At age 80, a vet and retired professor of history, I was drawn to studying terrorism by 9/11 and more recently the Trump administration’s warning about Muslims who come as immigrants and “seek to do us harm.”
The warning is believable because of actual attacks, 9/11 being the most destructive and embedded in our national memory, as the nation accepted the need for a war on terrorism. The spectra of war, weapons of mass destruction and the fear of an attack out the blue at any time poisoned our collective psyche. Frustratingly, there seems to be no exit from the war. The phase in Afghanistan, initially against the Taliban, is now almost two decades old, with no end in sight. Although Osama bin Laden is dead, his al-Qaida franchise lives on. The ISIS caliphate in northern Iraq fell, yet followers survived and attract new recruits.
So, as citizens, what is to be done? I suggest that the first step is to understand the “enemy,” and I recommend Louise Richardson’s 2006 book, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat. In her analysis, al-Qaida was motivated by three key goals: revenge, renown and reaction from their enemy. They want revenge for perceived slight by the West of Islam’s contributions to world civilizations; the presence of infidels on holy ground incensed by American bases in Saudi Arabia; and U.S. support for Israel and indifference toward the Palestinians.
As for the second objective, renown, al-Qaida and ISIS craved publicity and thrived on the huge amounts of media coverage of everything from their success in unconventional warfare to brutal public executions.
The terrorists have been wildly successful, as well, in getting a reaction from the West, especially from our country. In view of almost two decades of war, two trillion dollars expended, countless lives lost and urban centers destroyed, one might conclude that the West’s reaction and the cost undoubtedly have far exceeded the terrorists’ wildest dreams.
My second recommendation is Peter Berger’s book, The United States of Jihad (2016). The ISIS threat, he finds, is real but not a danger to our existence. For perspective, since 2001, jihadist terrorists in the U.S. have killed 45 Americans. By contrast, in the same time, far-right extremists, in acts of political violence, killed 48 Americans. Following 9/11, an American was 5,000 times more likely to be killed by a fellow citizen with a gun than by a jihadist.
Berger’s profile of a jihadist may surprise you as it did me. They are not impoverished Muslims driven to radicalism. Berger found that the 330 persons in America who became militants after 9/11 had an average age of 29, a third were married with children, and were as well educated and emotionally stable as the typical citizen. They were, in short, ordinary Americans.
The factors in their radicalization match those outlined by Richardson and include, in addition, an idealistic desire to correct perceived wrongs against Muslims, a wish for martyrdom and alienation from family. They responded to appeals on the internet that gave them a religious cause greater than themselves.
We have, Berger concludes, “a persistent low-level threat that will take many, many years before it withers and dies. . . . In the meantime, understanding, mutual respect and open dialogue seems a good way to move forward.”
Lastly, I recommend Souad Mekhennet’s memoir I Was Asked to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad (2017). In it I find a personal, intimate report on terrorists.
The author, now in her late 30s, has a distinguished career of investigative reporting from Germany. Mekhennet grew up in Frankfurt in a nontraditional Muslim home and became proficient in German as well as classical and Moroccan Arabic, French and English. She also had the skills and bravery needed to get “behind the lines of jihad” for interviews with its top leaders.
She relates her progression from one reporting opportunity to the next, starting in 2001 with an investigation of the “Hamburg cell” of the 9/11 attack – a group of radical Islamists who came to be key operatives in 9/11. At the heart of her inquiry is the general question, Why do they hate us? And the specific question, Why have young men (and some women) dedicated themselves to terrorism?
In many interviews over two decades in many countries with many jihadist figures, Mekhennet found, as Richardson had, that revenge was the major driving sentiment. They had a long litany of grievances about what Americans and Israelis had done to Muslims over the years, especially the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and French Muslims wanted revenge for the humiliations and treatment as inferiors they experienced in French suburban high-rises. Idealistic, religious late teens and young adults proved susceptible to propaganda that trumpeted those grievances and called for revenge. ISIS became a “party of youth,” as had National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s.
Mekhennet’s story is also a thriller, related in fast-moving, accessible prose in chapters devoted to specific years and places. She had greatest success in 2014. A masked ISIS executioner, known as “Jihadi John,” had shocked the Western world with recordings of his beheading of prisoners. Mekhennet set out to discover his name. Through rigorous research and tenacious sleuthing, she tracked him down and unmasked him. “I wanted,” she wrote, “to send a message to Jihadi John and others like him: We will tell the world who you are and stop you from spreading fear – and a Muslim journalist, a woman, has the power to do that.”
Mekhennet’s memoir is a compelling read, not only in narrating her assignments and highlighting the power of investigative reporting but for the many details that help answer the perennial question, Why do the Muslims hate us?
I believe Mekhennet’s insights are important going forward. The defeat of the ISIS caliphate in northern Iraq is not the end of the jihad movement. The anger that Mekhennet found remains, festering below the surface. Berger’s call for “understanding, mutual respect and open dialogue” is a sound answer to my question: As citizens, what are we to do?
(Kent Hackmann lives in Andover.)