At the same time, Al Qaeda has backed an array of lesser terrorist attacks on Western, Jewish, and other enemy targets; trained insurgents; and otherwise tried to build guerrilla armies.
Yet although Al Qaeda has repeatedly called for attacks against Westerners, and especially Americans, it has refrained from killing Westerners when it suited its purposes. Al Qaeda often takes a similar approach to Western aid workers operating in its midst: on at least two occasions, senior leaders of the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra implored the Islamic State to release Western aid workers the Islamic State had captured and were threatening to execute.
The Islamic State evolved out of the civil wars in Iraq and Syria, and its tactics reflect this context. Terrorism, in this context, is part of revolutionary war: it is used to undermine morale in the army and police, force a sectarian backlash, or otherwise create dynamics that help conquest on the ground. But it is an adjunct to a more conventional struggle. Al Qaeda, in contrast, favors a more gentle approach. A decade ago Zawahiri chastised the Iraqi jihadists for their brutality, correctly believing this would turn the population against them and alienate the broader Muslim community, and he has raised this issue in the current conflict as well.
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State both profess to lead the jihadist cause throughout the Muslim world. The Islamic State is playing this game too, and wherever there is a call to jihad, there is a rivalry.
Although attention is focused on the Islamic State, Al Qaeda affiliates have done well in recent months. The Islamic State has gained support from a number of important jihadist groups. In March, Islamic State supporters in Yemen bombed Houthi mosques, playing on the sectarian war narrative that the Islamic State has long emphasized and Al Qaeda has long sought to suppress—indeed, AQAP immediately issued a statement publicly disavowing any involvement in the mosque bombings.
It is difficult, however, to gauge the overall level of Islamic State support. Al Qaeda has historically been fairly quiet for a terrorist group when it comes to claiming and boasting of attacks, while the Islamic State often exaggerates its own prowess and role to the point of absurdity.
In the past, when an affiliate joined Al Qaeda, it usually took on more regional activities and went after more international targets in its region, but did not focus on attacks in the West. By taking on the Islamic State label, local groups seem to want to attach themselves to a brand that has caught the attention of jihadists worldwide. Yet this ascendance may be transitory. Like its predecessor organization in Iraq, the Islamic State may also find that its brutality repels more than it attracts, diminishing its luster among potential supporters and making it vulnerable when the people suddenly turn against it.
The good news is that the Islamic State is not targeting the American homeland—at least for now. Its emphasis is on consolidating and expanding its state, and even the many foreign fighters who have flocked to its banner are being used in suicide bombings or other attacks on its immediate enemies, not on plots back in the West.
Western security services are on high alert against the Islamic State threat. The thousands of foreign fighters under its banner are post a risk of greater regional instability at the very least, and U. Many of these individuals will have had little or no contact with the Islamic State as an organization, but they find its ideology and methods appealing and will act on their own.
Ironically, some of these individuals may have preferred to go to Iraq and Syria, but Western disruption efforts make it easier for them to attack at home. The United States and its allies should try to exploit the fight between the Islamic State and Al Qaeda and, ideally, diminish them both.
Efforts to stop foreign fighters should stress this infighting. Onlyin verb form three is anything said in either ofthese dictionaries about warfare, and even in this verb form both dictionaries adduce warfare as only a secondary meaning Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.
Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Institutional Login. LOG IN. Historically Speaking. How can a just society be set up when its roots themselves are grown on injustice?
How can these people who claim to be Muslims justify killing of the innocents as part of their Jihad? For that cause we decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.
Terrorism, in fact, is completely the opposite of Jihad. Any act of violence that instills fear in the minds of innocent people is an act of terror, particularly because this fear is not a fear against anything wrong, like corruption or theft. Instead, it is a fear of the powerful who wish to become more so. The right direction is henceforth distinct from error. And he who rejecteth false deities and believeth in Allah hath grasped a firm handhold which will never break.
Allah is Hearer, Knower. The latter question is all the more relevant as this attitude toward death is inextricably linked to the fact that contemporary jihadism, at least in the west — as well as in the Maghreb and in Turkey — is a youth movement that is not only constructed independently of parental religion and culture, but is also rooted in wider youth culture.
This aspect of modern-day jihadism is fundamental. Wherever such generational hatred occurs, it also takes the form of cultural iconoclasm. Not only are human beings destroyed, statues, places of worship and books are too. Memory is annihilated. While all revolutions attract the energy and zeal of young people, most do not attempt to destroy what has gone before.
The Bolshevik revolution decided to put the past into museums rather than reduce it to ruins, and the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran has never considered blowing up Persepolis. This self-destructive dimension has nothing to do with the politics of the Middle East. It is even counterproductive as a strategy. Though Isis proclaims its mission to restore the caliphate, its nihilism makes it impossible to reach a political solution, engage in any form of negotiation, or achieve any stable society within recognised borders.
The caliphate is a fantasy. It is the myth of an ideological entity constantly expanding its territory. Its strategic impossibility explains why those who identify with it, instead of devoting themselves to the interests of local Muslims, have chosen to enter a death pact.
There is no political perspective, no bright future, not even a place to pray in peace. But while the concept of the caliphate is indeed part of the Muslim religious imagination, the same cannot be said for the pursuit of death.
Additionally, suicide terrorism is not even effective from a military standpoint. The fact that hardened militants are used only once is not rational. Terrorist attacks do not bring western societies to their knees — they only provoke a counter-reaction.
And this kind of terrorism today claims more Muslim than western lives. What seduces and fascinates is the idea of pure revolt. Violence is not a means. It is an end in itself. It is also possible that this form of terrorism is merely temporary. The reasons for the rise of Isis are without question related to the politics of the Middle East, and its demise will not change the basic elements of the situation.
Isis did not invent terrorism: it draws from a pool that already exists. The genius of Isis is the way it offers young volunteers a narrative framework within which they can achieve their aspirations. So much the better for Isis if those who volunteer to die — the disturbed, the vulnerable, the rebel without a cause — have little to do with the movement , but are prepared to declare allegiance to Isis so that their suicidal acts become part of a global narrative.
This is why we need a new approach to the problem of Isis, one that seeks to understand contemporary Islamic violence alongside other forms of violence and radicalism that are very similar to it — those that feature generational revolt, self-destruction, a radical break with society, an aesthetic of violence, doomsday cults.
It is too often forgotten that suicide terrorism and organisations such as al-Qaida and Isis are new in the history of the Muslim world, and cannot be explained simply by the rise of fundamentalism. We must understand that terrorism does not arise from the radicalisation of Islam, but from the Islamisation of radicalism. It does not deny the fact that a fundamentalist Islam has been developing for more than 40 years.
There has been vocal criticism of this approach. One scholar claims that I have neglected the political causes of the revolt — essentially, the colonial legacy, western military interventions against peoples of the Middle East, and the social exclusion of immigrants and their children.
From the other side, I have been accused of disregarding the link between terrorist violence and the religious radicalisation of Islam through Salafism, the ultra-conservative interpretation of the faith. I am fully aware of all of these dimensions; I am simply saying that they are inadequate to account for the phenomena we study, because no causal link can be found on the basis of the empirical data we have available.
My argument is that violent radicalisation is not the consequence of religious radicalisation, even if it often takes the same paths and borrows the same paradigms. Religious fundamentalism exists, of course, and it poses considerable societal problems, because it rejects values based on individual choice and personal freedom.
But it does not necessarily lead to political violence. But the relationship between radicals and victims is more imaginary than real. They are not necessarily the poorest, the most humiliated or the least integrated.
0コメント