On July 31, the CIA identified and killed Al Qaeda’s top man, Aymane Ez-Zawahiri. Until then, he had been leading the terrorist group, having taken over right after Oussama Ben Laden died in 2011. Both figures planned and organized the 9/11 attack that targeted the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York, in 2001. This tragic event marked the beginning of the fight against terrorism, with President George H.W Bush announcing the “War on Terror.” The 9/11 attack turned the world upside down. It was indisputably considered the most offensive action against U.S. security, even though other terrorist attacks were carried out previously, such as knowing that there were many other attacks, like the hijack of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya in 1998, and Dar Salam, Tanzania in the same year. Also, in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, they attacked the USS Cole in October 2000, Billion dollars in guided missiles were destroyed, and the U.S. navies lost one of the most survivable ships; 17 U.S. servicemen were killed, and 38 others were wounded, according to Mr. Abderrahim Lamchichi, based on his article “Al Qaeda, an Islamist Internationale?”
Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms defines terrorism as: “The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological. At the end of the last century, many movements and organizations used violence and threat to express their dissatisfaction, generally related to religion”.
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This chart presents the most known active radical Islamic terrorist groups recognized by the United Nations. It shows the date and the place of creation of those groups, as well as their founders and actual leaders. Some groups are without a leader for many reasons, such as their assassination, as happened to Al Qaeda with the death of Aymane Ez-Zawahiri, or resignation.
The majority of those groups mentioned in the chart have a bloody history. The following chart shows their biggest assaults:
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Al Qaeda in Afghanistan:
The most known and pursued on an international level terrorist group is Al Qaeda, created in the last of 1980 in Pakistan, according to Jean-Pierre Filiu in his article named: the four fronts of Al Qaeda (‘Les quatres fronts d’Al Qaeda’ in the original language) by Oussama Ben Laden, Aymane Ez-Zawahiri, and Abdullah Azzam. They began as a logistical network to support Muslims fighting against the URSS during the Afghan War. When the Soviets withdrew base in Afghanistan for a period in the early 90s, the group eventually reestablished its headquarters in Afghanistan under the patronage of the Taliban organization. Al-Qaeda merged with several other militant Islamist organizations, and on several occasions, its leaders declared « holy wars » against the USA. The organization established camps for Muslim militants worldwide to train tens of thousands of paramilitary skills and knowledge, and its members engaged in numerous terrorist hijacks.
9/11 was not the last of al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities; many others have followed, either by al-Qaeda itself or other organizations around the world. In the six following years, they were engaged in many attacks in Jordan, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. All that has resulted from their internet usage to communicate and the expansion of their network. So they recruit people this way, share videos of their activities and broadcasts, and do their propaganda. Also, they are getting sponsors.
9/11 released 2,977 victims in New York. Over thirty-one attacks have generated more than 4400 deaths as Al Qaeda’s victims between 1992 and 2008 because of their tactics of assassination, bombing, hijacking, kidnapping, and suicide attacks, and their desire to obtain biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. The undeniable influence of Al-Qaeda as a terrorist network as it still has autonomous cells in over 100 countries and is financing training and logistical developments for Islamic militants in Afghanistan, Mali, Egypt…
ISIS in the Levant:
Another similar group in the Levant region, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), was founded in 2004 by Abu Musaab Zarqawi. First, it was a subsidiary of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Ayoub Al-Masri changed the group’s name to ISIS in 2006 and named Abu Omar Baghdadi its leader. ISIS is a jihadist group with a particularly violent ideology that calls itself a caliphate and claims religious authority over all Muslims, mainly from Syria and Iraq, ruled by Sharia law and the return to the golden era of Islam in the region.
The group uses modern tools like social media to promote reactionary politics and religious fundamentalism. Its fighters destroy holy sites and valuable antiquities as its leaders propagate a return to Islam’s early days, which we will explain later.
Their actual activities started after the Arab spring, taking advantage of the social chaos in the area. They began taking cities and regions under their control. Falluja was the first town they took in January 2014, then Mosul and Tikrit a few months later, al Qaim, Raqqa, Palmyre, Ramadi, and Hawija… until the area from Aleppo to Falluja was under ISIS control. ISIS was expanding, killing many diplomats and journalists, kidnapping others, and executing populations.
The jihadist group kidnapped more than 140 Kurdish schoolboys in Syria, where more than 30,000 Yazidi families were stranded in the Sinjar Mountains. A Yazidi lawmaker says that 500 men have been killed, 70 children have died of thirst, and women have been sold into slavery. The Iraqi government announced ISIS militants had killed 322 members of a Sunni tribe in a series of executions in 2014. In addition, they executed many Christians in Egypt and captured others in Syria, destroyed many historical monuments in Iraq and Syria, known as world heritage sites by UNESCO, and claimed these actions as war crimes in august 2015. From 2014 to 2022, more than 1990 persons died from ISIS, and more than 1600 were injured.
