The following is part of our original six part Global Jihad study and also includes some of what we presented in our six part The Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad.

In contrast to radical movements on a more localized level that combine element of both Islamism and Nationalism and display various degrees of pragmatism in their social and political behavior, the extremist ideology of the supranational violent post al-Qaeda movement is in principle unlikely to be moderated. - It is self delusional to think that quasi religious extremism in the form of violent Islamism can be neutralized by using modern western style democratic secularism. It cannot even be undermined by the moderate, mainstream currents operating within the same religious and ideological discourse, by moderate Islam. (E. A. Stepanova, Terrorism in Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects, 2008, p.152-53)

Jihad was declared by the early Muslim leaders as a sixth unofficial Pillar of Islam. It was conceived as an "instrument of Islam," a sufficient but not a necessary condition for the spread and defense of the religion. From historical accounts, including (but not only) religious texts and references, jihad was a state of mobilization in the interest of the Muslim umma (nation) as it developed its military and strategic dimensions. When Muslims fled Meccan oppression at the hands of Mecca's pagan political establishment, they defined themselves as an "umma." As they settled in Medina, north of Mecca, the followers of Mohammed organized themselves into a political and military institution. They decided to overrun Mecca's ruling institution and replace it with a dawla, a state. It was to become the dawlat al Islam: the state of Islam, soon to become the Islamic state. That theologically grounded choice to establish a government for the new religion was the basis on which the rulerfirst the Prophet himself, then his successors-granted themselves the right of sovereignty to manage the affairs of the state for the nation. The protection of, expansion of, and management of the dawlat al umma (the state of the Muslim nation) led logically to the buildup of instruments of governance for war and peace. Jihad, a state of effort at the service of the umma, the state, and Allah.

The scholars of the caliphate depicted the world to their followers as divided in two, on one side was the area where the Islamic state reigned and the Sharia of Allah was sovereign. It was called dar el Islam. Literally it translates to "house (or abode) of Islam." This "zone" matched the borders of Islamic state control. It was also called dar el salam, meaning "house of peace." The idea was that wherever the Islamic state is found, peace will be prevalent and guaranteed. On the other side of the equation, there was dar el Harb, which translates simply as "house of War," or, technically, War Zone.

The Ottomans in turn waged not only jihad, but also conquests (fatah)-the ultimate expression of jihad. But, the similarities between the Arab and Ottoman jihads are striking. Both groups started originally as nomadic tribes from remote and marginal regions. Both converted to Islam before they undertook their expansion and hence acted under the leadership of spiritual and military leaders simultaneously. Both invaded areas on three continents tenfold the size oftheir birthplace and populations. Hence as long as the Turkish sultans were marching into the dar el harb, conquering lands, subduing monarchs, and stretching Sharia laws deep into the kufr (infidel) zone, the jihadic currents relied on the state to push forward the agenda of the founding fathers.

In fact, much discussion of contemporary terrorism suffers from a lack of historical perspective.

Those who see the modern Islamists and jihad followers as mere freedom fighters, or national politicians or resistance militants, have totally missed the deep essence of who the Islamists and jihadists are, or what they have in mind.

A historical perspective is also able to reveal trends and patterns in the development of terrorism in general and the evolution of contemporary movements and groups in particular.

Also al-Qaedapursues immediate political objectives in support of a long-term vision. It seeks the removal of secular and apostate regimes in the Muslim world and their replacement by Islamic republics governed by sharia law. The organization and its supporters targeted Egypt and Saudi Arabia in particular and attacked the United States for supporting them. These attacks, first against American interests abroad and finally against the American homeland, began only after the United States deployed troops to the Persian Gulf to repel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and then left many of them deployed in the region, including forces stationed in the sacred "land of the two mosques" (Saudi Arabia), long after. Frus­trated that they could not achieve their political objectives in the Middle East because of American meddling, bin-Laden and groups that resonate with him during the second half of the 1990’s saw no alternative to forcing U.S. withdrawal from all Muslim countries.

The jihadists, including bin Laden's al Qaeda and the myriad of other radical Islamist warriors, have a system of reference for their actions--which they claim, is the "true Islamic code." It is the web of relationship between dar el harb and dar el Islam. The latter must defeat the former.

In particular American support for the state of Israel provides Osama bin Laden with a powerful example of a U.S. war against Islam, as does most recently the occupation of or/and influence in, Iraq. Replacing objectionable governments with Islamic ones, however, served a much broader ideological goal: reestablishing the uma or community of believers created by the Prophet Mohammed and his successors during the eighth century CE. In furtherance of this mission al-Qaeda wishes to cleanse Muslim lands of the immoral influences of Western secularism.

Less than a year ago Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah (as someone who could know) stated, that  the fight against Islamic terrorism would take at least  20-30 years, we prepared what to date is the most complete overview on the internet to date.

Jihad is the most organized force against Western capitalism since the Soviet era. Yet jihadism is multifaceted and complex, much broader than Al-Quaeda alone. In the first wide-ranging introduction to today's rapidly growing jihadism, Khosrokhavar explains how two key movements variously influence jihadi activists. One, based in the Middle East, is more heavily influenced by Islamic religion and political thought. The other, composed of individuals growing up or living mostly in Europe and Western democracies including the United States, is motivated by secular as well as religious influences. Khosrokhavar interprets religious and lesser-known Arabic texts and the real world economic and political dynamics that make jihadism a growing threat to Western democracies. Interviews with imprisoned jihadists on what motivated their plots and actions help the readers understand reality as seen by jihadists.

In each era, terrorism derived its ideology in reaction to the raison d’être of the dominant constitutional order, at the same time negating and rejecting that form’s unique ideology but mimicking the form’s structural characteristics. For example, if the State exists to forge the identity of the nation, its terrorists will deny all nationality and justify their works as necessary to forge an international identity, but they will be careful to adopt the meritocratic promotions and self-sacrificing ethos of the imperial state nation they attack. If the State exists to aggrandize the wealth of its territorial aristocracy, its terrorists will reject territorial definitions of citizenship and live in foreign climes while copying the State’s mercantile methods and massacring natives with the professionalized forces that replaced mercenaries.

While a common idea throughoutthe Muslim world, Radical Islamists seek to forseable realize, a Caliphate in which political and religious power are fused and whose hypothetical borders are indicated here. One should note that it encompasses the Christian, Confucian, Jewish and Hindu populations of Spain, the Balkans, Greece, central Africa, India and Indonesia.

The deeper context of jihadist terrorism however, involves a series of conflagrations, which lent apparent substance to the paranoid jihadist claim that Muslims were the victims of a temporal 'Crusader-Zionist' aggression, apparently unchanged since the Middle Ages.

In “Saudi State, Wahhabi World: The Globalization of Muslim Radicalism” (2007) Naveed S. Sheikh furthermore detailed, how the increases in the price of oil after the 1970’s enabled the Saudis to propagate their puritanical Wahhabist strain of Islam globally. Named after Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92), Wahhabism (a form of Salafism) was the austere version of Islam that underpinned the rule of the Saud dynasty in Arabia through a contract between clerics and rulers.

This petro-Islamic largesse was one of the main contributors to the gradual rise in consciousness of a global Muslim ummah or community.

The venerable texts which the Saudis were making available on a global basis however were amenable to many interpretations, especially when increased literacy enabled people to read them for themselves.

Nevertheless already the Qur'an, contains sufficient passages that justify warfare as aspect of the foundational narrative of Islam.
A modern, milestone event however was when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the Shah of Iran who fled his country, was replaced with the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

And while around 1970 the PLO already switched from a guerrilla style involvement on the West Bank, to more international terrorist campaigns like that of Black September-- immediate manifestations of the "new Iran" were the creation of Islamic Jihad, and the mobilization of Lebanon's Shi'ites Hezbollah.

Soon Iran sent an estimated US$50 million to US$100 million per annum to Hezbollah, basing hundreds of training personnel in the Bekaa valley, and using Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, its ambassador to Damascus, as co-ordinator of Hezbollah's campaign of assassination, bombings and kidnappings.
On 18 April 1983 a Hezbollah steered pickup truck, swerved into the exit of the US embassy on Beirut's seafront, and then exploded as it crashed into the main lobby. Sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans, were killed in a blast that momentarily lifted up the entire building before most of it collapsed in a mountain of dust and rubble.

Six months later two massive suicide truck bombs killed 240 US Marines housed in temporary barracks dubbed the Beirut Hilton, and fifty-eight French soldiers who were also in Lebanon on peace-keeping duties.

The Iranian Pasadren and their terrorist helpers in Hezbollah further pressured the West to vacate Lebanon through a series of kidnappings, including professors at the American University of Beirut, CNN reporters, priests and the local CIA station chief Bill Buckley. Agents based in Iranian embassies would enable Hezbollah to strike at Jewish and Israeli interests as far away as Argentina. (Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon. A Brief History of the Car Bomb, 2007, pp. 78-86)

The creation of Al Qaeda in turn, was the outcome of the war waged by self-described Islamic holy warriors (mujahideen) in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union after the latter invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.

This said, the majority of Afghan mujaheddin were suspicious of the Arab volunteers, whom they called Ikhwanis, meaning the Muslim Brothers, or Wahhabis after the puritanical Islamism that rejected more mystical Sufi traditions, saints and shrines.

