Terrorism is a simple idea — intentionally targeting non-combatants to instill terror in a way that will accomplish political goals — that has had a profound impact on the world. But while we may think of terrorism today as something associated with wild-eyed religious radicals, in fact its history is much more complicated than that, and even the rise of what we now call jihadism is more complicated than you may think. What follows are 33 maps (okay, a few of them are charts) to tell this story.
The pre-history of modern terrorism
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France's "reign of terror"
In September 1793, a few years into the French Revolution, a radical faction of revolutionaries known as the Jacobins established something called the Committee on Public Safety, whose goal was to root out so-called "enemies of the revolution" and, in many cases, kill them, often by public guillotine. It was, by design, terrorism. Maximilien Robespierre, a leading Jacobin, declared that "terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible." Between 1793 and 1794, somewhere from 15,000 to 40,000 people were killed in an attempt to terrify the French people into accepting the revolutionary regime. The term "terrorism" was coined to describe this repression.
Image credit: (The University of Oregon)
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America's most successful domestic terrorists: the KKK
In America's history of domestic terrorism, the most successful group, by far, was the Ku Klux Klan. Most Americans today think of them only as a hate group, but they were founded after the Civil War as an insurgent group that used terrorism to contest Reconstruction. Lynching was, in some ways, a predecessor to ISIS beheading videos: a clear warning to freedmen and their allies that any attempt to empower black people would be met with violence. The KKK played an important role in intimidating Southern blacks — and thus creating the conditions under which the apartheid Jim Crow regime could be installed. Lynchings, not all of which were organized by the KKK or any specific group, went on for decades.
Image credit: (German Lopez/Vox)
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The anarchists who invented modern terrorism
The pioneers of global terrorism as we know it today weren't Islamists: They were anarchists. In the late 1800s, anarchist theorists, frustrated with their lack of progress toward demolishing the state, developed an approach they called "propaganda of the deed." They planned to use spectacular acts of violence to polarize societies and thus set the stage for revolution. The movement started in the 1880s in Russia, and spread to the rest of Europe, North America, and even Asia. Anarchists assassinated several heads of state, including US President William McKinley, and bombed a number of civilian targets, such as Chicago's Haymarket, pictured above. Though anarchists never succeeded in actually bringing down a government, their global reach and pioneering use of spectacular violence to manipulate global sentiment directly presaged modern jihadists. UCLA's David C. Rapoport calls them the "first wave" of global terrorism.
Image credit: (Javier Zarracina/Vox)
The 20th century of terrorism
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The rise and fall of modern European terror
In the 1970s, Europe was the epicenter of global terrorism. This mostly owed to two kinds of militant groups: nationalist movements (more on that in a bit) and left-wing terrorists who sought to begin a communist revolution by force. Many leftists were inspired, according to UCLA scholar Rapoport, by the Vietnam War: "The effectiveness of Vietcong terror against the American Goliath armed with modern technology kindled hopes that the Western heartland was vulnerable too," he writes. Italy's Red Brigades, for example, even hijacked the Italian prime minister's plane and ultimately executed him. Many had links to groups that only loosely shared their communist ideology: Germany's Baader-Meinhof group, for example, trained with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Image credit: (Mark Dechesne)
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The European secessionists: the IRA and ETA
Two separatist insurgencies have stood out in Europe: the Irish Republican Army in British-controlled Northern Ireland and the Basque ethnic group ETA in northeastern Spain. The conflict between the UK and the IRA, called the Troubles, shows some parallels with the US war on terrorism after 9/11. For example, the British government trampled on the rights of Northern Irish citizens, detaining them without charge in internment camps and even torturing them. While the Troubles finally ended in 1999, with the Good Friday Accords, ETA continues to struggle for an independent Basque state — though the group is far less threatening than it used to be.
Image credit: (Mark Dechesne)
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The 1972 Munich massacre — terrorism on a truly global scale
On September 5, 1972, members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September took the Israeli delegation at the Munich Summer Olympics hostage. The above diagram shows a rescue plan that several German police officers unilaterally aborted mid-mission, resulting in a limited rescue that failed. Afterward, the terrorists panicked and executed 11 members of the Israeli team. Black September wasn't Islamist, like Hamas today — it was a Palestinian nationalist group looking to topple Israel and replace it with a Palestinian state. The attack targeted Israelis for that reason, and also because Black September wanted to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Though it targeted Israelis, the attack was felt globally. Several athletes from all over the world, including famed Jewish American swimmer Mark Spitz, withdrew from the Olympics out of concern for their security. According to German government documents uncovered in 2012 by Der Spiegel, this led the West German government to make policy concessions to the Palestinians in order to avoid future attacks. Terror groups around the world took the lesson that high-profile attacks could be effective.
