1 00:00:00,450 --> 00:00:02,130 Everyone, let's get started. 2 00:00:02,370 --> 00:00:13,560 So I am absolutely delighted to be able to welcome the latest speaker in our series on Iraq on the anniversary, 20 years after the ill fated invasion. 3 00:00:14,040 --> 00:00:18,029 I am delighted to be able to introduce my friend and colleague Thomas Hickman, 4 00:00:18,030 --> 00:00:23,040 and Thomas is a senior research fellow at All Souls College here in Oxford. 5 00:00:23,400 --> 00:00:31,290 He is a prolific author specialising in forms of political violence with a particular focus on jihadi movements. 6 00:00:31,800 --> 00:00:39,240 I think it's fair to say that there is some legitimate scepticism around the study of jihadi movements in Middle Eastern studies for very good reason. 7 00:00:39,660 --> 00:00:43,620 Thomas, I think makes them all look really good by comparison. 8 00:00:43,650 --> 00:00:48,360 He is a brilliant, brilliant scholar. He has authored many books and many articles. 9 00:00:48,360 --> 00:00:53,580 The most recent, The Caravan, Abdullah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad. 10 00:00:54,210 --> 00:01:00,630 I read this cover to cover it during lockdown. It's an excellent, excellent story around the rise of what becomes al Qaeda. 11 00:01:01,200 --> 00:01:07,649 Thomas is distinct both for working extensively with Arabic language source material, 12 00:01:07,650 --> 00:01:12,750 but also increasingly is pioneering the use of computational techniques, 13 00:01:13,170 --> 00:01:18,060 tools from data science and computational social science and the digital humanities. 14 00:01:18,450 --> 00:01:22,560 He's not just a scholar. He's also creating resources for all of us to use. 15 00:01:22,860 --> 00:01:24,479 I'm really, really excited about the talks, 16 00:01:24,480 --> 00:01:30,480 and I think we're going to hear a little bit that we're going to hear of some data looking at the effects of the invasion, 17 00:01:30,480 --> 00:01:33,720 occupation of Iraq and the rise of jihadi movements. 18 00:01:34,000 --> 00:01:42,700 Thomas Close, close. Thank you very much for your time. 19 00:01:42,910 --> 00:01:49,750 I'm thrilled to be here and love to talk about the Iraq invasion, something I was invited to to say something about Iraq. 20 00:01:50,110 --> 00:01:56,290 And the problem is that I, I don't work on Iraq and will probably become in the clear in the Q&A. 21 00:01:56,740 --> 00:02:04,130 However, Iraq has loomed very large and my granddaughter I of interest that of a kind of transnational jihadism. 22 00:02:04,160 --> 00:02:06,510 I started working on this right before 911. 23 00:02:06,530 --> 00:02:16,240 I follow the come the whole war on terror afterwards and the timing around it right after the Iraq war was a very, very momentous one. 24 00:02:16,540 --> 00:02:23,380 And so I remember kind of following all the activity on national jihadi forums, etc., but very, 25 00:02:23,710 --> 00:02:31,360 very much closed, never really took the time to go back and look at the overall picture. 26 00:02:31,570 --> 00:02:37,750 It was clear that it generated a lot of activity, but not exactly how and where. 27 00:02:38,290 --> 00:02:45,950 So you will be forgiven for thinking what? But I'm looking at the at the headline that I am taking it that way in this day. 28 00:02:47,290 --> 00:02:52,100 And by the way, I don't think this is the actual that was you know, it's from a theatre place, 29 00:02:52,630 --> 00:03:05,620 but you can also get the impression that it's common knowledge solidly understood that the Iraq war was sort of bad for the I and just check this. 30 00:03:05,620 --> 00:03:10,880 I did what every good student should do now, which is positive is that. 31 00:03:12,210 --> 00:03:16,210 Yeah. And it gives a very clear, clear answer. 32 00:03:16,210 --> 00:03:22,210 And this is I suppose is the textbook answer to my my question. 33 00:03:22,540 --> 00:03:29,020 And it comes, of course, from a series of studies addressing this question from various angles, 34 00:03:29,440 --> 00:03:33,250 like Rubin Powers was one of the first to write about this, 35 00:03:33,670 --> 00:03:42,850 focusing mainly mainly on kind of the qualitative changes in jihadi propaganda coming out of the Iraq war that most of, 36 00:03:43,300 --> 00:03:48,250 if I do dogs and propaganda produce promoting that conflict. 37 00:03:48,520 --> 00:03:57,070 I did some early work looking at jihadi forums, also kind of pointing out that this is a dominant topic there. 38 00:03:57,310 --> 00:04:04,990 My my colleague and I wrote an early study that basically a kind of process tracing of the motivations of 39 00:04:05,260 --> 00:04:12,730 European jihadis showing it in Iraq pops up as a central motivation for several plotters and attackers there. 40 00:04:13,060 --> 00:04:22,270 The most important influential piece that was probably the one written by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in 2017, 41 00:04:22,660 --> 00:04:24,560 basically in what the Mother Jones article, 42 00:04:24,580 --> 00:04:35,139 he was an immensely influential in in the Beltway and beyond in kind of establishing the understanding that from a counterterrorism perspective, 43 00:04:35,140 --> 00:04:44,920 the Iraq war had been had been very kind of counterproductive. And Daniel Byman and Ken Pollack did something similar to the afterwards. 44 00:04:44,920 --> 00:04:49,600 Projecting this way is going to further into the future, saying it will have a long term effect. 45 00:04:50,050 --> 00:04:55,810 The only slightly dissenting voice in this literature is an article by Martin Harrow. 46 00:04:56,110 --> 00:05:05,950 But I don't think it's a it's is a slightly kind of more speculative piece of I don't think he his arguments were widely accepted. 47 00:05:05,950 --> 00:05:10,690 So that is the bottom line is that everyone's kind of agree the new perspective. 48 00:05:11,260 --> 00:05:20,379 So why then look back on it? Well, if you look at the dates here, these are all these studies were done in the late 2000s. 49 00:05:20,380 --> 00:05:21,880 And if you subtract the year, 50 00:05:21,880 --> 00:05:31,120 attacks were probably done even earlier at a time when we we didn't have the full picture and when the available data was weaker. 51 00:05:31,210 --> 00:05:38,950 So, for example, the data that we talked about and crucially used in their piece is really quite weak by modern standards. 52 00:05:40,270 --> 00:05:44,080 Something like the global terrorism database didn't exist at the time and so on and so forth. 