The capital city of the international jihadist or ‘holy warrior’ movement at once was the dusty lawless Pakistani town of Peshawar, which was packed with spooks from the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. They were attempting to manage the chaotic and feuding mujahedin groups that had set up their headquarters in the town.  As the money poured in, mujahedin commanders bought glistening new Toyota Landcruisers that carried no licence plates and prowled the streets like wild animals stalking their quarry. They shared the roads with noisy three-wheeled rickshaws, donkey-drawn carts and injured fighters hobbling on crutches. The wounded were left to disappear in the dust and fumes of the four wheel-drive behemoths, which were often steered by a group of three or four men, packed into the front seats. Each would-be driver battled with the steering wheel as the Landcruisers bounced along the rutted roads, sometimes dumping a passenger or two who had clung on to the roof or the swinging doors that rarely closed. Each fighter was bearded and dressed in salwar kameez. Armed with a shiny new automatic rifle and gusto for war, they often raised their guns and screamed ‘God is Great!’ to passing aid workers.

The Afghan-Pakistan border became the site of a bewildering array of camps for some three million people fleeing the Soviets, whose tactics included ruining crops, sowing millions of anti-personnel mines and depopulating villages.

During the early 1980s, bin Laden made several visits to Afghanistan and supplied the mujahedin with arms, as well as tractors and drilling equipment to cut roads and tunnels through the mountains. Soon he became involved in combat with units under the command of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Arabic-speaking scholar with close links to Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden became a resident of Peshawar in 1984 when he opened a guest house for foreign mujahedin, designed to be a first point of call and staging post before they left for training camps inside Afghanistan. It coincided with the setting up of Maktab al-Khadimat, or ‘Office of Services’, which was run by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.

The Office of Services attracted thousands of fighters and created a formal international recruiting network.  It also organized accommodation in Peshawar that was known as Bait al-Ansar, ‘Houses for the Devoted Followers’. Along with official Saudi charities, the main benefactor was, Osama bin Laden. By 1988, bin Laden’s commitment to the war had escalated sharply.  He had built at least six military camps inside Afghanistan and later, as the number of recruits mushroomed, he set up training camps on the outskirts of Peshawar. The Saudi millionaire had met and befriended an Egyptian surgeon named Ayman Zawahri, who’d become the leader of the Jihad movement in his native Egypt. It appeared that bin Laden was drawn to Islamic radicals who wanted to escalate the jihad to include arming and training militants who would then return home to fight against their own governments.  Zawahri was particularly concerned to build up links with militants in Egypt and saw the potential to expand this strategy to radical Muslim groups around the world. Abdullah Azzam was sceptical; he adamantly opposed the undertaking of a global jihad before the creation of an Islamic state in Afghanistan and he disapproved of the murder of moderate Muslim leaders.  It seems that Zawahri eventually persuaded bin Laden to follow a different route. The surgeon, who was brought up in a well-off suburb of Cairo by a respected family of doctors, later became bin Laden’s deputy in al-Qa’eda.

There is considerable confusion about the term al Qaeda, because the people in al Qaeda did not refer to themselves as members of al Qaeda. In fact, they kept their actual oath to bin Laden a secret, referring to themselves simply as "brothers:' Bin Laden and other senior members would refer to their followers, whether they swore bayah or not (that is, whether they were actual members of al Qaeda), as the "youth." The followers would refer to their leaders by an honorific title such as "sheikh" regardless of whether they were religious scholars or not. These are terms that carry no universally accepted meanings and cannot be taken to indicate whether one formally belongs to al Qaeda. (Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, 2008, p. 29.)

But while Marc Sageman is also, of the opinion that terrorist cells are fragmented, Deepa Ollapally in turn proposes; that the so called US war on terrorism, is but the latest manifestation of longstanding external forces (like for example the influence of colonialism) acting on (in this case) South Asia’s political structures. (Ollapally, The Politics of Extremism in South Asia, 2008, p. 13.)

But not only was colonialism of an influence, as we suggested also the demise of the Ottoman Empire (itself an colonial state) was of some influence.

Also, when after the abolition of the caliphate and the sultanate in 1923 at the hands of Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, this central decision-making authority in the Muslim world vanished--the Wahabis and Muslim Brotherhood took it upon themselves to embody the international decisions of the caliphate. In fact they felt, that the jihadic strategic decisions were to be decided and developed by them until the return of a new khilafa (succession).

Other jihadist groups could already be found in Asia, like for example the Laskar-Jihad, whose spiritual leader Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, explicitly wants an Islamic state covering Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.

And on the Indian subcontinent, already in the nineteenth century, a network of madrassas, whose hub was at Deoband, north of Delhi, propagated a rigorously Wahhabist form of Islam. And while the abolition of Ottoman rule posed a crisis of legitimating in the realm of Islam, interestingly, the greatest outcry came from India, which had never been under Ottoman rule. Case Study: The Ottoman Demise

Indian rule in Kashmir furthermore led to attacks by Muslims on Hindus, many of whom fled, and the formation of dozens of militant groups, most of them backed by the army, the intelligence services or Islamist parties in Pakistan, who provide them with arms, money and volunteer manpower. These groups include Hizb-ulMujahedin and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, both of which combine guerrilla warfare with terrorism designed to frighten Hindus or to intimidate moderate Muslims. (See case study P.1 and P.2) For convenience sake, regional intelligence agencies refer to this wider South Asian network as Jemaah Islamiyah, that was founded by Abul Ala Mawdudi.

We also pointed out a number of other factors related to a current crises in Islam, and a search for new meaning.

Plus as we have seen in the case of W. Europe, increased globalization, has also, become a platform for the immediate transnational diffusion of grievances.

Al Qaeda soon became what could be called, an Islamic revivalist program, that aims to restore Islam’s strength as manifested in the early centuries of its existence, which were marked by a dramatic and incredibly rapid physical expansion of the dar al-Islam, the territory formerly ruled by Muslims.

According to Islam as a whole, the entire world, is divided into two parts: Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the Domain or House of Islam, and the Domain or House of War.) With according to the Islamists, the establishment of the Caliphate, a prior necessity before a takeover of the whole planet. Precedents of the Caliphate, are found in the Umayyad and Abbasid, and later the Ottoman, empires in the early centuries of Islamic existence up to the Mongol conquests as well as, in more recent centuries, in the Ottoman empire, whose formal existence span over 600 years, from 1299 to 1923. The style of the Caliphate envisioned by Al Qaeda, however, would resemble more that of the Taliban than that of the historical empires, since it would be guided by the doctrinaire, puritanical, and relentlessly stringent form of practice of Islam currently advocated by Al Qaeda and like-minded groups.

A look at Al Qaeda’s bylaws leaves no doubt about the central role that jihad plays in bringing about the caliphate. According to its own bylaws, Al Qaeda defines itself as a “religious group of the nation of Mohammad [who] … are adopting Jihad as a method for change so that the ‘Word of God’ becomes supreme, and … are working to provoke Jihad, prepare for it, and exercise it by whatever means possible.” (These documents are accessible at http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony_docs.asp). Osama bin Laden has since repeated the duty of jihad in nearly every statement of his. In his1998 “Fatwa against Jews and Crusaders” Bin Laden quoted verses from the Quran that call upon believers, “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).” Jihad is the sixth undeclared element of Islam. Every anti-Islamic element is afraid of it. Al Qaeda wants to keep this element alive and active and make it part of the daily lives of Muslims. The waging of this jihad is an individual duty of which no Muslim is exempted, because America has clearly declared war on Islam. “All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries … Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life.” ("World Islamic Front Statement of Jihad against Jews and Crusaders," 23 February 1998.)

Jihad is also the unifying concept under which Al Qaeda hopes to unite all true Muslims to wage the global struggle against the Crusader-Zionist alliance. In his book, Zawahiri describes the fundamentalist coalition of jihadist movements designed to repel the Western-led attack as a coalition that is rallying under the banner of jihad for the sake of God and operating outside the scope of the new world order. It is free of the servitude for the dominating western empire. It promises destruction and ruin for the new Crusades against the lands of Islam. It is ready for revenge against the heads of the world’s gathering of infidels, the United States, Russia, and Israel. It is anxious to seek retribution for the blood of the martyrs, the grief of the mothers, the deprivation of the orphans, the suffering of the detainees, and the sores of the tortured people throughout the land of Islam, from Eastern Turkestan to Andalusia. A first step on the way to the creation of the Caliphate, and in itself a fundamental goal of Al Qaeda, is to act as the vanguard that reawakens and reinvigorates Muslims from their perceived slumber, to inject them with confidence, and instill in them the spirit of jihad. Mobilizing the Muslim masses is important because the war against the West is portrayed as one of cosmic proportions - i.e., a protracted and monumental battle of good versus evil. As Zawahiri puts it, “an important point that must be underlined is that this battle, which we must wage to defend our creed, Muslim nation, sanctities, honor, values, wealth, and power, is a battle facing every Muslim, young or old.” (Al-Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, Part 11.) Al Qaeda’s bylaws confirm, and spell out Al Qaeda’s role in this global Islamic awakening: 1- To spread the feeling of Jihad throughout the Muslim nation.2- Prepare and qualify the needed personnel for the Muslim world by training and practical fighting participation. 3- Support, aid and help the Jihad movements around the world as possible. 4- Coordinate among the Jihad movements around the Islamic world in order to create a united global Jihad movement.

