Dynamic, Chaotic, Fragmented and Still Evolving — And Hard to Fight

For the masses to be mobilised, the violence must be seen as justified. That means choosing the ‘lowest common denominator’

Last week in Paris, three men killed 17 people, including several of France’s best known political cartoonists. In Nigeria, up to 2,000 may have died in a string of attacks. In Afghanistan, amid continuing violence, elements among insurgents pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. In Pakistan, the school attacked by the Pakistani Taliban last month reopened.

Are any of the attacks linked? No. Are they part of the same phenomenon: the dynamic, chaotic, fragmented, ever-evolving world of contemporary militancy? Yes, absolutely. And that’s the problem. Sweep them all together, and you risk generalising. Divide them, and you’ll miss the common elements.

In the wake of any attack, the same questions are asked. In the wake of those last week, these are more urgent than ever and answering them is crucial to determining the level and nature of what is clearly an ongoing threat. What is the nature of the threat? And how dangerous is it?

Let’s take the French attacks first. The first step is to establish what links there may be between the attackers on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris and any international organisations. It now seems clear that two of the three known members of the network—the Kouachi brothers—had spent time in Yemen. At least one had met Anwar al’Awlaki, the Yemeni-American propagandist based in the country who played a key role in the radicalisation of a series of extremists in the US and UK before his death in a suspected drone strike in 2011. Al’Awlaki was a senior figure within the Al’Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula organisation (AQAP), an affiliate of the main Al’Qaeda group.

AQAP has a long track record of trying to attack the West, and the Kouachi brothers have claimed themselves that they were acting on the group’s behalf. A link here seems clear—though the degree of command and control exercised by the group does not.

The third attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, claimed allegiance to the Islamic State, the group which has overrun much of eastern Syria and western Iraq. Here a connection seems less evident, though entirely feasible. Coulibaly’s partner, Hayat Boumeddiene, left France days before the attacks for, it is thought, Syria. The group has repeatedly called for attacks on France and several Frenchmen are known to be with the IS, including one who is a close associate of Coulibaly.

So who was behind the attack?

One possibility is that the IS and AQAP are cooperating. This seems unlikely. The two organisations are deadly rivals. The IS broke away from Al’Qaeda senior leadership and denounced them as betraying the true legacy of Osama bin Laden, the founder of the group who was killed nearly four years ago.

Another scenario is that AQAP itself is splintering. The group has been under pressure for some time, with drone strikes killing many leaders and offensives by both government troops and Shia rebels forcing it out of territory captured earlier. It is entirely possible that, in the constantly shifting world of jihadi groups, we are looking at a new combination of allies, perhaps a faction of AQAP and IS joining forces. What is certainly the case is that the best way for IS and Al’Qaeda to win the battle for credibility within the Islamic militant movement is to pull off a spectacular attack in Europe or the US.

Both groups recognise that any targets must seem legitimate to supporters and potential supporters. They are thus carefully chosen. Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine with a track record of publishing cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, clearly fits that bill. So too do Jewish targets, often much more vulnerable than a symbolic building connected to the US or the French state or indeed an airport. These will thus be high on the danger list for the foreseeable future.

But most likely is that, by looking at organisational links, we are making a mistake. There is no one ‘behind the attack’ as such, because that is not how modern Islamic militancy works with this kind of operation. What we have now, almost a decade-and-a-half after the 9/11 attacks of 2001, is a social movement composed of an infinite number of shifting, self-forming networks and communities which produce individuals like the Kouachi brothers or Coulibaly. If rivalries between groups are bitter at the top, they have no relevance on the ground. The attacks last week may simply be part of this new chaotic, hybrid militancy involving some input from above, but a lot more down below. The Kouachi brothers—or at least one of them—sought out training in Yemen. Coulibaly, an armed robber turned extremist, does not seem to have got any training at all. This is not a ‘directed attack’ by some organised group, but something else.

