A Fifth Wave of Terrorism? The Emergence of Terrorist Semi-States

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Rapoport’s four waves thesis, this study asks whether the emergence of terrorist semi-states (TSS) in the 21st-century MENA region and Pakistan mean that we are seeing the beginning of a new (fifth) wave. We define a TSS as a rebel group that a) has control over portions of a weak state’s territory, maintaining governance there; b) but still launches terrorist attacks against third-party states. To be considered a fifth wave, the new terrorism phenomenon at hand must both fit Rapoport’s criteria of a wave (be global, have the same driving force) and also be significantly different from the prior wave. Clearly, the TSSs are different from the religious terror groups of the fourth wave in key respects: they prioritize territorial control, they engage in a much wider array of governance activities (not just social services), most of their victims have been members of the same religion—namely, Muslims (which suggests that they are driven more by the pursuit of power than by Jihad); and finally, their behavior (though not their statements) shows they have a local rather than a universal agenda. The main counter-argument is that TSSs are all Islamic and have so far not been exported globally.

KEYWORDS:

• terrorism
• insurgency
• diffusion
• statehood
• terror waves

Notes

1. David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” in Attacking Terrorism, edited by Audrey Kurth Cronin and James Ludes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 47.

2. Ibid., 46–47.

3. This definition is different in three ways from the way that Brynjar Lia defines contemporary “jihadi proto-states”—namely, jihadi insurgents who announced the formation of “Islamic states” or “emirates.” First, not all the TSSs made announcements about the formation of an Islamic state (Hamas, Hezbollah). Second, our definition only refers to organizations that maintain permanent control over a defined territory, and provide state-like public services. Therefore, organizations like Al-Qaeda, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (which operates in the Sinai Peninsula), which fall under Lia’s definition, are not considered TSSs. Third, our definition of TSS includes only organizations that attack other countries besides the failed state. Therefore, some of the Jihadist movements that appear in Lia’s study are excluded from this one, like the Caucasus Emirate (only operates in Russia) and al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (operated in the 1990s in Egypt). Brynjar Lia, “Understanding Jihadi Proto-States,” Perspective on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015): 31–41.

4. Brian P. Fleming, The Hybrid Threat Concept (Fort Leavenworth, KN: United States Army Command and General Staff College, 2011): 2.

5. Brynjar Lia, “Understanding Jihadi Proto-States” (see note 2 above).

6. This latter claim is harder to prove. However, we do know that the dwindling financial resources of Fatah were an important reason why many Gazans chose instead to join Hamas in the early 1990s prior to the Oslo peace process.

7. Sudarsan Raghavan and William Booth, “Israel, Hamas and Egypt Form Unlikely Alliance against Islamic State Affiliate,” The Washington Post, April 30, 2016; Dean Nelson and Saeed Shah, “Taliban Creating ‘Safe Haven’ In Heart of Pakistan,” The Telegraph, April 23, 2009.

8. Stephanie Busari, “Boko Haram Sought Terror Training in Somalia,” CNN, February 26, 2016; Michal Rothenberg, “A Hostile Cooperation,” Davar Rishon, August 17, 2016 (Hebrew).

9. Martha Crenshaw, Lecture to Annual ICT conference.

10. Because the lone wolf phenomenon in the 21st century is so closely associated with (and even potentially dependent on) the TSS phenomenon, we hold that our thesis about the TSS phenomenon should be regarded as the main characteristic of the fifth wave. This is contrary to the claim of Jeffrey Simon that the non-ideological technological lone wolf operator phenomenon deserves to be seen as the central hallmark of the fifth wave. See Jeffrey D. Simon, “Technological and Lone Operator Terrorism: Prospects for a Fifth Wave of Global Terrorism,” in Terrorism, Identity and Legitimacy, edited by Jean E. Rosenfeld (New York: Routledge, 2011), 44–65.