Reawakening Muslims from their hibernation would also create unity among Muslims, and thus establish a true global community of believers. The unity of Muslims is based on the belief, held among all Salafi-Jihadists, but even among many non-Salafi Muslims that nation state borders are irrelevant, since Muslims are but one extended family. According to bin Laden, for example, “geographical boundaries have no importance … It is “incumbent on all Muslims to ignore these borders and boundaries, which the kuffar [i.e., the infidels] have laid down between Muslim lands, the Jews and the Christians, for the sole purpose of dividing us.” In other words, as a high-level Al Qaeda operative, Mahfuz ibn al-Walid (better known as Abu Hafs al-Muritani) put it, “the land of Islam is one single abode.” (Quoted in John C.K. Daly and Stephen Ulph, "How and Why: The 9-11 Attacks on America," Spotlight on Terror 1, no. 2 , 22 December 2003).

The psychologist and former CIA analyst Marc Sageman has studied a representative cross-section of Al Qaeda terrorists, including those who were there at its inception. The most important recruits were Egyptians such as al-Zawahiri, Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, who drowned prematurely in a Kenyan lake, and Mohammed Atef, its military supremo. Many of these men had already combined terrorism with careers as policemen or soldiers, which explains why Egyptians supplied a disproportionate number of AI Qaeda's ruling group as well as its top military commanders. Like al-Zawahiri himself, many of them had been through Egypt's prison torture system, emerging as implacable and steely. Egyptians made up over 60 per cent of AI Qaeda's ruling group, and nearly 60 per cent of them had been imprisoned for political reasons before they had volunteered for jihad in Afghanistan. They were dominant within a wider Arab representation from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the U AE and Yemen, the latter making up bin Laden's personal bodyguard. Some of these men arrived as little family bands.

Close ties were also cemented by marriage alliances within the emerging group, so that Mohammed Atef's daughter married one of bin Laden's sons, while Al Qaeda's treasurer married bin Laden's niece. That is true of other terrorist groups. Jemaah Islamiyah's Mohammed Noordin Top has two wives, both sisters of fellow jihadists. The next cluster that would become important in Al Qaeda, especially after the false dawning of the Islamic Salvation Front, consisted of Arabs from the North African Maghreb, that is Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and a separate group from South Asia, most graduates of two boarding schools run by Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia and Malaysia, with the occasional Uighur from China's westerly Xinjiang province. (Peter Brookes, A Devil's Triangle. Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Rogue States, 2005 p. 102.)

But also the Afghan civil war, and the heterogeneous backgrounds of the leaders, led to visceral - and often personal - splits over how AI Qaeda should be deployed. One conspicuous casualty of these was Azzam, who in addition to trying to avoid Arabs fighting Afghans had identified the Lion of the Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a minority Tajik, as the most impressive mujaheddin commander, at a time when most Arabs were backing the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatayar (initially supported by Pakistan). That sealed Azzam's fate, as al-Zawahiri had been spreading lies that he was a CIA agent, and Massoud had been one of the CIA's main clients. On 24 November 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed by a roadside bomb as they went to a mosque. AI-Zawahiri spoke sweetly at his funeral.

Having destroyed the Soviets, as he pretentiously viewed it, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia as the prodigal become all-conquering hero. Similarly, the experience of the Afghan war gave rise to the idea of creating a global Islamic umma.

When bin-Laden tried to interest the Saudi regime in his plans to destroy the Marxist government of the newly minted Republic of Yemen-- Yemeni pressure however, resulted in the confiscation of bin Laden's passport.

Bin Laden however soon would establish offices of a Reform and Advice Committee in London. Here his attention was drawn to the emerging rival to a discredited Saudi Arabia, the military Islamist regime of Hassan al- Turabi in the Sudan. And when bin Laden arrived 1991 in Khartoum, he cemented his ties with al- Turabi by taking the latter's niece as his third wife.

This was around the time that Gaza was in the grip of its intifada. During the 1990s Hamas increasingly made the running in terms of devastating terrorist attacks within Israel. In addition to money coming from both Saudi Arabia and Iran, Hamas built a vast charitable money laundering operation that had important nodal points in the USA.

Then during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, between September 2000 and September 2005 there were 144 successful suicide attacks in Israel among some 36,000 terrorist incidents.

The reawakening of Muslims requires that Al Qaeda pay particular attention to Muslim popular support. Remarkably, Zawahiri does not shy away from admitting at this point that the incitement of hatred of Israel and the United States is used not only because it reflects ideological principles, but also because it is the most useful tool in mobilizing the masses. According to the Al Qaeda deputy leader, The one slogan that has been well understood by the nation and to which it has been responding for the past 50 years is the call for the jihad against Israel. In addition to this slogan, the nation in this decade is geared against the US presence. It has responded favorably to the call for the jihad against the Americans… The fact that must be acknowledged is that the issue of Palestine is the cause that has been firing up the feelings of the Muslim nation from Morocco to Indonesia for the past 50 years. In addition, it is a rallying point for all the Arabs, be they believers or non-believers, good or evil. In portraying itself as the vanguard of the umma, Al Qaeda uses a number of tactics, which it has perfected. First, it makes use of the media to lower the morale of its enemies and to uplift the spirit of Muslims for whose sake it purports to act. Zawahiri made it abundantly clear that Al Qaeda understood that the struggle it is waging is in large part about public perceptions when he stated, “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And this media battle is a race for the hearts and minds of our people.” (Craig Whitlock, "Keeping Al-Qaeda in His Grip," Washington Post, 16 April 2006, A1.)

A second step on the way towards the redemption of Muslims by means of a creation of a new Islamic super-state is the need to defend Islam against the perceived attack by a conspiracy led by an alliance between ‘Crusaders,’ ‘Zionists,’ and apostate regimes in Arab and Muslim countries. Al Qaeda’s entire narrative rests on the assumption that the group is merely acting in self-defence. Thus, in an interview with John Miller, bin Laden said, “And my word to American journalists is not to ask why we did that [attack U.S. targets] but ask what their government has done that forced us to defend ourselves.” (Q uoted in Anonymous, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, xviii.)

Defending Islam is, first and foremost, presented as a religious duty for all Muslims. For Al Qaeda, however, the call on Muslims to rise up and defend their religion is, no less importantly, an integral part of its project to reawaken Muslims from their hibernation and take their destinies into their own hands. Al Qaeda presents a long list of Western infractions that it accuses of having caused the killing and suffering of millions of Muslims, including the deaths of innocent children and the dishonouring of women. These infractions revolve first and foremost about the occupation of Muslim lands by the United States, Israel, and previously by other Western countries such as France and Britain. Bin Laden said, for example, that the September 11 attacks occurred after he had witnessed “the iniquity and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon,” which gave birth to his “resolve to punish the aggressors” and give the Americans “a taste of what we have tasted and to deter it from killing our children and women …Should a man be blamed for protecting his own? And is defending oneself and punishing the wicked an eye for an eye - is that reprehensible terrorism?” (MEMRI Special Dispatch Series No. 811, 5 November 2004).

The notion of occupation is extended to the ‘apostate’ regimes such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which bin Laden accuses of collaboration with the West and hence as traitors to Islam whose fate shall be death. Even the United Nations is deemed to be “part of the Crusader kingdom, over which resigns the Caesar in Washington, who pays the salaries of Kofi Annan and his ilk,” as Zawahiri declared in December 2005 in an interview to Al-Sahab TV. No less important, bin Laden accuses the West and its collaborators in the Middle East of having utterly humiliated the Muslim nation at large and robbed it of its honor. Al Qaeda therefore demands the West to treat Muslims with respect, as Ayman al-Zawahiri noted in a statement in January 2006:“The reality you refuse to admit is that the Islamic nation will not allow you to treat it as you treat slaves and animals. Unless you deal with the Islamic nation on the basis of understanding and respect, you will continue to face one disaster after another. Your disasters will not end unless you leave our homelands, stop stealing our wealth, and stop corrupting leaders in our countries.” (Quoted in Michael Scheuer, "Zawahiri: Foreshadowing Attacks on Israel and America?," Terrorism Focus 3, no. 2, 18 January 2006).

Al Qaeda leaders also charge the United States with depriving the Middle East of its riches. In his book, Zawahiri accuses the United States of invading Afghanistan because of the large quantities of petroleum lying under the Caspian Sea. Similarly, Zawahiri finds unforgivable America’s sin of helping to establish and then provide aid to Israel, which he describes as “in fact a huge US military base.” Foreign occupation, however, is not the only way in which the West is allegedly attacking Islam. For Al Qaeda, and even for many less violent-prone Islamists, Western countries are involved in a conspiracy to incite non-Muslims against the followers of Muhammad. Thus, underlying Zawahiri’s and bin Laden’s opposition to U.S. and Western involvement in Islamic countries is a firm belief that the United States is bent on preventing Islam from becoming a dominant force throughout the Middle East and beyond. U.S. policies, its aid of Israel, and its opportunistic and devilish alliance with local Arab regimes, Zawahiri believes, are all designed to stem the rise of Islam, and thus constitute an attack on Islam, the faith chosen by God as the ultimate truth. In the words of Zawahiri, The United States, and the global Jewish government that is behind it, have realized that (government by) Islam is the popular demand of the nations of this region, which is considered the heart of the Islamic world. They have realized that it is impossible to compromise on these issues. Hence the United States has decided to dictate its wishes by force, repression, forgery, and misinformation. Finally it has added direct military intervention to all the foregoing methods. Zawahiri believes that the United States has taken its drive to stem the spread of Islam to the entire globe, and U.S. presence on any Islamic territory is framed as part of the American grand plan to defeat Islam. The United States is accused of “leading the battle” against Muslims “in Chechnya, the Caucasus, and also in Somalia where 13,000 Somali nationals were killed in the course of what the United States alleged was its campaign to distribute foodstuffs in Somalia.” Zawahiri adds that “in the name of food aid, the United States perpetrated hideous acts against the Somalis, acts that came to light only later. Detainees were tortured and their honor violated at the hands of the international coalition forces that allegedly came to rescue Somalia.” (Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, Part 7.)

