The terrorist threat has many faces
Further, experts describe a strategy that favors confrontation, without sufficiently taking into account the breeding ground of jihadism, such as war, chaos and corruption.
“Conflicts like the one in Syria can mobilize and radicalize thousands of fighters in a short period of time,” says Tore Hamming, a researcher at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
“One of the strongest mechanisms to prevent the recruitment of Islamist militants is to offer people better alternatives. Weapons do not do that,” he adds.
Twenty years after 9/11, the landscape has totally changed. Jihadism was mono-headed, embodied by Al Qaeda, now it is two-headed, with the emergence of the Islamic State group.
The geographic scope of the jihadist threat has also changed. Before, the groups were present in the Middle East, but now they are also active throughout Africa, most of the Arab world, and South and Southeast Asia.
“We are no longer talking about a small number of people who should be put on a watch list. The threat has metastasized. There are more regimes, in scattered areas, that face violent extremism, ”said the ITC specialist.
Africa has become the new frontier of jihadism between the Sahel and the Maghreb, Somalia and Libya, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). An expansion that sounds like failure.
The jihad front “has moved from the Middle East to Africa,” says Brenda Githing’u, a Johannesburg-based counterterrorism analyst. For her, the West has been unable to “anticipate the emergence of a new battlefield and take into account the potential of Africa in terms of a new jihad.”
The world order has also changed. 9/11 proclaimed Islamist terrorism overnight “enemy number one” of the United States and its allies. Since then, tensions with Iran, Russia and China have increased.
With information from AFP