As Americans mourned the victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks and President George W. Bush launched the war on terrorism, it became clear that al-Qaeda had developed its capacity for extreme and synchronized violence from a long period of ideological ferment intensified by a decade of combat against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The new special issue from Middle East Policy, 9/11 at 25, traces the origins of global jihad, explains its tools of financing and recruitment, and shows how the American reaction transformed the movement into a deadly but less effective collection of small cells.
Jed Lea-Henry portrays Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam as an architect of modern global jihad, seeking to unite Muslims through armed struggle and ultimately restore a caliphate. Palestine stood at the center of his vision. Through lectures, writings, fundraising, recruiting networks, and a mythology celebrating sacrifice and martyrdom, Azzam exhorted Muslims around the world to join the Afghan jihad in the early 1980s. Crucially, Azzam convinced a rich Saudi, Osama bin Laden, to visit Afghanistan in 1984 and help pay fighters and recruiters. The partners soon became rivals, as Azzam wanted Arab volunteers dispersed among Afghan units as part of an integrated international Muslim force, while bin Laden insisted on an independent Arab contingent. Bin Laden prevailed, and as his money and influence eclipsed Azzam’s, the Arab fighters elected him their leader. By the time Azzam was assassinated in 1989, bin Laden was emerging at the head of the movement that became al-Qaeda—though Lea-Henry argues that its ideology remained deeply indebted to Azzam.
However, Ann M. Lesch contends that ideology was not the sole motivation for the terror group. She situates bin Laden and al-Qaeda within a wider set of Middle Eastern crises, arguing that the Afghan war created a transnational militant network whose veterans later turned against their own governments. For bin Laden in particular, the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Persian Gulf War became a central grievance, compounded by sanctions on Iraq and American support for Israel. By the mid-1990s, bin Laden had recast these regional grievances as a global struggle against the United States. Lesch therefore warns that eliminating any single terrorist leader like bin Laden cannot end the movement if the underlying political grievances continue to generate new militants.
After weighing the motivations of the movement, the special issue turns to the tools used to develop it. Robert Looney shows how the hawala system allowed money to cross borders via networks of trusted intermediaries without passing through banks or generating paper trails. Al-Qaeda exploited this legitimate, deeply embedded remittance system to make its financing resistant to counterterrorism measures. The movement also needed people. Thomas Hegghammer shows that radicalization in Saudi Arabia was not simply a product of poverty or religious conservatism but a social process built through personal networks and foreign-jihad experience, as battle-hardened returnees became especially important to al-Qaeda inside the Arabian Peninsula.
The Middle East Policy analyses then show how the war on terrorism faltered as al-Qaeda was able to spread its expertise and to portray the United States as a malign actor against which Muslims must continue to fight. In the aftermath of 9/11, al-Qaeda faced a theological problem as leading Muslim clerics and even Islamist movements overwhelmingly condemned the deliberate killing of civilians. Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner show how the group sought to regain its moral footing by portraying the Americans as waging a collective war against Muslims, thereby erasing the distinction between civilian and combatant and legitimizing terrorism. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi insurgents were teaching the techniques of suicide bombing to the Taliban as the group began to fight back after being driven from power. Brian Glyn Williams demonstrates that this transfer of knowledge across jihadist theaters was normalized and helped make suicide bombing a weapon of choice for insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
At the same time, al-Qaeda tried to limit the aspirations of some of its followers. When al-Qaeda in Iraq prioritized attacks on Shia Muslims and then sought to reconstitute the Islamic caliphate across the region, the global leadership urged the group to target Americans and to avoid building a state that would be vulnerable to physical destruction. Glenn E. Robinson labels this focus on territorialization—the building of a state—as the third wave of global jihad. Although the Islamic State was able to take advantage of the chaos Washington had wrought through the Iraq War, the concentration of fighters on the ground in Iraq and Syria allowed American forces and their partners to target and destroy ISIS’s command and control. By contrast with this risky strategy, Robinson identifies a fourth wave, “personal jihad,” that is more difficult to defeat. This version of the movement features decentralized violence by individuals and small cells, enabled by the internet and requiring no territorial organization.
9/11 at 25: The World It Created
A Middle East Policy Special Issue
ANALYZING THE SHOCK ATTACKS
Bin Laden and the New Age of Global Terrorism
John O. Voll
At War With Utopian Fanatics
Alan Richards
America and the War on Terror
William B. Quandt
New Friends, New Enemies and Oil Politics: Causes and Consequences of the September 11 Terrorist Attacks
Julia Nanay
The Political Requirements of Victory
Ian S. Lustick
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ISLAMIST VIOLENCE
The Four Waves of Global Jihad, 1979–2017
Glenn E. Robinson
The Life and Death of Abdullah Azzam
Jed Lea-Henry
Osama bin Laden: Embedded in the Middle East Crises
Ann M. Lesch
Mullah Omar’s Missiles: A Field Report on Suicide Bombers in Afghanistan
Brian Glyn Williams
Hawala: The Terrorist’s Informal Financial Mechanism
Robert Looney
Terrorist Recruitment and Radicalization in Saudi Arabia
Thomas Hegghammer
Killing in the Name of Islam: Al-Qaeda’s Justification for September 11
Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner
THE WAR ON TERROR AND ITS TRAPS
Winning the “War on Terrorism”: A Fundamentally Different Strategy
Anthony H. Cordesman
The War on Terror: Forgotten Lessons From World War II
Stephen Van Evera
Whither Regional Security in a World Turned Upside Down?
James A. Russell
A Friend Like This: Re-evaluating Bush and Israel
Ari Barbalat
Jihadism in the Arab World after 2011: Explaining Its Expansion
Brynjar Lia
Are We Trapped in the War on Terror?
Ian S. Lustick | Ivan Eland | Charlotte Beers | Edward N. Luttwak
BOOK REVIEWS
Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy
Reviewed by Jeffrey Record
McGovern and Polk, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now
Reviewed by Marc Lynch
Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat
Reviewed by Mia Bloom
Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad
Reviewed by Sara Roy
Doumani, Academic Freedom after September 11
Reviewed by Eve M. Troutt Powell
Freeman, America’s Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East
Reviewed by Richard J. Schmierer
Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
Reviewed by Ian S. Lustick
Gorka, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War
Reviewed by Augustus Richard Norton
Malkasian, Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State
Reviewed by Ronald E. Neumann
Biden’s Gaza Failure, the Syrian Revolution, and the Folly of US Middle East Policy
A.R. Joyce