53 00:05:44,740 --> 00:05:53,410 So I think it's worth and this is generally I was big believer in kind of going back and checking that we have got the story of Iraq too often, 54 00:05:53,410 --> 00:06:02,299 kind of we finish a story and then we move on to the next and the next thing is worth checking whether this claim is actually true. 55 00:06:02,300 --> 00:06:11,290 But even if it is, it tends to be in line with what we believe before is not necessarily the case, that the kind of the effects are are known. 56 00:06:11,290 --> 00:06:19,000 So we know that. We may know that we've had a negative effect. We don't know by how much or how bad it is Iraq. 57 00:06:20,290 --> 00:06:27,370 And perhaps most importantly, we don't necessarily know why the Iraq war was so bad. 58 00:06:27,460 --> 00:06:30,490 And what are the mechanisms in here. 59 00:06:30,490 --> 00:06:33,790 I'm probably not going to provide the full answers or the mechanism questions, 60 00:06:33,790 --> 00:06:38,080 but I would like to get us to thinking about them because, you know, much as we also. 61 00:06:40,170 --> 00:06:43,470 Thinking of you as imperialism in the Middle East. It's not. 62 00:06:43,500 --> 00:06:51,780 When you think about it, it's not necessarily a given that a big invasion would cause a global wave of terrorism. 63 00:06:51,980 --> 00:06:53,640 You really don't like the Ukraine today? 64 00:06:53,820 --> 00:07:01,620 We have like a blatant, clear violation of international law and superpower, causing a lot of a lot of harm on the ground. 65 00:07:01,860 --> 00:07:07,110 And we don't have a we don't have terrorist attacks all around the world as a consequence. 66 00:07:07,140 --> 00:07:16,220 So what was it about that particular constellation, the fact that these were treated so forward? 67 00:07:16,230 --> 00:07:22,110 You want I just want to stress that some limitations here. I'm looking at transnational jihadism. 68 00:07:22,110 --> 00:07:29,150 I'm looking at what a bunch of kind of relatively small rebel groups around the world did in response to this. 69 00:07:29,160 --> 00:07:35,250 I'm not looking at the full facts of what humanitarian, economic, geopolitical, etc. 70 00:07:35,250 --> 00:07:43,680 That's a much bigger question. And of course, we certainly think the consequences would be much more much more severe, more severe. 71 00:07:44,010 --> 00:07:53,250 And also, it wasn't just that I'm focusing trying to focus mainly on the transnational on national things there as opposed to militancy in Iraq, 72 00:07:53,760 --> 00:08:01,889 because, I mean, the smallest mystery here is that you had violence in Iraq after the invasion and several of the other 73 00:08:01,890 --> 00:08:09,540 pieces that that before you use data from across America to try to make the case for terrorism. 74 00:08:09,930 --> 00:08:16,499 But I think we also have to look at stuff outside of Pakistan very, very quick, very capital. 75 00:08:16,500 --> 00:08:20,550 B, the events. I don't know if this is visible even on this screen. 76 00:08:21,240 --> 00:08:26,219 So I have about two timelines, one for like the run up to the Iraq war and the Iraq war itself. 77 00:08:26,220 --> 00:08:33,360 So basically, extremely simply, it's a story that kind of begins with Saddam's invasion of annexation of Kuwait, 78 00:08:33,720 --> 00:08:42,930 which worries the U.S. intelligence community because it poses a threat to the stability of oil supply in the Gulf and to the security of Israel. 79 00:08:43,470 --> 00:08:48,840 And this becomes a big issue in the news, politics in particular. 80 00:08:48,840 --> 00:08:54,720 And from in the course of the 1990s, there's momentum towards pushing for regime change in Iraq. 81 00:08:54,730 --> 00:09:02,130 In 1998, you have the Iraq Liberation Act, which makes it a form of U.S. policy to work for regime change in Iraq. 82 00:09:02,700 --> 00:09:12,249 And you have a 911, of course, which is a great shock to the U.S. and its international system and in the in US politics in particular. 83 00:09:12,250 --> 00:09:19,500 And this becomes is adds to the earlier concerns about what bad things Iraq may do in the region. 84 00:09:19,500 --> 00:09:24,360 And the worry here, of course, is that there might be an alliance between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, 85 00:09:24,480 --> 00:09:29,620 that they can carry out an attack on the US with biological weapons of chemical weapons. 86 00:09:30,450 --> 00:09:34,940 And then you have a bunch of sequence of events in 2002 that want to do that. 87 00:09:35,010 --> 00:09:42,000 And three, almost immediately after 911, Bush orders the thinking about the Pentagon's war plans. 88 00:09:42,420 --> 00:09:50,340 You know, the axis of evil speech. You have the various address to the U.N. and it was most obvious is that we know we now know 89 00:09:50,340 --> 00:09:55,070 it was kind of predetermined to maybe use the Bush administration had already decided. 90 00:09:57,810 --> 00:10:05,250 Once the war is started, it basically kind of takes a better in terms of conflict, severity, conflicts, 91 00:10:05,250 --> 00:10:10,950 kind of pyramid shape, kind of initially getting things go fairly smoothly or with a few casualties. 92 00:10:10,950 --> 00:10:13,889 But then in the matter of a year or two, a very, 93 00:10:13,890 --> 00:10:25,260 very intense insurgency builds up in Iraq and you get also kind of horizontal conflict dynamics and it's almost less severe sectarian violence, etc. 94 00:10:25,710 --> 00:10:35,280 And by 2006, 2007, the Defence Department basically feels things have gotten completely out of control and order the so-called surge, 95 00:10:35,280 --> 00:10:38,610 which is a kind of massive increase in the military presence. 96 00:10:39,060 --> 00:10:46,560 And this combined with internal developments in Iraq and a change of side in a firefight set by 97 00:10:46,560 --> 00:10:52,770 key tribes in Anbar province are able to of to suppress the worst content of the insurgency. 98 00:10:52,770 --> 00:11:03,059 And by the end to the end of the decade, the US was basically put on a field that is still safe enough to to leave in by August or September 2010. 99 00:11:03,060 --> 00:11:11,860 The date of the fiscal commission has officially ended, and before this we have a what I refer to as a transnational jihadi. 100 00:11:11,870 --> 00:11:20,310 You don't spend too much time on this, but there's always room to discuss exactly what the party movement is, 101 00:11:20,490 --> 00:11:23,520 especially in the in the 19th and early 2000. 