11. Henry A. Kissinger, “After Lebanon,” Washington Post, September 13, 2006.

12. In most TSSs there are separate morality police agencies tasked with enforcing the Islamic code of conduct in public (just like the Iranian “Guidance Patrols” Gasht-e Ershad) and with censoring books.

13. Attacking the TPVS often generates for these TSSs an image of strength which appeals to the marginalized youths who come to fight for these TSSs (ISIS, JN, and Boko Haram are prime examples).

14. Fleming, The Hybrid Threat Concept (see note 4 above), 2.

15. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

16. Fabrice Balanche, “Rojava’s Sustainability and the PKK’s Regional Strategy,” The Washington Institute, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/rojavas-sustainability-and-the-pkks-regional-strategy (accessed August 24, 2016).

17. “Syrian Kurds Open Unofficial Representative Mission in Paris,” AFP, May 24, 2016.

18. Sardar Mlla Drwish, “Why Syria’s Kurds Are Cooperating with Russia,” Al-Monitor, June 22, 2016.

19. Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918–1921) (Chicago, IL: Solidarity, 1974).

20. Alfredo Molano,”The Evolution of the FARC: A Guerrilla Group’s Long History,” NACLA Report on the Americas 34, no. 2 (2000): 23–31.

21. Since Hezbollah is gradually increasing its control over the state institutions of Lebanon, especially since the 2006 Second Lebanon War, one can argue that Hezbollah is in the process of becoming closer to the Taliban Model of fully controlling a weak state.

22. It is possible that the failure of the Fatah TSS dissuaded other organizations from following its lead and creating these kinds of entities during the 1980s.

23. Sebastian Salek, “Nairobi Attack: Hostages Remain Trapped Inside Shopping Centre as Al-Shabaab Claim Responsibility for Deadly Assault,” The Independent, September 22, 2013.

24. “Boko Haram Fighters Kill At Least 15 in Niger Village Raid,” Reuters, September 25, 2015.

25. This is why contrary to Jeffrey Kaplan’s claim, the TSS phenomenon should be regarded as the hallmark of the fifth wave and not tribalism, a phenomenon which the TSS subsumes. See Jeffrey Kaplan, “The Fifth Wave: The New Tribalism?,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 4 (2007): 545–70.

26. “Syria War: Who Are Jabhat Fateh al-Sham?,” BBC, August 1, 2016.

27. “ISIS Claims Responsibility of Paris Attacks,” CNN, November 16, 2015.

28. Tamer El-Ghobashy, “Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Deadly Bus Attack in Tunis,” The Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2015.

29. Aron Lund, “What Is the ‘Khorasan Group’ and Why Is the U.S. Bombing It in Syria?,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 23, 2014.

30. Ahmed Alwly, “Despite Arab, US attacks, AQAP Still Holding Out in Yemen,” Al-Monitor, May 13, 2016.

31. Katherine Zimmerman, “AQAP: A Resurgent Threat,” CTC Sentinel 8, no. 9 (September 2015): 21.

32. “Yemen’s Shia Rebels Finalize Coup, Vow to Dissolve Parliament,” The Globe and Mail, February 6 2015.

33. “Yemen’s Houthis Form Own Government in Sanaa,” Aljazeera, February 7, 2015.

34. Karl Vick, “Al-Qaeda Group Claims Responsibility for Paris Terror Attack,” Time, January 9. 2015.

35. Mohammed Al-Sulami, “Houthi Terror Poses Threat to Global Shipping,” Arab News, October 3, 2016.

36. Karl Kaltenthaler and William Miller, “Ethnicity, Islam, and Pakistani Public Opinion toward the Pakistani Taliban,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 11 (2015): 938–9.

37. Kathleen Hennessey, “N.Y. Bomber Has Al Qaeda Tie,” The San Francisco Chronicle, August 10, 2010.

38. Assaf Moghadam, “Motives for Martyrdom: Al-Qaida, Salafi Jihad, and the Spread of Suicide Attacks,” International Security 33, no. 3 (2009): 46–78.

