The jihad by Muslim extremists against the West began at 1:05 P.M. on April 18, 1983, when a dark delivery van made a sharp left turn onto the cobblestone drive of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Instead of parking, the van—laden with explosives—accelerated, and rammed into the entrance. The explosion echoed across the city. Black smoke enveloped the Embassy, a seven-story complex that overlooked the Mediterranean. When the smoke cleared, the front of the building was exposed, like the open face of a doll’s house, with bits of furniture and bodies thrown across the floors and onto the coastal boulevard beyond. More than sixty people were killed; many more were wounded. My office was just up the hill, behind the Embassy.
The jihad has mutated ever since; the groups have multiplied. The disparate wings now hold notorious records: in two separate bombings in Beirut, in 1983, the largest loss of U.S. military personnel in a single incident since Iwo Jima, and the largest loss of C.I.A. operatives ever. In 2001, in the United States, the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. In Madrid, in 2004, the deadliest terrorist attack ever in Europe, after multiple bombs went off on rush-hour trains. And in Paris on Friday, the deadliest attack in France since the Second World War. The jihad’s many tentacles have now terrorized Western targets on six continents.
The terror didn’t start in Beirut, of course. The world had already witnessed the simultaneous hijacking of American, British, and Swiss planes by Black September, in 1970; the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; and the 1975 kidnapping of eleven OPEC ministers, by Carlos the Jackal, in Vienna. They’re recorded on the National Counterterrorism Center’s timeline of major incidents since the emergence of terrorism as a popular form of modern warfare, in the seventies. Many terrorists had ties to the Middle East back then, too. But the acts were perpetrated by secular groups.
The ideological tide turned in 1979, with twin eruptions: the Iranian Revolution unleashed Islamic zealotry intent on ridding the region of Western (particularly American) influence. It appealed primarily to Shiites, including the young men who later formed Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan provoked a region-wide backlash in the form of new mujahideen holy warriors. They were primarily Sunni, and included the young Saudi Osama bin Laden. In both, religion became the idiom of opposition, the mobilizer, the rallying cry. Religion was invoked to condone violence—even a takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. Jihad was redefined.
The movement has grown exponentially with each decade. The eighties brought suicide bombings. The tactic, initiated by Hezbollah, was adopted and adapted by its brethren, notably in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Dawa (The Call), in Kuwait. But the groups had largely local and limited goals, such as confronting foreigners or seizing political space. Hezbollah’s attacks in Beirut in the early eighties sought to force American and French forces out of Lebanon. (They did.)
In the nineties, the jihadis went beyond their traditional turf, with Hezbollah’s attacks in Argentina and Al Qaeda’s first attack on the World Trade Center and its bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The pattern led the Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington to pen his controversial 1996 book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.” The post-Cold War world was re-organizing around “societies sharing cultural affinities,” Huntington wrote. “The West’s universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations.” The new fault lines, Huntington said, were largely between Muslims and non-Muslims.
The September 11th attacks and the American military response—in Afghanistan and, particularly, in Iraq—intensified the clash. Al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the war, but the American presence galvanized a new Iraqi branch that seemed eager to take on the world’s mightiest military. It lost Round One, but it eventually regrouped and morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. It is not losing Round Two, despite huge losses—an estimated thousand fighters killed every month—after more than a year of air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition.
More than three decades after the movement’s genesis in Beirut, the trend generally has proliferated in size, arena, and impact. Small covert cells have grown into big armies, some with thousands of troops. The six-pronged attack in Paris, French President François Hollande told his nation Saturday, “is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army.” The warriors, once formed from within neighborhoods, are now assembled from dozens of countries, oceans apart. In the past decade, the targets have less often been the big-ticket sites with historic, official, commercial, or symbolic heft; they are increasingly the vulnerable civilian, and otherwise quite ordinary, people and places—a café, a rock concert, a soccer game, a train station, a newspaper.
The battlefield now spans continents. The agenda is more ambitious, more aggressive, and more arrogant. It seeks to seize others’ space, too. “Let France and all nations following its path know that they will continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they partake in the crusader campaign,” the Islamic State said in a statement Saturday. “This is just the beginning.”
The past two weeks may mark a new phase, if the Islamic State is indeed responsible for triple attacks on three continents—on a Russian plane ferrying tourists from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; the deadliest bombing in Beirut since its civil war ended, a quarter century ago; and now Paris. The tally and scope would be unprecedented.
“It’s a tragedy we’re facing,” Patrick Klugman, the deputy mayor of Paris, reflected on CNN on Friday night. “Tomorrow will be another day. But we don’t know if it will start again tomorrow. We don’t know if it’s over.” It almost certainly isn’t.
Read additional New Yorker coverage of the Paris attacks, by Philip Gourevitch, Adam Gopnik, Dexter Filkins, Alexandra Schwartz, and George Packer.