102 00:11:24,030 --> 00:11:24,890 But broadly speaking, 103 00:11:24,900 --> 00:11:33,360 there's a process of transfer nationalisation and increasing connectedness between various Islamist militant groups in across the Muslim world. 104 00:11:33,720 --> 00:11:43,530 And it helped to by Afghanistan was becomes a place where people can meet in the 1980s are helped by technology. 105 00:11:43,890 --> 00:11:50,160 It becomes easier to travel around, is easier to keep in touch with and through the Internet and so on. 106 00:11:50,880 --> 00:11:59,520 And so in the course of the 1990s, you get a growing kind of subset of the militant Islamist world that sees 107 00:11:59,520 --> 00:12:04,530 itself as kind of global vanguard where the national authority doesn't matter. 108 00:12:04,530 --> 00:12:06,209 They're all in it together. 109 00:12:06,210 --> 00:12:15,930 And this is led by by by Al Qaida, which proposes a kind of a new strategy in the mid 1990 based on kind of direct confrontation with the West. 110 00:12:16,890 --> 00:12:27,630 But by sort of 2008, 2001, this kind of idea of confronting the West is quite controversial inside this national party movement. 111 00:12:28,140 --> 00:12:36,450 al-Qaida is basically a minority voice. Most of these groups want to focus on their respective national struggles against their respective regimes. 112 00:12:37,200 --> 00:12:40,500 But the 911 attacks very much changes this. 113 00:12:40,920 --> 00:12:48,329 It creates notoriety for Al Qaida, and it provokes some initial steps by the US, 114 00:12:48,330 --> 00:12:55,380 which kind of confirms what I have been saying you get about the invasion of Afghanistan and Guatemala, etc. 115 00:12:55,560 --> 00:13:03,510 So but in 2002, there's already kind of a nascent sort of what we call Al Qaida franchise, 116 00:13:03,510 --> 00:13:12,680 where groups have previously had were only kind of peripherally connected, increasingly seen themselves as part of this wider kind of thing. 117 00:13:13,290 --> 00:13:25,700 But it's still is still nothing like the wider franchise With respect to what does the Iraq war do to to this jihadi movement in. 118 00:13:26,230 --> 00:13:35,139 To the al Qaeda franchise. There are multiple ways to measure something like this in general, and there's nothing new. 119 00:13:35,140 --> 00:13:38,230 And I worked on like how do you measure the terrorist activity? 120 00:13:38,560 --> 00:13:42,340 And in some sense, we have to ideal type ways to do it. 121 00:13:42,370 --> 00:13:48,880 One is to measure operational activity and the other is to measure the number of people involved. 122 00:13:49,450 --> 00:13:54,890 And if we look at who starts out by looking at operational activity, the numbers are very clear. 123 00:13:54,940 --> 00:14:01,810 So if you look at just our looking at Iraq, we go from virtually zero activity in Iraq to Jamaica. 124 00:14:02,680 --> 00:14:12,190 Now there's a debate to be had about the kind of coding of various incidents in Iraq during the war. 125 00:14:12,580 --> 00:14:16,840 But that's not necessarily particularly due to the Q And this is the the some of the best 126 00:14:16,840 --> 00:14:22,450 data that we have that we have here when we're looking at the internal Iraqi theatre. 127 00:14:22,810 --> 00:14:28,100 And when we look at the wider Muslim world, it's clear that for one thing, what's going on? 128 00:14:28,120 --> 00:14:33,310 Iraq is huge. It was really out of proportion to anything else going on. 129 00:14:33,970 --> 00:14:44,260 So the the Iraq attacking activity is in the black on the left and in deaths from activity in Iraq is on the right. 130 00:14:44,770 --> 00:14:52,990 Notice how it's more pronounced and the death count graph, because on average, attacks in Iraq are much more deadly. 131 00:14:53,440 --> 00:15:00,910 And this has a lot to do with the explosion in the use of suicide bombings in Iraq, 132 00:15:01,390 --> 00:15:05,710 which, again, it probably has to do with the theatre being relatively symmetric. 133 00:15:05,900 --> 00:15:11,020 And if the rebel groups had relatively high operational freedom, more so than, let's say, 134 00:15:11,020 --> 00:15:15,130 jihadi groups operating in the centre of Cairo or having other kind of clandestine. 135 00:15:17,810 --> 00:15:21,320 If you look closely, too, you will see and by the way, you go back a little bit, 136 00:15:21,320 --> 00:15:29,260 you can just see that the activity kind of dips a little bit or slows down towards the end of the decade. 137 00:15:29,270 --> 00:15:31,550 This is probably surge related. 138 00:15:32,120 --> 00:15:40,690 And you can see this here, too, a little bit that that the Iraq activity kind of slows down towards the end of the decade. 139 00:15:40,720 --> 00:15:47,530 What then happens is that. It's starting to really increase in the in Afghanistan, in Pakistan. 140 00:15:47,830 --> 00:15:53,680 So just as the US thinks it's got things under control, Iraq is losing control in Afghanistan. 141 00:15:54,220 --> 00:15:58,210 And it's also increasing slightly in other areas. 142 00:15:59,620 --> 00:16:03,850 Now, what about other parts of the world? We are dealing with transnational crime and after all. 143 00:16:04,130 --> 00:16:13,570 Now, it's difficult to to measure this because the main data set for terrorist attacks, it doesn't code for perpetrator ideology. 144 00:16:14,530 --> 00:16:18,320 In the previous talks, I just drew the assumption that, you know, 145 00:16:19,360 --> 00:16:27,190 the majority of terrorist groups operating in selected parts of the Muslim world are Islamist motivated. 146 00:16:27,700 --> 00:16:34,720 Becomes harder if you move, for example, to the west, where there are bunch of other groups of other ideologies operating at the same time. 147 00:16:35,410 --> 00:16:43,180 But there are there have been data gathering efforts along the way that focus on and try to isolate different types 148 00:16:43,180 --> 00:16:48,940 of ideology that they just that are not for far right extremism and that there is one forum for jihadism as well. 149 00:16:49,150 --> 00:16:53,350 And that's maintained by Peter Nasser, my former colleague at the CIA in Oslo. 150 00:16:53,500 --> 00:16:54,850 And this is the best way, 151 00:16:54,850 --> 00:17:06,280 I think the best data we have an activity in in Europe and he he records plots with get well developed plans of attack as well as actual attacks. 152 00:17:06,630 --> 00:17:11,200 I think it's important just to also look at plots because in the West, 153 00:17:11,590 --> 00:17:16,749 security services are so effective that they kind of they put there often the 154 00:17:16,750 --> 00:17:22,150 ability to derail or prevent plots that would otherwise have kind of occurred. 