39. Shlomi Eldar, To Know Hamas (Jerusalem: Keter, 2012), 183–7 (Hebrew).

40. John Hannah, “Saudi Arabia Strikes Back,” Foreign Policy, August 16, 2016; Saeid Jafari, “Why Iran and Saudi Arabia Will Jaw-Jaw but Not War-War,” Al-Monitor, September 21, 2016.

41. Paul Mcleray, “Turkey, Iraq Edging Closer to Confrontation Ahead of Battle for Mosul,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2016; Mona Alami, “What Is Turkey Up To in Northern Syria?,” Al-Monitor, November 1, 2016.

42. Patrick Cockburn, “We Finally Know What Hillary Clinton Knew All Along—US Allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar are Funding ISIS,” The Independent, October 14, 2016.

43. “ISIS, Oil & Turkey: What RT Found in Syrian Town Liberated from Jihadists by Kurds,” RT, March 24, 2016; Michael M. Gunter, “Iraq, Syria, ISIS and the Kurds: Geostrategic Concerns for the U.S. and Turkey,” Middle East Policy, Vol. XXII, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 103.

44. Kim Sengupta, “Turkey and Saudi Arabia Alarm the West by Backing Islamist Extremists the Americans Had Bombed in Syria,” The Independent, May 12, 2015.

45. Jürgen Todenhöfer, “Interview with Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda) Commander in Syria,” Global Research, September 27, 2016.

46. Yoni Ben-Menachem, “Hamas New Base in Turkey,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, December 28, 2014 (Hebrew); Gallia Lindenstrauss and Süfyan Kadir Kıvam, “Turkish-Hamas Relations: Between Strategic Calculations and Ideological Affinity,” INSS: Strategic Assessment 17, no. 2 (July 2014): 4–8.

47. Scott Anderson, “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” The New York Times, August 10, 2016.

48. Marc Ambinder, ”How the CIA Really Caught Bin Laden’s Trail,” The Week, April 29, 2013.

49. Hassan Abbas, “A Profile of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan,” CTC Sentinel 1, no. 2 (January 2008): 1–4.

50. Oded Eran and Yoel Guzansky, “Political Islam on the Defensive,” INSS Insight, No. 530, March 20, 2014.

51. Monica Toft, “Getting Religion? The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War,” International Security 31, no. 4 (Spring 2007): 97–131.

52. Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, “Haji Bakr: Former Saddam Hussein Spy Is Mastermind behind Isis Takeover of Northern Syria and Push Into Iraq,” Independent, April 20, 2015.

53. Christoph Reuter, “Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State,” Der Spiegel, April 18, 2015.

54. Jan Sändig, “Framing Protest and Insurgency: Boko Haram and MASSOB in Nigeria,” Civil Wars 17, no. 2 (2015): 148.

55. “24 Reasons ISIS Are Wrong: Muslim Scholars Blast Islamic State,” RT, September 25, 2014.

56. Carla Power, “5 Reasons Boko Haram Is Un-Islamic,” Time, May 15, 2014.

57. Dean Obeidallah, “The Boko Haram Terrorists Are Not ‘Islamic,’” The Daily Beast, December 5, 2014.

58. Power, Time 2014 (see note 56 above).

59. Anderson, The New York Times 2016 (see note 47 above).

60. Global Terrorism Database (GTD), December 10, 2016. https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?charttype=pie&chart=attack&casualties_type=&casualties_max=&perpetrator=20029, https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?charttype=bar&chart=attack&casualties_type=&casualties_max=&perpetrator=40151

61. Ibid.

62. “Boko Haram Attacks with Children ‘Suicide Bombers,’” Al-Jazeera, April 12, 2016; “Boko Haram Widely Deploying Female Suicide Bombers,” The Clarion Project, December 15, 2014. http://www.clarionproject.org/news/boko-haram-widely-deploying-female-suicide-bombers

