As the events in Paris unfolded last week, I, as well as seemingly everybody with a Facebook feed, was overcome by waves of shock, disgust, and deep sadness. News of mass violence is nothing unusual, but this is the first time for me that it has happened somewhere that I have cherished memories. I’ve walked through some of the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred, and I could picture the terror too clearly. It seemed personal.
Despite sympathy for the victims of terror in Lebanon, Nigeria, and across the world, many of us have been hit much harder by the attack in Paris, because it is so much closer home. Western Democracies are supposed to be strongholds of security and pluralism, above the kind of sectarian conflict that plagues much of Africa and Western Asia.
For those of us who live in the West, it’s easy to see this absurd level of carnage occur in one of our own countries and interpret it as random, unexplainable hatred. It’s easy to see it as part of a centuries-old clash between civilizations who are fundamentally opposed to one another.
But if we take a wider view of history and politics, it’s clear that these attacks were not random—they were targeted retaliations, and are symptoms of a large and complex problem that dates back only one century, to 1916. And this is a problem that has a solution.
Before discussing the origins of ISIL and Islamic terrorism, it’s useful to provide some context by comparing a couple of other religiously motivated terror groups.
One of these groups is called the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA originated after the Ugandan Bush War, in which the various groups which inhabited the arbitrarily defined region of Uganda fought for dominance over the newly independent state. The Acholi people, many of whom had been killed by a genocidal dictator in the decades prior, were on the losing side of the civil war, and found their political participation suppressed in the ensuing years. It was in this environment that the LRA, pitching itself as an Acholi nationalist movement, began to gain support. Over the past few decades, they have committed innumerable killings and abductions of civilians, and publicly expressed their goal to establish a state based on Biblical law.
Another terrorist organization, also motivated by Christianity, is the Army of God, operating in the United States. Driven by their belief in the sinfulness of abortion, the Army of God has spent the past three decades trying to bomb abortion clinics and murder doctors in the United States.
Both of these organizations are galvanized by Christian ideology, but there is a stark difference: their death toll. While the LRA has been responsible for over a hundred thousand deaths (thankfully their influence has been rapidly diminishing since 2010), the casualties caused by the Army of God may not even breach the double digits.
Why this disparity? I believe that a huge factor is the difference in political structure between the US and Uganda. The United States is a fairly functional democracy—if you are deeply opposed to abortion on religious grounds, you can support politicians who agree with you. You have the freedom to join conversations and do your best to influence policy. You are not a member of an oppressed group.
By contrast, if you are an Acholi in Uganda, you have found yourself on the losing side of a brutal conflict over a geo-political region that was defined (and for sixty-eight years, directly controlled) by a foreign power. Not only will you be very angry, but you will have few avenues to express your views. A violent fringe group might be the only way to feel that you are making a difference.
The basic structure of the situation in Uganda is also true of the entirety of what we call the Middle-East. In 1916, as World War I was turning in the Allies’ favor, the U.K., France, and Russia signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, defining how the Middle East would be split between their spheres of influence after the inevitable toppling of the Ottoman Empire. Much like those of modern African states, the new borders of the Middle-East grouped together disunited ethnic, cultural, and political groups, who vied for dominance as these protectorates each gained independence in the mid twentieth century. It was into this chaos that the Soviets sent their troops in 1979. And it was in this environment that Abdullah Azzam entered the world stage.
While previously a theologian of no historic consequence, his belief in reclaiming all land once ruled by the Islamic Caliphate through violence was very appealing to the many Afghans who opposed the Soviets, and he was able to inspire thousands of fighters with his message of martyrdom. In the eyes of a psychopathic extremist, a community under siege is ripe for the harvest.
Faced with a choice between the Soviets and religious nationalists, the United States and other Western powers chose the latter. Azzam, his disciple Osama Bin Laden, and their mujahideen were flooded with Western weapons and aid money, the Soviets were driven out, Jihadism flourished, and the rest is history.
So what exactly can we learn from Christian terrorism in Central Africa, and Islamic terrorism in the Middle-East? Here is my theory:
Every religion, every culture, every social movement is going to have fringe thinkers who value extreme violence to accomplish their goals. But it isn’t until a population is dominated by outside powers that those fringe thinkers begin to have mass appeal. Unfortunately, the Middle-East has seen these situations continuously for the better part of a century:
When the U.K. and U.S. led a coup d’état in Iran to depose the democratically elected Prime Minister in favor of the recently ousted Shah, they set the stage for a much more extreme regime to take power two and a half decades later.
When France overrode the self-determination of the Arab Kingdom of Syria in order to create the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon, they sowed the seeds of resentment that would explode into progressively more extremist coups over the next decades.
Any time that foreign powers decide to dominate and cut up a region as they please, violent extremists suddenly find that they have a foothold in public opinion.
The basic phenomenon underlying the growth and appeal of ISIL is nothing new, but ISIL does present a historically unique challenge: their ability to attract disaffected youths over social media has given them an unprecedented geographic range of recruitment. This means that, in addition to a military campaign to contain them, our tactics for disempowering the group must come from two directions:
First of all, global powers need to learn to respect the sovereignty of less powerful countries. Some of those countries won’t look the way that we in the West want them to, but if the country is stable, and especially if the regime is supported by a majority of the country’s inhabitants, it should be left to debate and develop in its own way. In Syria (as President Obama reiterated in his recent press conference), our policy should not be to seek a victory through military power, but to seek a diplomatic resolution between the non-ISIL actors that will preserve the stability of the region, even if the borders between states end up looking different than they do today.
Within our own borders, we need to be ever vigilant that no young person is allowed to reach a point where mass violence seems like a reasonable solution to their problems. This means being unafraid to express support and welcome to Muslim-Americans, and it means any kind of civic engagement that can help build inclusive communities. It means offering help to anyone who does suffer violence and harassment at the hands of their neighbors, and proving by example that different opinions can peacefully coexist.
