Jason Burke
The Guardian / July 19, 2024
Officials and analysts warn of evidence of increased Islamic State and Al-Qaida militant activity across Middle East.
Security services across the Middle East fear the conflict in Gaza will allow Islamic State (IS) and Al-Qaida to rebuild across the region, leading to a wave of terrorist plots in coming months and years.
Officials and analysts say there is already evidence of increased Islamic militant extremism in many places, although multiple factors are combining to cause the surge.
In recent months, an IS branch in the Sinai desert has become more lethal, rising attacks by the group in Syria have caused concern, and plots in Jordan have been thwarted.
Turkey made dozens of arrests last month as authorities sought to combat an increased threat from an IS affiliate with a strong presence there, and Al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen (Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP) has made a concerted new effort to inspire followers to strike western, Israeli, Jewish and other targets.
Analysts and officials say the new activity is linked to the bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas, though widespread economic crisis, instability and continuing civil conflict are also playing an important role.
“Gaza is a source feeding terrorism and radicalization across the Islamic world. There is a strong emotional reaction,” one informed regional source said. “We are just beginning to feel the heat.”
Tricia Bacon, a terrorism expert at the American University in Washington DC and a former US state department analyst, described the Gaza war as “a seminal cause that will radicalize the next generation of jihadis”.
“We may not see it immediately but we certainly will over the years to come. It has really heightened the terrorism threat,” she said.
The United Nations has published a series of reports drawing attention to efforts by major extremist groups to exploit the war in Gaza to attract new recruits and mobilize existing supporters – despite both Al-Qaida and IS repeatedly condemning Hamas as “apostates” for decades.
In February, a UN report, drawing on contributions from intelligence agencies around the world, warned that at least one major Al-Qaida affiliate was planning ambitious operations in the Middle East and elsewhere, and had “significantly reinvigorated its media strategy and content, capitalizing on international events including … the 7 October attacks to incite lone actors globally”.
Regional officials underlined the effect of months of exposure, 24 hours a day, to images of suffering from Gaza on television and the internet, describing the conflict as a “push factor” encouraging extremist violence across the Middle East and elsewhere.
Mohammad Abu Rumman, an expert in jihadism at the Politics and Society institute in Amman, Jordan, said the region was facing a new wave of radicalization “because of what is happening in Gaza”.
“This is a huge event and Arab countries are refusing to do anything and there is strong disappointment,” he said.
More than 38,000 people have died in the Israeli offensive launched into Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials. About half of those who have been fully identified are women and children. The offensive came after the attacks by Hamas into southern Israel in October in which militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 250 people.
In Iraq, where IS launched its caliphate in 2014, the threat of violent Islamic militancy appears contained but in Syria, it has launched more than 100 attacks on government forces and Kurdish-led fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) over the past months, with violence peaking in March at levels not seen for several years.
“Daesh [IS] terrorist cells continue in their terrorist operations,” a SDF spokesman, Siamand Ali, said. “They are present on the ground and are working at levels higher than those of previous years.”
In one recent attack, seven Syrian soldiers died after being ambushed by IS in Raqqa province, in northern Syria, with 383 fighters from government forces and their proxy militias now killed since the beginning of the year, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Last month Jordanian security services were alerted to a plot in the country’s capital, Amman, when explosives detonated while being prepared by extremists in a poor neighbourhood of the city. Subsequent raids led to the detention of a network of predominantly young men apparently radicalized by IS propaganda.
Katrina Sammour, an independent analyst in Amman, said Islamic extremist groups were flooding the internet with material, including instructions for bomb-making. “They are capitalizing on the anger in Jordan. It is mainly leaderless, but part of an attempt to destabilize the government, the leadership, the state,” she said.
Social and economic conditions in Jordan also play a role. Rumman said: “There is much precarity, a feeling that there is no political hope, very high inflation and a very high rate of youth unemployment. All this is very dangerous.”
The UN report described how “public communications by [IS] … since 7 October” had been focused on “capitalizing on the situation in Gaza to mobilize potential lone actors to commit attacks”.
The media strategies followed by IS and Al-Qaida differ, underlining continuing disagreement over priorities. IS has remained true to its belief that local regimes should be targeted first, while Al-Qaida’s rhetoric still stresses a more global campaign against a “far enemy”, including the US and western powers.
Israel is geographically close and the Palestinian cause – along with the “liberation” of the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem – has long been central to the propaganda of both groups, although not a direct target of their attacks. Both groups have also repeatedly called for violence against Jewish communities around the world.
The UN report warned that that Al-Qaida “could exploit the situation [in Gaza] to recover relevance and tap into popular dissent about the extent of civilian casualties, providing direction to those keen to act”.
Al-Qaida has suffered a series of setbacks over recent years, with its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed in 2022 and internal divisions over strategy.
Sammour said Al-Qaida was targeting young people. One case in Jordan had involved a high achieving 17-year-old from a well-to-do, moderate Muslim family in Amman who was recruited by extremists in just three months; another involved a 13-year-old.
“They are too young to even grow a beard. They are encouraged not to show overt signs of religiosity. It’s like grooming. There is an intent to isolate and control,” she said.
Jason Burke is the International security correspondent of The Guardian; in 25 years as a foreign correspondent, he covered stories throughout the Middle East, Europe, Africa and South Asia