155 00:17:23,170 --> 00:17:25,930 We need to include them to get a sense of the activity level. 156 00:17:26,200 --> 00:17:35,950 And this shows you that in the around right after the Iraq war, there is this there is an uptick in the plotting activity in Europe. 157 00:17:36,520 --> 00:17:42,579 But the graph belies, I think, the severity of the effect, because almost all of these executed attacks, 158 00:17:42,580 --> 00:17:47,830 there are, of course, very few zero or even one casualties. 159 00:17:47,830 --> 00:17:53,830 There are only two attacks in the 2000s in Europe that cause major penalties. 160 00:17:54,070 --> 00:18:05,530 And it's the Madrid bombing in March 2004, The 77 bombing in London in 2005 killed 194 and 52 people, respectively. 161 00:18:05,890 --> 00:18:12,420 And both of those attacks, I think it's quite clear now, are linked to motivation, linked to to Iraq. 162 00:18:12,430 --> 00:18:22,839 So in the case of the Madrid attack, we know that the planners timed the attack to continue to punish the Spanish government forces, 163 00:18:22,840 --> 00:18:31,059 supporting the invasion of Iraq and to undermine the conservative government's chances of winning the election. 164 00:18:31,060 --> 00:18:34,690 That will have happened soon after. And in the case of the London bombings, 165 00:18:34,690 --> 00:18:43,150 we have we have the testimonies of the perpetrators who speak at length about Iraq as one of the justifications for. 166 00:18:45,630 --> 00:18:56,790 Another type of activity just to look at foreign fighter flows, which is when people don't carry out a plot anything in their in their home country, 167 00:18:56,790 --> 00:19:01,470 but instead try and join the conflict zone and fight there instead. 168 00:19:01,590 --> 00:19:07,200 That has been a historically a very important form of militant Islamist activity. 169 00:19:07,530 --> 00:19:14,309 And this is this goes back a long time and certainly back to the 1980s with Afghanistan. 170 00:19:14,310 --> 00:19:19,920 And since the 1980s, most countries in the Muslim world have attracted at least some foreign fighters. 171 00:19:20,190 --> 00:19:29,129 And by the time of the Iraq war, very early 2000, it had been a while since we had seen a very substantial foreign fighter mobilisation. 172 00:19:29,130 --> 00:19:33,680 But Iraq became the biggest since the Afghanistan war. 173 00:19:34,350 --> 00:19:45,810 And you had people mainly from men from Saudi, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, joining the three or 400 probably from the west. 174 00:19:46,350 --> 00:19:48,770 The thing here on the right is from some people, 175 00:19:48,780 --> 00:19:59,130 a senior document was a captured U.S. military captured basically personnel files from inside Al Qaida in Iraq on volunteers that used to be. 176 00:19:59,370 --> 00:20:07,620 Right. Propaganda production is another type of activity that organisations do, 177 00:20:07,980 --> 00:20:18,300 and those who have worked on jihadism know that there is an enormous amount of building material in circulation and that has been for a long time. 178 00:20:18,930 --> 00:20:30,420 And they remember the time of the Iraq war is the beginning of kind of the whole kind of visual explosion of propaganda with the number length, 179 00:20:30,570 --> 00:20:35,670 sophistication, technical quality of videos really, really increases. 180 00:20:36,360 --> 00:20:49,049 There is a. So back in the mid 2000, when I was working at Arabi, we began trying to record or to to capture and catalogue these videos. 181 00:20:49,050 --> 00:20:59,340 And we did what I think was our best effort to to log all of the major productions by jihadi groups across across the world. 182 00:20:59,850 --> 00:21:08,130 And the graph on the right shows you the number and kind of semantic distribution of this collection over there. 183 00:21:08,370 --> 00:21:13,949 Basically, I think it's 850 something videos and by something as a production, 184 00:21:13,950 --> 00:21:23,210 I would stress that because at any one time there will be hundreds if not thousands of like short clips that are not technically speaking productions. 185 00:21:23,220 --> 00:21:25,530 There's been no editing or anything, 186 00:21:26,140 --> 00:21:33,630 but these are kind of productions where a group or a kind of a media and entrepreneur has has gone to some length to publish the thing. 187 00:21:34,060 --> 00:21:40,230 So the mid 2000 sees a massive uptick, and much of this is linked to Iraq. 188 00:21:41,460 --> 00:21:50,220 Often we don't know where these videos were produced, but because they were disseminated primarily on the jihadi forums, 189 00:21:50,220 --> 00:21:54,310 we can assume that they were viewed by people from many different countries. 190 00:21:54,310 --> 00:21:56,900 So this is not simply a kind of internal Iraqi. 191 00:21:59,010 --> 00:22:06,090 Another important propaganda product for jihadis are magazines, which they have been producing since the 1980s. 192 00:22:06,330 --> 00:22:11,970 And I've in recent years tried to rebuild this in the militant Islamist magazine data sets. 193 00:22:12,970 --> 00:22:17,520 My ambition is to basically collect all jihadi magazines, and I think I'm nearly there. 194 00:22:18,930 --> 00:22:28,980 And we will look at the the issues or on the jihadi magazines issue, the published pieces or issue in the 2000 strong January 2000, 195 00:22:29,340 --> 00:22:38,010 2000 to December 2009 and plot them on a on a graph and clearly see that the number increases. 196 00:22:38,010 --> 00:22:41,250 And you can also see that the number of pages increases. 197 00:22:41,610 --> 00:22:48,420 So I just had however for is one way of realising age is like the number of pages on the y axis. 198 00:22:49,080 --> 00:22:58,170 The message is that there's a lot more magazine material in circulation from the late twenties onwards. 199 00:22:58,860 --> 00:23:06,719 You can also see that the Iraq related Iraq produced magazines are not among the longest. 200 00:23:06,720 --> 00:23:15,800 They're not driving the increase in length and sophistication, which skew the picture somewhat. 201 00:23:18,050 --> 00:23:25,070 Another way to look at movement strength is if you look at the number of people involved here, 202 00:23:25,070 --> 00:23:28,800 it becomes this is a harder exercise because it's fewer. 203 00:23:28,870 --> 00:23:36,140 We rarely have good insight into the personnel files of clandestine groups. 