Well, I'm really delighted, and you can join us for the book launch, but one of our colleagues to look at.
So Rafael is a senior research fellow in the $468 relations gearbox.
He's also an associate researcher at the University of Denmark and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
Rafael Central Research Interests, if you don't know, I'm guessing, were to get its way.
There is a changing nature of Sunni Muslim Middle East, with the particular focus on the Levant as first book on that subject from the ashes of Hamas.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was published in 2013. Profiles published a number of other journal articles,
but chapters including I Like People such date 19 pieces of the general elections specialist also knows a lot about left.
Besides his academic work,
Rafael actively engages with Arab and Western policymakers in matters of political and security developments in the Middle East,
and he is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Today, we're delighted to host Rafael to hear about his latest book, Jihad and the Militant Islam and Contentious Politics,
the journal recently published by university professor Rafael Lorsqu'ils.
Thank you so much for the introduction, and thanks as well to my crew for the invitation to do so.
This presentation to be talking about the sentiment and we're all familiar with armed Islamism.
And that's the title of my talk suggest idea arguing that it's less about religion or ideology that will sink local politics and local dynamics.
So this is the structure of the talk. I'll start with a broad introduction to this troublesome.
What I mean about how it's being analysed so far.
And then I spend the rest of the term kind of pushing back against ideological explanations.
I do this by going into one of these terms to argue, in particular, the Taliban movement.
This is a group I know quite well.
I spent seven years, seven years researching and going through its archives, interviewing 200 of its former fighters and their opponents.
And what struck me when I did research was how the group recruited when, expectedly Islamists,
but also what we may call no Islamists, that is fighters in local communities and neighbourhoods.
We're not particularly pious or religious observance and never really developed a strong commitment to science ideology.
So explaining why and how he wanted to recruit these fighters and why these fighters ended up joined the group and then I finished the book,
I wrote in an interview to see whether this story can tell us anything more generally about Islamism.
So let me jump in to the topic of Islamism. What does this term even mean to begin with?
Well, by that term, I mean, the spectrum of all groups involved in civil wars,
which featured an explicitly religious Islamic rhetoric and agenda, as you can see from the chart on the right.
On the Islamism is a phenomenon which became quite important in the 1970s,
which really saw an exponential growth in the 2000s and 2010s and indeed back years.
Islamist groups have become the dominant actors of the civil wars, which have erupted in Iraq,
in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, money and so on and so forth.
Remember, these groups included Kyra Iceman's and their myriad local branches, but not on.
There are also dozens of less radical Islamist groups,
from Hamas to the Syrian Brotherhood to an Islamic movement and others to the bottom of the extremism has grown considerably in the past decades,
and related to this is the question of its resilience.
Indeed, the question of the resilient Taliban are back in power.
Islamist rebels ousted from Syria after 10 years of brutal civil war.
ISIS and al Qaeda are resurgent in Africa. You may have heard of their growing rural insurgencies from Burkina Faso in the Congo to Mozambique.
This resilience is happening precisely as governments have spent massive amounts of resources trying to shoot them.
So what are the armed Islamists since especially resilient?
With that, of course, many possible answers,
but the prominent argument his condition is that these groups are resilient because their fighters are religious zealots,
people, fighters prepared to die for the sake of God willing to be monsters.
So this perspective essentially makes the assumption that religion or ideology is a sexual motivation of these groups and of the members.
Of course, this explanation can have some analytical traction in some cases.
Think of the case of foreign fighters suicide missions, but overall it is quite restricted perspective.
And it is a perspective which overlooks the fact often these Islamist armed groups recruit not Islamists or not, primarily driven by ideology.
Take the case of Tara Sharon. The Syrian rebel group you may be familiar with is under it's worth noting
that the Nusra Front and which nowadays controls most of northwestern Syria.
Of course, some of the group's members and especially its leaders,
do have a long history of Islamist militancy and a very strong Salafi jihadi credentials.
But what is striking is the group's willingness and ability to recruit fighters in local communities,
that's primarily driven by ideology that is specific to China's marginalised neighbourhoods of its sometimes entire villages.
On the right of the slide, you can see the picture taken just a month ago of the leader of the Irish Sun Abu Mohammed in Sudan,
meeting up with informal community leaders in the province of Italy, where the group is strong and trying to win their support.
