During the early 2000s, Islamic terrorism was everywhere. Or so it seemed. Muslims had been the default terrorists in movies and paperback novels starting in the 1970s, but a series of traumatic incidents starting in the otherwise placid 90s — the first World Trade Center bombing, the Khobar Towers bombing, and the attack on the USS Cole — had primed Western imaginations for the extended panic attack that would ultimately be unleashed by 9/11.
In the first 2008 Presidential debate, then-candidate Obama told the nation that Al-Qaeda was in sixty countries and that the greatest threat to America was a terrorist getting his hands on a nuclear weapon. In so doing, he named the assumption that drove Western anxiety about Islamic extremism: that things could only get worse. Terrorists had shown their willingness to kill on American soil in the thousands, as well as an ability to do so using very unsophisticated means. Surely the only thing preventing Al-Qaeda from inflicting millions of casualties was their lack of access to the means of doing so. And it was only a matter of time before they got it.
Yet, for the West, at least, things did not get worse. Instead, Western Europe and the US faced a steady drumbeat of fairly conventional terror attacks that ranged from the incompetent, like the attempted Times Square bombing in 2010, to the more serious, like the Madrid train attacks. The most-feared eventualities—a dirty bomb attack, the release of a biological agent, a crippling attack on critical infrastructure—did not come to pass. This low level of extremist violence has continued, particularly in the UK, where individuals have executed acts of what is essentially artisinal terrorism: one-on-one monstrosities like the murder of Lee Rigby.
For the rest of the world, things actually did ultimately get worse.
Deaths by Islamic extremism nudged 30,000 for the first time in 2014, a year that might ring a bell as the one in which Isis stopped being a name that New Age types felt comfortable giving their kids. But the Islamic State was only responsible for around a quarter of the casualties in that year:
Boko Haram, based in Northern Nigeria, had a similarly detestable showing with more than 7,000 murders. And the "other" category is a rogues' gallery — like United Colors of Benetton, but for Salafists. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula killed nearly a thousand in Yemen. The Pakistani Taliban killed hundreds more. Séléka massacred Christians in the Central African Republic, and Al-Nusra did its part in Syria.
The violence peaked around 2015, but the end of Islamic State didn't mean the end of jihadist terror. Taliban-caused deaths increased steadily nearly every year between 2010 and 2020, probably contributing to the Biden administration's sense of urgency around the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Boko Haram, Somalia's Al Shabaab, and the remaining tentacles of the Islamic State, amputated but still writhing, maintained a steady hum of murders.
The data for this piece comes from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which doesn't yet have data for 2021-2023, but I'd bet that deaths related to jihadism have continued to fall. Islamic State is mostly defeated. Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, exploded himself in mid-2021. And the Taliban, well— deaths caused by Taliban likely won't appear in GTD's data going forward, because the database only tracks terrorism by non-state actors.
This is a weird thing. Three years ago, if Taliban fighters had raided a village and assassinated some of its inhabitants in the middle of the night, those deaths would have been counted as casualties of Islamic terrorism. Now the Taliban can hang those same individuals in a soccer stadium, and they'll be just another handful of unfortunate victims of just another totalitarian state. When the data comes out in a couple years, I think we'll be able to look at a later version of these graphs and see a visible downtrend thanks to the decline of Taliban terror. But the reason for the decline in this particular case will have been that the terrorists won and, in doing so, stopped being terrorists.
This is not what happened in the case of Islamic State, which was defeated by a coordinated and massively destructive international operation. The primary cause of the decline of IS terror is probably that coalition airstrikes killed its fighters by the tens or hundreds of thousands. One imagines that this hurt recruitment. Martyrdom seems to have been enticing for some recruits, but in order to be a martyr you have to take some infidels with you; later IS recruits were just traveling a long way to commit suicide.
Of course, Islamic State was a global brand as much as it was an actual statelike entity — less Supreme Leader and more Supreme. The caliphate, such as it was, had a highbrow online magazine and a penchant for virality so effective that they were covered by PR Week.
This was a real thing — think back over the last fifty years. Was there a Golden Age of jihadist terror? If so, when was it?
We just lived through it. If you look through the GTD data, you'll see that the efflorescence of terror attacks in the West that occurred in the second half of the 2010s was driven by the popularity of IS — "ISIL-inspired attacks" were everywhere, mostly in Western Europe.
It's true that none of these attacks was hugely destructive. But terrorist attacks rarely are. 9/11 looms large in our imaginations; this might be obvious, but it's really an outlier, arguably the deadliest jihadist terror attack of all time. The median jihadist attack over the course of the last half-century has killed exactly one person. Less than 1% of all jihadist attacks kill more than 50 people, and that includes Islamic State.
Reading the descriptions of these attacks, it's important to note that many of them weren't executed by IS alumni or by operatives dispatched from the former seat of the caliphate in Raqqa; instead, they were attempted by fanboys. To me, this rise and decline of IS-inspired terror in Europe suggests something discomfiting about the causes of that terror: that it's caused by the salient successes of other terrorists. Violent, incompetent fanboys wound themselves up in their basements, watching propaganda videos of Muslim revolutionaries sweeping across Iraq and Syria, easily trampling any opposition. IS attacks in Europe started to decline only once IS was on the back foot.
This leads to an even more uncomfortable suggestion about the role that the US invasion of Afghanistan played in the evolution of Islamic terror. The coordination, scale, and sophistication of 9/11 was made possible by the relative stability of a well-funded (by bin Laden) terrorist network headquartered in a friendly state (Afghanistan). The West did not experience another attack of comparable scale, apparently because that network (and the rest of the country) was decimated by the US invasion. Similarly well-managed and well-resourced terror organizations aren't very common, and another one didn't arise to take Al Qaeda's place.
Yet something else also didn't happen — a massive wave of copycat attacks of the kind that we saw in the mid-2010s thanks to IS. I think it's interesting and a bit morbid to imagine a counterfactual history where Al Qaeda wasn't destroyed as decisively as it was: would we have been continually plagued by copycats who saw 9/11 as the starting gun in a race to topple the "far enemy?" And what does this say about fighting terrorism more generally? If terror of any kind — in this case jihadist, but plausibly neo-fascist, anarchist, or what have you — is a kind of meme that is communicated by highly visible, unreversed successes, the calculus changes. But I'm not sure exactly how.