Image credit: (roke-commonswiki)
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The rise of suicide bombing
This map of suicide bombings from 1982 to 2013 shows places such as Afghanistan and Israel that you might already associate with suicide bombings. But look at the cluster of red dots just southeast of India. That's Sri Lanka, home to the Tamil Tigers — a group that, more than any other, is responsible for the worldwide spread of suicide bombing. The Tigers were a secular secessionist group, battling to secure an independent state for Sri Lanka's Tamil ethnic minority. They got the idea to use suicide bombing from Lebanon's Hezbollah, and then perfected it — they were the first group to use suicide vests, for example, and also the first to use women as suicide bombers. Between 1980 and 2013, the Tigers used more suicide bombs than any other terrorist organization on Earth (they were defeated in 2009). The effectiveness of the tactic in Sri Lanka does much more to explain why jihadist groups like ISIS have become so enamored of suicide bombs than any religious drive for martyrdom.
Image credit: (Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism)
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The biggest WMD terror attack in history
Terrorist attacks using chemical or biological have been thankfully rare, but they have happened. The most is the 1995 Tokyo subway attack by members of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult. The group, whose beliefs were a weird mélange of Buddhism and anti-American paranoia, saw mass violence as the first step to gaining political power and ultimately bringing on the apocalypse. They got their hands on a batch of sarin gas and released it in the Tokyo Underground, killing 12 people and wounding 5,511. The cult, fortunately, largely botched the attack, but it showed the effectiveness of using deadly chemicals against a "soft target" where civilians congregate.
Image credit: (Mayhaymate)
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The past 15 years of terrorist attacks
This time-lapse map, from Milan R. Vuckovic, is a beautiful animation of an ugly thing: every terrorist attack that killed 21 or more people in the past 15 years, as counted by the authoritative Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland. The map shows, pretty clearly, where terrorist groups have been most active and when. For instance, you see the FARC, a Colombian leftist narcoguerrilla group, pull off a lot of big attacks in the early 2000s and then taper off as the group weakens. You see the spike in terrorism in Israel during the second intifada, as well as the fact that Iraq didn't become a terrorist hotbed until after the US invasion. And near the end, you see the rise of more recent threats like ISIS and Nigeria's Boko Haram.
Image credit: (Milan R. Vuckovic)
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The biggest terrorist attacks, 2000 to 2013
One thing this map does is put 9/11 into horrible context: It killed 2,977 people, making it by far the deadliest attack in recent history. And it all unfolded live on TV as the world watched. This illustrates a crucial aspect of terrorism: The point is often to terrorize not just through body count but through spectacle. Terrorism by definition seeks to achieve specific political objectives, with fear and panic as the mechanisms by which otherwise relatively weak groups like al-Qaeda can force their will on more powerful actors. As Peter Neumann, the director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, puts it: "Terrorism is not necessarily about the number of people you kill; it's about the terror you create."
Image credit: (Vision of Humanity/Institute for Economics and Peace)
The story of al-Qaeda
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The failure of Middle Eastern states
Al-Qaeda, like the European nationalist and leftist terror groups that came before it, sees terrorism as a tactic to achieve revolutionary political ends. But its ideology is rooted in the history of the Muslim world. In the 1890s, the growth of European empires made many Muslims feel like their societies had fallen behind. That feeling deepened in World War I, when the British and French Empires struck the secret Sykes-Picot agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire between them, bringing non-Muslim rule. Some Muslim scholars argued that the Islamic world had abandoned the faith's original religious principles, made great by the original caliphate, a seventh-century empire led by Islam's founding generations. Their idea was to use the caliphate as something of a metaphor for a purified Islam. But in the 20th century, some in the growing Islamist movement preached a literal return to a caliphate as means to restore Islam and Muslims to their rightful place of greatness. Al-Qaeda took this idea to radical new extremes.
Image credit: (Financial Times)
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The Middle East's democratic deficit
Al-Qaeda also grew in large part out of the utter failure of the modern Middle Eastern political order since independence. One of the Arab world's most unique features is its near-total lack of democracy (at least until 2011), making it the least democratic region in the world. The problem isn't Islam, as several Muslim countries (like Indonesia and Turkey) are democratic. Nor is it colonialism; Africa has, over time, become increasingly democratic. Scholars aren't really sure what the reason is, though there are a number of theories. Whatever the cause, the lack of democracy has left the Middle East vulnerable to radical recruitment: if you're a citizen looking for change but you can't find it democratically, then militancy becomes a much more promising strategy. Indeed, al-Qaeda's core leadership has always been Arab, even as the group has been based in different places around the Muslim world.
