Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 37

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN JIHAD

managing to do that which no other jihadist group had
ever achieved.
Since the Muslim Brotherhood had declared that
the Caliphate must be re-established back in the 1920s,
and by force if need be, scores of jihadist groups had
been founded around the globe, from the Middle East
to Southeast Asia and from Africa to Central Asia.
Some had been more successful than others, with the
Brotherhood itself being able to jeopardize the stability
of several Arab nations with assassinations and sundry
subversions and conspiracies. But each one was stymied
in their shortsighted focus on the proximate infidel or
apostate enemy. Whether it was Egyptian Islamic Jihad
trying to take down the secular government in Cairo,
or jihadist groups fighting the “heathen” Indians in
Kashmir, they were all limited by their operational parochialism. Under bin Laden and Zawahiri, this would
all change with al-Qaida becoming a self-appointed
“vanguard” of a global movement that would eventually
stun the world with the death and destruction it was
able to realize in Tuesday, 11 September 2001.
Al-Qaida now retooled itself along three fronts:
Exporting jihadists to new guerrilla theaters
across the globe
Becoming the global “face” of Jihad in terms of
propaganda
Establishing cells across the world to execute
terrorist attacks against the infidel
In the 1990s, al-Qaida would recruit new jihadi
fighters and deploy them to Bosnia in the Balkans,
Chechnya in Russia, Kashmir in India, and to all
significant war zones where Muslims were fighting
non-Muslims. At the same time, bin Laden would
come out of the shadows of the war in Afghanistan and
record video and audio messages for a global audience
of willing holy warriors, eventually becoming such an
international media “personality” that outlets such as
CNN and ABC would interview him.
All of this was happening as bin Laden and
Zawahiri were recruiting Muslims fundamentalists,
not only to become just guerrilla fighters but also to become clandestine operatives in terrorist cells embedded
within Western infidel nations, or nations where there
was enough of an infidel presence to afford a target-rich
environment. As a result of this network being successfully established in more than fifty nations around the
world, al-Qaida was able to take the Holy War to the

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MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

kuffar (infidel) again and again and again in the 1990s,
with bin Laden and Zawahiri being responsible, or
otherwise connected, to:
The first World Trade Center attack
The 1998 American Embassy bombings in East
Africa
The bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000
Despite all of these successful attacks against
America during that decade, as a nation we were not
prepared for, nor were we able to detect and prevent
the deadliest terrorist attack in history, and so on 11
September 2001, al-Qaida was catapulted to a position
of worldwide significance that other jihadist groups had
only dreamt of.
Throughout this period, and especially after the
9/11 attacks, when al-Qaida was discussed, it was
bin Laden who garnered all the attention, and for
obvious reasons, since he was the leader of the group,
and because he presented an image that fit the stereotype of the ascetic jihadi warrior. This focus on bin
Laden failed to recognize that it was Zawahiri who
was the ideological master of al-Qaida. It was the
older Egyptian jihadist who had studied and honed
his theological and rhetorical skills in the dock of the
Egyptian court system and the prisons of Cairo who
would engage online most often with other Muslims to
explain and justify the new global campaign of terror
that al-Qaida had unleashed. This role was crucial to
building the al-Qaida brand amongst potentially sympathetic Muslims around the world.
In preparation for the reaction to the 9/11 attacks and the worldwide attention they would bring,
Zawahiri went to the lengths of penning a semi-autobiographical book on his experience of jihad, and why the
time had come for all to choose sides in the religious
war to end all wars. Sent to an Arabic outlet in London,
Asharq al-Awsat, which published and serialized the
work online just two months after the attacks, Knights
Under the Prophet’s Banner—or Warriors Under the
Flag of Mohammad, more colloquially—built upon the
themes of both Qutb and Azzam, but reformats them
for the new age of holy war in which al-Qaida is the
global jihadi “brand” for the twenty-first century.
In brief, Zawahiri’s argument is that Islam must
rejuvenate itself with an assault on all that is un-Islamic
and that this revival to greatness will come through
each believer taking up the sword of jihad. The time has

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