You can see from the picture. These are not Salafi jihadi community leaders, but as their attire suggests, tribal elders.
Now, the point that I want to make in this book is not to argue that ideology doesn't matter, it does matter to some extent,
which is to argue that the excessive focus on religion and ideology has led us sometimes to overlook some of the local dynamics,
which also end up shaking these groups. That is what I mean with the title of my talk, all jihad is local.
But let us down for a little bit more deeply now into how these dynamics all played out in the case of what on in parts of Europe,
the target movement. But you can still slide on those pictures of military parade by the group in the city of Tripoli.
There was an Islamist armed group.
Which operated out of this city, mainly in the city of Tripoli during the Lebanese Civil War of the nineteen eighties.
Tripoli being the second largest city of Lebanon and as you can see from a place very across the Syrian border.
And so effectively a place under the Syrian Army's occupation during the conflicts of the 80s.
And the one aspect which really struck me when I did research on this is how
this group of two to three thousand fighters achieved major military success.
Fighters, the victims, the Syrian army out of Tripoli and the crackdown on local strong leftist militias.
So they ended up being defeated by the Syrian army three years later.
But even that was after a long and bloody battle.
So what made the group so strong words, fighters so resilient.
We're sure this last drug was a factor to some extent.
Now he recruited the small constituency of longtime Islamists and activists who were ready to mobilise and to die for their ideology purposes.
These militants were partially inspired by the leader of the revolutionary troupe and lightsaber from considering a rocket launcher.
In the picture on the right.
And they were also inspired by how terrorism chemicals sort of treatment and implemented what he called an Islamic Emirates.
This is a declassified cable by the CIA about the raid and whether it was clearly worried about the group.
Under some U.S. Islamic Unification Church, which is essentially everything you need,
is under 17 machine data as transform troopers from one of Lebanon's most tolerant and heterogeneous urban centres into Lebanon's
most autonomous instead of Christian charities applied the city's judicial system drugs and alcohol and been eliminated.
Western dress for women was criticised in Typekit members and forced to fast during Ramadan and shuttering obstructed the constituents.
There's no doubt about that. But what I found really interesting, I have to say during my research was the not stuck with there.
It's also recruited many not so returning fighters in local communities and neighbourhoods.
We were not particularly pious or religiously observant and never developed a strong commitment to Israel's ideology.
I was able to produce estimate where it was organised in distinct sections,
and so it wasn't very hard with the help of many interviews and former members of the group and
observers to reconstruct estimates of how numerically strong or weak each of the facts was.
And so there was a faction of approximately 600 fighters who came from one neighbourhood.
But it took them. These fighters were bands of youth locked, you know, ever with another neighbourhood.
And many actually drug alcohol. Another faction was made of another 600 fighters, who, for their part,
had some districts of the Old City and of Mina, some of them took drugs and crime.
I must add a history of engaging in acts of urban unrest.
So why would he be interested in recruiting so heavily in these three local communities?
We know his activism. This is a map of Tripoli to help you situate the neighbourhoods I'm talking about on the left is mineral rich,
as its name suggests, the districts of Tripoli.
Better to manage the northern enclave of the city and the Old City is Tripoli's historical sites of large neighbourhood.
So why was it interested in recruiting so heavily in these three neighbourhoods with no activism?
Well, the important thing to remember here is that the Islamists, like all rebel groups,
must be said to differ from clandestine terrorist organisations in that they're often interested in conquering territory governing in accordance.
Though, wasn't no difference. It's once it's Wall Street and create an Islamic Emirate there.
But in order to do this, it had to eliminate its openness and to control the city.
This, of course, required manpower required fighters.
And the problem is that centripetal the pool of military officers is actually quite small.
Sure, this is a city made up of 85 percent of Sunni Muslims, and many of them are pious, sometimes even conservative.
But that's not the same as being a veteran militant Islamists.
And you don't know which the fighters, it would have to mobilise local communities,
sometimes most to Islamist activism, and that's including this freedom because I just mention.
It actually sets eyes on these three neighbourhoods, especially, first of all, because they were large, so they offered a pool of potential recruits.
But beyond the need for manpower, there were also three more very specific reasons why he wanted to control these neighbourhoods.
One factor was politics. Remember that he injected the Syrian army out of chicken into it, had a target on its back.
