The world was stunned by last week's terrorist attack at the Kabul International Airport. It wasn't just the death toll or the humiliation suffered by the United States. The suicide bombing brought global jihad back into the headlines, and, to be more specific, it has created a feeling that what has just happened in Afghanistan is a prelude to the return of the global jihadi terrorism that struck the world through much of the past two decades.
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It has to be said that many experts believe the opposite is true. In their view, the world has changed, terrorism has changed, and even Afghanistan has changed. They believe one can not draw a parallel between what is happening now and events at the start of the millennium. Nevertheless, fears about the return of jihadi terrorism are not unfounded.
The Taliban has a history of cooperation with terrorist organizations and one of the first steps taken by the new regime in Afghanistan was to open prison gates and release thousands of terrorists. The exact number is unclear, but Western intelligence organizations estimate that anywhere between 2,000 to 6,000 Islamic State members were among those released.
According to a report released by the Institute for National Security Studies, there was a decline of some 14% in suicide bombings in 2020 in comparison to the previous year. The decline is part of an ongoing trend since 2018. Most terrorist attacks were carried out by Salafi jihadist organizations adhering to Salafist ideologies that seek to return Islam to its original pure form - to the ancestors (salaf) - and to impose Sharia law.
A brief history of Salafist-jihadi terrorism
The Salafist movement (salafiya) has been around for decades, but the jihadi aspect materialized around the conflict against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Tens of thousands of Muslims from around the region joined the mujahideen (armed Islamist fighters) and helped throw out the Soviet Union and bring down the Afghan Republic. The conflict also served as the bedrock for the establishment of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which started out as an ideological movement in the town of Kandahar in the south of the country and in 1996 completed its takeover of the country, established an Islamic Emirate and imposed strict Sharia law.
Jihadi-Salafist terrorist attacks began in the late 1980s, but there were two main waves, both based on a state infrastructure that provided the movement with protection and gave it the footing to carry out training and planning - something that on the face it now exists today as well.
The first wave was in Afghanistan: During the Taliban's first stint in power, Al-Qaida, under the leadership of Osama bin Laden established itself in the country. Al-Qaida's first notable attack was the August 7, 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Truck bombs exploded almost simultaneously outside the United States embassies in Nairobi, killing 213 people, and Dar es Salaam, killing 11.
While President Bill Clinton ordered retaliatory cruise missile strikes on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, Al-Qaida only came out stronger from the attacks. The organization became a magnet for disenfranchised youth from across the Muslim world. In October 2000, it launched another attack, this time hitting the USS Cole, an American navy destroyer, with a speedboat packed with explosives, as it refuelled in the port of Aden in Yemen. The attack, carried out by two suicide bombers, claimed the lives of 17 American servicemen.
Less than a year later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al-Qaida carried out the largest terrorist attacks in history. Two planes kidnapped by Al-Qaida operatives trained as pilots crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, a third crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, while a fourth plane crashed in an open field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought with the hijackers and managed to divert the aircraft before it reached its intended target in DC. The attacks claimed the lives of 2,977 people, while over 6,000 were injured.
The 9/11 attacks marked the beginning of the global war on terror. The US invaded Afghanistan with the declared aim of defeating Al-Qaida. Its secondary aim was to oust the Taliban regime which had sheltered Al-Qaida, while another goal was to establish a democratic regime in the country.
Two decades later it seems that America failed to achieve the latter two goals. Al Qaida was defeated, but it continued to exist even after the American invasion. The most significant attack carried out after the invasion was the 2004 Madrid train bombings in which 193 people were killed.
Nevertheless, Al-Qaida was on the defensive. Its leaders were forced to flee Afghanistan, becoming hunted men. Many of them were eliminated or arrested. Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, in an operation carried out by US Navy Seals.
The organization continued to exist under the leadership of Ayman al-Zawahri, its spiritual father and the leading religious figure in Al-Qaida. The US is offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of al-Zawahiri. An Israeli intelligence source however said this week that it is unclear whether Zawahri is alive. In recent years, the organization has declined with several groups working under its umbrella, splitting off to work independently or under the patronage of the new caliph in town - the Islamic State.
