International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 37

International Journal on Criminology
public). Subsequently, Iran began to export terrorism to protect the regime. When
the Soviet-Afghan war began, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan fought against the
Soviet Union, which had entered its neighbor Afghanistan to support that country’s
pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Curiously enough, the jihadists in Afghanistan moved
to different conflict zones and created the culture of jihadism in different regions
of the world during the war—a time when the world was mostly ignorant about
jihadists. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, the world
witnessed a ruthless fight against jihadists; however, this period also paved the way
for the creation of scores of new jihadist groups that found safe havens in the Middle
East when a security vacuum emerged in the region after the Arab Spring of
anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed conflicts against repressive regimes
in the early 2010s. During the period between the breakout of the Arab Spring and
the present, the war between the modern world and the region’s jihadist groups has
gone through phases in which one side or the other dominated.
The situation is somewhat different for AQ and ISIS. Over time, AQ became
the brand name for jihadist groups. Its presence was widespread, with operations
in different regions through its franchises. For many years, AQ had little competition
from other terrorist groups. All of that changed when ISIS emerged as a rival
of AQ. ISIS was popular in Syria and Iraq in 2014 and 2015, particularly among
smaller local jihadist organizations, which were largely responsible for raising the
popularity of ISIS to its pinnacle. It was not long before local jihadist groups began
to pledge allegiance to either AQ or ISIS. In the course of the global war against
jihadism, several local jihadist groups in different parts of the world experienced
organizational disruptions and had to pledge allegiance to either AQ or ISIS, both
of which had proven their resilience, in order to maintain their existence. In other
words, jihadist groups hit by disruptive events (such as the decapitation/death of
their leaders or the loss of a considerable number of their fighters after heavy military
campaigns), fragmented, restructured, or dissolved and gravitated toward either
AQ and ISIS as a strategy for resilience. When these groups pledged allegiance
to AQ or ISIS, they benefited from the larger group’s brand name and popularity,
attracted more recruits, received ideological and logistical support, and gained
the attention of world politics, as suggested by the extant literature. While these
benefits helped to raise the status of the smaller terrorist groups, their overarching
goal was to enable the organization to survive as a viable entity after facing an
existential threat. This viability, however, comes at a cost. Smaller terrorist groups
that form alliances with larger ones are forced to compromise on organizational
authority, 104 which brings with it the risk of being targeted by counterterrorism
units from the states that pursue counterterrorism campaigns. 105
Strategy, ed. A. Cronin and J. Ludes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 46–73.
104 Bacon.
105 Asal et al.
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