Well, I'm really delighted to join us for the book launch.
One of our colleagues, Rafael So Rafael, is a senior research fellow in the $468 relations here.
He's also an associate researcher at the University of Denmark and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
Rafael Central Research A chance to be. I'm guessing that's why there is a changing nature of Sunni Islam as it relates to that particular
focus that his first book on that subject was the ashes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.
It was published in 2013. Rafales published a number of other journal articles that chapters including like people
such date 19 pieces of the general elections specialist also knows a lot about the left.
And besides his academic work,
Rafael actively engages with Arab and Western policymakers and matters for political and security developments in the Middle East.
And he is a non-resident fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But today, we're delighted to host Rafael to hear about his latest book,
Jihad and the Militant Islam and Contentious Politics in Germany, recently published by Bainbridge University Press.
Rafael 4-Year-Olds. Thank you so much for the introduction, and thanks as well to my crew for the invitation to do so this presentation.
Are we talking about the phenomenon? We're all familiar with armed Islamism and that's the title of my talk suggest.
I'd be arguing that it's less about religion or ideology that will change local politics and local dynamics.
So this is the structure of the talk. I'll start with a broad introduction to what I expected you mean about how it's been 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 and in particular, the Typekit movement.
This is a group I know quite well.
I spent seven years and seven years researching and going through archives into interviewing 200 of its former fighters and their opponents.
And what struck me when I did research was how the group recruited, well, expect to be Islamists,
but also what we may call non Islamists that is fighters in local communities and neighbourhoods who are
considered pious or religious observance and never really developed a strong commitment to ideology.
So explaining why and how he wanted to recruit these fighters and why these fighters ended up joining the group,
and then I finished the book, I wrote in an interview to see whether this story contains anything more generally about Islamism.
So let me jump in to the topic of Islamism. What does this term even mean to begin with?
What about 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 about 10 years.
Islamist groups have become the dominant actors of the civil wars, which have erupted in Iraq,
in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Mali and so on and so forth.
Remember, these groups included Kyra Iceman's and their myriad local branches, but not on.
There were also dozens of this radical Islamist groups, from Hamas to the Syrian Brotherhood to an Islamic movement.
In other words, 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 resilience the 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 seem especially resilient?
With that, of course, many possible answers,
but the prominent argument is 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 demonstrate.
So this perspective essentially makes the assumption that religion or ideology is a central motivation for these groups and of their 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 a quite restricted perspective.
And it is a perspective which overlooks a key fact, often these Islamist armed groups recruit not Islamists or not, primarily driven by ideology.
Take the case of Tara some.
A 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, 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 tribes, marginalised neighbourhoods and sometimes entire villages.
On the right of the slide, you can see the picture taken just in multiple of the leader of the Irish Sun Abu Mohammed in Sudan,
meeting up with informal community leaders in the province of Idlib, where the group is strong and trying to win their support.
As 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 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 shaping these views. That is what I mean with the title of my talk, all jihad is local.
Which lets us delve a little bit more Gyptian now into how these dynamics all played out in the case of Lebanon,
in particular, the targeted movements.
To conceal this little picture 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 metal, a place very true.
The Syrian Lebanese border and so effectively a place under the Syrian army occupation during the conflict 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 of local strongmen leftist militias in Tripoli.
Sure, the 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 point were its fighters so resilient?
Well, sure, this lasted was a factor to some extent.
Now he recruited the small constituency of longtime militant Islamists and shipping activists to Egypt,
where Richards mobilised to die for their ideology purposes.
These militants were partially inspired by the leader of the revolutionary troupe,
and despite shutdown from considering a rocket launcher in the picture on the right.
And they were also inspired by the hidden gem sort of treatment and implemented what he called an Islamic Emirate.
This is a declassified cable by the CIA about the raid and whoever wrote it was clearly worried about the group entrance into something of leadership.
Islamic Unification Church, which is essentially everything you need,
is and the southern U.S. to transform troopers from one of Lebanon's most tolerant and heterogeneous urban
centres into Lebanon's most autonomous instead of pursuing Sharia is applied in the city's judicial system.
Drugs and alcohol have been eliminated. Western dress for women is criticised in target members and close the fast during Ramadan.
And tutoring obstructed the constituents in the stands and should know that some of that.
