Everyone, let's get started. So I am absolutely delighted to be able to welcome the latest speaker in our series on Iraq on the anniversary, 20 years after the ill fated invasion. I am delighted to be able to introduce my friend and colleague Thomas Hickman, and Thomas is a senior research fellow at All Souls College here in Oxford. He is a prolific author specialising in forms of political violence with a particular focus on jihadi movements.
I think it's fair to say that there is some legitimate scepticism around the study of jihadi movements in Middle Eastern studies for very good reason. Thomas, I think makes them all look really good by comparison. He is a brilliant, brilliant scholar. He has authored many books and many articles. The most recent, The Caravan, Abdullah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad. I read this cover to cover it during lockdown. It's an excellent, excellent story around the rise of what becomes al Qaeda.
Thomas is distinct both for working extensively with Arabic language source material, but also increasingly is pioneering the use of computational techniques, tools from data science and computational social science and the digital humanities. He's not just a scholar. He's also creating resources for all of us to use.
I'm really, really excited about the talks, and I think we're going to hear a little bit that we're going to hear of some data looking at the effects of the invasion, occupation of Iraq and the rise of jihadi movements. Thomas Close, close. Thank you very much for your time. I'm thrilled to be here and love to talk about the Iraq invasion, something I was invited to to say something about Iraq. And the problem is that I, I don't work on Iraq and will probably become in the clear in the Q&A.
However, Iraq has loomed very large and my granddaughter I of interest that of a kind of transnational jihadism. I started working on this right before 911. I follow the come the whole war on terror afterwards and the timing around it right after the Iraq war was a very, very momentous one. And so I remember kind of following all the activity on national jihadi forums, etc., but very, very much closed, never really took the time to go back and look at the overall picture.
It was clear that it generated a lot of activity, but not exactly how and where. So you will be forgiven for thinking what? But I'm looking at the at the headline that I am taking it that way in this day. And by the way, I don't think this is the actual that was you know, it's from a theatre place, but you can also get the impression that it's common knowledge solidly understood that the Iraq war was sort of bad for the I and just check this.
I did what every good student should do now, which is positive is that. Yeah. And it gives a very clear, clear answer. And this is I suppose is the textbook answer to my my question.
And it comes, of course, from a series of studies addressing this question from various angles, like Rubin Powers was one of the first to write about this, focusing mainly mainly on kind of the qualitative changes in jihadi propaganda coming out of the Iraq war that most of, if I do dogs and propaganda produce promoting that conflict. I did some early work looking at jihadi forums, also kind of pointing out that this is a dominant topic there.
My my colleague and I wrote an early study that basically a kind of process tracing of the motivations of European jihadis showing it in Iraq pops up as a central motivation for several plotters and attackers there.
The most important influential piece that was probably the one written by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in 2017, basically in what the Mother Jones article, he was an immensely influential in in the Beltway and beyond in kind of establishing the understanding that from a counterterrorism perspective, the Iraq war had been had been very kind of counterproductive. And Daniel Byman and Ken Pollack did something similar to the afterwards.
Projecting this way is going to further into the future, saying it will have a long term effect. The only slightly dissenting voice in this literature is an article by Martin Harrow. But I don't think it's a it's is a slightly kind of more speculative piece of I don't think he his arguments were widely accepted. So that is the bottom line is that everyone's kind of agree the new perspective.
So why then look back on it? Well, if you look at the dates here, these are all these studies were done in the late 2000s. And if you subtract the year, attacks were probably done even earlier at a time when we we didn't have the full picture and when the available data was weaker. So, for example, the data that we talked about and crucially used in their piece is really quite weak by modern standards. Something like the global terrorism database didn't exist at the time and so on and so forth.
So I think it's worth and this is generally I was big believer in kind of going back and checking that we have got the story of Iraq too often, kind of we finish a story and then we move on to the next and the next thing is worth checking whether this claim is actually true. But even if it is, it tends to be in line with what we believe before is not necessarily the case, that the kind of the effects are are known.
So we know that. We may know that we've had a negative effect. We don't know by how much or how bad it is Iraq. And perhaps most importantly, we don't necessarily know why the Iraq war was so bad. And what are the mechanisms in here. I'm probably not going to provide the full answers or the mechanism questions, but I would like to get us to thinking about them because, you know, much as we also. Thinking of you as imperialism in the Middle East. It's not.