204 00:23:36,150 --> 00:23:41,960 And and if we do, they'll be rare, you know, occasional snapshots so systematic. 205 00:23:42,420 --> 00:23:49,370 But we can start by looking at groups like how how many different groups are in operation any one 206 00:23:49,370 --> 00:23:56,560 time and what are the best sources is something called the Mapping Militants Project at Stanford. 207 00:23:57,080 --> 00:23:59,390 It was Martha Crenshaw's initiative, 208 00:23:59,900 --> 00:24:10,000 which is trying to kind of follow kind of mergers and splits and formations in groups in around the world since the 2000 2000 onward. 209 00:24:10,340 --> 00:24:14,510 And this is their kind of graph for Iraq and then surround it. 210 00:24:14,510 --> 00:24:16,400 So this is illegible, I realise that. 211 00:24:17,150 --> 00:24:25,250 But I think you can discern the general kind of slightly kind of pyramid shaped as a shape of this on this graph, 212 00:24:25,520 --> 00:24:31,319 indicating that what we intuitively know from following events in the late 2000, 213 00:24:31,320 --> 00:24:39,510 which is that there's a proliferation of groups and much more kind of complicated actor landscape from the mid 2000. 214 00:24:40,010 --> 00:24:51,469 This is another variant that looks at what they call that Al Qaida cluster, which would include the emergence of Al Qaida, 215 00:24:51,470 --> 00:25:01,820 right in Yemen, the joint to the inclusion of Algeria based groups into the Al Qaida franchise in Zimbabwe, Somalia, etc. 216 00:25:02,120 --> 00:25:07,550 But the broader point here, too, is that the organisational universe is expanding in these areas. 217 00:25:09,550 --> 00:25:14,980 What about individuals? Is there any way we can get close to like counts of people in these groups? 218 00:25:15,190 --> 00:25:18,430 Well, I think it's very hard for groups in the in the region. 219 00:25:18,760 --> 00:25:23,230 There have been attempts at doing it, but I have never really trusted any of them. 220 00:25:26,120 --> 00:25:31,839 And so I won't venture to kind of specification that. 221 00:25:31,840 --> 00:25:35,559 But we do have some interesting data from the West with numbers are smaller and 222 00:25:35,560 --> 00:25:40,240 the documentation this kind of figure and something called the Williamson project. 223 00:25:40,810 --> 00:25:44,320 And they used a closer look at Brandeis University. 224 00:25:44,410 --> 00:25:50,800 She and her team have been basically doing something that it's, I think, impossible to do in Europe for DARPA reasons, 225 00:25:51,340 --> 00:25:59,430 which is to collect to maintain a database of individuals who have become have been involved in terrorism investigations in the West, 226 00:25:59,440 --> 00:26:06,250 I would say in Western Europe and North America and in Australia, it's for a total of a little over 7000 people. 227 00:26:06,370 --> 00:26:10,900 And these are people who have been convicted for the most part of their activities. 228 00:26:11,170 --> 00:26:15,399 And and there's a link through the variable for time of radicalisation, 229 00:26:15,400 --> 00:26:24,200 which is they probably draw from the kind of the, the articles and support material for each person where there will be, 230 00:26:24,310 --> 00:26:29,320 there will be either a news article about the person or maybe some court transcripts where 231 00:26:29,530 --> 00:26:35,470 the person describes in his or her own words when they kind of first have involved in, 232 00:26:35,850 --> 00:26:39,579 you know, networks and that data, then kind of that for the first moment. 233 00:26:39,580 --> 00:26:47,020 And this this kind of simply shows that the number of people who reported a given year as their kind of entry into the. 234 00:26:49,230 --> 00:26:57,660 It's also worth noting that numerous high level intelligence officials have confirmed this without providing specific numbers. 235 00:26:58,100 --> 00:27:03,330 You know, 2010, for example, the former head of the FBI was crystal clear. 236 00:27:07,070 --> 00:27:16,940 Another window into kind of how many people were involved in this in the 2000 so-called jihadi forums, which have been around since the early 2000. 237 00:27:17,930 --> 00:27:25,129 And these are basically like kind of an early form of Twitter where you could kind of start you can start a message, 238 00:27:25,130 --> 00:27:31,520 you can add content to videos or pictures and so on, and other groups that use this forum to great effect. 239 00:27:32,270 --> 00:27:40,909 And for a long time, I thought that much of this data was was born because I have my colleagues who were on these forums on a daily 240 00:27:40,910 --> 00:27:50,270 basis in the 2000 because we didn't have the kind of the expertise to systematically preserve the material. 241 00:27:50,750 --> 00:27:57,649 Recently, I discovered that there was a team, there was a team of computer scientists in Arizona that did and preserved this, 242 00:27:57,650 --> 00:28:00,500 and they sent people to the Dark Web Forum portal, 243 00:28:00,830 --> 00:28:09,530 which has basically most of the main Islamist forums in the 2000s that we don't have the imagery, image, material, 244 00:28:09,580 --> 00:28:19,910 media and stuff on there, but we have the messages in text form associated with the messages, and it shows you what you would expect. 245 00:28:20,720 --> 00:28:27,470 We're kicking the dead voice here, but but we haven't really had this type of empirical verification. 246 00:28:30,650 --> 00:28:37,850 They're on the left, you see. This is actually over the overall number of messages per month in this kind of forum universe. 247 00:28:38,120 --> 00:28:44,299 And on the right is the distribution of messages by kind of focus. 248 00:28:44,300 --> 00:28:49,400 And I'm just using a simple dictionary to code zero and one whether a given 249 00:28:49,400 --> 00:28:55,520 message talks about mentions Iraq related works or Afghanistan related words. 250 00:28:57,260 --> 00:29:02,630 So we see that Palestine is big in the early 2,002nd intifada and all that. 251 00:29:02,990 --> 00:29:07,430 But it is quickly it fades into the background, superseded by. 252 00:29:09,220 --> 00:29:13,870 And then, by the way, this is I should mention, this is just like one year before and after the invasion. 253 00:29:14,050 --> 00:29:18,610 This is not between March 2002, March 2004. 254 00:29:20,270 --> 00:29:28,190 So I stop there with the kind of the times. It was rough, but I think it's pretty clear that the early indications were were true. 255 00:29:28,190 --> 00:29:38,070 But we have a better it's better specification of the the immediate sort of effect of the Iraq war on activity of the transnational jihadi. 