Even as several armed conflicts rage, a global trade war escalates and environmental crises worsen, terrorist attacks continue to be a major concern, frequently punctuating the news cycle. Last year, there were more than 80 such incidents around the world, many of them carried out by Islamist extremist groups such as ISIS. And yet, for much of the past decade, counterterrorism as a concerted, multinational effort has slipped quietly down the list of global priorities. The latest indication of this was just last week, when the US withdrew from the Global Counterterrorism Forum.
The fall of ISIS’s so-called caliphate and the winding down of large-scale western military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan may have created the illusion in many capitals that the age of organised, Islamist extremism was drawing to a close. It was not.
In addition to the rise of fascist and right wing groups, ISIS, Al Qaeda and other militant extremist groups remain active. While such groups have their differences and disputes between them, they share a connective tissue in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. The US’s decision on Tuesday to designate branches of the Brotherhood in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon as terrorist organisations is a necessary return to strategic clarity in the global effort against violent extremism.
The Muslim Brotherhood, often misrepresented as a purely political or social movement, has for decades functioned as an ideological incubator for radicalisation, providing moral justification, organisational cover and, in some cases, direct support to violent actors. Its doctrines birthed many of the most dangerous ideas plaguing the world today and can be found fuelling armed conflicts from the Philippines to Mali. Treating the Brotherhood as benign simply because its leaders dress themselves as politicians or scholars rather than militia commanders has long been a dangerous phenomenon that the group has exploited to proliferate its ideas in the West.
By acting now, the US is acknowledging that counterterrorism is an ongoing project. The so-called “Global War on Terror” the US spearheaded in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 may be over as a slogan, and the international coalition’s battles against ISIS in the Middle East may not be of the same scale as a decade ago, but the ecosystem that sustains extremist Islamist projects remains intact. ISIS and Al Qaeda continue to recruit, inspire and metastasise in fragile environments, and the Muslim Brotherhood persists as a transnational ideological project that blurs the line between political activism and militancy.
In Yemen, for example, the group is known to be active, and the recent withdrawal of UAE forces could re-open space for it as well as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to reassert influence. The vacuum that follows such withdrawals is rarely neutral; it is contested by those most willing to exploit disorder and grievance.
The UAE, which this month appointed its first ever special envoy for countering extremism and terrorism, has long recognised that securing the region against extremists is a long-term challenge that demands force when necessary, but also diplomacy, societal resilience and smart policymaking. That process requires knowing who it is you are up against, and this is why it is important that more countries follow America’s lead by combatting the Brotherhood and their poisonous ideology.
