ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the emerging practice of ‘urban jihad’ among Salafist jihadist groups since 2008. The attack against the Indian city of Mumbai inaugurated a practice that is becoming central for groups such as Al-Qaeda and associates, the Islamic State/Daesh and associates and other jihadist groups and cells acting on their ‘global battlefield’. Since 2015, Europe has also become a setting for ‘urban jihad’ as cities in France, Belgium, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Spain, among other countries, have become the places of its implementation. In recent months ‘urban jihad’ has become active and lethal in non-European scenarios, such as in the city of Marawi in the Philippines throughout the year of 2017, or Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina-Faso, in March 2018. The lessons learnt from these two examples are not only that the jihadists are implementing their violent efforts across the world in their ‘global battlefield’ as always, but that they are also improving procedures, which, sooner or later, they will try to apply again in Western cities. In sum, this ‘urban jihad’ is becoming central among the various Salafist jihadist terrorist tactics, and we study in our chapter not only its spread through the world but also its ideological basis.