But what I found really interesting, and I have to say intriguing during my research was the do not stop there.
It's also recruited many not so returning fighters in local communities and neighbourhoods.
We're not particularly pious or religiously observant and never developed a strong commitment to Wisdom'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 faction 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 you be interested in recruiting so heavily in these three local communities with no history?
Activism, this is a matter of Tripoli to help to situate the neighbourhoods I'm talking about on the left is mineral rich,
as its name suggests, the streets of Tripoli.
Better to balance the northern enclave of the city and the Old City is Tripoli's historical sort of a 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 groups said,
tend to differ from clandestine terrorist organisations in that they're often interested in conquering territory governing in accordance.
Though, wasn't there a 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 in Tripoli, the pool of militant Islamists is actually quite small.
Sure, this is a city made up of 85 percent of Sunni residents, and many of them are fighters, sometimes even conservative.
But that's not the same as being, let alone militant Islamists.
And so to know which fighters it would have to mobilise local communities, sometimes most through this lens activism.
And that's including the three languages I just mentioned.
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 regime recruits, whatever their ideological affiliations, if they had.
It's in this respect which mobilising and better today and with the sense.
I had been the beating heart of the anti-Assad mobilisation of the 70s, and so politically by mobilising them to consume petrol right there.
He was sending a strong signal to the Syrian regime in a message that any attempt
to launch a crackdown on the island would result in a long and bloody battle.
Another sector which may have started once mobilised, this time in the water, the cities of Tripoli was the strategic factor.
The group is it a high putnam's strategic location from which to ooze security and from which to defend itself in the case of Syrian attack?
In this respect, the authority city was extremely useful.
This is, as you can see from the picture on the right neighbourhood, made up of extremely narrow alleyways,
essentially a maze of alleyways that are very hard to manage, except for and 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 guards and military towers.
And last but not least, the Old City is home to the castle, which can see on the right.
A high rise mediaeval fortress with long range cannons can be positioned.
In a nutshell, then mobilising and giving city gifts unhindered access to a strategic area from where it was able
to dominate treatment of military with a single factor which played a key role in our heads,
much less well this time for the neighbourhood as minor was economics.
The group, after it regained control of Tripoli, needed resources in order to fight its opponents and to govern the city.
That's where it's interest in that comes. Miller is the economic hub of treatment.
It's what actually happens. It's where international ships come and go, with goods bound for Damascus,
Aleppo and Baghdad, as well as the port of the capital, had just been destroyed.
So kind economy potential was huge.
Constrained the neighbourhood, gaining support in industrial,
bought a lot of it 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 wage patronage. In other words, it allowed them to consolidate its share over treatment.
So to sum up, until now, for many reasons, that targets interest in co-opting local communities,
not primarily driven by state politics, military kind and a need for manpower for fighters.
But what about these local communities then?
Those who ended up joining Typekit, often known as as I mentioned before, so why would they join an Islamist party?
Went to a charter, they were used to maintenance strategies.
The first strategy actually was and existing support from neighbourhoods trauma.
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 facilities and support services to local residents.
This figure is called the Ob-La-Da Heritage.
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 shoot, local popularity and hundreds of territorial followers.
The man you can see on the right path with the slogan is wonderful director, the extremely popular.
Strongmen 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 to trigger the blood of hundreds of his own followers.
In fact, when he was murdered in 1986, 50000 residents of the neighbourhood turned to questionable.
This really shows the sheer extent. Facing potential.
So what I did then was to recruit Cadillac came on the right of the slide,
you can see the leader of Italian side Shaba posing in the backdrop and his clerical outfit.
These new popular recruits Cadillac himself wearing a leather jacket, of course, the proper attire of many of the world's.
For his part, drew attention to the Islamist group was the promise that he would become one of its leaders
and that you would benefit from Typekit protection in a local rivalry that you was.
Recruiting actually was a huge victory for Turkey. The group suddenly became very strong about its meaning it could now mobilise freedom and starts
recruiting hundreds of activists followers who went on to fight for their rights in key battles.
The interesting thing, though,
is that according to dozens of interviews that conducted competitive bidding sort of occurring during a few of these recruits,
they can shoot Islamists different beds and they started looking like other members.
But you've really remained neighbourhood Islamists fighters driven not by religion or 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 ones,
with between 70 and 90 percent of the locals living in poverty or extreme poverty.