This explains, at least in part, the nature of the attacks. Jihadist militants, few of whom have any deep understanding of their supposed faith, spend a great deal of time discussing the religious justification for their acts, referring naturally to a series of extremist interpretations of Islam’s holy texts. This explains the apparently surprising comments from one Kouachi brother that he did not want to kill all ‘civilians’, and Coulibaly’s rationalisation of his attack as effectively defensive. These kinds of statements have been part of the extremist narrative for more than 30 years and continue to be deployed by senior militants like Al’Awlaki to intensify the radicalisation of new volunteers. All are easily accessible now through the internet and social media.

Terrorists also choose targets because they believe they will be seen as legitimate by the audience they wish to sway. The audience is three-fold: the committed—that is, existing—members or supporters of extremist organisations and networks, the enemies who they want to ‘terrorise’ into a change of policy or behaviour, and those who are sitting on the fence, the undecided masses in the Muslim world who they want to radicalise and mobilise. Of the three, the latter is the most important, though those targeted directly by the violence usually miss this.

For the masses to be mobilised, the violence must be seen as justified, and that means choosing the ‘lowest common denominator’ of targets. In the Islamic world, and it is worth stressing that Muslims form the vast proportion of casualties of Islamist violence, it is often another sub-community such as Shias, not least because other targets are unavailable or too well-protected. In the West, this means the US, the UK, cartoonists who have satirised the Prophet, or anything that is Jewish and therefore seen to be connected with Israel.

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Given all of this, the failures of French intelligence would seem very significant. If their resources have increased significantly over recent years, all European security agencies have been sorely tested by the ongoing Syrian war. More than 1,400 young Frenchmen have travelled to Syria, and many have returned. At the same time there are people going, like the Kouachis, to Yemen or other conflict zones. All of them pose a potential danger and one which intelligence services have long been aware of. Last year, a security official in London described to me how the ‘grid’ of references his agency had built up over the years had been rendered totally out of date by the new influx—or reflux—of veterans. No security service can watch them all, all the time. Technology can only take you so far and it can take between 20 and 30 people to watch one individual around the clock. So decisions have to be made about who is and who is not a threat. In this instance, someone clearly made a tragically bad call.

Similarly, warnings from other agencies, such as that reportedly given by the Algerian secret services, are frequently too vague to be of any use. Unless there are specifics, such intelligence is not ‘actionable’ but just part of the huge flow of data constantly pouring in. A report— or several—will be commissioned and its conclusion will no doubt be that there was a significant analytical and institutional failure. This will be put right. But as the last decade or so has shown us, by the time this happens, the threat will have evolved once again, and the danger will still be there.

In South Asia, the threat is slightly different. Here Islamic militancy is less a social movement and more about organised groups, albeit ones which have an ambition and a vision which is largely restricted to the region, at least for the moment.

The Peshawar school massacre, in which more than 130 children aged between eight and eighteen, and eight adults died, is more of a conventional terrorist attack. It was ordered by a commander of a faction of the Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP), and was closely controlled. The target was chosen to terrorise the Pakistani government and, as a TTP spokesman said, to punish the Pakistani army for their offensive in north Waziristan.

The TTP do not have a track record like AQAP of attacking targets outside their home country. They have only been solidly linked to one serious transnational attack—in New York in 2010—which proved abortive. They are classic insurgents, aiming to oust a central government and impose a radical interpretation of Sharia law. In this they are similar to the Afghan Taliban, who are yet to be accused of perpetrating an act of transnational terror themselves. This is not the case of course with the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based group responsible for the Mumbai attacks of 26 November 2008. In addition to this operation, arguably part of a regional rather than international jihad, a breakaway faction of the LeT plotted to attack the offices of the Danish magazine that printed cartoons of Prophet Muhammad back in 2005.

Within India, there is still the loose complex of networks dubbed the Indian Mujahideen, even if the reality is more anarchic than the name suggests. Their capability is low, more of a nuisance than a genuine threat to stability or prosperity. However, connections with Pakistan, whether with groups that are close to or distant from the security establishment there, and, for some, elements in Afghanistan act as a ‘force multiplier’.