When you think about it, it's not necessarily a given that a big invasion would cause a global wave of terrorism. You really don't like the Ukraine today? We have like a blatant, clear violation of international law and superpower, causing a lot of a lot of harm on the ground. And we don't have a we don't have terrorist attacks all around the world as a consequence. So what was it about that particular constellation, the fact that these were treated so forward?
You want I just want to stress that some limitations here. I'm looking at transnational jihadism. I'm looking at what a bunch of kind of relatively small rebel groups around the world did in response to this. I'm not looking at the full facts of what humanitarian, economic, geopolitical, etc. That's a much bigger question. And of course, we certainly think the consequences would be much more much more severe, more severe.
And also, it wasn't just that I'm focusing trying to focus mainly on the transnational on national things there as opposed to militancy in Iraq, because, I mean, the smallest mystery here is that you had violence in Iraq after the invasion and several of the other pieces that that before you use data from across America to try to make the case for terrorism. But I think we also have to look at stuff outside of Pakistan very, very quick, very capital.
B, the events. I don't know if this is visible even on this screen. So I have about two timelines, one for like the run up to the Iraq war and the Iraq war itself. So basically, extremely simply, it's a story that kind of begins with Saddam's invasion of annexation of Kuwait, which worries the U.S. intelligence community because it poses a threat to the stability of oil supply in the Gulf and to the security of Israel. And this becomes a big issue in the news, politics in particular.
And from in the course of the 1990s, there's momentum towards pushing for regime change in Iraq. In 1998, you have the Iraq Liberation Act, which makes it a form of U.S. policy to work for regime change in Iraq. And you have a 911, of course, which is a great shock to the U.S. and its international system and in the in US politics in particular. And this becomes is adds to the earlier concerns about what bad things Iraq may do in the region.
And the worry here, of course, is that there might be an alliance between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, that they can carry out an attack on the US with biological weapons of chemical weapons. And then you have a bunch of sequence of events in 2002 that want to do that. And three, almost immediately after 911, Bush orders the thinking about the Pentagon's war plans.
You know, the axis of evil speech. You have the various address to the U.N. and it was most obvious is that we know we now know it was kind of predetermined to maybe use the Bush administration had already decided. Once the war is started, it basically kind of takes a better in terms of conflict, severity, conflicts, kind of pyramid shape, kind of initially getting things go fairly smoothly or with a few casualties.
But then in the matter of a year or two, a very, very intense insurgency builds up in Iraq and you get also kind of horizontal conflict dynamics and it's almost less severe sectarian violence, etc. And by 2006, 2007, the Defence Department basically feels things have gotten completely out of control and order the so-called surge, which is a kind of massive increase in the military presence.
And this combined with internal developments in Iraq and a change of side in a firefight set by key tribes in Anbar province are able to of to suppress the worst content of the insurgency. And by the end to the end of the decade, the US was basically put on a field that is still safe enough to to leave in by August or September 2010. The date of the fiscal commission has officially ended, and before this we have a what I refer to as a transnational jihadi.
You don't spend too much time on this, but there's always room to discuss exactly what the party movement is, especially in the in the 19th and early 2000. But broadly speaking, there's a process of transfer nationalisation and increasing connectedness between various Islamist militant groups in across the Muslim world. And it helped to by Afghanistan was becomes a place where people can meet in the 1980s are helped by technology.
It becomes easier to travel around, is easier to keep in touch with and through the Internet and so on. And so in the course of the 1990s, you get a growing kind of subset of the militant Islamist world that sees itself as kind of global vanguard where the national authority doesn't matter. They're all in it together. And this is led by by by Al Qaida, which proposes a kind of a new strategy in the mid 1990 based on kind of direct confrontation with the West.
But by sort of 2008, 2001, this kind of idea of confronting the West is quite controversial inside this national party movement. al-Qaida is basically a minority voice. Most of these groups want to focus on their respective national struggles against their respective regimes. But the 911 attacks very much changes this.
