Not so long ago politicians were hailing the end of al-Qaeda and the global jihad movement. By the middle of 2011, key ideologues like Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki were dead. Arab Street also appeared to have embraced peaceful protest, with popular uprisings unseating seemingly entrenched regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. A new dawn, we were told, was breaking.
The weekend’s events have brought that hopeless optimism into sharp relief. The terrorist siege of the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya continues, with around 70 people dead so far. Elsewhere, at least 80 Christians were killed in a suicide attack outside a church in the Pakistani city of Peshawar yesterday. Additional suicide attacks in Pakistan’s Balochistan province and in Iraq also killed scores of Shia over the weekend.
While the attacks in Pakistan, Iraq and Kenya are partly borne of local political issues, the overall resurgence of the global jihad movement can be traced to the conflict in Syria.
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