Image credit: (Vox/Zack Beauchamp)
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The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is the critical turning point for the movement we now know as jihadism. Prior to the war, violent Islamist movements focused mostly on toppling local dictators (in Egypt, most famously). The Soviet invasion, by contrast, became a global cause: Nearly 20,000 volunteers traveled to Afghanistan to fight alongside fellow Muslims — mujahideen, from the Arabic word jihad, or struggle. Al-Qaeda's top leaders met there. The Soviets' defeat in 1988 convinced the fighters that they were, in fact, God's soldiers — and that they really could take down a superpower.
Image credit: (Gilles Dorronsoro)
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US military bases in the Middle East and the "far enemy"
After the Afghanistan War, the mujahideen veterans debated what to do next. Some groups, like Algeria's GIA, returned home to wage what some saw as Islamic revolutions. But another faction, led by al-Qaeda, believed these local revolutions would be impossible until they dealt with the real problem: the United States. Osama bin Laden and his allies believed they could not topple their "near enemy" — dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia's — as long as those dictators were propped up by the US, which became the "far enemy." The 1990 Gulf War against Iraq, which saw the US deploy thousands of troops to new bases in the region, entrenched this belief. In 1996, bin Laden issued an official "declaration of war" against the United States.
Image credit: (Michael Izady)
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September 11, 2001
The 9/11 attacks were the culmination of al-Qaeda's strategy. Ideally, al-Qaeda wanted the US to withdraw from the Middle East in terror; barring that, it wanted to bait the United States into an expensive and ultimately unwinnable series of wars (a strategy patterned, at least in part, on the jihadists' victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan). And indeed, al-Qaeda succeeded in sparking these wars. But the attack also backfired. The 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan devastated al-Qaeda there, isolating and weakening its leadership.
Image credit: (FBI)
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The rise and fall of al-Qaeda in Iraq
The US invasion of Iraq was, in many ways, the ultimate vindication of al-Qaeda's strategy. America expended lives and resources to right a regime that wasn't, in fact, an al-Qaeda ally — and supercharged al-Qaeda's recruiting. To capitalize on the post-invasion chaos, in 2004 al-Qaeda invited a local jihadist group, led by a Jordanian who called himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to become their official branch as al-Qaeda in Iraq. It became the most feared Sunni terrorist group in Iraq. However, bin Laden had trouble controlling Zarqawi, who refused to listen to warnings that his brutality would alienate Iraqis. Bin Laden proved to be right: AQI was ultimately defeated by a Sunni rebellion called the "awakening," and was reduced to a shell of itself by 2009 — though it would later reconstitute itself as ISIS.
Image credit: (MNF-Iraq)
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The Afghan insurgency aids al-Qaeda's survival
Though the US war in Afghanistan dealt a harsh blow to al-Qaeda's leadership, it didn't destroy the group. Pakistan became a crucial base for al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies — a place where they could rebuild with the support of elements of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service. In the years after the invasion, the Taliban reconstituted itself as an insurgency, and mounted an increasingly deadly terrorist campaign against the US and its Afghan allies. Al-Qaeda hid out somewhere in the areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Taliban was the strongest, surviving in a weakened form.
Image credit: (BBC)
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How al-Qaeda operates: affiliates and allies
Since 9/11, al-Qaeda has established a much wider network. This includes formal affiliates that pledge "bayat" (loyalty) to al-Qaeda's leadership, such as al-Shabaab in Somalia, as well as groups that aren't formally dedicated to al-Qaeda's cause but are willing to help it (like the Afghan Taliban). Theoretically, al-Qaeda is in command of its affiliates, but in practice it doesn't exercise complete control over their day-to-day operations. As a result, local grievances and concerns, rather than a pure devotion to anti-American jihad, often shape the actions of members of the al-Qaeda network. Making things more complicated, this network is constantly shaping in opaque ways: The above map shows some major players in the network in 2012, but since the rise of ISIS the state of play has shifted.
Image credit: (Rand Corporation)
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America's drone war response
The US and its allies have fought al-Qaeda in all sorts of ways that aren't very visible: covert intelligence gathering and cutting off its finances, for example. But the international bombing campaign became, for better or worse, the public face of America's war on al-Qaeda. The attacks peaked in Pakistan in 2010 (as the above chart of deaths and strikes shows), and have grown in Yemen, per Bureau of Investigative Journalism data. The strikes have killed well over 2,000, hundreds of them civilians, and it's still unclear how effective they've been. A 2013 review of the evidence, funded by the US military, concluded that we have no good statistical proof that the attacks are making it harder for militant groups like the Taliban to launch attacks. And even when a strike takes out an al-Qaeda leader, it's not obvious that actually hurts them very much: The group is bureaucratized to a degree that it's easy to promote new leaders to replace the ones lost.