A letter dated July 9, 2005, purportedly written by Ayman al-Zawahiri to then-leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, sheds additional light on the importance of establishing a caliphate in Al Qaeda’s thinking. In the letter, Zawahiri describes the short-term goals of the jihad in Iraq as expelling the United States from Iraq and establishing an emirate - an Islamic entity led by an Emir - which will pave the way for a future Caliphate. Toppling neighboring regimes and incorporating them into the Caliphate is a long-term goal, as is the eventual extension of the Caliphate to as large a territory as possible. As an in-depth analysis of the letter concluded, a long-term goal of Al Qaeda that can be deduced from Zawahiri’s letter to Zarqawi is,[t]he expansion of the Islamic Caliphate throughout the whole of Iraq, al-Sham - Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine - Egypt, and the Arabian peninsula. Even these are not final borders, however, as the Caliphate is eventually supposed to spread its domain over the entire Land of Islam (Dar al-Islam) from North Africa to South-eastern Asia, and ultimately, over the entire world.( Shmuel Bar and Yair Minzili, "The Zawahiri Letter and the Strategy of Al-Qaeda," Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 3, February 2006, 40.) Iraq has presented Al Qaeda with an opportunity to establish such an Islamic state that will serve as the core for a future Caliphate in ‘the heart of the Muslim world,’ and in an Arab country on top of that. Moreover, Iraq’s importance is amplified by the fact that it had once served as a seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, as bin Laden has emphasized. (Scheuer, "Osama Bin Laden: Taking Stock of the 'Zionist-Crusader War'," Terrorism Focus 3, No. 16.)

No other tactic symbolizes Al Qaeda’s tenaciousness and ability to inspire a large number of Muslims worldwide as much as ‘martyrdom operations,’ as Al Qaeda members usually refer to these attacks.

Given the importance of this tactic, Al Qaeda designed special programs by which it trained volunteers for martyrdom operations, most of whom, according to KSM, where Saudis and Yemenis.  For major operations, such as the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden himself would select recruits. KSM told his investigators that bin Laden selected recruits for the “planes operation,” as the 9/11 plots were known during the planning phase, in as little as ten minutes. When the trainee was chosen, bin Laden would ask him to swear loyalty for a suicide operation. After the selection and oath-swearing, the operative would be sent to KSM, where he would receive training, and where a martyrdom video of him would be filmed. This function was supervised by KSM as the head of al Qaeda’s media committee. A key aspect of the training and subsequent execution of the SA was the empowerment of the martyrs, which would occur, inter alia, by forming teams of suicide attackers.

This desire for martyrdom has been inculcated into the minds of Al Qaeda’s rank and file, and potential recruits both in the training camps as well as in statements released on videotape and the Internet. Plus martyrdom operations are also portrayed as the weapon of the weak in an asymmetric battle against a materially more superior enemy. In this battle, the mujahideen, who do not possess the weaponry and technological sophistication of the West, nevertheless defeat the West with their willpower, selflessness, as well as ingenuity, illustrated in the mujahideen’s ability to beat the West at its own game by utilizing the West’s technologies against itself.

Perceptions of Muslims as victims next, were massively enhanced by the terrible wars that erupted amid the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The Balkans inspired anger, with tales of Serbs using ropes attached to cars to drag the testicles off Muslim males. In March 1992, the predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzogovina declared its independence, thereby reminding Muslims elsewhere that they had two million Serbo-Croatspeaking co-religionists indigenous to this part of Europe, South Slavs who had been Islamised under the Ottomans. However, after decades of Communism and secular education, and rates of urban intermarriage of 30 per cent by the 1980s, the Bosnian Muslims were largely Muslim by virtue of culture and tradition rather than fervency. Certain distinct customs and habits marked them out - like drinking coffee from cups with no handles, infant circumcision and distinctive names - but they also drank alcohol and ate pork, and were heavily Europeanised and scarcely hostile to a Western world they regarded as superior to Communism. (Noel Malcolm, Bosnia. A Short History 1994, pp. 220-22.)

At first, the organised Muslim world did not know how to respond to the plight of a Muslim community they knew next to nothing about. In 1992 the subject was discussed at Islamic conferences in Istanbul and Jeddah. The Iranians were the first to offer practical aid, shipping arms and training instructors via Turkey and Croatia to Bosnia, a supply stream that the US tolerated to redress the imbalance between Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, for many of these weapons fell out of their crates in Zagreb. Egypt and Saudi Arabia donated respectively humanitarian aid and US$150 million, while discouraging a repetition of the Afghan Arab jihad that was already blowing back streams of militants into their countries. Inevitably, since the fall of Kabul in 1992, the free electrons of the jihad were drawn to Bosnia as if by a powerful magnet. Unless they went deeper into Afghanistan, they had nowhere to go, for home was not an option. Pakistan had also blocked the passage of further Arabs into that country. Men connected to Al Qaeda installed the personnel to receive both Arab Afghan mujaheddin and local recruits from among Muslim European immigrants as they made their way to Bosnia via  Croatia.

A forty-two-year-old Saudi, sheikh Abu Abdel Aziz 'Barbaros' - the latter word referring to his two-foot-long henna-red beard - was a veteran Arab Afghan also known by the term 'Hown' after the Soviet Hound artillery shell he had used so proficiently. He was one of the first recruits to Al Qaeda. Although he initially thought Bosnia might be situated in the US, Aziz quickly pronounced that the conflict was a legitimate holy war for his fellow jihadi-salafists. Another key participant was a radical cleric, an Egyptian called sheikh Anwar Shaaban, imam of Milan's Islamic Cultural Institute, a mosque installed in a former garage.

A motley array of volunteers descended on Bosnia. A Bahraini prince and one of the nation's soccer stars, a Qatari handball player and young British Muslim medical students rubbed shoulders with bulky Arab Americans from Detroit. The group's official cameraman was a young German Muslim who as a teenager discovered that his German parents had adopted him from a Turkish couple, whom he rejoined. At the age of twenty-one Abu Musa went to Bosnia to fight and film for the mujaheddin, one of his key tasks being to capture the smile on the faces of dying jihadi's. A shadowy network of Islamist charities, based in the US, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, many of which had proven links to AI Qaeda terrorists and which would move its money around too, oiled the assembly and supply of this army. The names, Human Concern International or Third World Relief Agency, belied the evil intent.

As sixty thousand NATO peacekeepers descended on Bosnia in the wake of the- Dayton Agreements, the Bosnian government enabled many of the Arab jihadists, including those who had married locally, to become citizens by issuing them with batches of blank passports. This got around the provision in Dayton that the jihadists had thirty days to leave the country. The villages where they settled acquired road signs warning 'FEAR ALLAH'. Since the jihadists regarded the peace deal as a sell-out, and viewed Western NATO troops as enemies of Islam, any number of ugly incidents occurred when the two sides met, even as a Canadian suicide bomber attacked a Croatian police station in revenge for the abduction of al-Qasimy. In December, a nineteen-year-old British suicide bomber was killed when a car bomb he was readying for use against Croat forces prematurely exploded. A spiral of violence ensued, especially after Croat troops ambushed and assassinated sheikh Anwar Shaaban, the key figure in the entire Bosnian jihad. As Christmas was celebrated for the first time in four years in Bosnia, the mujaheddin shot up Croat soldiers returning from mass.

What happened in Bosnia is important for several reasons. The wars mobilised Muslim opinion across the world, simplifying complex internecine conflicts into a war between Christianity and Islam - a view somewhat undermined by the enormous relief efforts made by Christians in the West who would have recoiled from the nationalist Orthodox Christianity of the Serbs, whose only firm allies were their Russian co-religionists. The foreign jihadists acquired further combat experience and extended the organization of terrorism into Europe, under the noses of security services that had yet to learn that Human Concern International was not quite what the words implied. Yet there was something else too. The war was resolved by another Pax Americana and the presence of large numbers of NATO troops, including many from Muslim countries like Turkey. The jihadists' attempt to plant Islamist palms in the snows of the Bosnian hills had failed. The local Muslim population resembled a body that rejects an organ transplant. Faced with what the jihadists represented, the Bosnian Muslims opted for their local tradition of confining their religion to the private sphere, laughing off radical calls to ban Father Christmas. That this was all the local Islamist radicals called for was a victory of a notable kind. The trouble was that this evolving reality did not moderate the scenes of jihad that circulated on the internet or via DVDs, for these had joined the timeless fairytale too. (Gilles Kepel and Anthony F. Roberts, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, 2002, pp. 251-3.)