256 00:29:38,750 --> 00:29:44,480 Now, I haven't spoken at all about what happened after the 2000 and ISIS era, 257 00:29:44,930 --> 00:29:56,480 which sort of begins with Syria war and then these the rise of the caliphate, Islamic states attack offensive in Europe, 2015, 16 and so on. 258 00:29:57,770 --> 00:30:06,320 And that chapter in the story of international jihadism is even more severe in the sense that I could show you more graphs, 259 00:30:06,740 --> 00:30:17,360 but the 19 just skyrocketed to much higher levels than we saw in the 2004 attacks for foreign fighters, for propaganda and other measures. 260 00:30:17,960 --> 00:30:24,260 But I think the key question then becomes, how was the Iraq war in Iraq invasion 2003? 261 00:30:24,890 --> 00:30:30,410 Was that a cause of the rise of ISIS? Was it a war they linked? 262 00:30:30,410 --> 00:30:40,550 And I think they are, too. I think we can it's fairly clear that it is release of a kind of prerequisite because the the networks that 263 00:30:40,970 --> 00:30:49,250 were the seed of the ISIS's organisations were mostly the networks that had formed during the Iraq war. 264 00:30:49,850 --> 00:30:57,889 And I think a key ingredient in the rise of Islamic State was basically human resources, 265 00:30:57,890 --> 00:31:05,900 that you had a certain number of people in former Baath Party technocrats who brought 266 00:31:05,900 --> 00:31:11,140 with them their knowhow into the Islamist networks and later into Islamic State now, 267 00:31:11,300 --> 00:31:14,750 and lots of other factors, of course, in the eyes of story. 268 00:31:15,320 --> 00:31:23,800 But I think it's fair to say that the caliphate wouldn't have taken the proportions it did if there hadn't been that earlier. 269 00:31:26,050 --> 00:31:31,480 Now, why did the invasion have such a huge effect? 270 00:31:31,480 --> 00:31:41,830 I mentioned before already that far from war and ugly invasions translate into international terrorism. 271 00:31:42,130 --> 00:31:52,060 Why did this one have such a big effect? And I think I can think of four main reasons here, and you may add more in the Q&A. 272 00:31:52,060 --> 00:32:01,090 But the first and most obvious one is that the the grievance factor that the war harms people and causes a lot of 273 00:32:01,480 --> 00:32:11,530 suffering in Iraq and and that you get motivation to to fight back to resist the occupiers is a straightforward. 274 00:32:12,160 --> 00:32:19,030 But it can't be only that because it's hard to make the case that what happened is going to be an objective and a reflection of that 275 00:32:19,030 --> 00:32:25,860 kind of objective suffering on the ground is that the activity levels don't follow the patterns of objective suffering on the ground. 276 00:32:26,800 --> 00:32:33,010 But to have that grievance inflicted is replace pleasurable role. 277 00:32:33,670 --> 00:32:40,960 More important, I think, is where we might go and frame stadiums, which was by which I mean that in the US by invading Iraq, 278 00:32:40,990 --> 00:32:48,250 did exactly what Al Qaida and similar ideologues had predicted that it would do. 279 00:32:48,790 --> 00:32:52,300 This may be obvious to us now, but it wasn't then. 280 00:32:52,540 --> 00:32:59,240 I remember in the early 2000 being in many debates about this, about, you know, 281 00:32:59,290 --> 00:33:05,679 what is kind of the heart of al Qaeda ideology and that, you know, in all humility, 282 00:33:05,680 --> 00:33:11,480 I honestly and I think I have them on record is that I, I, 283 00:33:11,790 --> 00:33:19,180 I stressed very early on that and at the heart of the of this narrative is a victim narrative. 284 00:33:20,050 --> 00:33:28,270 It's what I call the siege of some places that fully depend upon an Islamic nationalism, a sense of sense that all Muslims are one people, 285 00:33:28,630 --> 00:33:37,480 that these people is being systematically oppressed and humiliated by non-Muslims with Americans and Jews in need. 286 00:33:37,600 --> 00:33:42,610 And that we need for this reason, we need to fight back. And it is because this oppression is so severe. 287 00:33:42,790 --> 00:33:47,500 We can use whichever methods we like, including attacks on civilians anywhere. 288 00:33:47,950 --> 00:33:56,229 Now, this was not always accepted because there was a kind of an alternative approach of perspective on how to use just 289 00:33:56,230 --> 00:34:03,940 more than kind of the the domestic reform part of the fight against domestic repression and corruption and so on. 290 00:34:04,360 --> 00:34:09,810 But I think this frame salience dimension is crucial to the fact, you know, 291 00:34:10,540 --> 00:34:18,730 because you look at the kind of geopolitical images of the Middle East in the eighties and nineties, 292 00:34:19,510 --> 00:34:25,300 the message that Al Qaida was putting forward wasn't really that convincing. 293 00:34:26,230 --> 00:34:34,810 If you think about it, and you and others were saying that the US had a long, bloody history of intervention. 294 00:34:35,510 --> 00:34:39,470 Subversion? No. That is true. 295 00:34:40,160 --> 00:34:44,830 But she tried to translate it into kind of tangible metrics. 296 00:34:44,870 --> 00:34:53,660 It's not entirely clear. So, for example, you know, is it true that the US always tried to find a muslim interest in this one? 297 00:34:54,380 --> 00:35:05,240 Well, Afghanistan war. The US and Western countries supported the Muslim religious or Islamist fight that conflict with enormous resources. 298 00:35:05,720 --> 00:35:08,820 Similarly, the similar type of support which happened in Bosnia. 299 00:35:09,010 --> 00:35:15,590 So, no, I'm not trying to whitewash at all U.S. Middle East policy, 300 00:35:16,100 --> 00:35:29,180 but on metrics like military presence on the ground and kind of side taking in key countries in the area, argument was a little farfetched. 301 00:35:29,600 --> 00:35:39,929 And this is clear if you look to the slide, if you look at you have data now on number of U.S. troops in, you know, deployed in various countries. 302 00:35:39,930 --> 00:35:43,430 And I remember seeing that in the Muslim world in the eighties. 303 00:35:43,430 --> 00:35:54,920 And I feel very, very small. However, this guy wrote from 2003 on the that a couple of between 100 and 200,000 on the ground. 