The 2015 terrorist attacks
in Paris and this year’s again in Paris and Brussels had a tremendous impact on
the European public opinion. This brought terrorism and ISIS to the media’s
front pages and headlines. ISIS claimed responsibility for the deadly multiple
attacks that shook Paris and Brussels. Many pundits and politicians saw these
events – and others similar - as expressions of the “revolution” that ISIS is
allegedly exporting worldwide. In other words, a terrorist threat posed by ISIS
to Europe.
We disagree with the exaggerated manner in which these attacks are
presented to the public and the menace ISIS is to
Western security.
A limited danger has been portrayed as an
“existential” threat, spreading fright and anxiety.
In the media, in political
discourse, in our daily lives, terrorism is now perceived as being omnipresent.
A certain form of collective psychosis is developing within the population,
which is perhaps more insidious and dangerous than terrorism itself.
As the fear of terrorism grows in Europe, it is important to determine
how real the threat is. According to the Global Terrorism Database, in the past
45 years, there have been more than 16.000 terror attacks in Western Europe, an
average of more than 350 year.
The peak was reached in 1979, when 1,019 attacks were perpetrated in
Europe, but all through the 1970s, 1980s, and mid-1990s attacks occurred with
an average frequency of about 10 per week. Since 1997, the trend line has been
even lower.
This year, however, stands out in terms of casualties. Both the number
of dead and wounded is above the average of the past 45 years, though still
below the levels of the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, there were significantly more
attacks – and victims – in the last decades of the 20th century than
in the first part of the 21st.
For instance, according to figures from the Global Terrorism Database,
there were more than 1,000 attacks in 1979 in western Europe compared with
around 300 in 2015. From the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s, more than 150
persons died every year from terrorism in Europe, while that number dropped to
double digits in the following years. Even with the Paris attacks, there were
still fewer fatalities from terrorism in Europe in 2015 than in an average year
of the late 20th century. Today’s fear of terrorism has more to do with
psychology – how people perceive and live with terrorism – than with the actual
threat.
The prevailing idea attributes these acts to ISIS through their proxy
obedient dormant lone wolves residing in European states, ready to wake up and
lash out attacks when ordered to do so. The advanced explanation misses the
point and does not in reality explain the phenomena behind those acts. Beyond
insufficient, the responses seem to be rather simplistic and divert the
attention from the crucial debate: what do these jihadist attacks really mean
to Europe?
The menace is conveyed in a
misgiving manner, masking
other security challenges that require urgent care, which are not on the agenda
of the European policy makers. The answer that we will try to rehearse in this
paper is much more complex: there is in fact an existential threat to Europe
however, it is not posed by the ISIS, but by the expanding radicalization of large sectors of the Muslim population
in Europe, which those attacks are
just an expression of.
We argue that those attacks
are just manifestations of social movements on the rise with sectarian
motivations capable, in the long term, of developing into insurgencies; with
potential to evolve into mass movements that will wipe out the continent, if
the European decision makers do not take firm and urgent measures, in a
coordinated manner.
Those vicious terrorist attacks have to be understood within the
framework of sectarian insurgent movements still in the nest. Regardless of
what will happen to the ISIS in the battlefield, the evolution of these socio-political
movements will not be influenced by the ISIS’ fate. These movements do not need
the ISIS to survive; they are autonomous, autochthones and not necessarily an
ISIS lunga manus. Therefore, a couple of matters need previous clarification before
moving onto the analysis of the current jihadist upsurge in Europe.
Firstly, we need to
understand what kind of movement the ISIS is and what differentiates it from Al
Qaeda: the former is an insurgent movement that uses terrorist tactics, as any
insurgent movement; and the latter a terrorist organisation. Both organisations
pursuit the same goal: to found a global caliphate, but
the ways to achieve it are
radically different. Despite belonging to the same
Salafi - jihadist family, there are significant conceptual
and tactical differences between them.
Al Qaeda prioritizes the
distant enemy, that is, the United States and European countries. It aims at
attacking first these enemies and delaying confrontation with its immediate
enemy, i.e. the Middle Eastern regimes, including the Shia’s. Its attention is
concentrated on killing and fighting Americans; Al Qaeda ordered its followers
to avoid distracting jihad away from the distant to the closest enemy.
