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The National Interest
EuroIslam: The Jihad Within?
by Olivier Roy
. . . And they are a wholly European phenomenon. Except for a few Pakistanis, no Al-Qaeda member left Europe or the United States to fight for Islam in his country of origin. . . .
The peripheral character of Al-Qaeda militants is also reflected in the geography of their chosen battlefields. There is a paradox: most Al-Qaeda fighters are ethnic Arabs, the bulk of them being Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian-Palestinian. But Al-Qaeda has been conspicuously absent from Arab lands (except, probably, for the Khobar Towers attack, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and perhaps recent small-scale activity in Kuwait). Nor have these militants cared much about Arab conflicts. Bin Laden gave only faint lip service to the Palestinian cause until the end of 2001. Training for the September 11 attacks was initiated before the so-called second intifada; most of the terrorists arrived on U.S. soil in the spring of 2000 and the decision to attack was taken that January. Instead of the Middle East, Al-Qaeda and its likes have been fighting in the West (New York, Paris, London), in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Philippines, Indonesia and East Africa-but not in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria or Algeria. . . .
While Al-Qaeda's campaign against U.S. interests has constantly increased and hundreds of Islamic militants have been arrested or tracked down in Europe, Islamist violence in the Middle East has steadily decreased since the Luxor killings of 1997. Hence the obvious question: Could EU member states be viewed as legitimate battlefields, and be attacked as a result? The answer is "yes, most definitely." . . .