Al Qaeda odyssey to Global Jihad

2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of al-Qaeda and twelve years since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States. Despite the global counter-terror campaign conducted against al-Qaeda, the organization and its partners are still responsible for the vast majority of terror attacks in the world, which kill and wound thousands of people every year. Beyond their involvement in terrorist attacks, al-Qaeda and its partners exert much influence in the international system, far more than their numbers and military power suggest. Al-Qaeda’s Odyssey to the Global Jihad explains how one terrorist organization, which at the height of its activity numbered a few hundred operatives, established a worldwide, highly influential phenomenon called the “global jihad movement” and succeeded, more than any other terrorist organization in modern history, in harming, harassing, and exhausting a hegemonic superpower and its allies and entangling them in bloody and costly military campaigns around the world. . The memorandum introduce the reader with current developments the activities of Al Qaeda and its partners and the authors propose recommendations for coping with the emerging threat derived from these activities particularly in an era of turmoil and instability in the Middle East. Yoram Schweitzer is a senior research fellow and director of the Program on Terrorism and Low Intensity Conflict at INSS. He served in Military Intelligence as head of the International Terror Department and in the Prime Minister’s Office as a member of the task force on locating missing soldiers and prisoners of war. After his discharge from the IDF, he served as an advisor to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Defense. He is the author of The Globalization of Terror: The Challenge of al-Qaida and the Response of the International Community (with Shaul Shay, 2003); Al-Qaeda and the Internationalization of Suicide Terrorism (with Sari Goldstein Ferber, 2005); and editor of Female Suicide Bombers: Dying for Equality? (2006). Aviv Oreg, a veteran of the Israeli intelligence community, headed the al-Qaeda and global jihad desk in the analyst and production Division of the IDF Intelligence Branch. Following his discharge from the military, he founded CeifiT (Civil Effort in Fighting International Terrorism), which advises international, government, and private entities on issues relating to confronting global jihad and al-Qaeda. He is a member of the advisory council of the terrorism and insurgency project of Imperial College Press in London and serves as a guest lecturer in academic and security institutions in Israel and abroad.

Global Jihadist Terrorism, 2021

by al-Qaeda (AQ) operatives, countering jihadist terrorism has become a primary security and political priority for many liberal democracies. The fact that global jihadist terrorism, notably in the form of AQ, Islamic State (IS) and their affiliates, has affected other liberal democratic regimes only deepens these concerns. Consequently, we have seen considerable shifts in the counter-terrorism (CT) strategies and tactics of liberal democracies, and in respect of their legal and other institutional arrangements concerned with security. Of course, jihadist terrorism has not only affected liberal democracies but more often than not it has also had greater direct impact on authoritarian states or, at least, on states other than well-ordered liberal democracies, such as Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Given their global ambitions and reach, the terrorist operations conducted by AQ, IS and their affiliates still impact upon liberal democracies both directly and indirectly. Such liberal democracies are the focus of both this volume and the European Research Council Advanced Grant (GTCMR-670172) research project of which it is a part. Global jihadist terrorism differs in important respects from traditional terrorism of the kind practised by the likes of the Irish Republican Army and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. For one thing, the goals of global jihadism are not simply narrow, nationalistic ones but far more grandiose, notably the establishment of a Caliphate. Moreover, the harmful impact of global jihadist terrorism has been much greater. In its attempts to establish a so-called Caliphate, the terrorism perpetrated by IS has not only hit various Western cities but has also resulted in the deaths of far more people in the Middle East, predominantly among the Muslim population that it claims to represent. Further, there is an important difference in terms of tactics. Elements of the IS Caliphate project that have materialised over the past few years have relied upon a variety of brutal terrorist tactics to subdue and coerce local populations to ensure that they remain under IS control. Finally, global jihadist terrorism has taken a somewhat different organisational form, such as AQ operating

Strategic Studies, 2016

Danial Byman‟s latest book, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Global Jihadist Movement: What everyone needs to know, comes at a crucial juncture in time when new terrorist outfits have been evolving out of the old ones. This piece of writing by Daniel Byman qualifies more as a handbook on Al Qaeda than an analytical attempt to ascertain how the terrorist organisations have developed over time. It may as well have been a detailed presentation of facts and figures if it were not for the author‟s personal but biased take on certain matters. It starts with a historical account of the pre 9/11 world and evolution of Al Qaeda long before that. In this section, the author explains how 9/11 was instrumental in bringing Al Qaeda from the periphery of global politics to its white hot centre. The author takes the readers back to the era of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. According to him, this time around, Al Qaeda was slowly establishing its organisational structure which was upgraded with time. But the only thing more effective than the concrete structure of the organisation was the idea behind its very existence. An idea that made a small band of people powerful enough to terrorise the world was the real ideology of this organisation. However, this premise is based on a false assumption as these organisations are not merely composed of a few adulterated minds and wrongly interpreted religious notions. The truth, which the author completely ignores, is that there has been substantial evidence which points to the bigger powers that have funded such organisations.

This paper suggests that due to the intricacies it exhibits, al-Qaeda can be best understood as a global insurgency. It argues that in one sense al-Qaeda is a transnational insurgent organization in itself but at the same time that it is also representative of a wider global insurgency. The analysis will consist of three main parts. The first part proposes an analytical framework and differentiates al-Qaeda from a terrorist organization. Drawing on the proposed framework, the second part analyses al-Qaeda’s societal roots, paving the way for the third part, which demonstrates its global scope.

2011

In recent years, Al-Qaeda has suffered a number of setbacks, but has also successfully spawned an expansionist global jihadist movement that will survive the death of Osama bin Laden. This article describes how the multifaceted threat posed by global jihadism has evolved over the last decade. It first recounts some of the more salient examples of Al-Qaeda's post-9/11 strategic, ideological, and structural adaptations, and then offers a balance sheet of Al-Qaeda's contemporary strengths and weaknesses. Al-Qaeda continues to enable the violence of others, orient that violence towards the United States and its allies in a distributed game of attrition warfare, and foster a dichotomous "us versus them" narrative between the Muslim world and the rest of the international community. Despite this overarching consistency, Al-Qaeda shepherds a different phenomenon than it did ten years ago. The aggregation of the movement's strategic, ideological, and structural adaptations has fundamentally changed the nature of the jihadist threat to the West. This evolved threat is not inherently more dangerous, as counterterrorism efforts today focus on and disrupt capability earlier and more consistently than prior to September 2001. This multifaceted global jihad will, however, continue to produce greater numbers of attacks in more locations, from a more diverse cadre of individuals spanning a wider ideological spectrum.