It knew that the Syrian regime would do anything to crush it,
so it needed anti-Syrian Syrian regime recruits, whatever their ideological definitions, if they had hadn't.
It's in this respect which mobilising and then it made sense.
Had been the beating heart of the anti-Assad mobilisation of the 70s, and so politically by mobilising them in big trouble, right?
The reason we're sending a strong signal to the Syrian regime and a message that any
attempt to launch a crackdown on the island will result in a long and bloody battle.
Another factor which may have started once mobilised this time in the city of Tripoli was the strategic factor.
The group needed a high performance strategic location from which to ooze security and from defence and in the case of the Syrian attack.
In this respect, the authority city was extremely useful.
This is, as you can see from the picture, the right.
The neighbourhood made up of extremely narrow alleyways, essentially a maze of alleyways that are very hard to navigate,
except for I sort of got lost there many times in four hours sometimes.
These are places, neighbourhoods and streets that are easy to defend and difficult to attack.
It's also a neighbourhood which is very different from modern times, and so it is surrounded by gates and military towers.
And last but not least, the Old City is home to the castle, which you can see on the right.
A high rise mediaeval fortress with long range cannons can be positioned.
In a nutshell, they're mobilising and giving city director access to strategy area from where it was able to dominate treatment of military.
A final factor which played a key role in our heads must first win this time for the neighbourhood as minor was economics.
The group, after it gained control of Tripoli, needed resources in order to fight its openness and to govern the city.
That's where it's interesting and that comes. Miller is the economic heart of treatment.
It's what actually happens. It's where international ships come and go, with goods bound for Damascus,
Aleppo and Baghdad to Beirut, as the port of the capital has been disturbed.
So this kind of potential was huge.
Constrained the neighbourhood,
gaining a foothold in industrial a allowed to impose taxes on top national shipping and to make literally millions of dollars.
This, in turn, allowed them to buy weapons, provide small services to the local population.
Of course. And which patronage? In other words, it allowed them to consolidate its shore over treatment.
So to sum up, until now,
for many reasons decided that his interest in co-opting local communities not primarily driven by the standards of Nigerian politics,
military and a need for manpower for fighters.
But what about these local communities that? Those who ended up joining Typekit, well, often known as I mentioned before, so why would an Islamist to?
Well, to attract them, they're used to maintenance strategies.
The first strategy, too, was enlisting support from neighbourhood strongmen.
Indeed, what characterises these three neighbourhoods is that traditional social fabric,
these are historically popular neighbourhoods with the presence of the state is very rich and
where functional strongmen emerged to provide assistance and support services to local residents.
This figure is good, although the average. And it is someone is trying to ends up being seen as the former leader of the neighbourhood,
someone who can often count on a huge local popularity and are hundreds of very loyal followers.
The man you can see on the right path with the slogan is wonderful director with the extremely popular strongman of the neighbourhood.
But it's been in the 1970s and 80s. Charity was what we could call a champion of globalisation.
Whenever you join a protest or was most to trigger the blood recruitment of hundreds of his own followers.
In fact, when he was murdered in 1986, 50000 residents of the neighbourhood turned to funeral.
This really shows the sheer extent professional potential.
So what I did then was to recruit Cadillac Kerry on the right of the slide,
you can see the leader of Carnival side blessing in the background and his clerical outfit.
These new popular recruits Cadillac himself wearing a leather jacket.
Of course, the proper attire of this is coming from the world. For his part,
drew attention to the Islamist group was the promise that it would become one of its leaders and
that you would benefit from Typekit protection in a local rivalry that you wasn't versed in.
Recruiting actually was a huge victory for Turkey. The group said that it became very strong about its where it could now mobilise freedom and
starts recruiting hundreds of followers who went on to fight for their rights in two battles.
The interesting thing, though, is that according to dozens of interviews, I conducted imperative that it was sort of a terrible use of these recruits.
They can shoot Islamists beds and they started looking like other members.
But you've really remained neighbourhood Islamists fighters, driven not by residual ideology,
but rather by loyalty for their other day and by local turf wars.
The second strategy, which started just in order to go up and recruit local communities in these three neighbourhoods,
was that it acted as a vehicle for social reasons.
