After the Caliphate

The Islamic State & the Future Terrorist Diaspora

Colin P. Clarke

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509533893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 2014, the declaration of the Islamic State caliphate was hailed as a major victory by the global jihadist movement. But it was short-lived. Three years on, the caliphate was destroyed, leaving its surviving fighters – many of whom were foreign recruits – to retreat and scatter across the globe.

So what happens now? Is this the beginning of the end of IS? Or can it adapt and regroup after the physical fall of the caliphate? In this timely analysis, terrorism expert Colin P. Clarke takes stock of IS – its roots, its evolution, and its monumental setbacks – to assess the road ahead. The caliphate, he argues, was an anomaly. The future of the global jihadist movement will look very much like its past – with peripatetic and divided groups of militants dispersing to new battlefields, from North Africa to Southeast Asia, where they will join existing civil wars, establish safe havens and sanctuaries, and seek ways of conducting spectacular attacks in the West that inspire new followers. In this fragmented and atomized form, Clarke cautions, IS could become even more dangerous and challenging for counterterrorism forces, as its splinter groups threaten renewed and heightened violence across the globe.

1
The Long Road to the Caliphate

Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, following a United States Special Operations Forces raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His death marked a major turning point in the US-led Global War on Terror, closing a chapter that had begun nearly a decade earlier on September 11, 2001. But the significance of bin Laden to the global jihadist movement goes back much further, and can be traced back to Afghanistan in late 1979, following the Soviet invasion of that country and the subsequent defense of the territory by Afghans and foreign fighters from throughout the Islamic world.¹ The earliest known attempt to organize foreign fighters, many of them from Arab countries, was through the establishment of al-Qaeda,² or “the Base,” at a meeting in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1988. Al-Qaeda itself was the outgrowth of an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), established by a Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam.

The organization’s early efforts focused on recruiting Arab fighters to join the resistance in Afghanistan, where the so-called mujahedin, or holy warriors, were fighting to expel Soviet troops from the country.³ At this point in al-Qaeda’s nascent history, the goal of establishing a caliphate was more of an abstraction than anything. The immediate necessity was merely embryonic survival. Early members of MAK, which was initially founded in 1984, included Azzam, bin Laden, and the Algerian Abdullah Anas. In the mid-1980s, bin Laden met and joined forces with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of core al-Qaeda. Zawahiri eventually merged key members of his group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), with al-Qaeda, once it emerged as its own entity in the late 1980s, at which point MAK had become more focused on humanitarian efforts rather than actual fighting.⁴

Al-Qaeda has continued to evolve over the years. Now entering its third decade, al-Qaeda is many things – terrorist organization, global jihadist network, brand and franchise group for Salafi-jihadists throughout the world. But beyond al-Qaeda, the global jihadist movement is a collection of groups and personalities – it is far from the unitary actor so often portrayed in the media. This trope actually plays into the hands of the jihadists, distorting the magnitude of the threat and making the movement seem omnipotent, when in reality it suffers from many of the same shortcomings, vulnerabilities, principal–agent and collective action challenges as other transnational non-state actors. The establishment of the caliphate has been a unifying, if not quixotic, rallying point for jihadists. But it’s been more of a battle cry, or an ideal, than an actual realization. That is, until IS was able to establish one that spanned the deserts of Syria and major cities in Iraq.

To many, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda represented the threat posed by jihadists to the West. But as witnessed by the emergence of the IS, the threat is, and in fact always has been, much broader than al-Qaeda. So while the killing of bin Laden was both a symbolic and tactical achievement against al-Qaeda and its allies, from a strategic standpoint, the battle continues. Even in the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s death, few serious commentators believed that his demise in any way signaled the end of the global jihadist movement. Accordingly, remarking on the event, reputed terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins soberly noted, “the death of bin Laden does not end al-Qaeda’s global terrorist campaign.”⁵ Nor did it foreshadow an end to the global jihadist movement that al-Qaeda helped to spawn.

Al-Qaeda has always been a central node – indeed, the central node – in the constellation of jihadist entities throughout the globe. But the movement is much bigger than one man, more complex than one organization. This book takes as its starting point the global jihadist movement as it coalesced during the Soviet–Afghan War, and the 1980s as its logical beginning. The movement as a whole remains the unit of analysis throughout this research. To even begin to understand what the global jihadist movement is, there are several critical questions this chapter will seek to answer:

• What are the origins of the global jihadist movement and how has it evolved over time?
• What is the ideology underpinning and motivating this movement?
• What are the goals and objectives of the movement?
• What strategy is the movement pursuing to achieve its goals?
• How is the movement structured to execute this strategy?

Evolution over Time

“The global jihadist movement” is a rather broad term encompassing groups, organizations, and individuals, as well as hinting at a specific worldview motivated by the ideology of Salafi-jihad, which advocates a raised awareness among Muslims to reclaim their faith and use violence, when necessary, to restore Islam to its proper status as a beacon of religious, political, military, economic, and cultural guidance.⁶ There is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes the global jihadist movement or how to measure its evolution over time, which provides scholars with a real challenge in terms of analysis.

This all leads to the difficulty of attempting to study the movement as a singular and consistent unit of analysis. Even al-Qaeda, certainly a more discrete entity, poses “a common analytic problem” in terms of “defining just what the group is.”⁷ It is part of the reason why, even years after the 9/11 attacks, prominent terrorism scholars still openly posited the question, “what is the current Al Qaeda? An organization? A movement? An ideology?”⁸ To ascertain a more fundamental understanding of al-Qaeda and the global jihadist movement it helped create, it might make sense to start with the death of its leader, an event that left millions worldwide hopeful that the scourge of Salafijihadist terrorism would die along with the man who was, for more than a decade, the world’s most sought-after man.

Al-Qaeda, perhaps correctly, is frequently analyzed as the nucleus of the global jihadist movement, conceptualized as four distinct – though not mutually exclusive – dimensions: al-Qaeda Central; al-Qaeda Affiliates and Associates; al-Qaeda Locals; and the al-Qaeda Network. Al-Qaeda Central is essentially the core of the original al-Qaeda and is comprised of the group’s initial leadership, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, and is based in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda Affiliates and Associates are made up of “formally established” terrorist groups that have worked closely with al-Qaeda over the years, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and Jemmah Islamiyah in Indonesia. Al-Qaeda Locals are “amorphous groups of Al Qaeda adherents” with “a previous connection of some kind” to al-Qaeda, no matter how tenuous. Finally, the al-Qaeda Network consists of homegrown Islamic radicals scattered throughout the globe with no connection whatsoever with al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group, but who are prepared to conduct an attack in solidarity with the ideology of Salafi-jihad.⁹

Daniel Byman’s analysis largely overlaps with Hoffman’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Ali H. Soufan
• Introduction
• 1 The Long Road to the Caliphate
• 2 The Inner Workings of the Islamic State
• 3 The Coming Terrorist Diaspora
• 4 From “Remain and Expand” to Survive and Persist
• 5 After the Caliphate: Preventing the Islamic State’s Return
• Index
• End User License Agreement