There was one other conflict in the 1990s whose complexities did not impinge on any Muslim with a crassly polarized view of the world. After the Algerian military had 'interrupted' the January 1992 elections, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was banned and some forty thousand Islamist militants were dispatched to camps in the Sahara. The problem with FIS was that although many of its supporters called themselves democrats, others believed in 'one man, one vote, one time'. Armed Islamism predated this coup, since the Algerian Islamic Movement (MIA) was formed in the early 1980s, evolving into the AIS or Islamic Salvation Army a little later, while the rival GIA emerged in 1991. The two organizations fought different types of campaign. Sometimes they briefly merged, more often they attempted to kill each other. Both organizations had a heavy representation of Algerian veterans of Afghanistan, who basked in the glory of successful jihad, members of the FIS who had gone underground, as well as criminals and unemployed street toughs who, combining Levi 501S, the Kalashnikov and the Koran, imposed totalitarian Islamism on their neighborhoods. Ideologically, the groups encompassed people who still wished to pursue a democratic course from a position of armed might, and jihadi-salafists who regarded democracy as un-Islamic and the entire Algerian population as kuffar apostates. This unstable composition led to deadly faction fights within these groups, which were subject to the murderous attentions of the Algerian military and murky intelligence agencies that regard torture as routine. Islamist prisoners arriving at a prison at Blida, where use of a blow torch was normal, were told: 'There is no God or Amnesty International here: you talk or you die.'

In the early 1990s the GIA murdered about ninety Western employees in the oil and gas industry, forcing a mass exodus of six thousand Europeans from Algeria. Twelve Croat technicians were abducted and, their hands bound with wire, had their throats cut in an empty swimming pool. The French interior minister, Charles Pasqua, deported seventeen Islamist clerics to Burkina Faso. The GIA also murdered forty francophone Algerian journalists, writers and doctors, including the Kabylia magazine editor and novelist Taher Djaout, whose Last Summer of Reason describes Islamist destruction of the dying remnants of Algeria's cosmopolitan culture. This great left-wing writer was shot dead outside his home in an Algiers suburb. His film-maker friend Merzak Allouache caught the hypocrisy and paranoia of the Islamists in his Bab el-Oued City, filmed in an atmosphere so dangerous that he could not return to do second takes in that quarter of the capital. The G IA also abducted and executed an Islamist cleric who refused to issue a fatwa licensing their activities, and in 1998 murdered Lounes Matoub, one of Kabylia's leading rat singers. Some six hundred schools were burned down in an effort to eradicate secular education, while sociologists and psychiatrists found themselves token victims of disciplines that the jihadists did not like. Women who did not conform to Islamist notions of decorum were threatened, raped and murdered; people who persisted in accessing 'pornographic' French satellite TV were warned before their severed heads ended up in disconnected dishes.

Late in 1994, four GIA hijackers took over an Air France jet at Boumedienne airport with a view to smashing it into the streets of central Paris. French commandos stormed the plane when it refueled at Marseilles, freeing 171 passengers and killing the four hijackers. The aim of this attack was to force France to abandon ties with Algeria, thereby weakening the Algerian government to the point of collapse. All it achieved was for the French to stop issuing visas in Algeria, using a central service in Nantes instead, and for Air France to cease flights to Algeria. Although many French people thought that Algeria could 'go hang itself', the French government came under intense US pressure to encourage the military regime to extend its political base. In Algeria itself, the government began arming village patriots to fend off the jihadists who came to commit murder in the dead of night.

The GIA was run by a swift succession of violent emirs, as most met grisly ends. The then emir, Djamel Zitouni, the son of a poultry merchant with a secondary education, alienated many Islamists when he had two leading Islamist ideologues murdered. He exceeded himself when in May 1996 seven French Trappist monks from the desert monastery of Tibhirine were kidnapped and beheaded. That brought to nineteen the number of Christian clergy killed by Algerian Islamists, culminating in the murder of Pierre Claverie, bishop of Gran. The murder of these monks, whose security the GIA had guaranteed, was too much even for Abu Qatada, the GIA mouthpiece in London, who suspended publication of the GIA's AI-Ansar bulletin. Zitouni was shot dead, by GIA members fed up with him, a while later. His twentysix-year-old successor, Antar Zouabri, found a new spiritual guide to replace Qatada in the shape of Londonistan's hook-handed Abu Hamza. They satisfied themselves that the main problem in Algeria was that the majority of the population had become apostates because they were not pursuing their duty of jihad. In the autumn of 1997 several hundred Algerian villagers had their throats cut, including women, who had first been raped, as well as children whose heads were smashed against walls. Attempts to blame this on the Algerian security services, one of whose members claimed that his former colleagues were really behind the G lA, were confounded when Zouabri acknowledged his own authorship of a vulgarly phrased communique that called all Algerians 'kuffar, apostates and hypocrites'. As the US journalist Robert Kaplan reported, relatives of the people massacred by Islamists knew that they rather than the secret police were responsible, although shady army and police units undoubtedly killed many people, sometimes with a view to discrediting the Islamists in the eyes of Western opinion.53

In the early 1990s the GIA murdered about ninety Western employees in the oil and gas industry, forcing a mass exodus of six thousand Europeans from Algeria. Twelve Croat technicians were abducted and, their hands bound with wire, had their throats cut in an empty swimming pool. The French interior minister, Charles Pasqua, deported seventeen Islamist clerics to Burkina Faso. The GIA also murdered forty francophone Algerian journalists, writers and doctors, including the Kabylia magazine editor and novelist Taher Djaout, whose Last Summer of Reason describes Islamist destruction of the dying remnants of Algeria's cosmopolitan culture. This great left-wing writer was shot dead outside his home in an Algiers suburb. His film-maker friend Merzak Allouache caught the hypocrisy and paranoia of the Islamists in his Bab el-Oued City, filmed in an atmosphere so dangerous that he could not return to do second takes in that quarter of the capital. The GIA also abducted and executed an Islamist cleric who refused to issue a fatwa licensing their activities, and in 1998 murdered Lounes Matoub, one of Kabylia's leading rat singers. Some six hundred schools were burned down in an effort to eradicate secular education, while sociologists and psychiatrists found themselves token victims of disciplines that the jihadists did not like. Women who did not conform to Islamist notions of decorum were threatened, raped and murdered; people who persisted in accessing 'pornographic' French satellite TV were warned before their severed heads ended up in disconnected dishes.

Late in 1994, four GIA hijackers took over an Air France jet at Boumedienne airport with a view to smashing it into the streets of central Paris. French commandos stormed the plane when it refuelled at Marseilles, freeing 171 passengers and killing the four hijackers. The aim of this attack was to force France to abandon ties with Algeria, thereby weakening the Algerian government to the point of collapse. All it achieved was for the French to stop issuing visas in Algeria, using a central service in Nantes instead, and for Air France to cease flights to Algeria. Although many French people thought that Algeria could 'go hang itself', the French government came under intense US pressure to encourage the military regime to extend its political base. In Algeria itself, the government began arming village patriots to fend off the jihadists who came to commit murder in the dead of night.

The GIA was run by a swift succession of violent emirs, as most met grisly ends. The then emir, Djamel Zitouni, the son of a poultry merchant with a secondary education, alienated many Islamists when he had two leading Islamist ideologues murdered. He exceeded himself when in May 1996 seven French Trappist monks from the desert monastery of Tibhirine were kidnapped and beheaded. That brought to nineteen the number of Christian clergy killed by Algerian Islamists, culminating in the murder of Pierre Claverie, bishop of Gran. The murder of these monks, whose security the GIA had guaranteed, was too much even for Abu Qatada, the GIA mouthpiece in London, who suspended publication of the GIA's AI-Ansar bulletin. Zitouni was shot dead, by GIA members fed up with him, a while later. His twentysix-year-old successor, Antar Zouabri, found a new spiritual guide to replace Qatada in the shape of Londonistan's hook-handed Abu Hamza. They satisfied themselves that the main problem in Algeria was that the majority of the population had become apostates because they were not pursuing their duty of jihad. In the autumn of 1997 several hundred Algerian villagers had their throats cut, including women, who had first been raped, as well as children whose heads were smashed against walls. Attempts to blame this on the Algerian security services, one of whose members claimed that his former colleagues were really behind the GlA, were confounded when Zouabri acknowledged his own authorship of a vulgarly phrased communique that called all Algerians 'kuffar, apostates and hypocrites'. As the US journalist Robert Kaplan reported, relatives of the people massacred by Islamists knew that they rather than the secret police were responsible, although shady army and police units undoubtedly killed many people, sometimes with a view to discrediting the Islamists in the eyes of Western opinion.( Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria. Anger of the Dispossessed, 2007, pp. 235ff.)

In 1998, and with encouragement on a satellite phone from Osama bin Laden, the Salafist Group for Prayer and Combat emerged out of the wreckage of the GIA. The GSPC took several steps back from the GIA's universal war on Algerian society, while simultaneously subscribing to the international jihad. It sought to destroy the Algerian military regime, replacing it with a sharia-based Islamist state, while pursuing the cause of the 'rightly guided caliphate' against Jews and Christians. Even as the GSPC evolved into one of the world's most deadly terrorist organizations, with a network of supporters throughout Europe, the AIS called in from the cold, accepting an Algerian government amnesty and the introduction of the presidential elections that put veteran foreign minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika in power. It is widely believed that about two hundred thousand Muslim Algerians were killed in the struggle between Islamists and the government during the 1990s.