304 00:35:55,430 --> 00:36:00,120 So basically, it makes the narrative that wasn't true. 305 00:36:00,120 --> 00:36:08,359 It makes it kind of. First mechanism, I think, is the opportunity cost, which is that it took away the Iraq war, 306 00:36:08,360 --> 00:36:13,519 took away resources and attention from the US U.S. security apparatus. 307 00:36:13,520 --> 00:36:22,010 They famously withdrew before we drew our resources from Afghanistan when they were hunting the perpetrators of 911. 308 00:36:22,490 --> 00:36:29,440 To manage the Iraq situation, which is probably the key reason why you have this sort of blossoming of activity in Afghanistan. 309 00:36:31,990 --> 00:36:38,960 But the fourth and that is the most important or perhaps least highlighted mechanism so far has been the role of 310 00:36:39,160 --> 00:36:48,490 technology that the Iraq war happened at a time when new technologies were becoming available and which really, 311 00:36:50,140 --> 00:36:54,430 really helped rebel groups in disseminating propaganda. 312 00:36:54,730 --> 00:37:06,820 So this is the sort of grievances there there locally can be projected to so many more people, so much faster than had been the case before. 313 00:37:09,680 --> 00:37:17,540 Probably spoken to for too long already. But just briefly, the counterfactual to the point that I didn't make. 314 00:37:17,540 --> 00:37:25,369 This is from Stratfor, but I think it does a good job of showing kind of the jihadi universe today from 2018, 315 00:37:25,370 --> 00:37:27,170 but not very much has changed since then. 316 00:37:27,530 --> 00:37:39,230 And if we think about what this landscape looked like in 2002, you basically you had prisons in broadly the same areas, but it was much, much smaller. 317 00:37:40,040 --> 00:37:48,110 And you did not have the Islamic State affiliated ones because obviously that kind of that movement didn't exist at the time. 318 00:37:48,720 --> 00:37:59,450 So the main sort of geographical centres of 2014 was the Al Qaida cluster in 2002 were Afghanistan and Pakistan. 319 00:38:00,140 --> 00:38:08,290 To some extent. Algeria in that adjacency was still very quiet, quite active and very data into a cluster. 320 00:38:08,840 --> 00:38:13,100 But then you regions of transdigm groups and most other other places. 321 00:38:14,030 --> 00:38:23,930 But for all of these areas, of course there are local dynamics that might well have produced situations conducive to local Islamist militias anyway. 322 00:38:24,290 --> 00:38:35,090 But if you were to go back and look at this, look at the activity levels, that the grave material indeed on these groups, it's very low. 323 00:38:35,660 --> 00:38:41,850 Do you think that we'll continue to discuss this counterfactual part together out there? 324 00:38:42,630 --> 00:38:48,540 And then in the second grade and then it sort of finished with some sort of counter arguments that one 325 00:38:48,540 --> 00:38:57,150 might think about for or against this review that Iraq was responsible for and almost everything. 326 00:38:57,640 --> 00:39:04,500 But in terms of what would cause it, I suppose, of saying that the growth of jihadism was overdetermined, 327 00:39:05,130 --> 00:39:13,380 that because you had this they had this sort of like forest victim narrative and the world was becoming more globalised, 328 00:39:13,680 --> 00:39:19,110 that would be it would always be possible to point to something that, you know, 329 00:39:19,290 --> 00:39:24,120 the U.S. or Western country had done to fight this or that argument and so on. 330 00:39:24,480 --> 00:39:34,860 But the technology was this dissemination of technology arrive independently of the invasion, would have empowered other groups anyway. 331 00:39:35,760 --> 00:39:36,970 And then from that, 332 00:39:37,470 --> 00:39:47,640 the Arab Spring and the Syrian war in illustrate that there was there were tensions in the region that were kind of waiting to kind of erupt. 333 00:39:47,640 --> 00:39:51,629 And one could make the case that something like a Syria type of civil war could have 334 00:39:51,630 --> 00:39:56,430 happened later on and become a hotspot for how they actually were being allowed to go. 335 00:39:58,120 --> 00:40:03,699 Another counterargument would be to say that, yeah, we've got a lot of sort of jihadism, 336 00:40:03,700 --> 00:40:13,840 but we at least we stop some kind of collusion between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein or or in a state actor or to say that 337 00:40:14,360 --> 00:40:25,329 a middle East without an Iraq invasion would be Middle East with the kind of weaker Western weakened US penetration, 338 00:40:25,330 --> 00:40:36,129 fewer sensors on the ground, U.S. would have been more dependent on local regimes for information about Al Qaida and other and other threats, 339 00:40:36,130 --> 00:40:39,400 and sometimes they might not have gotten rid of that in this way. 340 00:40:39,400 --> 00:40:40,930 That created some dynamic, 341 00:40:41,500 --> 00:40:51,970 could have been and be more and more dangerous than another kind of deeply kind of loss like occupation type presence that they got with the Iraq war. 342 00:40:52,720 --> 00:41:01,570 And the third, perhaps the most controversial, I think is quite interesting suggestion, is just to say that this kind of link to the first one, 343 00:41:01,570 --> 00:41:10,370 that the growth of to Adams it was over town is to say that the kind of the big kind of turn around in especially 344 00:41:10,390 --> 00:41:17,050 kind of local political sentiment in the Muslim world towards militant Islamism and jihad in particular. 345 00:41:17,260 --> 00:41:27,670 The big turnaround was the Islamic State phenomenon and the kind of the popular backlash against the the violence deployed by Islamic State. 346 00:41:28,090 --> 00:41:34,540 And the case can perhaps be made that without at the development of Islamic State, 347 00:41:34,540 --> 00:41:43,300 in that we have had a sort of simmering and low level support for al Qaeda type groups is going to be out there for for quite a long time. 348 00:41:43,720 --> 00:41:54,010 But I mean, I think increasingly the view that that there has been a kind of oasis effect on support not just for jihadism, but. 349 00:41:57,250 --> 00:42:00,250 What would you do to go from that to say that? 350 00:42:00,400 --> 00:42:08,350 Well, by invading Iraq, we kind of precipitated this cathartic moment that we need, I think is very much a stretch. 351 00:42:08,350 --> 00:42:12,640 But I think it's is interesting. Do you think about it in any case? 352 00:42:12,650 --> 00:42:19,450 I mean, these are intellectual exercise and we shouldn't forget the enormous humanitarian and. 353 00:42:20,150 --> 00:42:26,780 Economic impacts have. So I'll just stop there. 