In this sense, this problem is not unique to al-Qaeda or members of Islamic State. Psychopathology may well be involved in various manifestations of contemporary terrorism. Nonetheless, the cause for such brutality must have different justifications. The how, why, and when must be further investigated in connection with IS and like-minded groups. They seem to believe in methods of torture, not altogether dissimilar from the Spanish Inquisition and other European institutions that focused on religious outsiders, “witches,” and other scapegoats. In Europe, torture devices such as the breaking wheel apparatus and breast rippers were mainly used for extracting confessions or information. In contrast, the torture practices of the so-called Islamic State are used primarily for punishment and spreading fear. Yet the effect seems to be the same and perversely mirrors the governments these organizations wish to destroy, such as the brutal Assad regime.
From psychopathology emerges a neglected area of inquiry on which we must focus: the nature and ecology of evil. Julia Kristeva, a French psychoanalyst of Bulgarian origin, became interested in this subject and remains one of few scholars who deals with it in her writing. Few have used her lens to explore terrorism. The peculiarities of terrorist movements in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia have been examined in many studies and need not be reiterated. Only the important differences between this kind of terrorism and earlier traditional kinds will be briefly noted. One question avails over and over: for all their idealism and their desire to advance the cause of their movement, why commit such violent acts that scream of inhumanity? Ignored, meanwhile, is the reason why some terrorist groups seem to exercise restraint, even when killing, and others engage in wanton bloodshed aimed at dehumanizing and obliterating victims through mutilation, decapitation, immolation, and other depredations.
Given the terrorist violence seen over the last decade, more important than examining the causes of terrorism is the question of what the future of terrorism holds. The most pressing question: How long will the present fourth wave last? The members of terrorist groups are not just radicals but fanatics. This is of particular importance when trying to understand the fourth wave. Yet again the phenomenon of fanaticism has hardly been studied, even at a time when acts of terrorism by suicide have become quite frequent (though not unique to the present, as evidenced by the kamikaze pilots in World War II and examples from other regions and periods). The most attention paid to the fanaticism phenomenon came from psychoanalysts. They concerned themselves with explaining Europe under Adolf Hitler and Communism, as well as what motivated people to rationalize and accept vile acts. This literature is dated, though, and the fanaticism associated with Nazism and Communism was quite different from that of terrorist movements, and even more specifically with that associated with IS. Whether its suicide attacks, rape, and pillage contextualized with religious meaning, the acceptance of brutality by its followers is startling. This continues even after its atrocities have been publicized and its failures become evident. Its fanatics remain convinced of the superiority of their cause. There is a potent degree of denial among the most radical terrorists. They pick and choose embellished facts that point to impending victory when, on the whole, the number of casualties for their movement are high and unsustainable. They are unable to cope with the concentrated onslaught of nation-states. As will be explored later, the majority of terrorist movements fail, and yet fanatics have made an art of auguring some victorious outcome, which serves to inspire new terror groups as they “learn from the past” and try new approaches and strategies.
While most terrorist movements are doomed to fail, some have achieved marginal success, sometimes by modulating their violence, sometimes through their enemies’ mistakes, and frequently with self-inflicted wounds. Normally what happens is that they achieve some short-term tactical success that cannot result in sustained dominance or change. Terrorist tactics like the hijacking of planes, for example, do not result in any ultimate control. Originally common in the 1970s, hijackings produced results until more effective controls on airports prevailed, along with the growing unwillingness of governments around the world to permit the landing of hijacked planes. These governments did not want to manifest sympathy or solidarity with hijackers. But above all, there was an absence of significant gains from these early hijackings—until the strategy evolved to include significant landmarks as crash points. This was the intention of the 1994 Air France hijackers who intended to attack the Eiffel Tower. They failed, but al-Qaeda consummated this approach in September 2001.
