Al-Qaida, Islamic State Group Struggle for Recruits

Democratic thought has deep roots in Islamic tradition, including the “nahda” renaissance of Arab intellectuals in the 19th century, mass pro-democracy moments in the early 20th century in the Ottoman Empire and Iran, and the Arab Spring movement that started in late 2010.

Islamist militants such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State group view democratic efforts as a threat and have repeatedly targeted pro-democracy Muslim scholars and activists for assassination. For instance, Muhammad Nu’man Fazli, a cleric in Afghanistan, was among the recent victims of this sort of violence. His mosque outside Kabul was bombed by the Islamic State group in May 2021 during a cease-fire between the Taliban and the Afghan government, specifically because of his support of democracy, according to a statement in the Islamic State group’s newspaper.

The world’s governments have made it very hard for people to find and join militant groups. There are few safe places for training, and the ones that do exist are typically in remote areas that are hard to reach, such as the mountains of northwest Pakistan, the deserts of eastern Mali, the forests of the Lake Chad basin and northern Mozambique, and the islands of the southern Philippines.

Even online, militants must constantly seek new methods to avoid detection. Every message they send or receive risks exposing them to arrest or drone attack.

Competing for Recruits
Nationalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban are also trying to recruit Islamic extremists. Like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, these movements also aim to impose an austere version of Islamic law, at least partly through force of arms. But their ambitions are primarily local, as opposed to the global agendas of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

The nationalists and globalists may cooperate at times – most notably, the tense alliance between the Taliban and al-Qaida in the years leading up to 9/11. Still, they are fundamentally rivals when it comes to recruitment, and the nationalists are far more successful in drawing on trusted local networks.

In Afghanistan today, the Taliban have tens of thousands of militants among their recruits, according to U.S. government estimates. The Islamic State group’s regional branch, often referred to as ISIS-K, has approximately 1,000 fighters, and al-Qaida has fewer than 1,000.

Twenty years after 9/11, al-Qaida has never found enough recruits to carry out its second wave of mass-casualty attacks on America. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, only a dozen people in the United States were convicted in the years after 9/11 for links with al-Qaida, and none were involved in large-scale plots.

The Islamic State group has organized or inspired several dozen attacks in the United States, but the numbers fell off sharply in the middle of 2015, when the Turkish government closed its border with Syria. And those were do-it-yourself operations involving small arms, homemade explosives, vehicles and knives, averaging 14 fatalities per year. The Islamic State group has never mobilized enough militants in the West to “destroy the White House, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower, by Allah’s permission,” as it threatened to do in 2015.

Al-Qaida and the Islamic State group remain serious about targeting the United States. But the good news for Americans, on this anniversary of 9/11, is that militants face a recruitment bottleneck – a mundane organizational problem that afflicts these very unconventional organizations.

Charles Kurzman is Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillThis article is published courtesy of The Conversation.