War drives terrorism

[rug]

June 21 at 10:20 AM
By Daniel Byman
Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His latest book is “Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

Study after study has found no common profile of a terrorist. It is hard to explain why, say, almost four times as many recruits leave Sweden to fight with the Islamic State as from neighboring Norway, though Sweden’s population is only twice Norway’s. Pundits and politicians alike speculate on why individuals might embrace terrorism, but such a question risks missing one obvious point: Having a terrorist group around in the first place is one of the most important factors in influencing an individual’s choice to join.

Terrorist groups don’t emerge out of nowhere, and wars are perhaps the richest soil for seeding and growing violent groups of all stripes. Without the wars in the Middle East there would be no Islamic State, and it is not the only one: Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and other extremist groups all emerged out of regional civil wars. The formation of such groups is a political phenomenon, and so, too, is the radicalization of foreign fighters from the West.

Terrorist groups are rarely the cause of civil wars. Iraq’s civil war began in 2003 after the U.S. invasion and occupation; Syria’s civil war began with peaceful protests against a brutal dictator in 2011; and Libya’s strife came after a terrorist-supporting dictator was toppled in the same year.

Rather, such wars beget and foster terrorism in several ways. Terror itself is often a tool in war, used to sow an atmosphere of fear and undermine governments. Assassinations of rival political leaders, bombs for police and military recruits and random violence against civilians — these are all methods learned from Insurgency 101.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/06/21/war-drives-terrorism/

https://fas.org/irp/cia/product/insurgency.pdf

[Uncle Joe]

1. Of course it does.

Thanks for the thread, rug.

[Javaman]

2. the snake eats its tail...

war drives terrorism drives war drives terrorism drives war drives terrorism...

[baldguy]

3. But the war in question should be World War I, not the Invation of Iraq in 2003.

The Bush Regime was trying to exploit the existing conditions in Iraq (for the profit of oil interests in the US and Saudi Arabia), which were created in the aftermath of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.