Conversely, the ISIS
actively pursues an “Iraq first” approach. In contrast to Al Qaeda, ISIS
prioritizes the fight against Shias (wherever they are) and Iran, putting them
on the top of the enemies’ list. The ISIS
sees the struggle against the United States and European countries as a
secondary goal that must be deferred until a Sunni Islamic state is built in
the heart of Arabia. Its main goal is to consolidate its grip on the Iraqi and
Syrian territories it occupies. Why is this important? Because it will help us
to understand the real ISIS reach in Europe and in the world. We will elaborate
on this issue further on.
A second point that
deserves to be underlined and that clearly differentiates a terrorist from an
insurgent organisation is the support of the population. In this sense, ISIS
differs fundamentally from Al Qaeda. While, on the one hand, ISIS nourishes a
social constituency rooted in a pan-Sunni identity that provides it with a
plentiful source of potential recruits (Gerges, 200) as well as a territorial and political safe
haven; on the other hand, Al Qaeda is an underground, transnational and
borderless organization (Gerges, 223).
As an insurgent group, ISIS
intermingles with local Sunni communities. ISIS has a social base. It thrives
among poor and disenfranchised Sunni communities. The lower-class background of
ISIS’s combatants explains why the organization justifies its actions as a
defense of the poor and disfranchised (Gerges, 11). The ISIS narrative found
acceptance in socially traumatized rural areas and urban poverty belts
devastated by drought and war. ISIS used the revolt of the poor, particularly
agrarian populations against authority as an integral part of its ideological
project (Gerges, 200). Moreover, Sunni rebels and tribes played a
pivotal role in facilitating ISIS’s military actions. ISIS recognized their
role and the importance of their backing. ISIS might not be a mass movement but
it is surely a social movement with an expanding social base, especially amongst
the youth.
Thirdly, ISIS managed – so
far - to lead a successful insurgency. According to the insurgency doctrine,
ISIS reached the 5th phase of an insurgency which is called
insurrection, when insurgent forces are able to fight the governmental forces
on equal footing.
ISIS has a mini-professional army, an army capable of waging urban and
guerrilla warfare, as well as conventional warfare (Gerges, 143). The military
expertise provided by former Baathist officers, together with the skills of the
veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq, transformed ISIS into an effective fighting
machine.
In this phase of an insurgency,
insurgent forces are expected to control some parts of the disputed territory
(the so-called liberated areas), where they develop rudimentary infrastructures
of administration and governance. This
happened in several places and in Iraq as well. ISIS provides the inhabitants
of these controlled territories with basic services, physical security and
daily subsistence. ISIS has also set up its own system of taxation. All of this
makes ISIS radically different from Al Qaeda.
For some pundits, ISIS is more dangerous than Al Qaeda
because Al Qaeda neither controlled territory, people, nor had an immediate
design to create a state of its own. We tend to disagree with such an
assessment. This is precisely the weakness of the ISIS project. The explanation
was given by Bin Laden himself, who warned against the rush to create Islamic
emirates, because experience has shown that the United States would crush them.
The declaration of Islamic states would be like “putting the cart before the
horse” (Gerges, 95). It would become a vulnerability, a liability rather than
an asset. Bin Laden advised his followers first to wage a war of attrition
against the United States and weaken its ability to topple future Islamic
states. The facts speak for themselves, Bin Laden was correct. The project of
the caliphate is in serious danger and doomed to fail. It will fail because it
was ill-conceived.
This leads us to the real
ISIS worldwide reach, of note in Europe. We also challenge the idea that ISIS
has spread its tentacles worldwide; that ISIS is executing a campaign to terrorize and polarize
Europe. The matter of the fact is that a series of attackers, especially the so
called lone wolves, never had contacts with a terrorist group. We do question ISIS’ capacity
to plan, direct, command and control terrorist attacks several thousand kilometres
faraway. ISIS claims responsibility for their attacks as mere acts of
propaganda to galvanize its followers. Pledging allegiance to ISIS is not necessarily
synonymous of ISIS expansion. ISIS is not founding branches in other parts of
the world. Its “expansion” works the other way around, in a bottom-up flow.