And linked to this, these are areas where social anger had long been simmering.
But today in the Old City and meaner all had a long history of violent social rewards.
Histories and traditions of outbursts of anger aimed at the treatment at the moment.
This is actually where anarchist militias and criminal gangs had previously recruited,
including, most famously, the gang of the ultras, which can see pictures on the right.
Years before the growth of he had recruited precisely in these neighbourhoods
that recruited the surveillance on the residents of these three neighbourhoods,
and for an entire year, they had to gather the environmental targets and blackmailing and extorting the triple in the Netherlands.
They had been overturning Tripoli's social order. And so this is this is something that David also did play into this.
She dreams of urban ambitions and this powerful local socio economic grievances.
It also provided a conduit for that expression.
So on the one hand, it's discourse becomes socially very loaded, but most importantly, on the other hand, it's actually actually sort to.
The group began to target tourism politicians and businessmen, regardless of how finances actually work.
And this attracted hundreds of local supporters in this extremely deprived neighbourhoods.
Let's show gain, the interesting thing is that very few of these sorority members to reject the Islamists,
the vote for the group whenever they were asked to, for sure.
But the rest of the time they were dragging you into it to make sure the society had 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, state troopers and try to enter for 90 days.
This last battle was not only long, but what's too extreme, without which 600 killed in 19 minutes.
And with explained the regime was its it's rooted in best parts 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 of this local story? What kind of the story has started?
Tell us more broadly about what we may call the by triple digits of obstacles and
all the ways in which inspectors navigate relationships with local communities.
Local identities, local solidarities.
Well, I think the story that's just true mentions in this respect, which I find illustrates more contemporary examples before briefly concluding.
The first thing that story does is really to shed light on the myriad locally oriented Islamist armed groups there.
Indeed, when we think about the term Islamism, we do tend to spontaneously associated with transnational armed groups such as ISIS or Caida,
or with national armed groups such as the Taliban or Hamas.
But what it shows is the need for a third category,
the category factoring in the many armed groups which are international, not transnational, but local.
That is literally centred on a locality the neighbourhood, the city, the village region.
What characterises these groups is that they are locally oriented in that demand
and to some extent with broader trends and with actors external to their locality,
but ultimately deprioritized the local community.
It prioritised defence for the community of its integrity and its identity.
These lucrative oriented sales groups have actually become very prominent in the Libyan
and Syrian civil wars where I suspect you make a group of armed Islamist spectrum,
so I do think that it's important to recognise that and and also to illustrate it with another example not drawn from Turkey.
I'd like to talk for just a few minutes about the donor Mujahedeen Shura Council, as it should, which I that 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 key overarching goal of that group was explicitly local.
Of course, this was an Islamist party which carried what Sharia to us is, but it is still one group which had the power to protect.
They're not protecting it from ISIS and from Khalifa Haftar.
In fact, that changed its name.
Back in 2017 into the General Protection Force, and so it was quite interested in I was not able to do research that enough,
but I looked 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 was,
whether these were statements that really tackled broader national or international issues.
You were obsessed with all things Derna and their children's culture pages and pages into the city's history.
Its identity picture its beauty and telling many of the statements ended with a sentence may God protect them.
I think this shows the relevance of factoring in local and oriental influences on politics in our analysis of Islam,
they are not for national or transnational groups, and this local state has to a great extent in the second segment.
That story does need 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, may be interested in building up legitimacy in some local communities.
This will allow them to recruit, to govern and to help because when these groups are on the decline.
So the local resistance being used by these groups as a tool.
The third story, which just shows how the local can also affect the discourse on the behaviour of armed Islamists.
In fact, sometimes their violence may reflect the priorities of local communities these groups have been collecting, most of them ideology.
But you can just try this with a case of ISIS.
ISIS in the Syrian desert. Now this is not a group that is particularly well known for having tried to quote 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 came to the Syrian desert in 2015,
developed extremely strong bonds with the tribal elders of the term of a strong turned desert is this vast stretch of desert is vast,
and it includes two main tunnels a Southerner, which sees itself as the one victim of the Syrian desert and Palmyra,
which in the past decades has been considered the true capital of the Syrian desert as a group was led to a of.
And so. Looting itself local in the town of a stockman 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.