This three neighbourhoods, indeed, are literally Tripoli's most deprived alliance,
with between 70 and 90 percent of the locals living in poverty or extreme poverty.
And this.
These are areas where social anger had long been simmering, but today the austerity and meaner all had a long history of violent social rewards.
Histories and traditions of outbursts of anger aimed at the treatment intelligence.
This is actually where anarchist militias and criminal gangs had previously recruited,
including, most famously, the gang of the recruits, which can see a picture on the right.
It's years before the growth after he had recruited precisely in these neighbourhoods that recruited
the surveillance on the residents of these three neighbourhoods and for an entire year to gather,
didn't violent targeting and blackmailing and extorting the triplet and none of us had been overturning Tripoli's social order.
And so this is something that David also did play into this.
She dreams of urban descent and this powerful local socio economic grievances.
It also provided a conduit for that expression. So on the one hand, the discourse becomes socially very little.
But most importantly, on the other hand, it's actions actually to.
The group began to target Tripoli politicians and businessmen, regardless of how pilots actually work.
And this attracted hundreds of local supporters in this deprived neighbourhoods.
Let's show.
The interesting thing is that very few of these sorority members to Islamists, the vote for the group whenever they were asked to, for sure.
But the rest of the time they were dragging you into what you might call Social Jihad or acts of urban violence driven by economic grievances,
most of them by ideology. And inevitably, this ended up elevating the well-connected superintendent.
And so eventually, 1985. The representatives of the street management issued a statement imploring Hafez
al-Assad to send the Syrian army yet another time to try and stop him once and for all.
And this time this year, the army notes that in essence,
it's mobilised as many as seven thousand soldiers to stay in Tripoli and try to enter NATO for 90 days.
This last battle was not only in London, but also extremely bloody, with 600 killed in 19 minutes.
And with extolling the regime's was its route to the next part of treatment,
its ability to mobilise not just the small pool of ideologically committed fighters,
but also entire local communities with whole streets and neighbourhoods.
This last ditch struggle? So.
What are the takeaways for this local story? What can the story tell us more broadly about what we may call the matrix of obstacles
and more the ways in which actors navigate relationships with local communities,
local identities. Local solidarity?
Well, I think the story that's just to mention in this respect, which I'm sorry to say, it's more contemporary examples before briefly concluding.
The first thing that story does is really to shed light on the myriad locally oriented Islamists out there.
When we think about the term Islamism, we do tend to spontaneously associated with transnational armed groups such as ISIS on Kader,
all with national armed groups such as the Taliban, of course.
But what it shows is the need for a third category,
the category factoring in the many armed Islamist groups which are international, not transnational, but local.
That is literally centred on the challenging the neighbourhood, the city, the village region.
What characterises these groups is that they are locally oriented in that demand
gets to some extent with broader trends and with actors external to their ability,
but ultimately deprioritized the local community.
We prioritised defence for the community of its integrity and its identity.
These look ordinary entities, fans, groups.
I've actually become very prominent in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars where I suspect you would always be on this spectrum.
So I do think that it's important to recognise that and also to illustrate this with another example not drawn from Turkey
and the Black two talked for just a few minutes about the Derna Mujahideen Shura Council measures should I get one,
which was a coalition of Islamist rebels in the region of Derna, which control this northeastern city of Raqqa from 2014 to 2018?
I was quite interested in the group three years ago, so I did a bit of research on it.
And what struck me was how. The overarching goal of that group was explicitly local.
Of course, this was an Islamist army which carried lots carrying out a lot of things,
but it was also a group which had vowed to protect the country, not protecting it from ISIS and from head start.
In fact, that's changed its name.
Back in 2017 into the General Protection Force, and so it was quite interesting that I was not able to research that enough,
but I knew quite a bit of that into the statements put out by this group.
And I was also again struck by how localised a lot of these statements were.
These were statements that really could broader national or international issues.
You were obsessed with all things Derna and their children's culture pages and pages, which the city's history,
its identity picture its beauty and telling many of the statements ended with a sentence may God protect their.
I think this shows the relevance of factoring in local and oriental influences on this in our analysis of Islam.
They are not for national or transnational groups, and this local state has to a great extent been.
The second thing that story does is to illuminate the various ways in which the local
matters for the Islamists shows very clearly the range of reasons why Islamist armed groups,
including the most transnational ones, maybe interested in building up legitimacy in some local communities.
