There is only one jihad

It has been almost a quarter century since the September 11^th, 2001 attacks which killed almost 3,000 Americans. That mass casualty attack, with all its horrific drama, remains locked in the memories of those who experienced it, both old and young.

Those divorced from the attack by the passage of time increasingly profess to believe that it was carried out by a few terrorists living in caves. It is worthwhile to step back and consider with a fuller context the strategic movements of the enemy actually responsible.

Almost exactly a year prior to the jihadist attack against America, Mohammad Atta and other members of the Hamburg cell were training and preparing for the plot. Meanwhile, the second Intifada, a campaign of suicide bombings and other terror attacks, was launched, planned by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and spearheaded by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other jihadist terror groups. That fight would last over five years, and only come to a temporary halt with the building of a security barrier between Israel and the territories.

Despite propaganda falsehoods perpetrated after the fact, the second Intifada was never a spontaneous uprising caused by Israeli government actions, but was a planned campaign of terror, as its organizers later publicly admitted. The uptick in jihadist activity by both Al Qaeda and the Palestinian jihadist groups was far from coincidental, but instead represented a broader campaign of “Islamic Awakening” to use the term popularized by Muslim Brotherhood leader and Hamas financier, the late Yusuf Al Qaradawi. Nor was it only against the United States and Israel, but jihadist efforts during this period advanced across the globe, in Bosnia, Somalia, the Philippines, and everywhere in between.

As investigators examined the jihadist network that funded, recruited, and supported Al Qaeda, they repeatedly found that the same network facilitated material support for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other jihadist groups. Instead of insular groups operated only on behalf of a specific terrorist organizations in defined locales, they found vast structures for supporting jihad, no matter the place or group. Investigations into alleged terror funders grew organically, with overlapping co-conspirators. In most of these cases the common connective tissue between the organizers was a shared affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood or its allied Islamist groups –all  of whom viewed themselves as shared participants in a global “Islamic Movement.”  Mosques associated with this network, like the Islamic Society of Boston, with its ties to Qaradawi and convicted Al Qaeda financier and Muslim Brotherhood member Abdurahman Alamoudi, were the wellspring from which dozens of terrorists took their place in the jihadist ranks.

Muslim Brotherhood groups, such as the Muslim Students Association –which resides on nearly every college campus in the United States– were identified as “incubators of terrorism” by intelligence experts at the NYPD. And in the decades after 9/11 the MSA produced numerous terrorists, both high-ranking leaders like Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Anwar Awlaki, as well as minor players such as numerous young American Muslims who sought to join the Islamic State, after the declaration of the Caliphate in 2014. The Caliphate’s rise was itself conditional upon the “Islamic Awakening” of the Arab Spring, which brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt and North Africa. The subsequent ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Egyptian military resulted in Hamas fighters operating hand in hand with ISIS in the Sinai.

While jihadist groups take different names and fight on different battlefields, they still view themselves as operating in service to the same cause.  This was demonstrated by the cooperation in the simultaneous AQAP/ISIS attack against Charlie Hebdo Magazine and the Hypercacher kosher supermarket in 2015.

Decades after this “Islamic Awakening” was launched, American policy makers still refuse to take a strategic view of the threat. Instead of focusing on the Islamic Movement at large, U.S. policy reduces every threat to the smallest common denominator.  Law enforcement and intelligence analysts are swamped, forced to treat every potential jihadist as an atomized, independent actor with no connection to any larger effort or movement. As though each “blinking red light” that FBI Director Christopher Wray mentioned in his Senate Testimony following the Hamas invasion on October 7^th 2023, was somehow unconnected to every other, instead of representing a symptom in a larger problem.

There is only one jihad, whether it is waged by Hamas, or Al Qaeda, or the Islamic State, and all of them are facilitated by the same larger political movement that seeks to use violence to achieve its ends. Until we recognize that, we’ll remain as vulnerable today, as we were on September 10^th, 2001.