The interesting thing here is that the local was not just a tool, for instance.
It also ended up affecting disaffected discourse because after absorbing this,
two-thirds of local recruits from a now the ISIS discourse in this area became shaped by the local identity of just one.
I started calling a stock market capital of the game, as the title indicates,
previously had been reserved for €5m, and Churchill ended up affecting the violence carried out by ISIS.
Because when inside the city of Palmyra, a couple of weeks after recruiting the 2002 Fighters of Assortment,
it carried out a massacre of hundreds of residents in Europe,
and some events suggest that this massacre bore the marks of the local recruits
arises from a of traditions that inhabitants have been given as their rivals.
The strong bonds developed by cities with the tribal elders and communities of stockmen may
also explain actually part of why the group is the resurgence in this particular city.
It's not for everyone, but it is research and even amongst the tone of the song.
So these bonds, it was a lesson.
So conclusion. They've tried to do this talk is, of course, to mention that it seems to have often been up to be driven by region and ideology,
and also to further that this is an important part of the story, but also to all of you that does everything.
I've tried to propose those two energies perspective,
one exploring the metropolitans expose on Islamism when assessing the role of local dominance 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 groups.
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 drive and shape Islamism.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much for a really stimulating truth.
Everyone is going to be talking to us.
Let me just say it's great, so I've got a question.
Chelsea Wright she's one of a student of Middle Eastern studies.
Why did ISIS franchise with the people Iraq specifically and not with the people of Europe, tumours of the surrounding villages?
I have some questions to ask, but I defer to senior your.
There's this fascinating role, Rafael. There's just so much in that.
And again, a lot that just isn't. As you said, it sees a transnationally and even most of the national level.
These local dynamics are absolutely crucial. I have a couple of questions, though.
Should I wait for the second round? You're not going to reach.
First, one of these, I'm interested to see how do the genuinely Islamist leadership in some Typekit?
How did they recognise and justify the integration of the Ukrainian dismissed and
presumably behave in terms of drug taking alcohol sample continue to engage?
Do they see it as the great trend? Is it justified in that sense? The other question I'd like to I like to ask is, as you know,
I I studied in the past with the business insurgency in Algeria and again, very clearly local dynamics developed over time there.
And there were two particular engines that developed, one of which seems to be operating here, but one not so much.
One is the element of turf war between other rival groups and of the rival,
which is clearly what seems to be happening in Palmyra and in the desert in Syria.
The other one operates a lot in Algeria was the the economic domination in terms of racketeering,
which local exchange control over local political economy through almost mafioso style behaviour.
Is that something that you see in any of these cases? That was definitely the case.
But what about locally in regions in Algeria? Thank you.
What is your response? 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 is very good at in the past decade.
It is a group that think strategically about the local and sort of not just communities which have grievances.
And so I think the the residents of, as as I mentioned, all residents to the grid because they've seen their rivalries,
nero becoming essentially essential inhabitants of the capital of the Netherlands,
the capital of the Syrian desert, doesn't actually mean 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,
and the residents of the suttner felt grieved and marginalised and in fact, was done.
And so I think I think it's part of ISIS's try to build bombs in that city because this was a
city with the potential with grievances where people could be mobilised against against others,
especially links to ask Michael about why or rather how to justify the absorption of 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 non-Muslims will become as strongly committed in space all the time.
And it was not just a matter of a matter of that.
He invested cultural resources for the time back then into the three neighbourhoods were no incidents.
Where were men? It used mosques. It's a set of indoctrination camps and I haven't talked to instructors from this indoctrination and with
fighters who 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 to reproduce the results.
There were stories of Jews committed afterwards, but it was really the exception rather than words.
And so the bottom line is that I don't think I think that it was perhaps a bit naive and in
its approach to generally try to build on the ideological commitment of these students,
it just means that just the same. Also, remember, we're talking about a three year period, this is not a massively long amount of time.
Some conservative principles four years between 1980 to 1985, if it had stayed longer in charge of the city,
maybe there would be more cases of actual conversions and conversions to a 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.
In the case of this dynamic went very far indeed because once limited resources to govern the city,
it was ready to strike back with a dagger as it were full ActionScript principles 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 conversion to Islam.
What is the solution to terrorism? Essentially,
the group's willingness to recruit anyone to bring in revenues so that the group was able to continue operating and govern the city of Tripoli.