Another important change in the strategy and tactics of the terrorism associated with Salafist jihadist groups, particularly in the Middle East, has been the emphasis on the liberation (or domination) of territory, rather than attacks against individuals. This is curious for a few reasons. Success in conventional conflict is measured by the amount of space conquered in the shortest amount of time possible. Furthermore, this emphasis on conquest brings them closer in operational design with the traditional guerrilla groups of the twentieth century. The “liberation” of territories created obvious targets for counterterrorist forces that had not existed before. The advantage of the classical terrorist was the absence of territory, which made it easier to fade away and disperse after an attack. Counterterrorists were forced to allocate resources to gathering intelligence, tracking terrorists, and eliminating them. The problem for the terrorist group that considers geographic dominion a victory is that their continued legitimacy is based on being able to hold and administer the conquered territories, which is quite difficult for violent ideologues who know nothing about governing. Holding territory also means that terrorists must operate out in the open, making them easy targets for the modern air forces of most developed countries.
Among the “national liberation movements,” several organizations stand out for their success using terrorist methods—the Mau Mau in Kenya, for instance, but also the Vietminh in Vietnam, the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, and Fidel Castro’s movement in Cuba. However, terrorism itself was not the reason these movements prevailed. From a purely military point of view, for example, the French were successful in Algeria: they managed to stamp out the rebellion. But in the end, France was no longer strong enough to hold on to Algeria. Their victory, while complete, involved the use of torture, which helped mobilize the largely neutral Arab public, swelling the ranks of the FLN. Meanwhile, metropolitan France found itself disgusted by the wanton abuse of power by the French paratroopers, which went against the very values of French republicanism. It is worth remembering that in the 1950s, France did not view Algeria as a colony but rather as a “department” of the country, meaning this violence was meted out against French citizens, greatly delegitimizing the government, its methods, and its policy in Algeria. Ultimately, the FLN succeeded because the French public no longer supported the war effort. Disentangling the cause and effect of this conflict is impossible, but attributing success exclusively to the FLN’s adoption of terrorism is impossible. One could realistically argue things might have been different had France not been so heavy-handed in its treatment of Algeria’s Arab population, and even with the FLN’s violence, Algeria would still form part of France.
In this context, it is worth considering what IS accomplished in 2014. The liberation of territories and the proclamation of a new caliphate generated an aura of great power, almost invincibility. But these impressions were (as the setbacks of the IS movement in 2016/2017 were to show) exaggerated and at times misleading. These so-called liberated territories were sparsely populated or unpopulated. Nor has it ever been clear to what extent these territories were under the control and governance of their “liberators.” A common trope justifying this position was the supposed wealth IS had because of its control of oil fields and the advantages this conferred the organization in terms of maintaining its war-fighting capabilities. Those taking such a maximalist stance misunderstood the nature of terrorist groups. IS had engineers in its ranks, but few knew how to run oil fields. Any potential wealth would quickly dissipate due to the lack of a bureaucracy capable of extracting oil and selling it on the open market. This was even before the United States and its allies began targeting IS directly, which would only drain this wealth further. Indeed, a recent paper by Princeton professor Jacob Shapiro and a team of researchers from the World Bank demonstrates this.2 Using satellite imagery, these scholars measured IS’s oil production, detailing how most analysts overestimated the amount of oil sold and how unsustainable the group’s oil-funded strategy of conquest was.
Most recently, IS has attempted to reframe its evident military defeats as temporary setbacks, claiming that the “caliphate” will continue in a virtual form despite desertions and loss of prestige. It will continue plotting and inspiring plots across the Middle East and Europe. Most likely, in the latter case, it will impel reforms and investments in the security sector that will blunt the long-term efficacy of these plots. That has been the tendency with terrorist movements in the past: to innovate, to succeed in the short term, and to find their lack of organizational capacity keeps them from achieving what they have in mind. Unless terrorist groups acquire nuclear weapons, this will likely continue to be the pattern, which should give readers cause for optimism. Terrorism’s future depends more on how governments and societies react and learn to anticipate these challenges. If countries are proactive, if they calibrate their security and intelligence communities to these problems, the impact of terrorist activity will be blunted. Indeed, one can imagine an alternative universe where IS never emerged had the government in Iraq not been so capricious and so willing to alienate its Sunni population.