But also the US coalition defeat of the Taliban, whose leader mullah Omar was last seen speeding off on a motorbike, was accompanied by a stealthier war against minor terrorist groups whose absurd gangster names - such as Commander Robot - would not have inclined the US to take them seriously six months earlier.

In May 2001 Abu Sayyaf terrorists based on the Philippines island of Basilan used high-powered speedboats to raid the island of Palawan (three hundred miles away) so as to kidnap Western tourist divers. This would bring big ransom money and destroy the tourist trade. Instead, they captured three Americans, a middle-aged man living with a Filipina girl, and Martin and Gracia Burnham, a pair of Christian missionaries. The kidnappers also took the Filipino chefs and servants. The group's leader, Aldam Tilao, was built like a brown pit-bull, with a black dorag on his head and wraparound sunglasses. He fancied himself as a bit of a D J whenever he managed to commandeer a local radio station. A long bolo knife and an earring completed the piratical image, although this pirate sang Beatles songs as he sped away with his captives. These men were rapists and murderers who adopted Islamism as an ancillary pose. On their trek into the jungle interior, they grabbed more hostages from a coconut farm, hacking the heads off two men who annoyed them, a fateful decision as it turned out, because one of the victims was the uncle of a tennis coach who boasted that he was Tilao's oldest friend. The US sex tourist also got on their nerves, partly because he stood in the way of the terrorists and his pretty Filipina girlfriend. He was soon led into the dense foliage where his head was cut off too. Along the route to their hideout, a further ten people were decapitated, their heads left every few yards. The survivors included children of ten, six and three, although the three-year-old turned four in the course of this ordeal.

What before 9/11 might have elicited nothing more than diplomatic expressions of concern now attracted the full attention of the CIA when president Gloria Arroyo asked George W. Bush for help in freeing the hostages. The FBI tried paying US$300,000 ransom, but this was absorbed by the Filipino police. Rather than sending in the Marines, the CIA quietly set up shop in a container parked on a naval base, bringing in tracking devices and spotter aircraft made available from Afghanistan. The tactics adopted minimised a heavy US presence. They would work through the local Marines, including colonel Juancho Sabban and captain Gieram Aragones, a Muslim convert whose hatred of the jihadists' perversion of his religion made him vow not to shave or cut his hair until Tilao was dead. They and the CIA realised that the kidnappers' weak point was when they used couriers to pick up supplies in towns and villages. They recruited Tilao's oldest friend, while playing on the hip-hopper terrorist's vanity. As a test of his friend's reliability, he was instructed to take a local TV reporter, who had interviewed the terrorists before, on a two-day trip into the jungle, which would also establish the group's rough whereabouts. Having tested the connection, the CIA's Kent Clizbee complied with Tilao's request, via his friend, for a satellite phone. This would enable them to track his whereabouts every time he used it. They also made the friend the sole source of supply, by arranging disabling accidents, like a couple of broken legs, for other known couriers. One item handed over was a backpack with a hidden tracking device.

As the Marines kept the group under surveillance, the CIA prepared to deploy a Navy SEAL team to rescue the hostages. That was preempted after the Filipino army decided to blunder in, when on 7 June 2002 they stormed Tilao's camp, killing Martin Burnham and a Filipina nurse the group had also abducted. They freed Burnham's wife Gracia, although she was shot in the leg too. With incredible stupidity, Tilao resolved to flee the island on the same high-powered boat he had used to reach it. The Marines turned the two-man crew and hid tracking devices aboard it. When Tilao and his men cautiously left the jungle for the darkened beach, they had no idea that two CIA spotter planes were circling overhead, while four Marine and SEAL teams cruised offshore. The CIA watched black and white images on computer consoles in their container. When the terrorists' boat was far enough out for no one to swim back alive in shark-infested waters, it was suddenly crushed by a heavier Marine craft, hurling the terrorists over the side. Shooting while treading water is not smart since muzzle flashes reveal positions. Tilao did that and was ripped in half by a Rumpelstiltskin-like Aragones who emptied the magazine of an assault rifle into him. Aragones called Clizbee: 'We just killed the motherfucker.' Abu Sayyaf ceased to be anything more than a local nuisance in the southern Philippines. (Mark Bowden, 'Jihadists in Paradise' Atlantic Monthly March 2007 pp.54-75.)

The first priority for AI Qaeda's leaders was their physical survival and the speedy resumption of operations through networks they had cultivated already. They did obvious things like ceasing to use satellite phones, and constructing camouflaged hides with multiple exits to avoid being crushed and buried alive by bombing. One major setback, in March 2002, was a joint Pakistani-US raid on an apartment building in Faisalabad which netted twelve Al Qaeda suspects, including Abu Zubaydah, the successor of Mohammed Atef. Zubaydah had planned innumerable terrorist attacks and was rebuilding Al Qaeda from the hundreds of men he had recruited. Information gleaned from him, with the use of extreme measures, led to the arrests of Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Karachi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi in September 2002 and March 2003. The US had the key players behind 9/11, although this is often overlooked because of the escape of bin Laden. The arrest of Zubaydah seems to have prompted Abd al- Halim Adl to write to 'Brother Muktar', believed to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, complaining that bin Laden was not listening to sound advice, and rushing into ill-considered operations that were making AI Qaeda 'a laughing stock' of the world's intelligence agencies. (West Point Counter-Terrorism Center Harmony Project Adl to Muktar dated 13 June 2002.)

In 1999 the Jemaah Islamiyah cell in Singapore had reconnoitered several targets, taking the family out for the day to camouflage the five films an engineer called Hashim bin Abbas and a printer called Mohammed Khalim bin Jaffar recorded. These had soundtracks: 'This is the bicycle bay as viewed from the footpath that leads to the MRT station [where a shuttle bus dropped off US troops]. You will notice that some of the boxes are placed on the motorcycles - these are the same type of boxes that we intend to use.

An edited master disc was sent by Hambali to Mohammed Atef in Afghanistan who green lighted the project. It was found intact in the debris of Atef's house, along with targeting notes that he had taken as Khalim spoke with him. The Singaporean cell had about sixty to eighty members, including women and several people with well-paid jobs. They paid an extra income tax that went to Al Qaeda and to cross-subsidizing Jemaah Islamiyah in Malaysia as a whole. While Ate licensed one line of attack, Jemaah Islamiyah's leaders in Malaysia authorized the Singapore cell to attack water pipes on which the city depended and to crash a Russian airliner into Changi airport by way of avenging the Chechens. They also wanted to attack a US warship with a suicide boat at a point where a narrow channel would restrict its evasive maneuvers. Al Qaeda had this second set of projects shelved while it pushed ahead for a spectacular.

As he put the final touches to 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's mind turned to this new venture. The idea was to rig seven trucks with ammonium nitrate and fuel-oil bombs each weighing three tons. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed dispatched Farthur Roman al-Ghozi, or 'Mike the Bomb Maker', and an Arab code-named 'Sammy', the former being the master bomber behind the Christmas campaign in Indonesia. The targets were the US and Israeli embassies, the Australian and British High Commissions, a US naval base and other American commercial interests. They used codes like 'market' (Malaysia), 'soup' (Singapore), 'book' (passport) and 'white meat' for Westerners. The targets were filmed and recorded on a video CD entitled 'Visiting Singapore Sightseeing'. As the group had four tons of ammonium nitrate in store, they only had to get a further seventeen. A friend of a friend knew a despatch clerk at a firm of chemical importers. When the friend came to buy the bomb ingredients, he was arrested. His interrogation led to the arrest of twenty-three Jemaah Islamiyah members in Singapore. The Singaporean government insisted that the dominant ethnic Chinese should not blame the Malay Muslim minority, while explaining to the latter that they would be subject to specific security checks, on the grounds that if you are looking for a stolen Jaguar you do not stop all Mercedes. They did not bother with vacuities about hearts and minds. Lee Kuan Yew, the ever vigilant father of the nation, demanded that Singapore's neighbors co-operate in the fight against terrorism, while simultaneously criticizing distortions in Western foreign policy. (See Lee Kuan Yew, 'Winning the War on Terrorism' Foreign Affairs January/February, 2007, 86, pp. 2-7.)

Thwarted in their desire to cause simultaneous havoc with seven suicide truck bombs, AI Qaeda fell back on Plan B, soft Western targets in South Asia. Meetings were held in Thailand at which Noordin Top was appointed head of logistics. Dr Azahari Husin of the Technological university of Malaysia was the bomb master, and Mukhlas, a founder of Jemaah Islamiyah, was in charge of the attack. Behind all of them was Hambali, and behind him Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who contributed US$30,000 for the attacks. An engineer and computer expert, imam Samudra, was the field commander. He had named his son Osama. Mukhlas's brother-in-law, Amrozi bin Haji Nurhasyim, bought the necessary chemicals and a car with Balinese plates, for a target had been decided on this predominantly Hindu island. (Simon Elegant, 'The Terrorist Talks' Time/CNN 5 October 2003 p. 2 which quotes from CIA briefings.)

