In a past article we’ve seen how 17 years of war on terror (since the September 11, 2001 attacks) was not free from obstacles.
The war against terrorism has curbed the threat of terrorist organizations and helped dismantling al-Qaeda, although some experts suggest that the killing of the Al-Qaeda’s godfather, Osama bin Laden, was a turning point as Zawahiri could not fill the gap left by Bin Laden. But the following rise of Daesh and the decentralization of al-Qaeda turned out to be a new threat.
Not much was done on the intellectual level to counter the terror ideology. As a result, Daesh continued to spread through social media and new media platforms. It would’ve gotten worse if major companies like Google did not update their algorithms to track and remove radical content online. Underfunded and not persuasive, most overt strategies to combat underground terror have not yet achieved major breakthroughs.
Let’s not forget, as questions arise around the fate of the war on terror, the mistakes of the major powers, especially the United States, which overlook the link between the spread of terrorism and the need for big issues in the Middle East to be resolved, most importantly the occupation of the Palestinian territories by the Israelis.
Decision-makers in Washington disagree on whether the Israeli occupation and its policies against the Palestinians fuel terrorism. Freeing the occupied territories and war with Israel are not on the agenda of most terror groups on the short term, but one of the pretexts used to promote extremism is without question the occupation of Jerusalem, the third most sacred place in Islam, not to mention the repeated Israeli violations against the Palestinian people.
After almost two decades of counterterrorism efforts, there are still a lot of things that need to be corrected as uncertainty surrounds the seriousness of these efforts.
The return of the Taliban, the most dangerous host of al-Qaeda on Afghan territory, and its control over a large part of the territory of the country, and the re-appearance of Daesh’s al-Baghdadi sure brought uncertainty back, in addition to the threat of pro-al-aQaeda al-Nasra Front in Syria and the funding of extremist and terrorist organizations as the international community failed to adopt a serious and firm stance on proved terror-sponsoring States.
