I have yet to hear a Friday sermon in which believers are not reminded to lend a helping hand to their beleaguered Palestinian and Iraqi counterparts. The ability of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, or Party of God, to resist the Israeli military onslaught has lent credence to Al-Muqawama proponents. "Hezbollah’s victory over the mighty Israeli army had broken the psychological barrier of fear among Muslims," a leading political activist told me. "We no longer fear American and Israeli military power. We are armed with faith."
Furthermore, while Muslim public backing for global jihad – as opposed to local jihad – is limited, Iraq today is one of the most promising theaters for the movement’s revival. Local jihad focuses only on occupied Arab and Muslim territories like Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, while global jihad’s boundaries extend wide and far to New York, Washington, Madrid and London. The American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has given rise to a new generation of jihadists who differ dramatically from the first generation – the founding fathers who killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 – and the second generation, Afghan Arabs or Al Qaeda.
Members of the first generation of the jihadist movement – the pioneers – came from the middle class and upper middle class and graduated from top scientific and social sciences departments in Egypt’s best universities. They possessed a complex, though distorted, grasp of various schools of Islamic thought and laid the theoretical foundation of jihadism utilized by the Al Qaeda generation and the Iraq generation alike.
In contrast, many of the Iraq generation of jihadists, who represent a tiny minority of all fighters in Iraq, come from the poverty belts of Arab and Muslim ghettos and streets. Many have shockingly little religious and formal education. I met teenagers who aspired to join the fight against the American occupiers and were nearly illiterate, with no grasp of interpretations of religious texts. They lack the financial means – a few hundred US dollars – to travel to Iraq, but they and others like them form a huge pool of potential recruits for global jihad.
Moreover, unlike the first and second generation, the Iraq jihadists, few as they are so far, do not make a clear distinction between the near enemy (Muslim ruling "renegades") and the far enemy (the US and its allies). They wage an all-out war against internal and external enemies alike. The lines of demarcation between Muslims and non-Muslims have also become blurred. The Iraq jihadists are willing to kill thousands of fellow Muslims who, in their eyes, are kufar, or apostates, and are as dangerous, if not more so, as Americans and Westerners.
In my conversation with members of the first generation and some of the Afghan-trained Arab fighters, they were at a loss to explain the beastly acts of terror carried out by their Iraq counterparts. While jihadists are conspiratorial by nature, they conceded that the indiscriminate killings of Muslims and civilians are a byproduct of the Iraq generation’s scanty religious education, low social status and America’s violation of Muslim sanctity.