What about the geography of violence? In our time, terrorist operations are often based in Muslim countries or in countries where Muslims constitute a significant part of the population. The question of why this should be the case has been discussed in great detail, but it is worth exploring. Does Islam preach violence to a greater extent than other religions? Appeals for violence can be found in the Old as well as the New Testament. The attitude of the Israelites toward the Philistines was not one of pacifism; and in Christianity (for instance, in the Gospel of Matthew), much can be found in the way of aggression and violence. The age of the Crusades constitutes another example. Meanwhile, the Qur’an (Sura al-Baqara) says, “No compulsion in religion.” According to commentators, this statement referred to the faith of a girl in Medina who had been born Jewish, but raised Muslim, and eventually rejoined her tribe. Violence in the name of religion is not limited to Islam, and militant conversion is not a central tenet (and is, in fact, denounced) in Islamic scripture.
That said, appeals for a holy war in the present day are more numerous. There has been, in recent decades, a wave of religious fanaticism. Similar spikes have occurred in past centuries. The original expansion of Islam in the age of Muhammad came to a halt soon after the successful advance of its militants, who conquered North Africa and reached France by way of Spain, eventually halting at Tours and Poitiers in 732. The Franks were victorious, and the Arab forces had to retreat not only from their conquered French territories but also from most of Spain, excluding Al-Andalus, which remained in their hands for a long time thereafter. Some magnificent buildings in Granada and Cordoba bear witness to their presence. Later, the Turks reached Vienna twice—once in 1529 and again in 1683. This campaign was initiated by Suleiman the Magnificent, but his forces were defeated by an army of soldiers from a variety of countries. Popular songs like “Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter” (Prince Eugene, the Noble Knight) are remembered to this day in connection with the “Turkish War,” which lasted some fifteen years. But it is highly doubtful that these campaigns should be considered motivated by religion. They were wars between great powers, not primarily wars of religion, though it is worth reflecting on whether and how they have influenced the modern era. The present wave has, in all probability, to do with the weakened state of many Islamic countries. True again, the countries in which most Muslims live (such as Indonesia and India) have hardly been affected. Even in the countries in which most militant fighters and suicide terrorists have appeared, the overwhelming majority of the Muslim population wants a quiet life and often takes a dim view of the activities of the young militants who have been so prominent in the media. This should give readers pause when hearing the claims linking religion and terrorism, as the correlation from a historical perspective appears spurious.
Nevertheless, considering the predominance of explicit terrorist activity in Muslim countries, the source texts of Islam should be studied more deeply to determine their roles. Often, in public discourse, these texts become obfuscated or juxtaposed to the point that they are presented as one single, coherent whole, claiming to represent all of Islam. In teasing them apart, it is important to understand the modern Islamic terrorist mind-set. Many believe that Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah (hereafter referred to as Ibn Taymiyyah), who lived from 1263 to 1328, was an important figure. He was a religious scholar, Damascus-educated, but frequently deviating from the then contemporary religious dogmas. This led to frequent incarcerations, during which he managed to produce influential works. In his writings, Ibn Taymiyyah sought the return of Sunni Islam to its early days and its early interpretations of the Qur’an. Seen in this light, he was a forerunner of progressive radical movements in Islam such as Salafism and Wahhabism. Ibn Taymiyyah is best remembered now as the godfather of jihad through his declaration of holy war against the Mongols. In his lifetime, a great expansion of Mongol power took place, and Damascus was twice occupied by the invaders. Such declarations had rarely taken place before (or were extremely infrequent) because in earlier centuries Islam had been the expanding power.
The origins of Wahhabism were in a then-remote part of the Arabian Peninsula. Wahhabi teachers (ulema) gained prominence in the region, which became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The years of greatest influence of the Salafi movement began in the nineteenth century and continued up to the 1980s, declining thereafter. The founder of the movement, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, was born around 1700, and he took a harsh stance on Muslims who attempted any innovation to the original concepts of Islam. He declared them, and anyone who disagreed with his stance, completely outside of Islam. However, the remoteness of the area in which these events took place caused the movement’s influence outside Saudi Arabia to remain quite limited. That said, a strain of Wahhabism has always been important in Saudi domestic and foreign policy, and the movement gained a certain influence and some steadfast followers in faraway Egypt. To this day, all extremist Muslim groups are known as Wahhabi in Russia (particularly in the Caucasus), quite irrespective of their real character and inspiration.