The specific target was selected after it proved too difficult to hit the Dumai fuelling station or ExxonMobil storage tanks. Sheer racial hatred was the motivating force behind the attack, on the part of a group whose members had travelled from the larger groups with shared prejudice via a more exclusive persecutory bigotry to the obsession killing rage that characterizes many terrorists. This was about killing 'whitey' and nothing else, although that aspect of jihadism rarely receives much consideration. Imam Samudra recruited five young Indonesian men as suicide bombers. For three weeks he and this separate cell kept two bars on Bali's Kuta Beach under surveillance. As Samudra recalled: 'We sat in the car in front of the Sari Club. I saw lots of whiteys dancing, and lots of whiteys drinking there, that place - Kuta and especially Paddy's Bar and the Sari Club - was a meeting place for US terrorists and their allies, who the whole world knows to be monsters.' When it was subsequently pointed out that most of their victims were Australians rather than Americans, Amrozi quipped: 'Australians, Americans, whatever - they're all white people.'

They rented a white L-300 Mitsubishi van. After removing the seats they loaded it with twelve small filing cabinets, each filled with a mix of potassium chlorate, sulphur and aluminum powder. They wired this up to ninety-four detonators made from three grams of RDX plastic explosive and a booster of TNT. Not trusting in fate, there were four separate detonation systems: a mobile phone, a trigger operated by Arnasan, one of the suicide drivers, a timer in case he could not pull this switch, and a booby-trap trigger inside one of the filing cabinets which would go off if opened. At the last minute they discovered that Arnasan could not change gears or turn a car. Ali Imron, a brother of Mukhlas, had to take his place, with Arnasan and 'Jimi', a suicide bomber, alongside. Imron parked the van and left. (Maria Ressa, Seeds of Terror. An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda's Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia, 2003, pp. 143ff.)

At five past eleven at night on 12 October 2002, Jimi walked into a crowded Paddy's Pub on Legian Street. It was a popular haunt of young Australian and American tourists, some breaking their long journeys with an exotic holiday involving cheap booze and easy sex. As Jimi exploded, many patrons rushed outside, where they were incinerated in a double-tap attack by a one-ton device detonated by Arnasan in the white Mitsubishi van. The effects on the 'white meat' were catastrophic, although many Balinese trinket and food sellers died too as the blast set their straw-roofed shacks alight. Two hundred and two people perished, eighty-eight of them Australians, a huge loss for a relatively under populated country. Many victims received horrific burn injuries and had to be immersed in hotel pools. Others were flown to hospitals in Darwin and Perth. A third smaller device in a package Imron had earlier carefully dropped from a motorbike was detonated outside the US consulate in Denpasar by a mobile phone call, the detonation system representing a new level of sophistication. (Arabinda Acharya, 'The Bali Bombings: Impact on Indonesia and Southeast Asia' Hudson Institute (New York 2006, pp. 1-5.)

Swift police work meant the arrest of the operation's immediate commander, Amrozi, who announced, 'Gosh, you guys are very clever, how did you find me?' His home had the usual bombers' paraphernalia of receipts for chemicals, training manuals and copies of speeches by Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and bin Laden. A mobile phone had the stored numbers of several of his associates, who were arrested too. Ali Imron was also arrested. At a bizarre news conference, he boasted: 'The capability of our group as one of the Indonesian nation [sic] should make people proud.' Attempts to connect Abu Bakar Ba' asyir with the bombing failed, although he was subsequently given a two-year sentence for inciting it and other terrorist outrages. He saw himself as like the salesman of sharp knives who is not responsible for how his customers use them, a peculiar view of the role of religious preacher.(Kumar Ramakrishna, 'The Making of the Jemaah Islamiyah Terrorist' in James J. F. Forest (ed.), Teaching Terror: Strategic and Tactical Learning in the Terrorist World, 2006, pp.223ff.

Hambali used US$15,OOO to support the families of the imprisoned terrorists. Although he did not need this pretext, from then on Australia's prime minister John Howard, the most successful conservative leader in the world, would be a loyal ally in the 'war on terror', bringing his fellow countrymen's characteristic lack of circumlocution and tough-mindedness to the issues. (John T. Sidel, Riots, Pogroms, Jihad. Religious Violence in Indonesia, 2006, pp. 196ff.)

Azahari was killed during a siege by Indonesia's elite Detachment 88 counter-terrorism unit. He threw bombs from a house, urging the police to enter so as to join him in paradise. Colonel Petrus Reingard Golose of Detachment 88 remarked: 'he said he didn't want to die alone, but I made it dear I didn't want to join him'. Azahari was shot dead by police snipers. Noordin Top fled to fight another day. The most wanted man in South Asia continues to issue bloodcurdling threats against Australia. Imam Samudra set up a website devoted to justifying the Bali atrocity. (Jay Solomon and James Hookway, 'In Indonesia, War on Terror Shows Both Gains and Worrisome Trends' Wall Street Journal 8 September 2006.)

Another soft target identified by Al Qaeda for its comeback was Europe. Spanish intelligence agents believe that, from 2001 onwards, jihadist terrorists in Spain were conspiring to attack the nation's train system, in other words long before Spain dispatched troops to Iraq. Terrorists struck on the morning of 11 March 2004 when a series of bombs, triggered by mobile-phone detonators, exploded on commuter services at local stations or on trains entering Madrid from the capital's eastern suburbs. Seven devices hidden in backpacks exploded on two trains entering Atocha station. They killed a hundred people, including three Moroccan Muslim immigrants, who had gone to Spain to make a new life. Had the trains been in the station, it would have collapsed, crushing tens of thousands of commuters. On one of the trains, two young Romanian girls had flirted with a good-looking Syrian, named Basel Ghalyoun. When he rushed off the train, they shouted that he had forgotten his backpack. When it exploded, it killed one of the girls. Shortly afterwards, two more bombs went off in two suburban stations. All together, within five minutes 191 people were killed and fifteen hundred injured.

The invasion of Iraq m early 2003 provided the latest of a series of inflammatory causes which further incensed many Muslims, and millions of non-Muslims too, although only the former seem to respond hysterically to Theo van Gogh's film Submission, Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet, or, for the second time, the honoring of writer Salman Rushdie. It is interesting how this rage takes time to be fomented. This is not the place to rehearse the reasons given for war, but it would be simple-minded to pretend that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have not served to re-incite Islamist anger and grievance, which is rather different from accepting the monotone in which such people engage with the world. Despite the evidence of their eyes, most Muslims do not seem to grasp the fact that the vast majority of killings in Iraq are carried out by fellow Shia and Sunni Muslims and not by coalition soldiers, and that it is the strategy of AI Qaeda in and beyond Iraq to trigger a wider sectarian religious war.

The initial demonstration of coalition airpower seemed another instance of Goliath stamping on David, notwithstanding the fact that much of this assault involved precision weaponry devised with a view to minimizing civilian casualties in a world where warfare is under twenty-four-hour media scrutiny, with legal repercussions whenever anyone screws up. The US has developed artillery systems which calculate possible collateral damage, so that at a certain point the guns cannot be automatically fired. Apparently a new generation of robot weapons with built-in moral systems to factor out such human emotions as anger and vengeance are only a couple of years from deployment. The massive investment such systems require makes no sense if the intention is to kill Muslims indiscriminately. The technology is designed to do the opposite.

It became apparent that intelligence materials had been deliberately contaminated by political concerns, specifically to support the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction whose deployment was imminent. The fact that he had used such weapons in the past, notoriously with devastating effect against the Kurds, was elided with flimsy evidence that he was planning to use them against coalition armies, and even flimsier proof that he had been consorting with Al Qaeda terrorists. This double deceit has caused long-term damage to some of the intelligence agencies involved, which may find it hard to make a plausible public case in the event of future conflicts. Promoting one of the key figures involved in putting together that intelligence to the post of director of MI6 seemed dubious to many observers. At least the US largely stuck to the line that its primary goal was to remove a dictator who had flouted any number of UN resolutions.

One consequence of an invasion whose occupying aftermath was culpably mismanaged with the passive connivance of the entire Blair government, including all hold-over’s to the Brown administration, was the activation of Europe's AI Qaeda/Ansar aI-Islam networks, with the result that some hundreds of Belgian, British, German, French and Italian jihadists were recruited and sent via Kurdistan or Syria to fight coalition troops inside Iraq.

By early 2006, Al Qaeda’s top operational priorities, according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, were attacks on the U.S. homeland and U.S. interests overseas, as well as on U.S. allies, in that order. (Statement by the Director of National Intelligence, John D. Negroponte, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 2 February 2006.) The strategy to achieve these aims, however, was subject to a number of adaptations. For one, the preferred targets after 9/11,tended to be ‘softer’ civilian targets that were not necessarily symbols of Western, especially American, economic and military powers as most targets up until that time had been. And especially after 2003, attacks against purely civilian targets such as dance clubs, restaurants, shopping malls, wedding ceremonies, and even funerals increased relative to attacks against more symbolic installations such as embassies, military bases, or financial centers. SAs planned and executed by jihadist groups in places like Bali, Riyadh, Morocco, and Iraq left no doubt that civilians now became fair game.