Decentralized terrorism
The Islamic State (ISIS) has its origins in Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), a group that appeared in 2004 when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi pledged allegiance to Al-Qaida and originally fought against US troops in the country following the 2003 invasion. Like Al-Qaida, the group fought both Muslim infidels (moderate Sunnis, and Shi'a Muslims), and 'Crusaders' - foreigners of other religions - primarily Americans and Europeans.
The US killed al-Zarqawi in 2006, and in 2010 assassinated his successors Abu Ayub al-Masri and Abu Omar al Baghdadi. The next in line, Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri, aka, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would take over the leadership of ISIS and turn the organization into a terror powerhouse.
Al-Baghdadi would make ISIS the largest and most influential terrorist group in modern history. As Al-Qaida had done in Afghanistan, al-Baghdadi took advantage of the geopolitical situation - the civil war in Syria, which had undermined the regime of President Bashar Assad and torn apart the country, while in Iraq the Sunni population in the north was alienated from the pro-American regime in Baghdad.
In February 2014, the Islamic State split from Al-Qaida after refusing to adhere to al-Zawahri's orders for its to halt its operations in Syria. Four months later it made its greatest achievement to that point when it captured the Iraqi city of Mosul. Over 1,000 Iraqi soldiers who had been taken prisoner were executed in what was the beginning of the Islamic State's photogenic campaign of terror.
A short while later, al-Baghdadi declared the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate. He placed himself at the head, as Emir of the Believers.
It was in August 2014 that al-Baghdadi gained the West's attention. One evening, in a slickly produced video, a man dressed in black appeared on television along with a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit. At the end of the video, the prisoner, James Foley, an American photojournalist was beheaded.
Overnight, ISIS became a global event. In a short time, it had managed to establish itself as the world's leading terror group, and organizations around the globe - many of whom had previously been affiliated to Al-Qaida - rushed to swear allegiance.
ISIS rapidly expanded the territory under its control, capturing large swathes of Iraq and Syria and imposing strict laws, denying women rights, and meeting out harsh punishments to criminals and infidels. The group also had an economic arm that funded its operations and those of its proxies around the world. It was based primarily on tax collection, trade in oil from wells found in territories it had captured, and from protection rackets, including ransoms of millions of dollars for hostages it had taken.
The Islamic State made sure to document its atrocities and broadcast them on social media, from mass executions and gruesome murders (such as the burning to death of a Jordanian pilot) through to the shocking enslavement of thousands of Yazidi girls. The media campaign had two goals: to strike fear into the hearts of its enemies and to lead believers to join it and carry out operations under its flag.
ISIS became such a big threat that it managed to bring together a rare coalition against it, one that included not only the West and moderate Sunni countries in the Middle East, but also Shi'ite Iran, and Turkey.
At the same time, the organization became a magnet for bored and confused youth from around the world; men who wished to fight, and women who wished to serve the struggle in their own way. Many of the new recruits arrived not from the Middle East, but from the West: Second-generation immigrants to Europe and North America who were fed up with a life of poverty and humiliation and sought ways to take revenge.
Unlike Al-Qaida, ISIS didn't run a centralized mechanism for carrying out terrorist attacks, instead opting for decentralization. It called on its believers, wherever they may be, to carry out attacks in whatever fashion they could - so long as the assailants - be they in California, Paris, Berlin, or London - declare that the attacks were carried out in the name of the organization.
Some of the operations were carried out by other groups that accepted the Islamic State's patronage. Some of these groups wanted to gain fame, others wanted finance. Branches of ISIS operated across the globe, including on Israel's borders. The most prominent of these groups - one that remains active - is the Islamic State Sinai Province. Another branch operated in the Syrian Golan, but melted away when the Syrian Army regained control of the region bordering with Israel. Both ISIS branches refrained almost totally from operations against Israel.
The apex of the Islamic State was in 2016 when alongside its capture of territory, the organization and its partner groups carried out some 330 suicide bombings resulting in the deaths of over 4,500 people. But it was its broad scope of operations that proved to be the organization's undoing. The coalition that ISIS put together led to a broad coalition of interests against it. Russia feared the complete collapse of Syria, the United States feared the collapse of Iraq, and regimes around the region feared they would be next to fall.
All these factors led to the greatest assault in history against a terrorist organization. At its peak, the Global Coalition to Defeat the Islamic State had 83 partner countries. ISIS was defeated in 2017, and by 2019 it had lost its last remaining stronghold in Syria. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in October 2019 when American special forces raided his hideout in Idlib province.