Salafism is another distinct orthodox, revivalist movement in Islam. The name is derived from the word salaf (predecessor), role models of the past whose lives can be used as guides for followers in order to more closely observe the original admonitions and proscriptions of the Qur’an. Salafism appeared on the scene in the late nineteenth century in Egypt. Followers usually emphasized their closeness to the teachings of Ibn Taymiyyah. This movement was largely confined to Egypt. Since its decline, “Salafi burnout” has entered the language as a slang phrase to denote a surge of radicalism among the young generation followed by a quick disappearance. Today, Salafism is used interchangeably to describe Islamic terrorist groups by nonspecialist commentators. This is wrong. This book explores the concept in further detail later, but it is worth mentioning now that while there is a correlation between Salafism and terrorism, a Salafi follower is not necessarily a supporter of terrorism. One of the tasks this book hopes to accomplish is demystifying some of the commonly used vocabulary and bringing sense to a variety of movements that seem to share elements, but are inspired or caused by a varying array of phenomena.
The last two major changes concerning terrorism deal with the concept of so-called lone-wolf terrorists and, later, the concept of the caliphate. When the term lone wolf arose in the 1970s, the average American citizen would have sooner guessed it referred to a literal solitary beast than a human danger. Today, sadly, it is a household term that refers to a relatively new species of terrorism. Especially following the 2005 London bombings, there has been a desire to attribute great potential to the destructive power of these individuals over that of organizations like al-Qaeda. Some of the most highly regarded terrorism scholars forged a career from that moment, claiming that al-Qaeda was becoming irrelevant and the main terrorist threat was from radicalized individuals acting alone (but according to shared values and beliefs). Similar predictions were made by other highly placed scholars and government officials across the world. They were proven wrong both by al-Qaeda’s continued plotting and its formation of franchises across the world, and later with the rise of IS. Of course, owing to the ambiguity of language and the desire to generalize with limited data, lone wolves are a highly debated concept. Firstly, lone wolves are not a totally new phenomenon. They have appeared time and time again in the history of terrorism, especially during the apogee of the anarchist movement. It reappeared in the United States when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Indeed, the phrase was first associated with Louis Beam, a notorious white supremacist who wrote a tract called Leaderless Resistance in 1962.
Secondly, and more controversially, it is questionable how much validity the concept has in explaining the current wave of terrorism. In the aforementioned London bombings, the initial belief was that the attacks were committed by homegrown radicals who learned to manufacture bombs from instructions found on the internet. Later it emerged that there was a nexus between the bombers and al-Qaeda. More recently, the same story line played out with the cargo truck driver who plowed into pedestrians in Nice, France. He had been in contact with a variety of Muslim radicals. While instances of homegrown radicals committing attacks do exist, a general trend is that some link to a terrorist organization usually emerges after the fact, undermining the explanatory power of the lone-wolf hypothesis.
Similarly, when the caliphate was mentioned fifty or sixty years ago, people would probably think of Harun al-Rashid as he strolled the streets of Baghdad at night, or of the beautiful Scheherazade telling her endless stories, or perhaps Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Alexander Orwin’s recent essay, “In Search of the Vanished Caliphate,” begins this investigation with drawing our attention to the Qur’anic origins of the caliphate:
Terse Qur’anic verses such as 2.30, 10.14, 10.73, and 38.26 already contain the general meaning of the term without explaining its specific implications. By means of a long and murky historical process that we cannot begin to explore here, the requirements of divinely ordained rule and succession expressed in the verses came to be embodied in a concrete institution. The 8th and 9th centuries, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates ruled the entire Muslim world. Long after these mighty empires went the ways of all the powers of the earth, the sacred aura surrounding the Caliphate refused to dissipate. Deprived of all real political power by the 10th century, the Caliphate managed to subsist more or less continuously for another millennium, outliving countless empires and dynasties. It succumbed to the powers-that-be only in 1924, when Ataturk sought to usher in a new republican age by putting the old imperial Caliphate to rest. Its last figurehead, Abdulmecid II, was bundled ignominiously into a train bound for Europe.3
The contemporary idea and concept of the caliphate has mainly to do with the political program of IS. The caliphate concept goes back a very long time, even though it is not mentioned in the Qur’an or the Hadith. For a long time, it referred to the belief that Ottoman Sultan should be the protector and leader of all Muslims. It was disregarded for several centuries, but again became a factor of some prominence in the 1770s. It was again dismissed and eventually dropped altogether in the 1920s, when the last Sultan, his family, and his closest aides were exiled.