Interestingly enough, this neighbourhood's getting hit by this attrition that doesn't.
This whole section on one section, but each ended up engaging in alcohol smuggling.
And people say that the Typekit is, 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 and need manpower to provide services,
you need to engage in patronage. And for all of this, you need resources, whether wherever we come from.
Thanks for being so yeah, really enjoying the spectacle.
Thousands of questions. And so the study is very well motivated by pushing back against explanations that are simply reasonable ideology.
But the medium term perspective suggests that in many ways,
the mental approach to understanding the small form of that is precisely to write out ideology from a over of the account.
So thinking here salvation is what, for example,
from the early 2000s when she talks about Islam as being a Islamism as being idiom of politics in which universe.
But it's ultimately about politics, and I'm thinking here also, it's almost like hurricane spike here recently, where it is provocative.
This is the dominant approach is that the jihad uses that religion or ideology is like a wrap up.
But actually the core of it is actually the politics of the conflict,
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 the beginning,
because I think you're absolutely right that true ideologues are very great gal. I
necessarily have to recruit beyond trying to be able to sustain a large force of movement.
But what were the look then?
But surely the 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 how indeed from animal comparable movements if we think about political skills as a spectrum.
Where do they kind of sit on that spectrum? Do they feel inspired by in their initial initial stage?
But I also wanted to pursue as well to think about this, this framing about politics.
Presumably, you want to introduce this kind of race.
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 this counterfactual.
Obviously, it's it's interesting. How much did you find?
Could we imagine a version of ourselves that was the national or transnational?
And how then would that have changed these kinds of local dynamics or not?
OK, let's. So many good questions and how to answer the first question for us was about the framing of
my talk and perhaps some sort of wrong ideology and kind of pushing it back 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 such a beautiful.
And I wanted to make this argument for getting to the second, but the book does explain the ways in which ideology actually mattered.
You know, I have I have this argument in the book that I do trajectory matter quite a bit into.
I think I also admitted to that in the talk,
but with especially because there were a handful of children coming to this interview who organised as a fiction and try to shape human behaviour,
try to love the leader of the group and the whole leadership to take ideologically inspired decisions.
So Richard did matter.
But it's true that in this talk, I pushed back against this tendency on the part of some scholars to over emphasise ideology nonsense.
You're right to mention the work of several items, including a children's.
He's written a brilliant article precisely on his back in the late 1990s with the truth, but the feedback loop is that it's a design institute.
There are people for pushing back against ideological dimensions.
There are also people who are engaging with this ideology on extreme issues and these people in other fields.
I'm thinking of civil wars. The issue of terrorism studies, especially awesome things government in this current conversation.
Hence, my attempt to push back against this perspective, people is talking to other students about sort of all earnestness.
You asked a really good question on which first movers the first movers as to where the revolutionaries?
Yes, of course the where is. But then what kind of Islamists?
There were two kinds of missions which formed.
The first one was what's happening with the could.
We were inspired by a fringe of the Muslim Brotherhood and its mission by the Muslim Brotherhood's radical ideologue.
But there was another group of Islamists which was starting to 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 centrists and ended up being inspired by the Iranian Revolution,
Palestinian Islamic Jihad and one of them. And so these were the two types of Islamists which coexisted with the beginning of the life of.
And then your third question, what about the parents? Was that all start local?
And so inevitably, all politics is local reform groups that are in there.
The beginnings of. So he has a three year period of life can be considered as short in the middle of a civil war.
This is not too short of the interesting and started local.
That's true that never developed broader ambitions.
This was not a group of some groups that good, but with broader ambitions,
with broader ends taking over their roots in 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 what the group's ambition was. And as I tried to suggest,
I don't think that these locally oriented movements on this is an exception or that their only characteristic of the early years of maintenance.
There are many movements that start remain local because of locally oriented.
They are formed with the attrition goal of protecting the community, protecting the village and neighbourhoods.
The mountain sometimes and have many of which never to try to broader than their parents.
How do you choose one of them? Northern Syria centred on one village up to seven.
It's a group that seems to be better here than 10 years, and you never developed into an action because it never intended to develop its momentum.
What motivated was the protection of its village and its villages around the.
But I'm happy to get some results back.