It creates notoriety for Al Qaida, and it provokes some initial steps by the US, which kind of confirms what I have been saying you get about the invasion of Afghanistan and Guatemala, etc. So but in 2002, there's already kind of a nascent sort of what we call Al Qaida franchise, where groups have previously had were only kind of peripherally connected, increasingly seen themselves as part of this wider kind of thing.
But it's still is still nothing like the wider franchise With respect to what does the Iraq war do to to this jihadi movement in. To the al Qaeda franchise. There are multiple ways to measure something like this in general, and there's nothing new. And I worked on like how do you measure the terrorist activity? And in some sense, we have to ideal type ways to do it. One is to measure operational activity and the other is to measure the number of people involved.
And if we look at who starts out by looking at operational activity, the numbers are very clear. So if you look at just our looking at Iraq, we go from virtually zero activity in Iraq to Jamaica. Now there's a debate to be had about the kind of coding of various incidents in Iraq during the war. But that's not necessarily particularly due to the Q And this is the the some of the best data that we have that we have here when we're looking at the internal Iraqi theatre.
And when we look at the wider Muslim world, it's clear that for one thing, what's going on? Iraq is huge. It was really out of proportion to anything else going on. So the the Iraq attacking activity is in the black on the left and in deaths from activity in Iraq is on the right. Notice how it's more pronounced and the death count graph, because on average, attacks in Iraq are much more deadly.
And this has a lot to do with the explosion in the use of suicide bombings in Iraq, which, again, it probably has to do with the theatre being relatively symmetric. And if the rebel groups had relatively high operational freedom, more so than, let's say, jihadi groups operating in the centre of Cairo or having other kind of clandestine.
If you look closely, too, you will see and by the way, you go back a little bit, you can just see that the activity kind of dips a little bit or slows down towards the end of the decade. This is probably surge related. And you can see this here, too, a little bit that that the Iraq activity kind of slows down towards the end of the decade. What then happens is that. It's starting to really increase in the in Afghanistan, in Pakistan.
So just as the US thinks it's got things under control, Iraq is losing control in Afghanistan. And it's also increasing slightly in other areas. Now, what about other parts of the world? We are dealing with transnational crime and after all. Now, it's difficult to to measure this because the main data set for terrorist attacks, it doesn't code for perpetrator ideology.
In the previous talks, I just drew the assumption that, you know, the majority of terrorist groups operating in selected parts of the Muslim world are Islamist motivated. Becomes harder if you move, for example, to the west, where there are bunch of other groups of other ideologies operating at the same time.
But there are there have been data gathering efforts along the way that focus on and try to isolate different types of ideology that they just that are not for far right extremism and that there is one forum for jihadism as well. And that's maintained by Peter Nasser, my former colleague at the CIA in Oslo. And this is the best way, I think the best data we have an activity in in Europe and he he records plots with get well developed plans of attack as well as actual attacks.
I think it's important just to also look at plots because in the West, security services are so effective that they kind of they put there often the ability to derail or prevent plots that would otherwise have kind of occurred. We need to include them to get a sense of the activity level. And this shows you that in the around right after the Iraq war, there is this there is an uptick in the plotting activity in Europe.
But the graph belies, I think, the severity of the effect, because almost all of these executed attacks, there are, of course, very few zero or even one casualties. There are only two attacks in the 2000s in Europe that cause major penalties. And it's the Madrid bombing in March 2004, The 77 bombing in London in 2005 killed 194 and 52 people, respectively. And both of those attacks, I think it's quite clear now, are linked to motivation, linked to to Iraq.
So in the case of the Madrid attack, we know that the planners timed the attack to continue to punish the Spanish government forces, supporting the invasion of Iraq and to undermine the conservative government's chances of winning the election. That will have happened soon after. And in the case of the London bombings, we have we have the testimonies of the perpetrators who speak at length about Iraq as one of the justifications for.
Another type of activity just to look at foreign fighter flows, which is when people don't carry out a plot anything in their in their home country, but instead try and join the conflict zone and fight there instead. That has been a historically a very important form of militant Islamist activity. And this is this goes back a long time and certainly back to the 1980s with Afghanistan. And since the 1980s, most countries in the Muslim world have attracted at least some foreign fighters.
And by the time of the Iraq war, very early 2000, it had been a while since we had seen a very substantial foreign fighter mobilisation. But Iraq became the biggest since the Afghanistan war. And you had people mainly from men from Saudi, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, joining the three or 400 probably from the west.
