The ‘War on Terror’, State Crime & Radicalization by Shamila Ahmed

Author:Shamila Ahmed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030401382
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This period was vital in terms of providing many of the factors which would continue to exist, and influence the existence and continuation of terrorist groups, such as AQ. Bin Laden was given power, shown how to use ideology to form a terrorist group and ultimately trained in how to build a terrorist group by states.

The growth of Islamist terrorism was also influenced by the larger geo-political context, which involved amongst other events, the Iranian revolution. The revolution incorporated the war between Iran and Iraq, and the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq facilitated ‘the rise and radicalization of Islamist movements all over the world’ (Mozaffri, 2005: 37). Conflicts in ‘Chechnya, Iraq (in the period after the US-led invasion in 2003), Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Mali and others’ helped to attract jihadist foreign fighters (Bakker & Zuijdewijn, 2015: 2). Bin Laden also exploited the existence of global injustices through claiming that AQ was fighting global injustices against Muslims, and this further strengthened and combined religion with political motivation to advance the political cause of pursuing jihad, and pursuing justice (Sadiki, 2002). For example, following the Madrid bombings in March 2004, an AQ statement read, ‘if you don’t stop your injustices, more and more blood will flow and these attacks will seem very small compared to what can occur in what you call terrorism’ (Al-Qaeda, 2004). It could be argued that because the idea of achieving justice via war was successful in ousting the Soviet Union, bin Laden then continued to use injustice to mobilize troops and facilitate recruitment.

The Afghan war and the coalition used the concept of godlessness to create a religious binary and this was a powerful ideology because it exploited individuals’ religious sentiments to gain political motivation. They also portrayed terrorism and therefore violence as a legitimate way to counter the threat of godlessness, and the Soviet threat to the existence of religion and Islam. In uniting these concepts, jihad became associated with armed conflict (Alexiev, 2004) and Muslims were radicalized to believe that it is their ‘religious and moral obligation to wage Jihad against kafir or non-believers’ (Githens-Mazer, 2010: 5). Therefore, state practices which facilitated terrorism included creating the economic conditions for terrorism, supplying arms for terrorism, creating an ideology that incorporated religion and politics, the educational institutionalization of jihadist ideologies, use of ideologies to facilitate recruitment into the Mujahideen and the use of terrorism to counter ideologies such as godlessness. Prior to discussing the continuation of these state-instigated factors in the ‘war on terror’, it is worth noting that whereas during the Afghan war, states controlled the use of these ideology, weapons and finances, following the war, states were no longer able to control these entities and especially the use of the jihadist ideology.

The war and post-war conditions fed into the micro-individual-emotional level through, impacting trauma and other psychological disorders (Shaw, 1986; Speckhard & Akhmedova, 2005; Weenink, 2015), powerlessness (Boyns & Ballard, 2004; Henderson-King, Henderson-King, Bolea, Koches, & Kauffman, 2004; Lemu, 2016; Speckhard & Akhmedova, 2005); promoting a

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