Introduction

Keywords:

• Caliphate
• insurgencies
• Iraq
• ISIL
• national liberation
• Quran
• Syria
• ummah

This special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies examines the phenomenon of jihadist insurgencies. It explores the strategic, political, and ideological significance of some of these movements operating in the Middle East and North and West Africa. These movements have become an increasingly important part of modern irregular warfare though they are by no means new on the international political landscape. They are termed ‘jihadist’ insurgent movements though not all are attached solely to waging guerrilla warfare. Some have evolved quite a larger military repertoire encompassing terrorism, suicide bombing, and assassination; in some parts of the Middle East and Libya, the huge supply of weaponry has led to conflict escalating almost to the level of a conventional small war, involving artillery, air strikes, trench warfare, and bitter urban battles.

The two key dimensions of this insurgency are terrorism and guerrilla warfare. As some articles in this issue point out, the two tactics are employed in different ways by different jihadist movements. Sergei Boeke, for instance (in an analysis that employs the analytical framework of Duyvesteyn and Fumerton) points out that terrorism and guerrilla warfare are essentially two different military strategies: terrorism is pivoted around generating a response in order to achieve a political effect, while guerrilla warfare is orientated towards the control of territory, population, and resources in order to wage a longer term war that might, in Maoist terms, escalate eventually to the conventional level.¹ What looks strategic at one level, though, might be viewed as tactical at another. Terrorism and guerrilla warfare may be less strategic than tactical when seen in terms of a longer term strategy of winning political power or establishing control over a state that will necessitate the development of other strategies including the development of a shadow state ready to take over power at the centre.

Leaving aside the issue of tactics versus strategy, it is clear that these essential differences between terrorism and guerrilla warfare impact on the way the movements are formed. Movements that are essentially terrorist in nature tend to be small and secretive conspiracies operating through underground networks; guerrilla movements, on the other hand, tend to evolve into more formal political entities, such as political parties and bureaucracies, that emulate the state structure they seek to defeat. For guerrillas, the support of the population is critical as a base of support and for potential new recruits; for terrorist organisations this is less the case, especially if enough new recruits can be found from outside the territory where the organisation functions.

These differences are never really absolute and jihadist insurgencies, like other insurgencies before them, have adopted a mix of tactics. Adapting to differing regional and political situations has been crucial in enabling many of these movements to become increasingly important actors in conflicts throughout the Islamic world. Even before the emergence of ISIL, for instance, many of the movements that were associated with al Qaeda referred to themselves as operating within a particular ‘field of jihad’ or fi sahat al-jihad. This meant that they were anchored in a particular region such as Somalia, Pakistan, or Iraq and were orientated towards a more specific set of short- to medium-term goals in that region. This would also be the case with Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, which started out as being a rather secretive underground-type terrorist organisation but would evolve over time into becoming an important guerrilla movement in the Syrian civil war.

While only a few years ago, it is quite likely that future historians will look at the period between 2011 and the proclamation of a caliphate by ISIL in Mosul in June 2014 as a defining watershed in global politics. In the years before 2011 there had certainly been a variety of insurgencies proclaiming jihad: numerous movements of varying size and scale surfaced in terrains ranging from Kashmir and Afghanistan to Somalia and Yemen, exhibiting different lifespans and capacities to attract international attention. Some, like the movement led by Mohammed Farah Aideed in Mogadishu, briefly gained global interest following the confrontation with US peacekeepers in 1993 before lapsing into an obscurity alleviated only by continued interest in the film Black Hawk Down.

On the whole, jihadist movements have tended, until recently at least, to be quite localised even if the conflicts in which they were engaged (such as Jammu Kashmir) spanned several decades. It was ‘global terrorism’ rather than jihadist insurgencies per se which dominated much strategic debate in the decade after 9/11, though some analysts have suggested that this new type of terrorism had the capacity to turn itself into a ‘global insurgency’. Al Qaeda (AQ), under its leaders Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, appeared to be the main radicalising force among disaffected Islamic youth across the globe rather than any specific guerrilla movement, even though AQ fostered a number of regional insurgent affiliates such as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQIP), and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) over which it tried to maintain some form of central control.

