ABSTRACT
Al-Qa’ida has been waging a terrorist campaign against the United States and its allies around the globe. The culmination point of this ght were the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and terms like “global jihad” and “jihadism” seemed appropriate to describe a “new” phenomenon which had struck the Western world with awe. However, in the years after September 11, several events hinted at a gap in this paradigmatic explanation of the development of Islamist terrorism:
Usama Bin Laden published an audio-tape in mid-December, 2004, in which he addressed the people of Saudi Arabia and stated that the Meccan perpetrators of September 11 had attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, “in order to defend Mecca and its surroundings (i.e. Saudi Arabia)”. If his main target were the United States or the Western world, this would have been a highly surprising declaration. In April 2004, Jordanian security services uncovered a large plot to attack government installations in Amman planned by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, who at that time was operating in a highly hostile environment in Iraq, where he was constantly hunted by U.S. forces. Why did he divert considerable resources and one of his best operatives for a plot only super cially related to his ght against the U.S. in Iraq? In Iraq itself, in the course of the year 2004, more and more Iraqis, among them many civilians, became targets of terrorist activity. If al-Qa’ida and the Zarqawi network’s aim was to hit the U.S., this was counterproductive. Trying to win Iraqis over to ght the U.S. would have seemed a more logical move, if the Islamists’ goals were truly global.