The thing here on the right is from some people, a senior document was a captured U.S. military captured basically personnel files from inside Al Qaida in Iraq on volunteers that used to be. Right. Propaganda production is another type of activity that organisations do, and those who have worked on jihadism know that there is an enormous amount of building material in circulation and that has been for a long time.
And they remember the time of the Iraq war is the beginning of kind of the whole kind of visual explosion of propaganda with the number length, sophistication, technical quality of videos really, really increases. There is a. So back in the mid 2000, when I was working at Arabi, we began trying to record or to to capture and catalogue these videos. And we did what I think was our best effort to to log all of the major productions by jihadi groups across across the world.
And the graph on the right shows you the number and kind of semantic distribution of this collection over there. Basically, I think it's 850 something videos and by something as a production, I would stress that because at any one time there will be hundreds if not thousands of like short clips that are not technically speaking productions.
There's been no editing or anything, but these are kind of productions where a group or a kind of a media and entrepreneur has has gone to some length to publish the thing. So the mid 2000 sees a massive uptick, and much of this is linked to Iraq. Often we don't know where these videos were produced, but because they were disseminated primarily on the jihadi forums, we can assume that they were viewed by people from many different countries. So this is not simply a kind of internal Iraqi.
Another important propaganda product for jihadis are magazines, which they have been producing since the 1980s. And I've in recent years tried to rebuild this in the militant Islamist magazine data sets. My ambition is to basically collect all jihadi magazines, and I think I'm nearly there.
And we will look at the the issues or on the jihadi magazines issue, the published pieces or issue in the 2000 strong January 2000, 2000 to December 2009 and plot them on a on a graph and clearly see that the number increases. And you can also see that the number of pages increases. So I just had however for is one way of realising age is like the number of pages on the y axis. The message is that there's a lot more magazine material in circulation from the late twenties onwards.
You can also see that the Iraq related Iraq produced magazines are not among the longest. They're not driving the increase in length and sophistication, which skew the picture somewhat. Another way to look at movement strength is if you look at the number of people involved here, it becomes this is a harder exercise because it's fewer. We rarely have good insight into the personnel files of clandestine groups. And and if we do, they'll be rare, you know, occasional snapshots so systematic.
But we can start by looking at groups like how how many different groups are in operation any one time and what are the best sources is something called the Mapping Militants Project at Stanford. It was Martha Crenshaw's initiative, which is trying to kind of follow kind of mergers and splits and formations in groups in around the world since the 2000 2000 onward. And this is their kind of graph for Iraq and then surround it. So this is illegible, I realise that.
But I think you can discern the general kind of slightly kind of pyramid shaped as a shape of this on this graph, indicating that what we intuitively know from following events in the late 2000, which is that there's a proliferation of groups and much more kind of complicated actor landscape from the mid 2000.
This is another variant that looks at what they call that Al Qaida cluster, which would include the emergence of Al Qaida, right in Yemen, the joint to the inclusion of Algeria based groups into the Al Qaida franchise in Zimbabwe, Somalia, etc. But the broader point here, too, is that the organisational universe is expanding in these areas. What about individuals? Is there any way we can get close to like counts of people in these groups?
Well, I think it's very hard for groups in the in the region. There have been attempts at doing it, but I have never really trusted any of them. And so I won't venture to kind of specification that. But we do have some interesting data from the West with numbers are smaller and the documentation this kind of figure and something called the Williamson project. And they used a closer look at Brandeis University.
She and her team have been basically doing something that it's, I think, impossible to do in Europe for DARPA reasons, which is to collect to maintain a database of individuals who have become have been involved in terrorism investigations in the West, I would say in Western Europe and North America and in Australia, it's for a total of a little over 7000 people. And these are people who have been convicted for the most part of their activities.
And and there's a link through the variable for time of radicalisation, which is they probably draw from the kind of the, the articles and support material for each person where there will be, there will be either a news article about the person or maybe some court transcripts where the person describes in his or her own words when they kind of first have involved in, you know, networks and that data, then kind of that for the first moment.