A second element of the new strategy was the deliberate attempt by Al Qaeda and the global jihad movement to erode popular support for the United States by targeting mostly Western countries in what, per Al Qaeda’s calculation, would result in a chasm between the United States and its traditional allies. Several books published in 2003 and early 2004 appealed to jihadist cells to adopt just such a strategy. One of these books was titled Iraqi Jihad: Hopes and Risks, and was published on an Islamist website by The Information Institute in Support of the Iraqi People - The Center of Services for the Mujahideen. On 8 pages of the book, the author made a case that Spanish troops present in Iraq should be attacked because Spain was the “weakest link” of support for the United States. Attacking Spanish forces, the author/s argued, would be a useful starting point in a domino effect by which Al Qaeda would gradually erode Western support of the United States by undermining relationships between Western countries and the United States, thus isolating Washington. On December 8, 2003, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) published a more explicit threat, hinting at the possibility of attacks against Spain outside of Iraq. Indeed, on March 11, 2004, three days before Spanish elections, Madrid was shaken by bombings on four commuter trains that killed 191 people. (Richard Bernstein, "Tape, Probably Bin Laden's, Offers 'Truce' to Europe," New York Times, 16 April 2004, 3.)

The strategy to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies was part of what appeared to be a growing political sophistication among the leadership of Al Qaeda. The SAs in Istanbul, which coincided with a Bush-Blair summit in London, and the Madrid attack’s timing, which coincided with the Spanish elections, led some analysts to believe that Al Qaeda, by exploiting the political calendar in the West for its own purposes, became a more pragmatic actor. Al Qaeda’s growing political activity was also apparent in April 2004, when bin Laden offered a ‘truce’ to European countries, albeit not to the United States - an offer widely regarded as an attempt to cause disagreements between the United States and its allies in the West. (Richard Bernstein, "Tape, Probably Bin Laden's, Offers 'Truce' to Europe," New York Times, 16 April 2004, 3.)

Norwegian terrorism analysts Lia and Hegghammer showed that Al Qaeda’s growing political sophistication was reflected in the publication of a new genre of “jihadi strategic studies” - writings that draw on Western secular-rationalist sources, identify and analyze weaknesses of both parties, consider political, economic, and cultural factors in the conflict, and recommend realistic strategies. The writers of these tracts, which included such strategists as Yusuf al-Ayeri and Abu Musab al-Suri, oftentimes refrain from long religious justifications of the need to fight the West based on the Quran and the Sunna, and instead focus on practical strategies and tactics of how to wage that struggle. Lia and Hegghammer added that these strategic thinkers adopted an academic approach, constructing arguments in a rational and organized fashion, while extensively drawing fromWestern media and academic sources. (Brynjar Lia and Thomas Hegghammer, "Jihadi Strategic Studies: The Alleged Al Qaida Policy StudyPreceding the Madrid Bombings," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27, no. 5, September-October 2004).

The third adaptation of its strategy, was the jihad movement’s growing presence on and exploitation of the Internet. For Al Qaeda, this medium was the perfect tool for what has been traditionally its most important priority, namely to spread the spirit of jihad in as many countries and to as many people as possible. On April 28, 2003, a forum of 225 Islamist clerics, scholars, and businessmen opened a web site at the URL www.maac.ws in both Arabic and English. The Secretary General of this virtual body was Dr. Safar al-Hawali, a man regarded as a key mentor of Osama bin Laden.

October 2005 saw the inaugural broadcast of Sawt al-Khilafa (Voice of the Caliphate), a television program announced as the new weekly Al Qaeda news broadcast to appear on the Internet. A masked newsreader presented the week’s news from a Salafi-Jihadist standpoint, sitting next to a machine gun and a copy of the Quran. (Stephen Ulph, "Al-Qaeda Tv, Via the Web," Terrorism Focus 2, no. 18, 4 October 2005; and Yassin Musharbash, "Al-Qaida Startet Terror-Tv," Spiegel Online, 7 October 2005.)

However, suicide attacks, just like terrorism at large, is a tactic, and hence cannot be ‘defeated.’ Like the genesis of war, there are countless reasons why terrorism exists - and like war, it is unlikely that terrorism  and suicide attacks will ever cease to exist. Governments, therefore, must be committed to a long-term effort to manage this problem. Where we have shown, that suicide terrorism is highly context-dependent. The strategy to counter suicide attacks must therefore be carefully evaluated on a case-by-case basis. While the goals of the strategy to counter terrorism should be clearly formulated, the strategy must be sufficiently adaptable to different - and constantly changing - circumstances.

Conclusion: As suggested by us at the start of this overview, global Islamist terrorist ideologies share a moral reductionism, which ascribes simple causes, and their implied remedies, to complex events. This simplicity makes them easy to grasp, explain, and accept. This vagueness of these ideas about the nature of man, God, society, and history mixes politics and morality in a clear appeal for young Muslims to join the fight.

Islamist terrorism is more about how the terrorists feel than about how they think. Their worldview boils down to a morality play where human events are totally shaped by a constant fight between good and evil or virtue and corruption. To them, the West is actively engaged in an apocalyptic ‘War against Islam:' In this war, human character, good or evil, must be the real engine of human history.

This worldview as we suggested, lends itself to global conspiracy theories. These theories are surprisingly ubiquitous in the world. This is especially true where governments are not accountable to their constituencies, as in authoritarian states. In the Middle East, the lack of transparency in government decisions invites credible conspiracy theories. A global conspiracy theory is different. It is comprehensive in nature and points to the existence of a vast, insidious, and effective international network designed to perpetrate acts of the most evil sort. In this view, this wicked cabal is the decisive factor in making history. A global conspiracy theory does not merely hint at a political conspiracy. It suggests that this collusion is the explanation for understanding history. To the global Islamist terrorists, a small cabal of evil men-Crusaders and Jews-manipulates the world.

This global conspiracy provides the dramatic background for the self-appointed role of the global Islamist terrorists. They view themselves as warriors willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of building a better world, and this gives meaning to their lives. They are part of an elite avant-garde devoted to absolute principles regardless of personal cost. Their enemies, who pursue their self-interest and give into temptation, are symbolic of the decadence of the present world. This ‘good fight’ is at its base a crisis of values: the purity of absolute moral principles representing God's will against the decadence of the West, which has subverted God's will by promoting exclusive materialism and moral perversions such as pornography, homosexuality, women's equality, and usury. The global Islamist terrorists reject this depraved Western morality. Better a dead virtuous hero than a live happy sinner. The jihadi warrior hero must prove himself in this fight. Easy victory has no glory. At this point, after a gradual escalation of the price of glory, the standard of heroism has become martyrdom.

As for the organisational aspect of the most famous of jihadist entities; al Qaeda today, can best be described as:

1. The core vanguard group: The group  composed of Osama bin Laden and his close trusted associates. These are highly skilled, professional practitioners of propaganda, militant training and terrorism operations. This is the group behind the 9/11 attacks.

2. Al Qaeda franchises: These include such groups as al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Although professing allegiance to bin Laden, they are independent militant groups that remain separate from the core and, with somethimes tension and disagreement between them and the al Qaeda core. These regional franchises vary in size, level of professionalism and operational capability.

3. Homegrown jihadist: This group includes individuals and small cells inspired by al Qaeda but who, in most cases, have no contact with the core leadership.

Some groups - such as AQIM, the Yemen franchises and the franchises in Pakistan and Afghanistan - have gained momentum over the past few years.
Others - such as those in Iraq, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the Sinai Peninsula and Morocco - have lost steam. The franchises have done little to expand their operations outside of their regions of interest and to conduct attacks against the “far enemy” - that is, attacks in the United States or Europe.

The homegrown jihadists in turn,have posed a fairly consistent, though lower-level, threat. While there are far more grassroots jihadists than there are militants in the al Qaeda core, the grassroots jihadists tend to be highly motivated, but poorly equipped to conduct sophisticated terror attacks.

It also means however that currently, the ideological battlespace is more important than the physical battlespace in the war against jihadism, and in the jihadists’ war against the rest of the world. Unfortunatly, it is far easier to kill people than it is to kill ideologies.

Al-Qaeda's broad ideological goals however, resonate with many people in the Muslim world who do not support its use of violence. And bin Laden and his followers thus represent an extreme manifestation of a broader, Islamist reform movement.

However, while jihadist insurgencies will continue to erode stability in areas of particularly, the Middle East and South Asia for some time to come, another phase of terrorism might be developing in the context of state-to-state conflicts.

To give one example, since the Russo-Georgian war in August, there have been a number of indications that Russia is looking to revive some of its Cold War contacts in places such as Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, Lebanon and the Horn of Africa, among others.

State sponsorship in general, is capable of transforming a small, largely ineffective group into a serious threat. With state sponsorship, a militant group that previously was capable of only popping off trash can bombs in Manila can access difficult-to-obtain materials (such as blasting caps and explosives) via the state sponsor’s diplomatic pouch. State sponsors can then train these groups to develop superior tradecraft in improvised explosive device construction for larger, deadlier attacks.

Militant groups with state backing also benefit from training in target surveillance and operational security, essential skills for avoiding scrutiny from hostile intelligence agencies. For militants always on the run, state sponsorship can provide a group with havens for planning and training purposes. Finally, state sponsors can prove essential in giving logistical support to militants who need funding and travel documents to move around with greater ease.

But having a state sponsor can also place limits on militants. A state sponsor is more likely to keep tabs on the activities of its militant proxies, keeping such things as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) out of militant hands for fear of attacks on the sponsor’s own soil. With a state sponsor, a militant group will have less autonomy and thus less inclination to acquire nonconventional weapons. By contrast, more autonomous nonstate actors like al Qaeda are more likely to work to acquire WMDs, though in this context, their chance of success remains low.

 

 

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