ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to place modern terrorism in an historical context in order to properly understand the nature and magnitude of the threat. It examines the exaggerated, but insidiously resilient, threats posed by Jihadi-Salafism and the forms of right-wing extremism that it resonates with. The migration, first to Saudi Arabia and then to Afghanistan, saw the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders embrace violent jihadi means and incorporate elements of the austere theology of Wahhabi-Salafi fundamentalism into their revolutionary Islamist political thought, giving birth to a radical hybrid ideology: Jihadi-Salafism. The Saudi-born founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and his colleagues, assisted foreign fighters, predominantly from the Arab world, in travelling to Afghanistan to fight with the Afghans against Soviet occupation. Even before declaring its caliphate or Islamic state in mid-2014, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, as it was then, had enormous drawing power around the region and across the world.