And this this kind of simply shows that the number of people who reported a given year as their kind of entry into the. It's also worth noting that numerous high level intelligence officials have confirmed this without providing specific numbers. You know, 2010, for example, the former head of the FBI was crystal clear. Another window into kind of how many people were involved in this in the 2000 so-called jihadi forums, which have been around since the early 2000.
And these are basically like kind of an early form of Twitter where you could kind of start you can start a message, you can add content to videos or pictures and so on, and other groups that use this forum to great effect. And for a long time, I thought that much of this data was was born because I have my colleagues who were on these forums on a daily basis in the 2000 because we didn't have the kind of the expertise to systematically preserve the material.
Recently, I discovered that there was a team, there was a team of computer scientists in Arizona that did and preserved this, and they sent people to the Dark Web Forum portal, which has basically most of the main Islamist forums in the 2000s that we don't have the imagery, image, material, media and stuff on there, but we have the messages in text form associated with the messages, and it shows you what you would expect.
We're kicking the dead voice here, but but we haven't really had this type of empirical verification. They're on the left, you see. This is actually over the overall number of messages per month in this kind of forum universe. And on the right is the distribution of messages by kind of focus. And I'm just using a simple dictionary to code zero and one whether a given message talks about mentions Iraq related works or Afghanistan related words.
So we see that Palestine is big in the early 2,002nd intifada and all that. But it is quickly it fades into the background, superseded by. And then, by the way, this is I should mention, this is just like one year before and after the invasion. This is not between March 2002, March 2004. So I stop there with the kind of the times. It was rough, but I think it's pretty clear that the early indications were were true.
But we have a better it's better specification of the the immediate sort of effect of the Iraq war on activity of the transnational jihadi. Now, I haven't spoken at all about what happened after the 2000 and ISIS era, which sort of begins with Syria war and then these the rise of the caliphate, Islamic states attack offensive in Europe, 2015, 16 and so on.
And that chapter in the story of international jihadism is even more severe in the sense that I could show you more graphs, but the 19 just skyrocketed to much higher levels than we saw in the 2004 attacks for foreign fighters, for propaganda and other measures. But I think the key question then becomes, how was the Iraq war in Iraq invasion 2003? Was that a cause of the rise of ISIS? Was it a war they linked?
And I think they are, too. I think we can it's fairly clear that it is release of a kind of prerequisite because the the networks that were the seed of the ISIS's organisations were mostly the networks that had formed during the Iraq war.
And I think a key ingredient in the rise of Islamic State was basically human resources, that you had a certain number of people in former Baath Party technocrats who brought with them their knowhow into the Islamist networks and later into Islamic State now, and lots of other factors, of course, in the eyes of story. But I think it's fair to say that the caliphate wouldn't have taken the proportions it did if there hadn't been that earlier. Now, why did the invasion have such a huge effect?
I mentioned before already that far from war and ugly invasions translate into international terrorism. Why did this one have such a big effect? And I think I can think of four main reasons here, and you may add more in the Q&A. But the first and most obvious one is that the the grievance factor that the war harms people and causes a lot of suffering in Iraq and and that you get motivation to to fight back to resist the occupiers is a straightforward.
But it can't be only that because it's hard to make the case that what happened is going to be an objective and a reflection of that kind of objective suffering on the ground is that the activity levels don't follow the patterns of objective suffering on the ground. But to have that grievance inflicted is replace pleasurable role.
More important, I think, is where we might go and frame stadiums, which was by which I mean that in the US by invading Iraq, did exactly what Al Qaida and similar ideologues had predicted that it would do. This may be obvious to us now, but it wasn't then.
I remember in the early 2000 being in many debates about this, about, you know, what is kind of the heart of al Qaeda ideology and that, you know, in all humility, I honestly and I think I have them on record is that I, I, I stressed very early on that and at the heart of the of this narrative is a victim narrative.
It's what I call the siege of some places that fully depend upon an Islamic nationalism, a sense of sense that all Muslims are one people, that these people is being systematically oppressed and humiliated by non-Muslims with Americans and Jews in need. And that we need for this reason, we need to fight back. And it is because this oppression is so severe. We can use whichever methods we like, including attacks on civilians anywhere.
