Introduction
In 2004, Ahmad Fadeel al-Khalayleh , better known as Abu Musâab al-Zarqawi , founder of the Al Qaida franchise that eventually mutated into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), wrote a highly revealing letter to his nominal superior, Usama bin Ladin . Setting out his strategy for turning Iraq into a haven for jihad , he announced that Iraqâs Shia community is âthe key to changeâ: âThe solution that we see, and God the Exalted knows better, is for us to drag the Shia into the battle because this is the only way to prolong the fighting between us and the infidelsâ (Zarqawi 2004). Zarqawiâs logic was sophisticated andâin hindsightâappears to have been as effective as it was cunning. Provoking the Shia would, in turn, provoke Iraqâs Sunnis to fight: âIf we are able to strike them with one painful blow after another until they enter the battle, we will be able to [re]shuffle the cards. Then, no value or influence will remain to the Governing Council or even to the Americans, who will enter a second battle with the Shia. This is what we want, and, whether they like it or not, many Sunni areas will stand with the mujahidinâ. Without civil war, Iraq would become stable and democraticâforcing the mujahidin to leave to find another conflict-ridden or ungoverned space. But a civil war between Sunni and Shia would initiate a permanent jihad , in which Zarqawiâa Jordanian by birthâand his largely non-indigenous fighters would not only flourish, but become the vanguard of a new form of governance.
Zarqawiâs strategy reveals something about modern Islamist terrorism which is both obvious and curiously under-researched: it has a strong but complex relationship with conflict. The extent to which ISIL is a legacy of the 2003 international war (and subsequent US-led occupation) remains controversial, but it is unarguable that ISIL is both the product of and, in its previous incarnations, the primary instigator of a series of civil conflicts that began in 2003 and continue to tear the country apart. Often dismissed as little more than a brutal and opportunistic thug (Stern and Berger 2015), Zarqawiâs letter demonstrates a remarkably insightful grasp of the relationship between conflict, political legitimacy and governance, and the role that violent extremist organisations can play in fomenting and benefiting from wars.
Why has the relationship between conflict and violent extremism not attracted more attention? One reason is that violent extremist groups are usually studied as terrorists, and terrorism studies is a Western-oriented field. Transnational groups which threaten the West, such as Hizbollah and Al Qaida have, understandably enough, has been the focus of researchersâ attention, and even when those groups are participants in civil conflicts, as both currently are in the Syria n civil war (Al Qaida in the guise of Jabhat al-Nusra ), their more localised strategies and operations are of less pressing interest to academics and Western officials. Groups such as Al Shabaab and Boko Haram frequently grab headlines, but the academic literature has remarkably little to say about them, while less newsworthy violent extremist groups in, for example, southern Thailand or the southern Philippines are even less well understood. This Western-centric optic is one limitation, but more practical problems include the hazards involved in primary research in conflict-afflicted countries, and the difficulty in identifying and gaining access to the violent extremists themselves. The academic literature on violent extremism is, as a result, partial and more theoretical (some would say speculative) than empirical. But there is at the same time much valuable, relevant and empirically rich research in the field of conflict studies on how and why civil wars are fought, so bringing together what we know from the two disciplines of terrorism studies and conflict studies should provide a fuller picture.
The principal questions of this study are how Islamist violent extremists influence and are influenced by the conflicts they fight in, and whether they are qualitatively different from other types of conflict actor. To answer that question, we need to explore first what causes violent extremism in conflict situations before examining whether Islamist violent extremists are different or new.
Creed or Grievance? Causes of Violent Extremism in Conflicts
Wars of Ideas? The Importance of Ideology
All groups which seek social or political change can be said to be ideological, if ideology is defined simply as a worldview or set of beliefs that guides individual or collective action. In looking at terrorism and violent extremism, the controversy is over the extent to which ideology can explain extremist violence. Some political scientists (e.g. Neumann 2013; Wiktorowicz and Kaltenthaler 2006) offer ideology as a causal explanation for the onset of Islamist extremist violence and its persistence: how else can we explain why some groups resort to violence while others do not? Other studies suggest that ideology sometimes follows rather than precedes violent planning and action, so that ideology should be seen as enabling rather than driving violence by âreducing the psychological costs of participation in all terrorist organisationsâ (Della Porta 2001). This enabling function is not unique to Islamist terrorists: Crenshaw (1981) points out that all terrorists need to cope with the recognition that they kill people by employing a belief system that protects against feelings of guilt and anxiety.
What kind of ideology are we talking about here? It is important, firstly, to separate ideologies exhorting violence from those that are merely radical. In much of the Middle East and South Asia, Islamismâa broad and diverse collection of movements whose common denominator is that Islam should be the source of law and politicsâis mostly expressed politically. It is more a mainstream political current than a violent fringe (Hamid 2014). If we narrow our focus to violent Islamists, some research argues, or assumes, a distinction between nationalists, whose violence is motivated by nation or ethnicity, and ideological groups which are motivated by a worldview: according to this dichotomy, ideological terrorists seek to transform global society, often according to a religiously sourced vision of perfection, rather than establish a separate homeland. In the case of Islamist groups, according to this line of argument, those classified as âideologicalâ may seek to transform the world but do not seem to be motivated by any particular nationalist or ethnic identity (Fettweis 2009; Piazza 2009); nationalist groups are presumed to be seeking a political or territorial objective, such as the end of Israeli occupation in Palestine or an independent, unified Kashmir .
However, the reality is clearly more complex. The modern jihad movement emerged from two sources: Islamist revolutionaries in Egypt, of whom the first to emerge in the 1960s was Sayyid Qutb (1906â1966), and thinkers based in Saudi Arabia ânotably the Palestinian academic Abdullah Azzam (1941â1989)âwho articulated a theory of transnational jihad (Hegghammer 2010, 2010/11). The Egyptian theorists sought primarily to purify the Arab world, starting with their home country, and therefore necessarily subscribed to elements of nationalistic thinking. Even Ayman al-Zawahiri , now leader of Al Qaida and hence standing at the vanguard of transnational Islamism, was formerly a proponent of revolutionary jihad in the Arab heartland: his 1995 article âThe Road to Jerusalem Goes Through Cairo â, for instance, argued that the mujahidin should concentrate on near objectives before considering distant ones (Gerges 2005). Azzamâs theory of transnational jihad, meanwhile, was founded on a concept of global Muslim identity, but it was also primarily territorial: Azzam argued that Muslim lands were under attack and therefore required a global mobilisation of fighters to defend them. Moreover, many Islamist violent groups have roots in distinctly territorial conflicts, from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines to Lashkar Tayyaba in Kashmir . As we shall show in later chapt...