All this changed substantially with the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011, a year in which Bina Laden himself was also killed in a raid on his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan by US Navy Seals. For the first time the whole pattern of the American-dominated order in the Middle East came under serious challenge at a time when the administration in Washington displayed a strong commitment to withdraw, as far as circumstances allowed, from future military engagements.² The challenge thrown up to traditionally authoritarian Arab regimes by the youthful and media-savvy democratic movements of the Arab Spring proved, though, to be short-lived, beyond the one surviving example of a multi-party regime in Tunisia. The Arab regimes mobilised, in several cases, a brutal response and crackdown, exemplifying what Jean Pierre Filiu has termed the power of a widespread ‘deep state’ in the Arab world, rooted in a long tradition of the ruthless exertion of power by loyal Mamelukes in the Ottoman empire.³ The thesis, while compelling, has only limited explanatory for certain regimes, such as Kemalist Turkey, Egypt, and perhaps the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria.⁴ The Libyan regime of Qaddafi proved only too fissiparous and it is hard to find there much evidence for a ‘deep state’, a concept which is also prone to the charge that it largely reduces history to being dominated by hidden conspiracies. The same applies to other states on the periphery of the Arab world, such as the relatively weak post-colonial state of Yemen, and the concept needs to be developed into a far more focused attention on the inner workings of particular states and their respective military and intelligence organisations.

In any case, in both Iraq and Syria the workings of the ‘deep state’ need to be seen alongside regional and global factors that have led local civil wars escalating into wider proxy wars and an increasingly permissive regional environment for violent forms of jihadist insurgency to flourish. What Filiu has termed the ‘Arab Counter Revolution’ was by no means united and monolithic, reminiscent of the ‘Holy Alliance’ of reactionary states organised by Russia in the wake of the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. Rival regimes in the Middle East ended up supporting and funding either the state or oppositional insurgent movements in both the Iraqi and Syrian conflicts, illustrating all too clearly that the region has become, as Alex Marshall recently pointed out in an introduction to a special issue on proxy wars in Small Wars and Insurgencies, ‘the most obvious current cauldron of proxy conflict’.⁵ Indeed, the integration of rival insurgent movements as well as the state itself in both the Iraq and Syrian conflicts have hampered the chances for any easy diplomatic resolution to a conflict that, in the Syrian case, has destroyed large parts of civil society and created a huge exodus of refugees to Europe.

These issues will be explored in some of the articles in this issue. At this stage, it is important to examine what is exactly meant by the term ‘jihadist insurgency’ and its links to Islamic religious belief before we locate the term in the wider literature on guerrilla warfare and small wars.

What do we mean by a jihadist insurgency?

The jihadist ideology that drives ‘jihadist insurgent’ movements is a heavily contested one. As a concept ‘jihad’ has its foundations in the Quran and a long history in the Arab world and Islamic societies generally. This history has provided a series of sacred concepts, personages, lessons, and images that amounts to nothing less than a providential history that contemporary jihadist ideologists draw on to justify current political agendas. There is thus an interesting dialogue between the present and the past in the Islamic world, though we would be loath to describe this as amounting to anything resembling a ‘reformation’ comparable to that in European Christendom. This idea, fondly held by some Western liberals, is pivoted around the idea that there needs to be a clean separation between Church and state in the Islamic world as occurred in Europe. However, this rather overlooks the break between religion and politics in most of the Islamic world outside Shi’ite interpretations of Islamic belief. Islam never had, in the Sunni world at least, any formal religious hierarchy, and the caliph, who has been opportunistically resurrected by ISIL, was first and foremost a prince rather than a pope, capable of building mosques but never acting as any source of religious authority.⁶

Generally speaking, jihadist insurgents seek to displace the established political power in a certain space and, to this degree at least, share at some of the features of former of guerrilla insurgencies that emerged after 1945 in colonial territories seeking ‘national liberation’ from European colonial rule. The national liberationist guerrillas in such former colonies as Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe were usually more nationalist than liberationist. Most, too, in the decades following their attainment of political power, adjusted quite rapidly to the international system. Mozambique, for instance, under its FRELIMO regime, ended up receiving loans from the International Monetary Fund within a few years of liberation. Others have tilted towards the West in the context of new patterns of regional power politics or maintained an uneasy independence such as Zimbabwe, though even here the currency eventually adopted was the US dollar.