This will allow them to recruit, to govern and to hide.
Of course, when these groups are on the decline. So the local system used by these groups as a tool.
The third story was just shows how the local can also affect the discourse on the behaviour of armed Islamists.
In fact, sometimes their vitals may reflect the priorities of local community groups that have been promoting Muslim ideology.
But will you just try this with a case of ISIS?
ISIS in the Syrian desert? No, this is not a group that is particularly well known for having tried to co-opt local communities.
But there was an exception in the Syrian desert. I don't quite know why.
Maybe the commander there was interested in doing that, maybe there were particular strategies.
I believe that's what is for sure is that when ISIS comes to the Syrian desert in 2015,
they're extremely strong bonds with the tribal elders of the town of as termed as desert is.
This vast stretch of desert land is of Homs, and it includes two main tunnels Suttner,
which sees itself as the one which follows the Syrian desert and Palmyra,
which in the past decades has been considered the true capital of the Syrian desert as a group led to a.
And so. Looting itself lucrative in the town of a supermarket was very useful for ISIS because the balance of the
time that created with the tribal elders made it possible for ISIS to recruit 2000 fighters in this town.
But the interesting thing is that the risk was not just the tool for ISIS,
it also ended up affecting disaffected discourse because after absorbing this,
two-thirds of local recruits from a stop near the ISIS discourse in this area became shaped by the local identity.
That's just what I started cutting talk stock market, capital of the desert and the title of that in decades previously had been
reserved for Palmyra and ended up affecting the violence carried out by ISIS.
Because when the size of the city of Palmyra a couple of weeks after recruiting the 2000 fighters,
it carried out a massacre of hundreds of residents of Palmira.
And some evidence suggest that this massacre?
Well, the monks of the local recruits devices from a tradition of inhabitants have been given as their rivals.
The strong bonds developed by ISIS with the tribal elders and communities of stockmen may
also explain actually part of what the group is about the resurgence in this particular,
but it's not for everyone, but it is resurgence even amongst the tone of the.
So these bombs? There was a lot less to.
So in conclusion. I've tried to do when the story is, of course,
to mention that since the seems to have often been up to be driven by region and ideology and also thought about that,
this is an important part of the story, but also to argue that it does everything.
I've tried to propose changes perspective when exploring the microplastics of Islamism,
when assessing the role of local dynamics in the behaviour and trajectory of these groups.
The key finding of my research is that all Islamist groups are arguably affected by local conflicts, including transnational Jews.
I think that this is interesting because not in and of itself for the local,
but also because from new insights into the range of motivations other than ideology which try and shape Islamism.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much for a really stimulating.
Everyone is going to be for some of us. So I got a question.
Chelsea Wright, she's one of the reasons that it's why did ICE's franchise with the people so specifically and not with the people of Europe,
tumours of the surrounding villages? I have a couple of questions if I can abuse or should I wait for the second round?
So I defer to senior question. Well, this a fascinating rule.
Rafael, there is so much in that and again, a lot that just isn't, as you said,
these transnationally and even most at the national level, these local dynamics are absolutely crucial.
If it's not going to breach. First one is I'm interested to see how do the genuinely Islamist leadership in some Typekit?
How did they recognise and justify the integration of the indigenous and presumably behave in terms of drug taking alcohol,
for example, continue to engage? Do they see it as the great trend?
Is it justified in that sense? The other question I like to ask is, as you know,
I studied in the past with the business institute here and again very clearly local dynamics developed over time there,
and there were two particular dimensions that developed, one of which seems to be operating here, but one not so.
One is the element of turf war between other rival groups and not the rival,
which is clearly what seems to be happening in Palmyra and in the desert in Syria.
The other one that operates a lot in Algeria was the the economic domination in terms of racketeering,
which local exchange control over local political economy through sort of almost mafioso style behaviour.
Is that something that you see in any of these cases? That was definitely the case.
But what developed locally in regions in Algeria? Thank you.
Yes, a great set of questions to start with. Thank you very much.
So the question as to why did ISIS align with a soccer match this Egyptian premier?
It's a great question, and I think it goes to the core of what ISIS has been very good at in the past decade.
It is a group that think strategically about the local and sort of notices communities which have grievances.
