ABSTRACT
Modern terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and their followers merely follow a tradition of religious extremism and violence that goes back 1000 years. Later terrorists such as al-Zawahiri and other religious militants were initially radicalized during this first wave of jihad, which produced elaborate theological justifications for violent attacks on "renegade" and "apostate" regimes. The genesis of the root node of the global jihadist network, which adopted the name al-Qaeda, is closely related to two important events of 1979: the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The "structure" of the global jihadi movement is thus the operational relationship between the "central node" and the widely-dispersed terrorist "cells" that carry out central-node mandates. The existing local nodes and the central node in spite of the existing links, operate autonomously.