Jihadist insurgent movements seem rather more ideologically zealous compared to the earlier secular national liberation models. They tend to be organised and led by figures who have, in many instances, learned a puritanical and Salafist interpretation of Islam through a variety of means including prison, the mosque, the university, the madrassa, and modern social media. This is, though, not true of all their leaders, who may, in some cases, come from a more conventional military background such as the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein in the case of ISIL. Modern jihadist insurgencies are typically fighting to bring about a single, global system based on particular interpretations of Islam. They are heavily shaped by ‘religious’ ideology in the form of a highly politicised set of readings of Islamic sacred texts. This ‘Islamic’ ideology has become the key glue that binds these insurgent movements together, providing as it does the essential moral and ethical base for the movement’s long-term aims, even if many of their recruits might have little actual knowledge of either Islam or the Quran, exemplified all too well by the apocryphal story of one group of British volunteer recruits to ISIL travelling to Syria equipped with Islam For Dummies.⁷

Jihadist insurgencies are characterised by a struggle over claims of political legitimacy. The primary objective is the overthrow of more secularly inclined states and the imposition of Islamic law in all elements of human society. In cases where the state already is guided by Islamic belief, such as Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, the aim is to overthrow the royal elite that runs the state and replace it by a revolutionary regime. The degree of commitment to sharia law depends, to some degree, upon the wider networks to which the movement is attached and the degree of ideological zealotry of its leaders. This is not an issue confined solely to Islamic insurgent movements since similar patterns of terror and the enforcement of barbaric codes of law enforcement can be observed among drug gangs in Mexico and Central and South America.⁸

Jihadist insurgent movements, nevertheless, represent a new and distinctive phase of guerrilla insurgencies that have caught analysts rather by surprise. By the end of the Cold War in 1990–1991 it seemed as though the era of guerrilla insurgencies might be coming to an end, given that the main post-war insurgent movements of national liberation had all largely achieved their aims or, as in the case of the South African transition to an ANC-led government in 1994, been bypassed by a politically negotiated transfer of power. In the immediate post-Cold War period of the 1990s the main issues seemed to be collapsing or ‘failed’ states such as Somalia, Sierra Leone, and Liberia with the emergence of warlord-type militias that seemed very debased forms of guerrilla insurgency given the way they were led by violent macho godfather figures employing child soldiers and girls as sex slaves. Such ‘movements’ seemed to be little more than extended criminal gangs focused on drug dealing and the trade in valuable commodities such as hardwoods and diamonds.

What we can now see as the first main impetus for the emergence of modern jihadist insurgent movements was external military intervention by great powers into the Middle East and Asia, beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as well as the revolution in Iran the same year. The latter stages of the Cold War were not characterised by a simple retreat by the superpowers from imperial-type involvement but a fillip for a new type of military and political engagement in regions that had formerly escaped major external military involvement in the years after World War II. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to the first real global awareness of jihadi guerrillas that were increasingly aided and supported by the CIA. But, in contrast to later jihadist insurgent formations in the 1990s, these were the ‘good guys’ as far as the Western media were concerned as well in feature films such as Rambo III and Charlie Wilson’s War. Only with the departure of the Soviet Union in 1989 did a new image of the insurgencies start to emerge. By the 1990s a more militant pattern of jihadist insurgencies began to emerge characterised by an increasing resort to terrorist activities as well as an increasingly strident anti-Western rhetoric. The disaster for US forces in Mogadishu in 1993 also suggested a new form of menacing jihadist insurgency, located in disintegrating cities in addition to remote rural terrains like Afghanistan, that would be hard to control and defeat.

Religion and guerrilla insurgencies

The centrality of religious ideology in contemporary jihadist insurgent movements suggests that far more attention needs to be paid to the role of religion in the historical understanding of guerrilla warfare and the establishment of movements that Metz has termed ‘spiritual insurgencies’.⁹ Given that a guerrilla insurgency requires the active involvement of groups of ordinary people not normally linked to formal army or military structures, it would not be surprising to find that religion and religious symbolism play a major role. The study of guerrilla insurgencies since the nineteenth century suggests that religion has frequently been a crucial force in popular mobilisation though one that it is still rather poorly understood by military analysts; religion, for instance, clearly played among the conservative Spanish peasantry drawn into the guerrilla resistance to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain between 1808 and 1814.¹⁰