And so I think the term the residents of a shop as a nation are residents who feel aggrieved
because they've seen their rivals become an essential inhabitants of the capital of the world.
The capital of the Syrian desert is an actual name that the Syrian regime against the Baath Party gets to the city of Palmyra.
So the Baath regime has chosen Palmyra as its capital of the desert,
with the residents of the suttner felt grieved and marginalised and in fact, was done.
And so I think I think it's part of why ISIL's tried to build bombs in that city because this
was a city with potential with grievances where people could be mobilised against others.
It partially links to ask Michael about why, rather, how does he justify the absorption of non-Islamists into the into the group?
It's a very good question, and maybe I should have mentioned that in the tall, dark Phoenix list hopes that this nonsense will become strong.
Recommendations raised all the time, and it was not just a matter of veterans that he invested cultural resources for
the time back then into the three neighbourhoods where non-citizens were where.
Of these mosques, it's a set of indoctrination camps and I you talked to instructors from this look trashy general and
we as fighters went through the camps on the other side of the camp as sort of attendees or students.
It was clear from both perspectives that this didn't actually work out, really reproducing the results.
There were stories of Jews committed afterwards, but it was really the exception rather than religion.
And so the bottom line is that I think that it was perhaps a bit naive,
and Mitt's approach was actually to try to build on the ideological commitment of these students just the same.
This is remember we're talking about a three year period, this is not a massively long amount of time.
It was in contrast to results for years between 1980 to 1985.
So if it had stayed longer in charge of the city,
maybe there would be more cases of actual conversions over conversions to the strong brand of Islamism.
The question you ask on racketeering, extortion and measures of behaviour.
Actually, the parallels with Nigeria in the 1990s are really fascinating story.
This dynamic went very far indeed because once the resources to govern the city,
it was ready to strike back with a dagger as it were to ActionScript stables into each integrated into the group,
an actual criminal gang headed by a Christian who supposedly converted to Islam and then became an Islamist.
But again, that was that was not a case of sincere conversion to Islam.
What is the solution to terrorism? Essentially,
the group's willingness to recruit anyone to bring in revenues so that it wasn't able to continue operating and govern the city of Tripoli?
Interestingly enough, this neighbourhood's getting edited by this attrition mechanism.
This whole section should section.
It ended up engaging in alcohol smuggling.
And people say that the targeting there new, but that this was such a profitable business that they just let it happen.
So it shows again the extent to which these local dynamics and sometimes simply
the need for resources as your government and you need boots on the ground,
we need manpower to provide services. We need to engage in patronage.
And for all of this, you need resources wherever we come from.
Thanks for being really enjoying the spectacle.
I'm going to pass on some questions, so I've had some questions about the framing, which is about ideology.
So the study is very well motivated by pushing back against explanations that are simply reasonable ideology.
But let me be intelligent with respect to suggest that in many ways,
the modal approach of understanding political Islam is precisely to write out ideology from all of the accounts.
So thinking here.
So this is what, for example, from the early 2000s when she talks about it in the politics in which the universe splits ultimately about politics.
I'm thinking here also Thomas Eric Duncan conspicuously recently, where he is going to go to the business.
The dominant approach is that we try to use is that religion or ideology is like a rapper.
But actually, the core of it is actually politics and economics, which is obviously an issue that seems to come out very strongly with new research.
What I was kind of curious to hear about was about the ideology of taxes the beginning,
because I think you're absolutely right that true ideologues are very great regulation.
They necessarily have to recruit the true ideal to be able to sustain a large force of movement.
But surely that kind of the cool country of the early risers, if you will, they presumably were more motivated by ideology.
And I was curious to hear what distinguished it from animal operable movements.
If we think about political stuff as a spectrum. Where do they kind of sit on that spectrum?
If you were inspired by it in their initial investment stage, I also wanted to pursue as well to think about this, this framing about politics.
Presumably, you want to introduce this kind of radical groups.
Presumably, this is in large part a function of the development of the organisation at the time,
but is to say that organisation is not necessarily so, and some become national and transnational.
And so what? I was kind of curious to hear your thoughts on the counterfactual.
Honestly, it's astonishing. How much did you find?
Could we imagine a version of the philosophy that was national or transnational?
And how then would that have changed these kinds of local dynamics or not?
