The In Anemas gas plant, Algeria, seen from the air. It was attacked by Islamists in January 2013.
A beheading in Woolwich, a suicide bomb in Beijing, a blown-up marathon in Boston, a shooting in the head of a young Pakistani girl seeking education, a destroyed shopping mall in Nairobi and so it continues, in the name of Islam, from south London to Timbuktu. It is time to take stock, especially on the left, since these things are part of the worlds daily round.
Leave aside the parrot-cry of Islamophobia for a moment. I will return to it. Leave aside, too, the pretences that it is all beyond comprehension. Progressives might ask instead: what do Kabul, Karachi, Kashmir, Kunming and a Kansas airport have in common? Is it that they all begin with K? Yes. But all of them have been sites of recent Islamist or, in the case of Kansas, of wannabe-Islamist, attacks; at Wichita Airport planned by a Muslim convert ready to blow himself up, and others, in support of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. We cannot stop lone wolves, a British counterterrorism expert told us after Woolwich. Are they lone? Of course not.
A gas facility in southern Algeria, a hospital in Yemen, an Egyptian police convoy in the Sinai its complex all right a New Years party in the southern Philippines, a railway station in the Caucasus, a bus terminal in Nigerias capital, and on and on, have all been hit by jihadis, with hostages taken, suicide belts detonated, cars and trucks exploded, and bodies blown to bits. And Flight MH370? Perhaps. In other places in Red Square and Times Square, in Jakarta and New Delhi, in Amman and who-knows-where in Britain attacks have been thwarted. But in 2013 some 18 countries gotit in the neck (so to speak) from Islams holy warriors.
There are battlefields and battlefields in this conflict. Some are theatres of actual orpotential civil war, most often when Sunnis and Shias are at each others throats on behalf, respectively, of Saudi Arabia andIran. Other battlefields are in failed or failing Muslim states, others again where the infidel has unwisely intruded upon and assaulted Muslim lands. At the same time, weapons and warriors are in constant movement in Islams cause across dissolving national boundaries, many of themof western colonialisms creation. And in India, with its 175 million Muslims, their mujahedin will be in action soonenough if Hindu nationalists come to power this month.
Jihadist groups, from Pakistan to the Philippines, also fight each other. But for the most part they are consolidating and expanding often as affiliates of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in the Maghreb, in Somalia and Kenya, in Iraq and Syria, in Gaza, in Bangladesh and in south-east Asia. There are separatist or secessionist Islamic insurgencies, too, from Russias Caucasus to north-west China, in southern Thailand, in Burma, in northern Nigeria and in divided Kashmir.
Warriors for Islam, believing that they areunder infidel threat, today range an increasingly frontier-less world. Thats globalisation too. A car-bombing in New York which failed was planned by a Pakistani-American trained in a tribal area ofnorthern Waziristan. Many would-be warriors from western countries learned their skills from Taliban instructors, going on to fight in Iraq as they now fight inSyria. There, ubiquitous Bearers of the Sword and Defenders of the Faith from Britain and France, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Indonesia and Kazakhstan, and evenUighurs from Chinese Xinjiang, are to befound armed to the teeth in the battle against Assad while being trained for future combat in their countries of origin.
In the Islamist merry-go-round, jihadis from Libya after the countrys collapse went on to Syria, Tunisian holy warriors crossed into Mali, Egyptian and Canadian Muslim fighters were among the attackers on the refinery in Algeria, and Somalis from Minnesota have returned home to join al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda affiliate that carried out the Kenyan mall attack. Ugandan Islamists are in eastern Congo, and a Malaysian army captain was linked to two of the 9/11 hijackers. Beat this? No.
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