Thanks very much. Great talk to Russians, and the first one relates a little bit to the points.
I'm I'm wondering about the early stage because if they did, they did they?
Do 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 hearts and minds.
You know, 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 struck with too much conscious of the bit of time?
Let me just here's one more question in this case from an anonymous attendee.
Thank you for an extremely interesting presentation. The question is mainly just the other reasons why he started recruiting not.
According to Rafael. Why was the strategy so effective?
I mean, looking at the other side of the fence,
why did the Nordic Islamist fighters feel so attracted to it and subsequently decided to join the cast?
Why didn't non-Islamists join? What would that sort of incentives effectively?
So why would they attract some movement and decided to do what is presumably a high risk strategy and decide to join to?
Perhaps the last question first,
why did not I mention the talk through mechanisms through which targeted Crucible is not one of them was a listing of the squad of megahertz children.
So this strong winds were a similar concern on the front in some neighbourhoods.
So what motivated these two factors to target them was the fact that their neighbourhoods
a giant step in and out of a mix or the sense of loyalty and neighbourhood solidarity.
A lot of them ended up. It's actually quite striking when you ask people so 40 years later, but nonetheless, it's interesting.
Why did you turn everything else? Know some of these neighbourhood was this one?
And sometimes because that German controlled group a city of the it's the it's it's difficult to.
It's I mean, one cannot underestimate the extent to which these local authorities, these local identities, the maintenance can really matter.
In the case of people and having the name of that, someone was really active.
So in this one neighbourhood, it's not been.
In the case of the other neighbourhoods, I mentioned that Typekit was willing to also that for their people.
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 time in terms of being fighters at some points in 1983,
most before and after. So I suspect that was also part of the story.
And as I also suggested my response to Michael's question on extortion,
quite a few of these fighters joined because we wanted to make money out of organised crime.
So he was giving them the insurance and therefore by joining, this is excellent way to continue engaging,
smuggling and engaging in alcohol trafficking and cigarettes trafficking.
Maybe some kind of trafficking Western intentions. Shows the extent to which this response of ideology was the single most important factor.
And I think that leads to the question you asked about the earlier stages of the.
What was the mission from the start to? It's important to remember that David was born in the summer maintenance, which summer maintenance.
It was important for two reasons. First, it's a few months after the Hammer massacre.
Hammer is not too far from Tripoli, and back then in the summer in 1982, the Syrian regime had crushed the rebels in Hama.
The bloodshed and there were talks back then that the Syrian regime would move into Tripoli and operate the city was very,
very brutal crackdown on the entire city, just setting the entire city.
And so that matter and 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 the children of liberals.
And so. Quite a few people think that is the size of its tool in shipping,
so that is sort of going to compensate children must be because it has to important is never suggestions in which the terrorists choose from.
Israel did nothing invading the north of Lebanon.
That's all north. And Syria does not end up carrying Hamas, a massacre of children.
I just want to mention the treatment. But protecting children from these two threats was really what brought the two different
breeds of incidents that I mentioned before together and governments gathered in this group.
You will ask another question, all.
What it essentially completes its rivals, what made them able to become such a strong resistance group in instrument with.
Shipping the had a strong sense of self drew back then he actually had quite a few of Morrissey's armed groups,
but Islamist armed groups were very few. The Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood, which is strong and this is a national kind of militia trading volumes.
This was really, really the shadow of what's involved in the Civil War, the only 20 or 30 people that was in 1976.
And so by 1982 there were not very strong. There were no serious competitor that.
Another group was the soldiers of God.
And that ended up being sold because starting to become quite rightly, such a strong with resources and some sort of.
So, yeah, 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 quite busy as it were when the left Congress.
But the spectrum of extremism in them was very, very small,
and there was some very much involved in triggering the coverage of militant concerns was very, very small.
They run out of time.
So let me then thank Rafael for a really great tool and the suffering of Christians and great Christians doing such excellent arts,
since it's the least that you probably have been able to ask the question of Rafael,
I'm sure he would be delighted to have some back and forth with the email.
I would really encourage you to take a look at this book and participate.
Thank you all very much. Just thinking of you in the audience and sometimes followers.
And just to say that also having suffered at the Vatican, whether to enrich uranium and things just wouldn't be nice.
So thanks to you very much for joining us once again.
Thank you. Very.