In World War I, the Turks made a half-hearted attempt to gain the support of Muslims in India through the invocation of the caliphate, but it was a total failure. There are allusions to this attempt in John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle, a fine read but not at all reliable as a historical source. That the concept is again of great interest today has mainly to do with a changing political environment. Arab extremists do not want a Turkish sultan as their protector. The revival of the caliphate idea during the last decades of the twentieth century owed mainly to two political figures. The first was Abdülhamid II, who became the Turkish sultan in the 1870s. He was a poet, a wrestler, and an enthusiastic traveler, and he was fascinated by the caliphate idea. Abdülhamid II has entered Western popular culture as an almost magic and mystical figure. His sanity was doubted in a variety of books and even early silent movies. The other key figure was a major religious-political thinker named Rashid Rida. In a book published in 1922, Rida gave enthusiastic support to the caliphate idea. However, neither individual had a decisive impact on the subsequent fortunes of what we now call the caliphate. Such a support came only when IS, one of the most well-known terrorist groups of our time, absorbed the caliphate idea into the very center of its religious-political ideology and propagated it in a variety of manifestos, preaching the “old gospel” suitable for youths in the contemporary world. However, the activists who became the leaders of this movement were not figures of high caliber and magnetism and were not likely to be accepted by wider sections within Muslim communities. The self-appointed present caliph is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The U.S. government has announced a reward of $25 million for his capture. This should have greatly added to his popularity among some radical segments in the Arab world, but he still has not been accepted as a major religious or political authority.
These are but a few examples of the great changes that have taken place in the discussions on the upsurge of Islamic terrorism. The extraordinarily intense public discourse on terrorism certainly centers on the fact that terrorism has been a top priority of the international political agenda for some time. Terrorism is as old as the trees. It predates, for obvious reasons, conventional warfare, but it never was a factor of such zealous interest until now.
Has this, perhaps, to do with the fact that there are more victims of terrorism than in the past? According to one well-known and respectable survey, approximately eighteen thousand people were killed in terrorist actions in 2013 (17,958 to be precise).4 The great majority of terrorist attacks took place in five countries—namely, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria, in this order. But the number of those who died from heart disease that year was about forty times higher. Even the number of deaths from exotic diseases was exponentially higher than the number of terrorism victims. It is crucial to put our observance of and focus on terrorism in this way. However these figures are established, there is no doubt that terrorism is not the greatest peril facing mankind at the present time. This could change if, or when, terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction. Thankfully, this has not happened yet, and our question concerning the reasons for the dominance of the terrorism debate in international discourse therefore remains unanswered.
Such statistics thirty or forty years ago would have presented a very different picture. European countries, Latin American countries, and of course countries at the center of the Arab-Israeli conflict would have figured on top of the list of countries affected by terrorism, and Nigeria would have probably not appeared at all. Furthermore, despite the necessity of attempting to answer such questions, lists concerning individual countries are still not wholly reliable. If we do not have trustworthy figures for the German victims who perished during the last year of World War II (knowing how meticulous the Nazi Party was with record-keeping), we must pause before relying on figures from nations that lack the resources and systems to undertake such scrupulous research.
This brings up another important issue of debate, largely how terrorism is defined and discussed. Given the focus on the Middle East in recent years, this has opened terrorist scholars to accusations of Islamophobia and ignoring acts of violence perpetrated against civilians by nation-states. This type of argument is not unique. A few decades ago, some terrorism observers, mainly from the left, denounced the mainline experts in this field for ignoring what they called “state terrorism.” It is, of course, beyond doubt that many more people have been killed throughout history as a result of wars and other forms of political violence, but terrorism in contemporary usage means something very specific. It has nothing to do with World War I or II. The attempt to disregard this fundamental truth usually stems from the wish to obfuscate differences for political reasons, or even to justify terrorist operations. Indeed, as early as 1977, we noted that finding a generally agreed-upon definition of terrorism would probably never succeed, and this has thus far proven to be correct. This is the case because terrorists, their victims, and their opponents will not agree on a common denominator, such as a mutually agreed-upon authority. Even inside these camps the most basic disagreements will not disappear. It is true that a clear definition of terrorism is highly desirable (not only because of the legal aspects it entails), but arriving at one still remains beyond our capacity. Perhaps the only observation that can be made without fear of contradiction is what has been said about pornography: you know it when you see it.
