Terror began spreading internationally in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the actions of secular ideological and separatist terrorist organizations. In the late 1980s, many radical Islamist organizations pledged their allegiance to a new force – al-Qaeda [1], one of the largest ultraradical international terrorist organizations of the Wahhabi branch of Islam. Salafi jihadist terrorism fully positioned itself in the international arena with the terrorist attacks of 2001 in the United States.
During the decade following those attacks, the world community mounted a unified struggle against al-Qaeda and its affiliates and came to believe that it was managing to prevent most of the terrorist attacks. The elimination of key al-Qaeda figures, including its leader, Osama bin Laden, led to the conviction that the organization was essentially liquidated and the Salafi jihadist camp effectively destroyed. However, the events of the “Arab Spring” – that inflamed the entire Middle East – proved that assumption wrong.
The world community faces the task of developing the necessary measures to combat the threat of terrorism on a global scale. Every state attempts to analyze the nature of this phenomenon and to develop its own method for countering this evil. The authors of this report believe that an analysis of terrorist activity and a system of counter-terrorism measures developed by the Israeli expert community hold particular promise as Israel has had to repel the terrorist threat constantly throughout its history.
About authors:
Tatiana Karasova, PhD in History, Head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Oriental Studies Institute Department for the Study of Israel and Jewish Communities
Zvi Magen, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS, Israel), Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine (1993–1998), in Russia (1998–1999), Head of the “Nativ” organization (1999-2006)
Yoram Schweitzer, Senior Research Fellow, Head of the Program on Terrorism and Low Intensity Conflict at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS, Israel)
Download report in Russian (PDF)
[1] Banned in Russia (Ed.Note)
