Jihadi Terrorism and the Radicalisation Challenge: European and American Experiences by Rik Coolsaet

Author:Rik Coolsaet [Coolsaet, Rik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Terrorism
ISBN: 9781409476450
Google: GOKhAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17684655
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

The ‘Islamo-nationalist’ Terrorist Precursor Phase2

The mid-1980s saw the first encounter for Belgium with an apparently new form of terrorism: state-sponsored groups that referred to Islam as a legitimating factor of their activities. These groups were created after the Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979 that overthrew the Shah, and were sponsored by the new regime in Teheran. The Iranian Shi‘a regime tried to export its revolution globally via terrorist cells, articulated around its embassies abroad. After a series of terrorist attacks in Paris in 1986, committed by the Fouad Ali Saleh network, support cells were also discovered in Belgium. The emergence of this new form of ‘religiously inspired’ terrorism led to the establishment within the existing Anti-Terrorist Unit of the Gendarmerie of a specific entity entirely dedicated to ‘radical Islamism’. For the Belgian police and law enforcement community a ‘real learning process’ started (Grignard 2008: 86).

Subsequently, in the early 1990s, Belgian authorities discovered similar support cells of the Algerian radical Islamist movement, GIA, an outgrowth of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) that had failed to win power via the ballot box as a result of the intervention of the Algerian military. In this Armed Islamic Group (GIA) Algerian veterans from the Afghan war played a prominent role. In 1995 a first network was dismantled in Belgium, the so-called Zaoui network, named after a former member of parliament for the FIS, who had settled in Belgium and organised a local GIA cell. This cell was created with the aim of providing logistical support to GIA’s armed activities in Algeria and its plots in France. But obviously it was also linked to the broader Afghan veterans’ diaspora, since members of the Zaoui network had been travelling to the Afghan–Pakistan border and participating in training camps in Afghanistan. More significantly, Belgian investigators discovered the first ever jihadi manual, 8,000 pages long, produced by the Mekhtab Al-Khidemat (The Office of Services for the Mujahedin), created by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam in 1984.

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