63. GTD, https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?charttype=pie&chart=attack&casualties_type=&casualties_max=&perpetrator=20036, https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?charttype=pie&chart=attack&casualties_type=&casualties_max=&perpetrator=30101

64. “Suicide and Other Bombing Attacks in Israel Since the Declaration of Principles (Sept 1993),” Israel MFA, December 10, 2016. http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/terrorism/palestinian/pages/suicide%20and%20other%20bombing%20attacks%20in%20israel%20since.aspx; Sean Yom and Basel Saleh, “Palestinian Suicide Bombers: A Statistical Analysis,” 2004.

65. Martin Kramer, “Sacrifice and ‘Self-Martyrdom’ in Shi’ite Lebanon,” Terrorism and Political Violence 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 30–47; Dov Gilhar, “Leader Among Equals: the First Druze Battalion Commander in Golani Who Fell in Lebanon”, Walla, May 11, 2016. (Hebrew). http://news.walla.co.il/item/2960368

66. Cnaan Lipshitz, “Bulgaria Reveals New Evidence on Hezbollah-Burgas Link,” The Times of Israel, June 20, 2013.

67. Tom Batchelor, “ISIS Imposes ‘Infidel Tax’ on Non-Muslims in Crackdown against Christians,” The Express, February 11, 2016.

68. Elhanan Miller, “In Al-Nusra Front’s Syria, No Room for Religious Minorities,” The Times of Israel, May 29, 2015.

69. Cheryl K. Chumley, “Boko Haram Slaughters 20 Over Nonpayment of Islamist Tax,” The Washington Times, May 27, 2014.

70. Tim Daiss, “Why Islamic State’s (ISIS) Oil Revenue Is Plunging,” Forbes, August 26, 2016; Fazel Hawramy, Shalaw Mohammed, and Luke Harding, “Inside Islamic State’s Oil Empire,” The Guardian, November 19, 2014.

71. Fiona Rose-Greenland, “How Much Money Has ISIS Made Selling Antiquities?,” The Washington Post, June 3, 2016.

72. Farouq al-Kamali, “Houthis ‘Took’ $107 Million from Yemen Bank,” The New Arab, April 29, 2015.

73. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism” (see note 1 above), 63.

74. Jim Michaels, “New U.S. Intelligence Estimate Sees 20-25K ISIL Fighters,” USA Today, February 6, 2016; Jim Sciutto, Jamie Crawford, and Chelsea J. Carter, “ISIS Can ‘Muster’ between 20,000 and 31,500 Fighters,” CNN, September 12, 2014.

75. Perry Chiaramonte, “Jihadist Groups across Globe Vying for Terror Spotlight,” Fox News, July 10, 2014.

76. Lihi Ben Shitrit, Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 71.

77. “Who Are Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamist Group?,” BBC News, November 24, 2016; “Boko Haram at a Glance,” Amnesty International, January 29, 2015.

78. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism” (see note 1 above), 63.

79. This is why Nazism also largely died with the defeat of Nazi Germany.

80. Adam Hoffman, “Jihadi Soft Power: The Changing Importance of Da‘wa in Salafi-Jihadi Discourse since the Arab Uprisings,” in Forthcoming in Da’wa: Preaching Islam in the Modern World, I. Weismann and J. Malik, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016), 23–24.

81. Some fourth wave terrorist groups had effective control over certain ungoverned territories, like Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; but they nonetheless did not govern this territory in a state-like form. Al-Qaeda, for example, functioned like a venture capital firm—providing funding, contacts, and expert advice to many different militant groups and individuals from all over the Islamic world, but showed no interest in taking the governance work from the then Afghan rulers, the Taliban.

82. This claim is contrary to the one made by Brynjar Lia, who argued that these new entities often acted aggressively and provocatively vis-à-vis the outside world. For more, see Brynjar Lia, “Understanding Jihadi Proto-States,” Perspective on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015).