Now, this was not always accepted because there was a kind of an alternative approach of perspective on how to use just more than kind of the the domestic reform part of the fight against domestic repression and corruption and so on. But I think this frame salience dimension is crucial to the fact, you know, because you look at the kind of geopolitical images of the Middle East in the eighties and nineties, the message that Al Qaida was putting forward wasn't really that convincing.
If you think about it, and you and others were saying that the US had a long, bloody history of intervention. Subversion? No. That is true. But she tried to translate it into kind of tangible metrics. It's not entirely clear. So, for example, you know, is it true that the US always tried to find a muslim interest in this one? Well, Afghanistan war. The US and Western countries supported the Muslim religious or Islamist fight that conflict with enormous resources.
Similarly, the similar type of support which happened in Bosnia. So, no, I'm not trying to whitewash at all U.S. Middle East policy, but on metrics like military presence on the ground and kind of side taking in key countries in the area, argument was a little farfetched. And this is clear if you look to the slide, if you look at you have data now on number of U.S. troops in, you know, deployed in various countries. And I remember seeing that in the Muslim world in the eighties.
And I feel very, very small. However, this guy wrote from 2003 on the that a couple of between 100 and 200,000 on the ground. So basically, it makes the narrative that wasn't true. It makes it kind of. First mechanism, I think, is the opportunity cost, which is that it took away the Iraq war, took away resources and attention from the US U.S. security apparatus. They famously withdrew before we drew our resources from Afghanistan when they were hunting the perpetrators of 911.
To manage the Iraq situation, which is probably the key reason why you have this sort of blossoming of activity in Afghanistan. But the fourth and that is the most important or perhaps least highlighted mechanism so far has been the role of technology that the Iraq war happened at a time when new technologies were becoming available and which really, really helped rebel groups in disseminating propaganda.
So this is the sort of grievances there there locally can be projected to so many more people, so much faster than had been the case before. Probably spoken to for too long already. But just briefly, the counterfactual to the point that I didn't make. This is from Stratfor, but I think it does a good job of showing kind of the jihadi universe today from 2018, but not very much has changed since then.
And if we think about what this landscape looked like in 2002, you basically you had prisons in broadly the same areas, but it was much, much smaller. And you did not have the Islamic State affiliated ones because obviously that kind of that movement didn't exist at the time. So the main sort of geographical centres of 2014 was the Al Qaida cluster in 2002 were Afghanistan and Pakistan. To some extent. Algeria in that adjacency was still very quiet, quite active and very data into a cluster.
But then you regions of transdigm groups and most other other places. But for all of these areas, of course there are local dynamics that might well have produced situations conducive to local Islamist militias anyway. But if you were to go back and look at this, look at the activity levels, that the grave material indeed on these groups, it's very low. Do you think that we'll continue to discuss this counterfactual part together out there?
And then in the second grade and then it sort of finished with some sort of counter arguments that one might think about for or against this review that Iraq was responsible for and almost everything.
But in terms of what would cause it, I suppose, of saying that the growth of jihadism was overdetermined, that because you had this they had this sort of like forest victim narrative and the world was becoming more globalised, that would be it would always be possible to point to something that, you know, the U.S. or Western country had done to fight this or that argument and so on.
But the technology was this dissemination of technology arrive independently of the invasion, would have empowered other groups anyway. And then from that, the Arab Spring and the Syrian war in illustrate that there was there were tensions in the region that were kind of waiting to kind of erupt. And one could make the case that something like a Syria type of civil war could have happened later on and become a hotspot for how they actually were being allowed to go.
Another counterargument would be to say that, yeah, we've got a lot of sort of jihadism, but we at least we stop some kind of collusion between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein or or in a state actor or to say that a middle East without an Iraq invasion would be Middle East with the kind of weaker Western weakened US penetration, fewer sensors on the ground, U.S. would have been more dependent on local regimes for information about Al Qaida and other and other threats,
and sometimes they might not have gotten rid of that in this way. That created some dynamic, could have been and be more and more dangerous than another kind of deeply kind of loss like occupation type presence that they got with the Iraq war.
And the third, perhaps the most controversial, I think is quite interesting suggestion, is just to say that this kind of link to the first one, that the growth of to Adams it was over town is to say that the kind of the big kind of turn around in especially kind of local political sentiment in the Muslim world towards militant Islamism and jihad in particular.