A bloody decade
The decade from 2010 to 2020 was the bloodiest in terms of the number of terrorist attacks committed - over 3,000 suicide attacks in 45 countries, in which 31,000 people were killed and 57,000 wounded. In the peak years 2014-2016 there were around 500 attacks a year.
The defeat of ISIS led to a gradual decline in the number of terrorist attacks. In 2019, there were 149 suicide bombings committed by 236 suicide bombers; the following year saw 127 attacks committed by 177 suicide bombers. Most of the attacks took place in three countries: Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria.
In Afghanistan alone, there were 57 suicide bombings last year - over half the global total. There were another 37 suicide bombings in Africa and 33 in the Middle East, 19 of them in Syria. Jihadi-Salafist groups were responsible for most of the attacks. The Islamic State's role declined significantly, while the number of attacks committed by Al-Qaida affiliated groups was on the rise.
In Afghanistan, some of the attacks were conducted by the Taliban, while others were conducted by Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISISK), the local branch of Islamic State and a rival of the Taliban. ISIS-K sees the Taliban as too moderate and as not being loyal to Sharia law. Many of those released from jail after the Taliban regained control of the country were members of ISIS-K, which raises questions given that the Kabul Airport attack conducted by ISIS-K didn't just harm the United States, it also hit the Taliban, which is perceived as being unable to bring the country the calm and prosperity it has promised.
Western and Arab intelligence organizations are watching the situation in Afghanistan with trepidation. Each has its own concerns, but the principal worry in the "good camp" is that the US is perceived as having been humiliated, giving a tailwind to terrorist groups (and to "terror armies" such as Hezbollah and Hamas).
Another major concern is that Afghanistan will once again become a base for terrorist organizations as it was in the 1990s. While the Taliban's leaders have been making conciliatory statements, nothing in their behavior suggests they have become a peace-loving group, and it would appear that they are seeking calm to allow themselves to entrench their rule and to obtain aid.
"The annual budget of the Afghan government is around 20 billion USD," explains Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Amos Yadlin, until recently, director of the Institute for National Security Studies and a former head of Military Intelligence. "About two billion dollars of that comes from tax collection and the remainder from Western aid. Even if they were to receive a little more from China, and were to smuggle more drugs, that wouldn't make up the difference. They have a country to run and they will be a lot more cautious and won't rush to sign a divorce from the West."
Prof. Eyal Zisser of Tel Aviv University isn't convinced, however. "For every radicalization, there is greater radicalization," says Zisser. "ISIS State went against Al-Qaida and now it is going against the Taliban. I'm not sure they will succeed. The Taliban won't let them raise their heads - not because of the Americans, but because they are afraid of ISIS."
The Taliban also has complex relations with Al-Qaida. The group carried out the 9/11 attacks without informing the Taliban regime. The result was that Al-Qaida lost its terror base, while the Taliban lost power.
"In my view, the Taliban won't be in a hurry to bring Al-Qaida back because that doesn't serve their interests," says Zisser. "Perhaps the Taliban won't hunt Al-Qaida down, but they certainly won't host them as generously as they did in the previous round, because they simply have nothing to gain from doing so."
But the question isn't, what does the Taliban want, but what do the terrorist organizations want. From their perspective, the events of the past few weeks have been greatly encouraging. The next stage will be to increase pressure on the Americans to withdraw from Iraq, a much more dramatic move in general, and from Israel's perspective as well. While Afghanistan is a failed and far-away state, Iraq sits on the mouth of the Persian Gulf and has massive oil reserves. An American departure could hand the country over completely to the Iranians and create an Iranian axis running from Tehran to Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea.
We haven't returned to 9/11," says Yadlin, "but the situation needs monitoring because for the first time since 2018 a state is ruled by Sharia. However, today's Taliban is different. It isn't Al-Qaida and it certainly isn't ISIS. It has been sitting in the Ritz-Carlton in Qatar for a few years and has gotten used to the good life. I'm not so sure that it will want to get all the world's guns pointed at it again."
Yoram Schweitzer, a former senior Military Intelligence officer and head of the INSS Program on Terrorism and Low-Intensity Conflict, cautions that "we are always making the same mistake of basing our forecast for the future on our past experience."