OK. Thanks. You are concerned.
Good questions and how to answer the first question for us was but the framing of my
talk and perhaps some sort of wrong ideology and kind of pushing it back against it,
against me, pushing back against intolerance, which was first of all,
let me start by saying that the book is slightly more sophisticated when we talk as the talk is 30 minutes of truth.
And I wanted to make this argument for getting to in second, but the book does explain the ways in which I actually matter.
You know, I have this argument in the book that I do trajectory matter quite a bit into reading.
I think I was also admitted to that in the talk, but especially because there were a handful of children coming to this interview
who organised as a fiction and try to shape human behaviour tied to London,
the leader of the group and the whole leadership to take ideologically inspired decisions.
So I think it did matter. But it's true that in mistake.
I pushed back against this tendency on the part of some scholars to overemphasise ideology nonsense.
You're right to mention the work of several items, including a children's written,
a brilliant article precisely on this back in the late 1990s with the truth.
But the feedback loop is that it's a designed to.
There are people for pushing back against ideological institutions.
There are also people who are engaging with this ideology. Only explanations.
And these people in other fields, I'm thinking of civil wars.
The issue of terrorism studies, especially also against government in this current conversation.
Hence, my attempt to push back against this perspective, which is talking to other students outside of all the students.
You asked a really good question on which first movers the first movers as to where were.
Yes, of course the where is. But then which kind of Islamists?
There were two kinds of issues which followed.
The first one was the could.
We were inspired by the fringe of the Muslim Brotherhood and its mission by the Muslim Brotherhood's radical ideologue side.
But there was another group of Islamists which was started through and really with the end of the day verging towards the end of the movement.
And these were for millions of people for Tunisians, which were inspired by the Iranian revolution, which is not the exception.
We know that, of course, there are other groups that are simply centrists and ended up being inspired by the Iranian Revolution,
Palestinian Islamic Jihad and what of them. And so these were the two types of issues which coexist at the beginning of the life of the.
And then your third question on weather patterns was that all groups start local,
and so inevitably, all politics is local to form groups that are from their beginnings.
So he has a three year period of life can be considered as short in the middle of a civil war.
This is not crucial to consider. The interesting and started local, that's true, that never developed broader ambitions.
This was not often groups start local, but with broader ambitions,
with broader ends taking over the roots of the Lebanese government or starting revolutions across the world or toppling the Syrian regime and so on.
That wasn't the case. This was a group that Musketeer wanted and wanted to take Tripoli over government.
That's the group's ambition was. And as I tried to suggest,
so I don't think that these locally oriented movements on this sort of an
exception or that your only characteristic of the early years of maintenance.
There are many movements that start to and remain local because of locally oriented.
They are formed with the attrition goal of protecting the community, protecting the village and neighbourhoods.
The mountains sometimes and you have many of which never would try to, but rather than their opponents, it is one of them.
Northern Syria centred on one village.
It's a group that still exists within 10 years, and you never developed into a national because it never intended to develop into a national.
What motivated me was the protection of its village and its villages around the country.
Other examples, but I'm happy to get into. Thanks for being with us, Freddy.
Thanks very much. Great talk to Russians. And the first woman relates a little bit to the points you mentioned.
I'm wondering about the early stage in this group.
Did they have a sort of ideological moderation or pivot when they decided essentially in Tripoli itself?
Or was that always the ambition right from the start? So just sort of tracing the, I guess,
the leadership of it and looking at whether or not the more Salafi elements of
a sort of great gain greater or lesser influence as the organisation develops.
The second thing that I'm wondering about is also related to the sort of early onset of this group.
I wonder how they competed with other groups in the conflict who were also competing for local parts and local influence?
Was it was this just a matter of they had more committed fighters and they were able to possess revenue streams like sports,
which they may tax off of? Or how did they really outcompete those other groups that were also struggling so much?
Conscious of the growth of time, just crazy, we will question this space from an anonymous attendee.
Thanks you for an extremely interesting presentation.
The question is mainly talking about the reasons why he started recruiting Hispanics, according to Rafael.
Why was the strategy so effective?
I mean, looking at the other side of the fence, why didn't all the Christmas actors feel so attracted to it and subsequently decide to join?
So why would they attract some movement and decided to do what is presumably for a virus strategy and decide to do?