The big turnaround was the Islamic State phenomenon and the kind of the popular backlash against the the violence deployed by Islamic State. And the case can perhaps be made that without at the development of Islamic State, in that we have had a sort of simmering and low level support for al Qaeda type groups is going to be out there for for quite a long time. But I mean, I think increasingly the view that that there has been a kind of oasis effect on support not just for jihadism, but.
What would you do to go from that to say that? Well, by invading Iraq, we kind of precipitated this cathartic moment that we need, I think is very much a stretch. But I think it's is interesting. Do you think about it in any case? I mean, these are intellectual exercise and we shouldn't forget the enormous humanitarian and. Economic impacts have. So I'll just stop there. Thank you so much. I'm sure there are lots of questions about his condition that I have to ask the first question.
So let me let me abuse that prerogative. Let me push you on a couple of things. So for those of you, the students of my course who read about Middle East political science, I promise this work.
But I also saw a book that recently came out by Nebula who told us actually encouraged me to read, which is a kind of real breakdown of what happened to al Qaeda after 911 based on the documents that are recovered from Abbottabad after Navy SEAL Team six, I have to say read the compound and the story that you get from that book from the kind of primary source material is that Al Qaida post-9-11 is an extremely weak organisation materially in terms of personnel,
in terms of the resources that it can bring to bear. And I wonder then in this story, who is coordinating, who is taking advantage of the invasion of Iraq, who is coordinating this, all these new people who are being recruited or all these. You know, when you talk about this kind of franchising system, is this garden variety Islamists rebranding themselves to take advantage of it, or what is the kind of the material basis of it? A second question.
I just wanted to push you on a lot of the time series plots that you showed looking at these graphs, the discontinuity of 23 is not always clear. A lot of the time it's actually trending upwards beforehand.
And I wanted just to think kind of factually whether what happened in Iraq in 2003 is really accelerating a tendency that you actually see beforehand, because just looking at a lot of the trends, a lot of the plots, if you look at the Brandeis data, if you look at the message forums, if you look at media production, it's going that way anyway. And then Iraq happens and it just continues to accelerate upwards. So I wonder counterfactual, what would have happened then given that tendency?
Hmm. I'll leave it there. Yeah, great questions. So I don't think we really know the material bases of the Al Qaida franchise is because I think we're dealing with something very messy that not even the key actors understood. And so at some level, we're dealing you know, we're talking about individuals, people that are describes very, very well in her book, you know, people as a family going about their business and and thinking about how to continue the jihad from their hideout and so on.
And you also have specific leaders that we now know things about. But there's also you know, there's there's an acceleration in recruitment that's so high that clearly the key the key leaders cannot have known all of these all these individuals. And I think in a lot of cases and you see this also, if you process trace the plots that only a small minority of plots in the West and elsewhere are instigated by the head of organisations.
You know, a lot of these folks are kind of bottom up initiatives with new, new young people who have essentially watched videos online and together with their mates and and been, you know, very wound up, wound up and angry about what's going on and wanting to do something.
And that's that's the situation in a lot of cases. I mean, this question of how much coordination is there in the al Qaeda movement, I mean, it's been so heavily debated since the beginning that some of you may have heard about the polemic between Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman about, you know, related matters. And yeah, so I think it is a debate that can't really be adjudicated as a mixture of both.
And I can't see a situation where we'll get data that's good enough to enable us to to really adjudicate it. But I think in a sentence, this was an uncoordinated move really with largely by technological forces. So for some of the groups, you know, I think to go more deeply into the data to where is the increase happening and who is behind it. But in the case of the Iraq invasion, we have to bear in mind that there was there was a long run up to it, because that's one thing.
There was talk about an invasion for at least six months before beforehand. So when you see this on the forums, for example, they're talking about it. The other thing to bear in mind is that you have a Palestinian father and the Chechen Chechnya war is still fresh in people's minds. And both of these two issues have been major symbols of members of religious symbols in this sort of jihadi victim narrative. So that may also have been behind some of that activity in the early 2000.
But both of those conflicts, you know, they petered out. And I think, you know, a strong case can be made that they would have petered out even further. And so we would have seen. He's to you know, to sort of around 1999, 2000 levels. But I obviously guess. Great. Thanks. Recycle speaker So.