"Al-Qaida and ISIS will try and take advantage of the situation to awaken the masses, but they don't have the infrastructure they used to. In 2014, the Sunni provinces in Iraq were weak because they were neglected by the Iraqi government and so they didn't put up a fight in Mosul. In Syria, the central government was weakened by the civil war. Al Baghdadi gambled by establishing the Islamic State – and failed. He overstepped the mark when he thought he could come out well from an altercation with the rest of the world."
Schweitzer concurs that the Taliban won't give terrorist organizations carte blanche to operate from Afghan territory. "They have learned their lesson," he says. "I believe this can only happen in failed states like Yemen or Somalia where jihadi-Salafist organizations can blossom. The chances of this happening in other states are very low unless there is another Black Swan event like the Arab Spring."
Without firing a single bullet
The experts are united in agreement that in the absence of a country from which they can operate freely, the terror organizations will find it hard to replicate their previous successes. But at the same time, the common opinion is that they will try to take advantage of the momentum generated by the American flight from Afghanistan. Iraq will be in the spotlight, but security sources believe that we will see an increase in attacks by all the terrorist organizations.
"I don't see in Al-Qaida today the leadership and creativity that existed in the past," says Schweitzer. "Most of the veteran leaders have been eliminated, and it isn't at all clear who is still alive and who is still functioning."
Al Zawahri's fate is unknown. The acting leader of Al-Qaida in recent years is Saif al-Adel, who is believed to operate from Iran. Tehran has complex relations with Al-Qaida. As a Sunni organization, it is an enemy of Shi'ite Iran, but it is also a partner to war with the Americans. According to foreign reports, in November of last year, Mossad eliminated in Tehran an Egyptian member of Al-Qaida by the name of Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah (aka Abu Muhammad al-Masri) for his role in the 1998 American embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. The hit was carried out on August 7, the 22nd anniversary of the embassy attacks.
"For Al-Qaida to stand tall again, it needs a growth engine," says Schweitzer. "The war in Afghanistan in the 1980s was such a growth engine, and it is doubtful that similar circumstances exist today. ISIS may be more active, but it too has seen a decline in its activities in recent years. It operates mostly under the radar in far-off places such as Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, and Niger, or in Iraq and Syria. It is not succeeding in targetting the West."
The general feeling is that the threat level from ISIS has dropped significantly. There are many reasons for this, one of them being the role played by Israel in the global war on terror in general, and against the Islamic State specifically. As Syria is constantly being watched by Israel, Military Intelligence and Mossad had a major advantage in gathering information and operating sources in a region that all of a sudden became a global area of interest. Information provided by Israel is believed to have thwarted dozens of terrorist attacks in the West, some in not-so-friendly countries such as Turkey. Israeli intelligence has also played a role in several coalition operations against ISIS, primarily in Syria, but also in Iraq. In other words, without firing a single bullet, Israel played a significant role in defeating ISIS.
A morale boost for terror
Global jihad never made Israel the main target. It may have been on the list of targets, but relatively low down, after American and European targets, after the effort to hit the moderate Sunni regimes, and after the never-ending war between Sunni and Shi'a.
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An exception was a terrorist attack in Kenya in 2002 in which three Israelis and 13 Kenyans were killed in an attack on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombasa. At the same time, two surface-to-air missiles were fired at an Arkia Airlines plane taking off from the nearby airport. However, the missiles missed their target. A group close to Al-Qaida was responsible for the attacks.
Over the years there have been other planned attacks against Israeli targets that were thwarted or were not eventually carried out. It is safe to assume that the terror organizations feared Israel's strength in the region. "They worked using the salami method," says a senior security source, "their intention was first of to deal with what they saw as smaller threats, and only when they were strong enough to come for us. It never happened. That's the reason that although ISIS is active in the Sinai, it doesn't operate against us."
But groups that operate against Israel, such as the Palestinians and Hezbollah could take inspiration from the Afghan scenario, according to Schweitzer. "The perception that a small organization can defeat a power is something that Nasrallah is already riding on."
What happened in Afghanistan is a morale boost for terror," adds former INSS director Yadlin. "Afghanistan showed that with a lot of patience, and help from Allah, even if you have to wait 20 years, a power like the United States can be defeated. On the other hand, I wouldn't panic. We aren't back to 9/11."