All the changes and discussion outlined so far have made their way into the public discourse and have become part of the political vocabulary in a very confused manner. With the rise to power of a new administration in 2017, terrorism remains very much at the top of the national agenda in the United States. President Trump promised that the terrorist movements would be obliterated, and he even mentioned the possibility that nuclear weapons would be used to that effect. Trump claimed that he knew more about terrorism and the ways to combat it than the generals, but there have been no striking successes in the war on terror during the first year of his administration. He dropped a massive bomb in Afghanistan, which had great psychological ramifications for those present, but he did so without a decision about his strategy for the country, preventing the United States from capitalizing on its impact. President Trump also promised to defeat the ideology of radical Islam, and he made certain promises concerning the illegal entry of refugees from Muslim countries. But this proved difficult. A sizable number of American citizens are Muslims, making it unclear how a travel ban could be carried out without violating the United States Constitution. Moreover, he seems to underplay the threat posed by right-wing terrorism. Given the cast of his administration, it is more likely that the language of terrorism is a rhetorical device used to mask some of the xenophobia he has adopted from such colorful characters as Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the latter being the author of the original executive order that sought to ban Muslims. In other words, President Trump has yet to articulate a counterterrorism strategy and seems reliant on the same ideas developed by President Obama.
In Europe, the issue has taken on a more palpable tone because of the larger number of attacks committed there. With attacks in Paris, London, Nice, Manchester, Barcelona, and elsewhere, the continent has suffered more terrorist violence compared to the United States. There too, much like the United States, terrorism has become politicized to mask obvious xenophobic tendencies, but it seems that the western part of the continent is more familiar with and resistant to those ideas than the United States. By the middle of 2017, both Marine Le Pen of France and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands had campaigned on staunchly racist platforms and lost their elections. Nonetheless, the specter of racist right-wing populism remains prominent, and becomes more so as nationalist parties obfuscate sober discussions on the challenge of terrorism by blaming citizens of their own countries. At the end of 2017, right-wing extremists held massive protests in Poland, resurrecting old fascist slogans, and in October, the extreme right came to power in the Czech Republic. At this point too, Viktor Orbán has been in power since 2010, making him at the time of this writing, the third-longest-serving prime minister in Hungary’s history.
By confusing and mudding the conversation on terrorism, these politicians do a disservice to their citizens. As can be seen from this introduction, the study of terrorism is already one fraught with inconsistencies, mutable variables, and disagreements over the very meaning of the concept, and when biased individuals monopolize the media to speak untruths, the public suffers. It is no wonder that for many outsiders, understanding terrorism seems to require some sort of hermetic training to unravel the various threads informing it. With all these ideas introduced, it is worth outlining what comes next. The purpose of this book is to serve as a guide for nonspecialist readers wishing to make sense of terrorism. This book is not exhaustive in the topics it covers and cannot give a full taxonomy of what is and what is not to be considered terrorism, detail every terrorist movement in existence, or give robust leadership profiles. Instead, this book will endeavor to provide a general profile of modern terrorism for the lay reader.
As such, this book is divided into three sections. The first is a condensed history of terrorism, covering the earliest of such movements and showing its evolution over the centuries. Most of this material corresponds with the early history of terrorism, from the French Revolution through the end of World War II, and is intended to help answer some of the questions posed earlier in this introduction. The next section deals mainly with modern terrorism, exploring contemporary battlefields after 9/11, the ideologies that inform them, and how the phenomenon is studied. While this history is not exhaustive, it looks at the emergence of IS, its rivalry with al-Qaeda, different branches of al-Qaeda and IS throughout the world, and also the matter of terrorism in Europe and North America. The final section concerns reflections and general commentary on terrorism, from its culture to its origins, its evolution, and the future. Like any book seeking to make predictions, this section is at best speculative.
Copyright © 2018 by Walter Laqueur and Christopher Wall