Religion, after all, has traditionally provided important iconic symbols for local and communal identities in rural societies: the church, the synagogue, the mosque, or the Buddhist or Hindu temple has frequently served as a centre of local identity along with festivals, feast days, and periods of fasting. Any insurgent leadership moving into a rural area would be ill-advised to ignore the religious beliefs of peasant and farming communities living there; while in urban areas, local religious centres continue to serve as major points of community identity as well as locations for the storage of weapons and propaganda and the recruitment of new members of insurgent cells. Likewise, the language used by religious communities and groups of believers can be adapted for the formation of ideologies of revolutionary insurgency in situations of crisis and political repression; this is a dimension that has been frequently underplayed by secular, Western analysts of insurgencies, who have often preferred to focus on the frequently self-justifying writings of insurgent leaders such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, or Che Guevara. Religion, or a form of spiritual belief, it can be argued, has often formed a moral centre of gravity (COG) of a guerrilla movement and one that in turn will help define the critical capabilities essential for the COG to function. This is an observation that some political anthropologists have been making for years; as far back as 1970, for instance, the French anthropologist Georges Balandier pointed out that ‘religious conflicts are a clear expression of political struggle – which they provide with a language and means of action – in situations caused by the weakness of central power.’¹¹

It is surprising how many analysts have neglected this religious dimension of insurgency, preferring to focus on the apparently more compelling appeals of nationalism, socialism, and Marxism. General surveys of guerrilla insurgencies by Walter Laqueur, John Ellis, Max Boot, Ian Beckett, and Douglas Porch have all rather underplayed the role of religion in insurgencies.¹² This general indifference to religion is partly due to the way many guerrilla insurgencies became harnessed to Marxist movements of ‘national liberation’ in the years after 1945. The three decades from 1945 to 1975 might be said to form a sort of Procrustean bed for much subsequent analysis, acting as a historical yardstick through which to understand how most guerrilla insurgencies operate in the modern world.

The Western left also tended to see many modern guerrilla insurgencies as largely secular in orientation; they more or less accepted at face value the language of the insurgents themselves in their desire to secure a revolutionary transformation of their societies to remove the power not only of traditional landlords and capitalists but of organised religion.¹³ For the ‘new left’ in Europe and the United States it was the example of the Castroite revolution in Cuba, as much as any, that fostered a myth of guerrilla war in the late 1960s and 1970s – linked as this was for a period to the celebrity-like image of Che Guevara. Indeed, it was Cuba that especially helped to sustain the ‘guerrilla myth’ of the Western new left until it was overtaken by the harsh crackdown by a series of military regimes in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁴

In parts of the Islamic world, especially the Middle East and North Africa, jihadist insurgencies have developed in the last decade in a context of a growing crisis of statehood. The crisis effectively began with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, although well before then states such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen had already fractured. The fragility of statehood became especially evident when the invasion led to an effective collapse of the Baathist state, while the new regime put in place in Baghdad under Nuri Al Maliki proved little more than a Shi’a-dominated regime. By 2006–2007 Iraq had descended into an intensifying sectarian war, a conflict that not only has heavily destabilised Iraq but also has given rise to Islamic State or ISIL, which has proven to be a major factor in the continued instability of Iraq.

But one of the key dynamics has been the brutal response by a number of regimes to the Arab Spring that started in 2011. This was a movement for democratisation initiated by students and the educated middle class in December of that year in Tunisia. It rapidly spread to a number of other states in North Africa and the Middle East such as Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, while further civil disturbances occurred in a variety of states such as Morocco, Jordan, Oman, Mauritania, Kuwait, and Sudan. None of these uprisings led to the actual overthrow of the ruling regime apart from the ‘dignity revolution’ in Tunisia, which eventually led to the departure of the corrupt dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011. In many cases, the civil disturbances were relatively easily contained by the ruling regimes, confounding the predictions of some optimistic Western news reporting, such as that of the BBC, that Tunisia was the ‘Arab Gdansk’ and the start of something resembling the ‘velvet revolutions’ in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s.¹⁵

The misreading in the West of the Arab Spring was partly due to the way that the imagined ‘revolution’ was transmitted globally in real time by social media, making it a fashionable example of modern civil action producing a new kind of popular politics. Its favourable reporting in the Western media can, with hindsight, be seen, largely as wishful thinking driven by a remarkable lack of understanding of the relatively narrow social base of the young would-be revolutionaries, whose adroit use of social media disguised the fact that they had weak political roots within many of the societies from which they came. This became starkly exemplified by the draconian response by the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria to Arab Spring demonstrations in Damascus in the spring of 2012; the conflict rapidly descended into sectarian civil war between a regime narrowly based around Alawites, Christians, and other minorities (along with small numbers of Sunnis) and the Sunni majority.

