Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East Read Online Free PDF Page B

state—a policy caricatured by their critics as “one man, one vote, one time”). Similarly, the main Egyptian Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, avoided violence during this period and was rewarded by being allowed some marginal participation in the Egyptian political system (through the election to parliament of “independent” candidates who were not permitted to publicly proclaim their membership in the Brotherhood). Extreme violence in Egypt was the domain of two much smaller Islamist groups, Islamic Jihad, which organized the assassination of Egypt’s president Anwar Assad in 1981, and the Islamic Group, which waged an insurgency against the Egyptian government in 1992–98 that killed almost eight hundred people. The primary targets of the latter group were Egyptian military and political figures, but towards the end of its campaign it also branched out into killing foreign tourists: seventeen Greek tourists outside their Cairo hotel in 1997, and fifty-eight Western and Japanese tourists in Hatshepsut’s temple in Luxor later the same year.
    The strategic rationale behind these attacks was much the same as in terrorist campaigns anywhere else in the world. First, they drew the attention of the public to the existence and ideas of the revolutionary organization, in a media environment where it was otherwise very difficult to get the message out. Second, in countries that depended heavily on tourism—more than 5 percent of Egyptian GDP in the late 1990s—attacks on foreign tourists could create great economic hardship by damaging the tourism industry. In terrorism theory, at least, those who lose their jobs because tourists are afraid to come will blame the government for their misfortune rather than the terrorists, and so will be readier to withdraw their consent from the regime and support the revolutionaries.
    Two other major Islamist uprisings in the Arab world during this early period were the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and the revolt in Hama in Syria in 1983. In Saudi Arabia it took the army two weeks to take back control of the most sacred site in the Islamic world, and at least five hundred people were killed in the fighting. The revolt in Hama against Syria’s secular Ba’athist regime was led by the local Muslim Brotherhood, which had taken a more violent path than its parent organization in Egypt. The fighting in Hama lasted three weeks, much of the city was destroyed, and an estimated 30–40,000 people were killed by the regime’s troops. But none of these attempts to spark a revolution, in Egypt, Syria or Saudi Arabia, led to the overthrow of the existing regime and the creation ofa government run by Islamists. And in case the message was not clear enough already, the fate of the Islamist uprising in Algeria in the 1990s drove it home.
Except for those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death .
    – Attributed to Antar Zouabri, “emir” of the Islamic Armed Group, 1996–2002 4
    The increasing radicalization and eventual collapse of Islamist opposition to the rule of the army in Algeria during the civil war of 1992–2002 epitomizes the problem faced by Arab revolutionaries in the post-colonial era. In the Algerian independence war of 1954–62 it was obvious who the enemy was: the imperial power, France, and the million French-speaking European settlers in Algeria. For most Algerians the choice was easy, and in the end the French army did not even have to be destroyed in battle. Just make the cost to the French of staying in Algeria too high in lives and in money, and they will eventually cut their losses and go home because they actually have another home to go to . Revolutionary victories in several dozen European colonies in the 1950s and 1960s created the myth that revolutionary war, whether fought as a guerrilla war in rural areas or a terrorist war in the cities, was unstoppable, but it really only worked well in the anti-colonial