Terrorism, from Asia to Africa:
ISIS became more active in Africa in 2016; many of the group’s affiliates had been established in African areas by that time, as had al-Qaeda since the 1990s, for many reasons, such as organizing terrorist attacks and planning meetings where their existence is unnoticed. Other terrorist groups saw the light at the beginning of the third millennium for many reasons, such as corruption, widespread suffering from dictatorial governments, poverty, and lack of knowledge of religions; the population was easy to co-opt by international terrorist groups, which promised paradise in the afterlife, and to be rich on earth by joining the group, through trafficking in human beings, drugs, and weapons. It started to spread with Egypt and Libya, then Tunisia, and arrived in Sub-Saharan countries, such as the Lake Chad Basin region, especially in Congo, the Sahel region, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Somalia, causing significant secretarial troubles to African countries, using the situation of corruption and socio-political issues that that these countries suffer.
The West African subsidiary of Al Qaeda, AQIM (Al Qaeda of Islamic Maghreb), was created in 2007 by the Algerian Abdelmalek Droukdel. At first, it was a coalition between the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). AQIM is still active in the Sahel region, particularly in Mali, since 2012. It has carried out several terrorist attacks in several states of the area. Ain Defla in Algeria has always been an era of bombings since the black decade in Algeria: 2009, 2015, and 2020. On 16 January 2013, Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists affiliated with a brigade led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar took expatriate hostages at the Tigantourine gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria. In 2016, they organized a bombing in Ouagadougou that caused 29 death. The U.N. estimates that more than 4,000 deaths were recorded in 2019, as a continuation of a long story of execution, kidnapping, human, weapons, and drugs trafficking,
AQIM and ISIS are not the only terrorist group in the Sahel region, Ançar Dine, Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA), Jama’a Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), and Boko Haram are present too, and they committed attacks and caused securitarian and safety troubles in the region they are based on.
In 2011, the fall of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya led to a dispersion of weapons in the area: the Tuareg fighters hired by the former Libyan head of state returned home, taking with them ammunition and guns. The Tuareg population was demanding more autonomy from the Malian army then. Then, they judged the power of Bamako ineffective and overthrew the government of Amadou Toumani Touré. The Tuareg fighters were joined by Ansar Dine, a radical Islamist group. They imposed Sharia law on populations and, at the end of June 2012, destroyed the Sufi mausoleums of Timbuktu, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was the beginning of terrorism in Mali and the Sahel Region.
Since November 2020, the situation in Burkina Faso has seriously deteriorated, and attacks are almost daily. Less than a week ago, nearly thirty people were killed in an attack on a church. A UN report states that in one year, the violence in the Sahel has displaced more than 700,000 Burkinabes.
Sub-Saharan Africa, which mainly borders Niger and shares with Mali, is particularly affected by jihadist attacks. On January 14, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on the military camp of Chinégodrar, killing 89 Nigerien soldiers. A month earlier, 70 men were killed by inmates in retaliation against Nigerien forces involved in the G5 Sahel organization. The government has declared a state of emergency for two years.
From the end of February 2020, the Minister of Education of Mali, Daouda Mamadou Marthé, has decided to close 350 schools in response to insecurity and the growing number of attacks. In January 2019, nearly 100 people died in a retaliatory attack on Yirgou, a Fulani village in Mali.
In the Lake Chad Basin, which includes Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad, economic viability and control are as crucial to the resilience of extremist groups as military tactics or dogma. To consolidate its position, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a faction of Boko Haram, generates revenue from remote communities in exchange for services.
According to residents and security sources, ISWAP has established state-like structures by occupying dozens of island villages on Lake Chad in local governments in Borno State, Abadam, Kukawa, Guzamala, Marte, and Monguno in northeastern Nigeria.
Among the countries being closely monitored is Kenya, which has been the scene of several bloody attacks: the one that struck the American embassy in Nairobi in 1998, but also in November 2002, when a hotel in Mombasa was targeted by a kamikaze attack and missiles narrowly missed an Israeli plane. To keep a close eye on minor incidents and look for clues that could indicate the beginnings of an attack, Kenyan police tried to track down the perpetrators of the mid-November 2005 theft of police uniforms in Mombasa, a city with a large Muslim population that has often been the site of demonstrations in support of bin Laden.
The U.N. is also concerned about repeated embargo violations on arms sales to Somalia. A recent report shows a 350% increase in arms sales transactions to Somalia during the first eight months of 2005, compared to the same period last year. These arms are reportedly transiting through Yemen, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The pirate groups are believed to be composed mainly of former members of the Somali navy, accompanied by fishermen converted to sea piracy. All of them obey al-Qaeda. Well-armed, they operate from small, fast-moving units, rarely more than four or five in number. Very well organized, their actions would be coordinated by a larger flagship.