354 00:42:36,160 --> 00:42:41,250 Thank you so much. I'm sure there are lots of questions about his condition that I have to ask the first question. 355 00:42:41,260 --> 00:42:45,340 So let me let me abuse that prerogative. Let me push you on a couple of things. 356 00:42:45,730 --> 00:42:52,570 So for those of you, the students of my course who read about Middle East political science, I promise this work. 357 00:42:52,570 --> 00:42:57,400 But I also saw a book that recently came out by Nebula who told us actually encouraged me to read, 358 00:42:57,850 --> 00:43:02,860 which is a kind of real breakdown of what happened to al Qaeda after 911 based 359 00:43:02,860 --> 00:43:08,760 on the documents that are recovered from Abbottabad after Navy SEAL Team six, 360 00:43:08,770 --> 00:43:15,040 I have to say read the compound and the story that you get from that book from the kind of primary source 361 00:43:15,040 --> 00:43:22,719 material is that Al Qaida post-9-11 is an extremely weak organisation materially in terms of personnel, 362 00:43:22,720 --> 00:43:24,670 in terms of the resources that it can bring to bear. 363 00:43:25,270 --> 00:43:33,540 And I wonder then in this story, who is coordinating, who is taking advantage of the invasion of Iraq, 364 00:43:33,550 --> 00:43:37,990 who is coordinating this, all these new people who are being recruited or all these. 365 00:43:38,190 --> 00:43:40,690 You know, when you talk about this kind of franchising system, 366 00:43:41,170 --> 00:43:49,990 is this garden variety Islamists rebranding themselves to take advantage of it, or what is the kind of the material basis of it? 367 00:43:50,740 --> 00:43:51,910 A second question. 368 00:43:51,910 --> 00:44:01,230 I just wanted to push you on a lot of the time series plots that you showed looking at these graphs, the discontinuity of 23 is not always clear. 369 00:44:01,240 --> 00:44:04,590 A lot of the time it's actually trending upwards beforehand. 370 00:44:04,600 --> 00:44:12,850 And I wanted just to think kind of factually whether what happened in Iraq in 2003 is really accelerating a tendency that you actually see beforehand, 371 00:44:13,330 --> 00:44:15,010 because just looking at a lot of the trends, 372 00:44:15,070 --> 00:44:22,930 a lot of the plots, if you look at the Brandeis data, if you look at the message forums, if you look at media production, it's going that way anyway. 373 00:44:23,110 --> 00:44:30,190 And then Iraq happens and it just continues to accelerate upwards. So I wonder counterfactual, what would have happened then given that tendency? 374 00:44:30,470 --> 00:44:33,740 Hmm. I'll leave it there. Yeah, great questions. 375 00:44:33,910 --> 00:44:40,629 So I don't think we really know the material bases of the Al Qaida franchise is because 376 00:44:40,630 --> 00:44:45,550 I think we're dealing with something very messy that not even the key actors understood. 377 00:44:45,970 --> 00:44:53,530 And so at some level, we're dealing you know, we're talking about individuals, people that are describes very, very well in her book, 378 00:44:53,530 --> 00:45:02,920 you know, people as a family going about their business and and thinking about how to continue the jihad from their hideout and so on. 379 00:45:03,070 --> 00:45:06,940 And you also have specific leaders that we now know things about. 380 00:45:06,940 --> 00:45:12,909 But there's also you know, there's there's an acceleration in recruitment that's so high that clearly 381 00:45:12,910 --> 00:45:17,020 the key the key leaders cannot have known all of these all these individuals. 382 00:45:17,380 --> 00:45:20,410 And I think in a lot of cases and you see this also, 383 00:45:20,410 --> 00:45:28,389 if you process trace the plots that only a small minority of plots in the West and elsewhere are instigated by the head of organisations. 384 00:45:28,390 --> 00:45:33,550 You know, a lot of these folks are kind of bottom up initiatives with new, 385 00:45:34,090 --> 00:45:41,790 new young people who have essentially watched videos online and together with their mates and and been, 386 00:45:42,100 --> 00:45:46,600 you know, very wound up, wound up and angry about what's going on and wanting to do something. 387 00:45:46,900 --> 00:45:55,810 And that's that's the situation in a lot of cases. I mean, this question of how much coordination is there in the al Qaeda movement, I mean, 388 00:45:55,820 --> 00:46:07,629 it's been so heavily debated since the beginning that some of you may have heard about the polemic between Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman about, 389 00:46:07,630 --> 00:46:14,620 you know, related matters. And yeah, so I think it is a debate that can't really be adjudicated as a mixture of both. 390 00:46:15,370 --> 00:46:22,450 And I can't see a situation where we'll get data that's good enough to enable us to to really adjudicate it. 391 00:46:22,660 --> 00:46:31,510 But I think in a sentence, this was an uncoordinated move really with largely by technological forces. 392 00:46:32,980 --> 00:46:40,480 So for some of the groups, you know, I think to go more deeply into the data to where is the increase happening and who is behind it. 393 00:46:40,960 --> 00:46:46,880 But in the case of the Iraq invasion, we have to bear in mind that there was there was a long run up to it, because that's one thing. 394 00:46:47,380 --> 00:46:52,120 There was talk about an invasion for at least six months before beforehand. 395 00:46:52,480 --> 00:46:55,960 So when you see this on the forums, for example, they're talking about it. 396 00:46:56,470 --> 00:47:03,910 The other thing to bear in mind is that you have a Palestinian father and the Chechen Chechnya war is still fresh in people's minds. 397 00:47:03,910 --> 00:47:13,890 And both of these two issues have been major symbols of members of religious symbols in this sort of jihadi victim narrative. 398 00:47:15,010 --> 00:47:20,160 So that may also have been behind some of that activity in the early 2000. 399 00:47:20,180 --> 00:47:23,350 But both of those conflicts, you know, they petered out. 400 00:47:24,820 --> 00:47:29,290 And I think, you know, a strong case can be made that they would have petered out even further. 401 00:47:29,560 --> 00:47:37,120 And so we would have seen. He's to you know, to sort of around 1999, 2000 levels. 402 00:47:38,140 --> 00:47:41,170 But I obviously guess. Great. Thanks. 403 00:47:41,810 --> 00:47:42,910 Recycle speaker So.