puritanic form of Islam propagated in Saudi Arabia, which evolved into collaborations with MILF/MNLF and other violent groups.
Another well-known terrorist organization not associated with Muslim extremism and puritanism is Aleph, formerly known as Aum Shinrikyo. Aleph is a Japanese doomsday cult which carried out the deadly Tokyo sarin attacks in March of 1995, which killed 12, severely injured 50, and caused permanent and temporary vision impairments in thousands of train passengers—the most devastating attack against Japan since World War II. The prosecution concluded the attacks to have been an attempt to overthrow the Japanese government and install the leader of the cult, Shoko Asahara as the new “emperor” of Japan.
Terrorist networks aside, Asian countries are actively participating in “regional and international efforts to counter terrorism. Australia, Fiji, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan are partners in the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, and New Zealand are members of the GCTF. As co-chairs of the GCTF Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Working Group, Australia and Indonesia organized an annual plenary meeting and workshops on monitoring, measuring, and evaluating CVE programs, CVE in prisons, and the role of gender and civil society organizations in CVE,” says state.gov.
What if we go west to the Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and European regions?
In the Middle East we see some of the world’s largest and most feared terrorist networks, their motives often regarding radical Islamic views and separatism. The Taliban, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria)/ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), and Al-Qaeda occupy large swathes of land, asserting their cruelty over them while garnering international attention for their heinous and hateful acts.
Taliban, meaning “students” in the Pashto language, is a hardline Sunni Islamist fundamentalist movement that formed in the 1990s following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Since then, they have promised peace in a war-torn nation, but have also “implemented their own austere variation of the Sharia, or Islamic law,” as BBC states. They took over Afghanistan, still recovering from the recent Soviet invasion, in a couple of years and by 1998, they occupied most of Afghanistan. They were welcomed at first, as Afghans “were weary of the mujahideen’s (Afghan guerrilla fighters and Afghanistan’s former governing body) excesses and infighting.”
ISIS and ISIL started as an affiliate terrorist group of Al-Qaeda, created by an associate of Osama Bin Laden named Abu Masab al-Zarqawi. Originating in Iraq and extending to Syria (hence its name), since its creation in 2004, ISIS has enforced cruel variations of Sharia law in occupied regions and locales all over Iraq, Syria, and the Levant (which encompasses Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine). ISIS/ISIL regularly tops the list of most active terrorist movements and have caused much bloodshed to not only innocent citizens of occupied countries, but foreign journalists and humanitarians, taking hostages and carrying out other “heinous acts of violence.”
Al-Qaeda (lit. The Base), also widely known around the world for the founding of ISIS/ISIL and the historic 9/11 attacks, is another militant Islamist network that has struck fear into many. “Al-Qaeda began as a logistical network to support Muslims fighting against the Soviet Union during the Afghan War; members were recruited throughout the Islamic world. When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the organization dispersed but continued to oppose what its leaders considered corrupt Islamic regimes,” Encyclopedia Britannica states. Al-Qaeda has merged and collaborated with several other Islamist organizations, some of which being the Egyptian Islamist Jihad and the Islamist Group, Boko Haram, and others. While Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed in 2011, the group continues to carry out terrifying assaults on those who defy their extreme views.
Meanwhile in Europe, Islamist massacres have scarred the Union. According to the New York Times, “European leaders have expressed solidarity, but the Muslim world has been convulsed