The rapid pace of events that devastated large parts of Syria over the next five years was impelled not only by a festering series of internal dynamics but external intervention by a series of powers including Iran, Turkey, and Russia that has transformed the war into a proxy war with the potential to run for many years. Leaving aside the complicated diplomatic process necessary to secure viable peace negotiations between a range of warring parties, the Syrian civil war has further eroded conventional forms of statehood in the Middle East. By August 2015 the Syrian government was estimated to control no more than 16% of the country’s population, though since then its position has been partially strengthened by the brief intervention of Russia, the long-standing patron of the Baathist regime in Damascus.

The fracturing of Syria in the wake of the sectarian disintegration of Iraq between 2003 and 2011 has produced a situation almost unimaginable at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Perhaps, historians in years to come will conclude that this was the final phase of Western imperial thinking about the ‘Middle East’ (a term only invented in the early twentieth century by strategic writer Alfred Thayer Mahan) that underpinned the Versailles Peace Settlement of 1919. The Settlement constructed a number of new states out of the carcass of the Ottoman empire, whose demise has remained poorly understood until relatively recently by historians compared to the collapse of the other three great empires at the end of World War I – Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. It was out of the areas of former Ottoman control that a number of newly invented states were forged, such as Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (most of the latter forming after 1948 the state of Israel). None of these states had any real traditions behind them or a clear sense of identity. Several insurgent movements thus started out as local and tribal revolts against the power of the central state. It is only in more recent years that a number have become transformed into ideologically coherent jihadist insurgencies under the control, in many cases, of Salafist zealots, as some of the articles in this issue indicate – though it should be pointed out that other jihadist insurgencies emerged among Shi’as such as the Sadrist movement in Iraq led by Muqtada al-Sadr.

Studying such movements emphasises the importance of religious ideology in insurgent movements. The ultimate objective of many jihadist insurgencies is the full implementation of Islamic law on a regional if not global basis. Such beliefs are anchored in myths of single Islamic ummah, or community; they are not going to disappear even if some of the current jihadist insurgent movements such as ISIL or al-Nusra are defeated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Duyvesteyn and Fumerton, ‘Insurgency and Terrorism’; Lister, The Syrian Jihad, 59–60.

2. Lynch, The New Arab Wars, 19 and passim.

3. Filiu, From Deep State to Islamic State, 47–8.

4. See the critical review of Filiu’s book by Hugh Roberts, ‘The Hijackers’, London Review of Books, 16 July 2015.

5. Marshall, ‘From Civil War to Proxy War’, 183.

6. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, 147.

7. Martin Robertson, ‘British terrorists from Birmingham bought “Islam for Dummies” book before traveling to Syria to join rebel fighters in Jihad’, Daily Mail, 8 July 2014.

8. See for instance, Sullivan and Bunker, ‘Rethinking Insurgency’.

9. Metz, ‘The Future of Insurgency’.

10. The Spanish guerrillas fighting against Napoleon’s armies before 1814 were largely Catholic-inspired rightists who would fight as reactionaries in later civil wars of 1820–1823 and 1830. See Lawrence, ‘Poachers Turned Gamekeepers’. See also Chartrand et al., Spanish Guerrillas.

11. Balandier, Political Anthropology, 121.

12. Laqueur, Guerrilla; Ellis, From the Barrel of a Gun; Boot, Invisible Armies; Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies; Porch, Wars of Empire. Laqueur discusses the guerrilla insurgencies in Poland and Italy, though one would have thought that the centrality of the Catholic Church in both societies would have led at least to some discussion of religion (Laqueur Guerrilla, 132). Beckett acknowledges the role of the Catholic Church to have been of some importance in the Spanish and Polish revolts in the nineteenth century as well as the Tyrolean revolt under Andreas Hofer and the revolt of the Kingdom of Naples between 1806 and 1811, though in the latter instance Beckett considers that religion amounted to little more than banditry (Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, 6–7). Porch emphasised the centrality of ‘national liberation’ in the history of guerrilla insurgencies, erecting in the process a sort of radical Whig view of history by which to judge their growth and development.

13. Miller and Aya, National Liberation.

14. Bell, The Myth of the Guerrilla.

15. BBC News, 15 January 2011.