Thus,
we need to understand exactly what it means when a group announces loudly its
allegiance to ISIS and the precise implications thereof. The extensive network
of ISIS sympathizers across Europe has an autonomous existence. These groups do
not depend on ISIS to survive. As other jihadist organizations, these groups
have existed on their own even long before the ISIS was born. We should not
interpret a convenient and opportunistic pledge of allegiance as a tight
operational and political control of these networks by ISIS. The so-called
Wilayats (provinces) are grotesque imitations of a real empire’s provinces.
It
is true that ISIS used its military commander Abdelhamid Abouaad to coordinate
multiple attempts in Belgium and France. ISIS may send similar skilled
individuals back to their countries to plan terror attacks. We acknowledge that
when ISIS came under sustained military pressure, it
started devoting more resources to the battle abroad, to the fight against the
distant enemy, by inciting supporters to take action into their own hands, in
order to divert attention from its defeats. However, these actions only
represent a tactical shift in ISIS’s modus operandi, not a strategic change of
priorities. Its key goal continues to be the consolidation of its territories
in Syria and Iraq. ISIS is fundamentally, like the Taliban, a parochial,
localized and sectarian insurgent movement.
Having said that and without ignoring the possibility of ISIS inspiring
terrorist attacks through existing networks, European decision makers should be
focusing their attention on the real threat instead: the emergence of a
sectarian subversive social movement in Europe. This movement is still in a
very early phase. It has not established a strategic political agenda nor a centralized
political leadership yet For the time being, we are just speaking about
interconnected human networks.
The reputed Global
Terrorism Index states that the majority of terrorist attacks in the West are
not carried out by well-organized international groups. Instead, the terrorist
threat in the West largely comes from lone wolf terrorism. A disclaimer should
be added to this statement. The findings of the Global Index refer to terrorist
acts with other motivations than jihadism. Despite this, it is interesting to
note the definition of lone wolf terrorists used by the authors of the Global
Index, that is, individuals or a small number of individuals who commit an
attack in support of a group, movement, or ideology without material assistance
or orders from such a group. While we agree with the
first finding, we lean towards challenging the second one, when it comes to the
authorship of jihadist terrorism in Europe. These acts – with increasing
complexity and specialization - organized by networks of radicalized groups
constituted by homegrown elements with different expertise, do not fit in the
lone wolf explanation.
The Spanish counter terrorism experience validates
this working hypothesis. According to an El
Cano Royal Institute report, the overwhelming jihadist actions in Spain
have developed by small groups and networks. As the report underlines, it is better to call
these groups networks not cells because their members may have frequently
different external affiliations or bounds (Reinares, García-Calvo, 20).
According to the same
report, the Jihadist mobilization in Spain since 2011 has stimulated the
setting up of new networks and the reconstitution of old ones. These networks,
initially constituted by Moroccan jihadists, have been progressively replaced
by others comprising autochthon and homegrown elements. This development is an
important game changer and a trend identifiable in other European countries.
The radicalization of
Muslim groups in Europe is growing by the day. Evidences are out there:
according to a pool in 2014, one
in six French citizens sympathizes with the ISIS. This percentage increases
among younger respondents, spiking at 27% for those aged 18-24; in a report by the Belgium Defence
Minister, responding to a parliamentary question, around 60 Belgian soldiers showing sign of radicalization were surveyed by
military intelligence services;
groups of youngsters Muslims celebrated in the streets of Brussels the attacks
at the airport and metro that killed tens of people. We could put cite many
other examples.
The reasons why large segments
of the Muslim population are radicalizing deserves an in-depth study. We will
not miss the target, if we say the reason has deep sociological roots. Though a large portion of
Muslims in Europe come from families who have lived there for three or four
generations, many are not integrated in the societies where they live, living
instead in isolated Muslim-dominated areas. In a telling example of this
isolation, Matthew Levitt, the director of the Stein Program on
Counterterrorism and Intelligence, at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, noted in a recent article that only eight of the 114 imams in
Brussels speak any of Belgium's traditional languages. Muslims migrate to the west
to better their lives, but they segregate themselves, form isolated communities and warn their children to not learn the ways of
unbelievers. A recent survey in England shows that nearly 30% of the
Muslim population have never entered in a non-Muslim home.
