'Syria should not belong to one family, to one coterie, or to one party. It belongs to all the people of Syria equally, in all their religious and ethnic diversity' – William Hague Recent terrorist attacks in Egypt and Tunisia confirm that jihadists returning from Syria are bent on acts of violence in support of Islamists either under fire, or ousted from power, as was the case in Egypt. One is reminded of the 1980s when many Arab countries sent Islamist militants to Afghanistan to back the United States in its Cold War against the Soviet Union. The US was fighting the “commies”, the jihadists were fighting “heretics”, and the Afghan people suffered. Over the next three decades they watched their country and neighbouring Pakistan become incubators of religious extremism with all its pernicious repercussions. They also watched as these repercussions spread to other countries in the Middle East when those “Arab Afghans” returned to their native lands (as occurred in Egypt, which experienced an unprecedented wave of terrorist violence in the late 1980s and 1990s). It looks like the syndrome is repeating itself, judging from the evidence that has come to light in the context of the current wave of targeted assassinations against army and police personnel, political officials and political activists in Egypt and Tunisia. Investigations into the car bombing that targeted the Egyptian minister of interior revealed that one of the perpetrators was a former Egyptian army officer who had been discharged in 2005 on the grounds of his religious extremism. He had recently returned from Syria, after passing through Afghanistan. He was recruited into a jihadist cell whose members have also been arrested recently. The terrorists who were involved in the assassinations of security personnel and political figures in Tunisia were also recent returnees from jihadist missions in Afghanistan and/or Syria. This phenomenon once again raises crucial questions regarding terrorism beneath the banner of “jihad”. What is the real relationship between political Islam and terrorism? Recent events in Egypt suggest an intimate one. Jihadists and other radical Islamists who took part in the many acts of violence targeting innocent citizens in Egypt had been among those who took part in the sit-ins in front of Rabaa Al-Adaweya Mosque in Cairo's Nasr City and in Nahda Square in Giza. This was certainly the case with the drive-by shooting at a crowd of wedding celebrants in front of the church in Warraq. The people in those sit-ins were, virtually by definition, supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and their policies. Egyptians were given a clear idea of the nature of those policies at various junctures of the Muslim Brotherhood's year in power. The last occasion was former president Mohamed Morsi's speech to a large gathering of his fellow Muslim Brothers and Islamist supporters in which he declared “the opening of the door of jihad” in Syria. The behaviour was very unusual for the head of state of a country with the size and status of Egypt. In all events, it was the last of the many stances that would backfire against Morsi who would soon be forced out of power by a popular revolution in which the army intervened in order to safeguard stability and security and in order to save our country from the brink of anarchy to which the mentality of the Muslim Brotherhood was propelling it. In Egypt, developments in Sinai since Islamists came to power most palpably throw into relief the connection between their way of thought and the mentality behind jihadist operations (there is a clear relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist activities there). This is important to bear in mind when contemplating a concurrent development, namely the rise in jihadist warfare and violence in Syria. To Egyptian and other Arab societies this should sound a warning bell in light of the prospect of the eventual return of those jihadists to these countries. We need only to cast our minds back to the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the subsequent return to Arab countries of the jihadist volunteers in that war. Arab societies still suffer the repercussions of that period: the spread of religious extremism, rising levels of intolerance and sectarianism, modes of behaviour that were Al-Qaeda to the core, from dress to murder and terrorism. If that was the case with relatively remote Afghanistan, what are we to make of the repercussions of the situation in Syria? Surely that is a jihadist timebomb being primed to explode in our faces at any moment. We are already watching the preludes in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries, such as Libya, Lebanon and Turkey. This is not just about the bombings and killings. The danger extends to the spectre of a renewed spread of extremist thought and the creation of a jihadist terrorist culture in the societies to which Islamist militants return. Not only would a large segment of youth be at risk of having their minds stupefied by the jihadist intellectual opiate, as many of these countries lack strong central governments, entire societies would be at risk of “Somalisation” — the disintegration of the country into fiefdoms controlled by jihadist warlords. Indeed, Libya appears to be sliding rapidly into that direction. Every town and every district in every town is controlled by one or another of that country's proliferating militias, each of which rules its turf in accordance with its idiosyncratic creed and is prepared to wage a war of extinction against those who stand in its way. Nor can we rule out the possibility of the emergence of new jihadist groups in our midst, different from those that had issued ideological revisions. However, what remains the most worrisome cause of concern is the mother organisation of political Islam. I refer of course to the Muslim Brotherhood which, for decades, denied all connection with jihadist Islamist groups but that, in tandem with recent political developments, has become associated with many of the acts of terrorist violence perpetrated by those groups. The danger is twofold. On the one hand, is the considerable damage that political Islam can wreak in societies in which the state is still strong, which appears to be the Muslim Brotherhood's policy in Egypt at present. On the other is the tenaciousness with which they boast the logic of coercion and terror without investigating alternative modes of behaviour that would enable them to reintegrate into society. This problem can only grow more acute the more these groups are involved in or associated with crimes that appall and alienate public opinion, such as the attack on the Warraq church in which children were among the innocent victims, or the attacks against bus loads of soldiers whose only sin was that they were performing their duty to the nation. I fear that we are at the beginning of a new phase of terrorism that is being bred in Syria. No society in this region will be safe from its poison because of that country's central location in the Arab world. These societies need to be alert to this danger now. They must step up their vigilance by taking such measures as identifying and keeping track of everyone who travels to Syria on the pretext of “the jihad” there. When those people return home they will be more radical than when they left and they will be motivated by a thirst for revenge against society fired by their extremist ideas and perceptions. This said, there remains the question as to whether they will succeed in sowing jihadist seeds, especially given the context of the different times we are in now that the revolutions of the Arab Spring have broken so many established moulds and paradigms. The writer is managing editor of the quarterly journal Al-Demoqratiya published by Al-Ahram.