Then of course there is Al’Qaeda, the veteran group known for the 9/11 attacks but much diminished since. The group recently announced the formation of a South Asian affiliate, though clearly more in hope than in anticipation of any powerful local group emerging rightaway. However, the organisation has shown its heft with a series of ambitious attempts to mount spectacular attacks—one on a navy frigate in Karachi harbour nearly succeeded.

One reason for ‘old’ Al’Qaeda’s (AQ’s) sudden activity is the emergence of the Islamic State as a serious rival. AQ has largely been eclipsed in the last year by IS, which has more territory, fighters, cash and weaponry than AQ ever had, and seems a good deal closer to achieving the long- term goal of Islamist militants to re-establish a single united Muslim political and religious entity, the Caliphate. This explains the trickle of commanders and clerics among insurgents in Afghanistan who have pledged allegiance to the IS. There are some indications too in Pakistan that the IS is now being seen as the vanguard of the jihadi struggle.

In the context of the US drawdown in Afghanistan, all of this spells troubled times ahead. There may well be a transfer of jihadi resources towards Kashmir, or a concentration in an increasingly unstable Afghanistan itself. Neither is good news.

The third group to hit the headlines last week was Boko Haram, in poverty-stricken northern Nigeria. The name is derived from the local Hausa language term for ‘Western education is sin’. It was founded a decade ago but began to make significant impact in 2009. Again, like the IS, it has pursued a territorial strategy rather than a mobilisation and instigation strategy, as favoured by AQ under Osama bin Laden. This means more insurgency— massed attacks, assass- inations, bombing of religious places—and less ‘propaganda by deed’.

Boko Haram has become increasingly extreme, abducting 200 schoolgirls, massacring thousands of people, now apparently aiming to bring down the Nigerian government as a step towards establishing a new ‘caliphate’ in its region, presumably a part of that declared in June last year by the IS from Mosul, the northern Iraqi town. Boko Haram already has some kind of authority over around 77,000 sq km on the borders of Niger, Cameroon, Nigeria and Chad. However, it has only tenuous links with either AQ or IS, and though it has threatened long-range international strikes, has not yet been linked to any.

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In this brief overview, a dozen or so different groups have featured. There are many more, as is to be expected in the complex and dynamic world of contemporary Islamic extremism. At first sight, this landscape looks chaotic. It is, but there is some order there too.

Ten years or so ago, it was possible to distinguish four categories into which all groups or cells or even individual volunteers fell: the hardcore Al’Qaeda leadership, the network of affiliates, unaffiliated groups that were nonetheless active and often effective, and the ideology, within which one could include all the many thousands of radicalised volunteers or self-starters who had militant aspirations or ambitions themselves or simply shared the worldview.

These days, instead of one central core leadership, there are now two main ones—Al’Qaeda and IS. The unipolar world of jihad in 2001 has become a multipolar world of 2015. But the rest of the categories are still extant.

Each of these cores, which are basically concentrations of links and connections which allow influence and power, has its own set of networked groups and cells, comprising the second category, and these have their own networks, building outwards into the third category: the semi-radicalised, semi-mobilised, ideologically sympathetic movement. Alongside the groups that are on ‘team IS’ or ‘team AQ’ are those that are independent. The neat vision of a series of concentric circles has been replaced by a series of nodes and overlapping zones of activity which are all in constant motion.

But one element remains the same. What they all share is a dependence on zones where authority is weak or non- existent, usually as a result of a pre-existing conflict. That goes for Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Indeed it goes for parts of Europe too. If there is no full-fledged conflict, long running tensions exist between minorities and states in some countries. Equally, a look at the backgrounds of the Charlie Hebdo attackers shows the degree to which they inhabited the margins of French society at a time of social and economic stress; they had access, via the internet, to extremist propaganda and to extremists themselves.

Domestic terrorism can usually be handled without great difficulty by states and the societies they represent. The real problem arises when a range of factors combine to give domestic groups international reach and ambition, as India has repeatedly found out to its cost. Islamist militancy is evolving once more. As a US commander said to me in Iraq around a decade ago: “If you think you have understood what and who the enemy is, and what they do, then you’re out of date.” n

(Jason Burke is the South Asia correspondent of The Guardian and the author of The 9/11 Wars)