One
important reason to be receptive to the appealing calls for radicalization is
the worsening of the social conditions associated to Europe’s economic decline, which in
different ways affects different segments of the population. The cooling of the
European economy has disproportionately affected the Continent's Muslim
population and has created an alarmingly high unemployment rate among young
Muslims. In addition to frequent discrimination in the job market, this has
left many Muslims feeling alienated, disenfranchised and resentful. This has
created an atmosphere that favours those exposed to radical discourse to be
easily recruited into radical political or even militant activities.
But the economic decline in
Europe has another dangerous facet: it is responsible for a crisis of
representation; a growing number of citizens no longer feel represented by mainstream
political parties, unions and other traditional institutions. Therefore, the
prospects of the Muslim population adhering to the principles and values of
liberal democracies are very bleak, let alone joining the party system, which
itself is discredited and going through a dramatic transition, with the
political centre losing ground. If not addressed, this social movement risks
evolving into an uncontrollable political problem. However, to be properly addressed
this phenomena needs to be understood first.
For the aforementioned
reasons, we seriously doubt European societies can really integrate these
disenfranchised groups in the discredited party system of our liberal
democracies. Michel Houellebecq’s controversial vision of the future in France
is indeed benign, when he fictions in his book France an Islamized country by 2020,
where universities have to teach the Koran, women have to wear the veil and
polygamy is legal. All of this will happen without bloodshed, determined by the
will of the majority when votes are casted.
Time is not yet ripe in
Europe for the prevalence of a new order. At the moment, the aforementioned
networks are not sufficiently interconnected yet, neither have a centralized
leadership nor gather around a common political program. However, their
resilient existence allows us to say they may represent the embryo of a social
movement with potential of becoming a future political mass movement alien to
the values of liberal societies. This risk is getting worse, if these
disenfranchised groups adopt sectarian and fratricide violence to challenge
those values and principles. In an initial phase, such a sectarian and
subversive political environment in Europe would provoke the securitization, or
if we prefer, the “Israelization” of the continent with the strengthening of
its security structures and the marginalization of the moderate political
forces.
If this scenario is realistic,
we are witnessing the preliminary stage of an insurgency, which does not
exactly fit into the postulates of the insurgency doctrine. Actually, we can
identify at the moment actions that belong at the same time to the three first
phases of an insurgency. Although the subversive movement is still defragmented
and without a unifying strategy and defined political goals (as far as we
know), it is able to carry out visible actions, such as terrorist attacks.
Therefore, from our
standpoint, it is dangerous to equal terrorism – a strategic option – to
terrorist acts, a virulent tactical expression of an insurgency. Terrorism and
terrorist acts are different things. The former is a strategy, the latter is a
tactic. The similarities between these two phenomena is impeding many of us to
understand the facts. That is why we consider the exaggeration of the threat posed by the ISIL as dangerous, namely its
international expansion. The real threat is not ISIS, a short-lived
ill-conceived and painful project, as foreseen, by the way, by Bin Laden, but
the political mobilization of European Muslims who do not want to integrate in
the system. This is where the challenge lies, existential and civilizational.
Bibliography
·
Gerges, F. A., A History:
ISIS (2016). New Jersey. Princeton University
Press.
· Ministério do Exército
(1966). O Exército na Guerra-subversiva, Vol. I, Lisboa.
· Reinares,
F., García-Calvo, C. (2015).
Terroristas, Redes y Organizaciones:
Facetas de la Actual Movilización Yihadista en España (Documento de trabajo)
17/2015, Madrid. Real Instituto El Cano.
·
Global Terrorism Index 2015: Measuring and Understanding the Impact of
Terrorism. Institute for Economics & Peace.
Global Terrorism Index 2015: Measuring and Understanding the Impact of
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‘Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat’, Prometheus Books
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