Would you perhaps the last question first,
why did not I mentioned the talk through mechanisms through which to is not one of them was a listing of the support of neighbourhoods, children.
So this summer, as well as serving on the ground in some neighbourhoods.
What motivated these factors to start observing them was the fact that they're able to
determine a joint in and out of a mix or the sense of loyalty and neighbourhood solidarity.
A lot of that it's actually quite striking when you ask people so 40 years later, but nonetheless, it's interesting.
Why did you decide that were, you know, some of these neighbourhoods or was this one?
And sometimes the answer because that general control group.
Quite simply, it's difficult to. I mean, one cannot underestimate the extent to which these local authorities, these local identities,
the neighbourhoods came really mattered in the case of people and having the name of the storm was actually saw in this one neighbourhood.
Not then. In the case of the other neighbourhoods, I mentioned that Typekit was willing to also that country for their peoples.
And so I think that was a key factor. The group paid sometimes strict rules.
It was not always a systematic approach, and it's very depending on all the resources and depending on the central banks.
It was at some point you might, which is most of get before and after.
So I suspect that was also part of the story. And as I also suggested,
my response to my question on extortion of quite a few of these fighters joined because we wanted to make money out of organised crime.
So he was giving them the facts are stupid and therefore by joining, this is something that was actually able to consider engaging,
smuggling and engaging in trafficking and cigarettes trafficking in some cases of trafficking Western intentions.
Shows the extent to which this response ideology was the single most important factor.
And I think that leads to the question you asked about the earlier stages of the group.
What was the mission from the start to the past?
It's important to remember that David was born in the summer maintenance, which summer refuge was important for three reasons.
First, it's a few months after the Hammer massacre.
Summer is not too far from Tripoli, and back then in the Senate in 1982, the Syrian regime had crushed its members in the bloodshed,
and there were talks back then that the Syrian regime would move into Tripoli and operate the city.
A very, very bloody crackdown on the entire city.
Just send the entire city and so that of protecting children from the threat of a Syrian Hamas massacre.
Of course, the summer of 1982 is especially linked to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982,
which saw the Israeli army cover up to 20 murders some children.
And so. Quite a few people think that is someone gets to shipping to that Israel Resorts are going to come and say to them,
must be because it has to vote on a number of suggestions in which the piano was to choose from.
Israel did nothing invading the north of Lebanon that's far north, and Syria does not end up carrying Hamas massacre children.
I just want to mention the truth about protecting children from these two threats was really what brought
the two different breeds of incidents that I mentioned before together and govern together in a musical.
You asked another question. What it essentially completes its rivals.
What made them able to become such a strong resistance group?
Instagram When? Tripoli, the military had strong militants as shells drew back in Tripoli actually had quite a few modest objects,
but it seems to underscore very soon the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood, which is strong in Tripoli.
This is a national hideaway. Michelle Williams.
This was a villa in the shadow of what's involved in Civil War, the only 20 or 30 people.
That was in 1976. And so by 1982 it were not very strong.
There were no serious competitor. 12. Another group was the soldiers of God.
And that ended up being sold by time because starting to become quite such a strong with resources and so on and so forth.
So I think that he ended up working in the local environment, which was marked by this intense action in the armed Islamist spectrum.
The spectrum was quite busy as it were when leftist countries, but the spectrum of Islamism was very, very small.
And then something happened to munchenberg in the coverage of militant Islamists was very, very similar.
Christian. It's great you run out of time.
So let me then thank Rafael for a really great tool and the suffering of Christians and great Christians giving such excellent answers.
You will hear we would sell Rafael's books, unfortunately, unless you are willing to listen to, you haven't been able to ask the question.
I'm sure you would be delighted to have some back and forth on email.
I really urge you to take a look at this book and purchases.
Thank you all very much. Just embarrassing to all of you pretending that sometimes far away.
And just to say that somehow having suffered a little bit concerned with whether it's with rich women and this was really, really nice.
So thanks to all of the items. That's the talk next week is by Joseph, a student from Georgetown University.
The book basically on his own family, the Sassoon family,
merchants coming here in blocks to speak in Britain and to be speaking at five o'clock next judge's decision on that.
And anyway, thank you very much for joining us once again, sir. Thank you very much.