Image credit: (Pitch Interactive)
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Al-Qaeda's most dangerous affiliate: AQAP
Today, al-Qaeda's two strongest affiliates are in Syria and Yemen. The Syrian franchise, called Jabhat al-Nusra, seems more focused on the Syria war than transnational terrorism. But the Yemen affiliate — called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) — has a history of planning transnational attacks. A 2009 failed suicide bombing aboard a US aircraft, as well as two bombs shipped on cargo planes in 2010, originated with AQAP. And in 2015, the group has actually grown stronger. A civil war between Yemen's internationally recognized government and Houthi insurgents has allowed AQAP to expand its territory, as the above map shows. Though the world's attention may be focused on ISIS in Iraq and Syria, AQAP's growth suggests that the al-Qaeda network is very far from defeated.
Image credit: (European Council on Foreign Relations)
The rise of ISIS
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Iraq as the cradle of ISIS
Perhaps the biggest difference between al-Qaeda and ISIS is territorial. While al-Qaeda has roots all over the Muslim world, ISIS is a fundamentally Iraqi phenomenon that has grown outward. And the thing that fueled its rise, more than anything else, is Iraqi sectarianism. Since the US invasion, the government has been dominated by Shiite Arabs, who are the country's majority and live mostly in the south. In the north and west are Sunni Arabs, who used to run things when Saddam Hussein was in power (there are also Kurds, who are religiously Sunni but ethnically distinct). ISIS grew out of a Sunni sense of loss: After the Iraq War, Sunnis felt threatened by the Shiite takeover of what they saw as rightfully their country. This sense of dispossession, as well as actual repression by the Shiite majority, made al-Qaeda's claim to be the true protector of Sunni interests more persuasive — helping the group to flourish in 2003 and '04.
Image credit: (Michael Izady)
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ISIS already had big ambitions in 2006
This map is hypothetical, but the fact that it exists at all speaks to ISIS's longstanding ambition. Aaron Zelin, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, found this 2006 map produced by al-Qaeda in Iraq, showing the areas it hoped to control and overlapping oil sources. The correctness of the map aside (there is not actually much oil in this area, despite the little derrick icons), it shows that the group has been thinking about the territory it wants and how to control it for about a decade. These territorial ambitions have long been a major source of friction between al-Qaeda central and AQI, now known as ISIS. Al-Qaeda believes that a caliphate cannot be established in the Middle East until after the US and other foreign powers are pushed out; ISIS's leadership has long seen this attitude as cowardly defeatism.
Image credit: (Aaron Zelin)
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The Arab Spring enabled ISIS's expansions
At the outset, the 2011 Arab Spring appeared to be a hammer blow to jihadism. Muslims were rising up, often peacefully, to demand democracy and individual rights, apparently discrediting the al-Qaeda narrative that democracy was an un-Islamic form of Western imperialism and that only violence worked. But the revolutions in Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia weakened the local governments, making it easier for jihadists to move in. The civil wars in Libya and Syria were even easier to exploit. As a result, both ISIS and al-Qaeda expanded their presences around the region.
Image credit: (Miguel Madeira)
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How Syria's civil war helped make ISIS
At first, Syria's war was mainly between the government and homegrown rebel groups. But early on, Assad encouraged extremism among his opponents in order to deter foreign intervention: In amnesties issued between March and October 2011, Assad released large numbers of extremists from Syrian prisons. At the same time, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — then the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq — sent operatives into Syria to establish a branch there. The jihadists recruited many of the released prisoners, and established Jabhat al-Nusra in January 2012. Nusra quickly became one of the most effective rebel forces on the battlefield, making it indispensable to the rebels struggling to defeat Assad.
Image credit: (Stratfor)
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The Syria proxy wars that helped grow ISIS
This map shows the patterns of international support for factions in Syria in 2012: Iran sent troops and weapons to prop up Assad's regime, while Sunni Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia funneled weapons and money to the rebels through Turkey. This benefited ISIS in two ways. First, Iranian support for Assad helped polarize the conflict on sectarian lines, indirectly fueling Sunni extremism. Second, private individuals in Gulf states funded extremists, including ISIS predecessor groups, they saw as the best way to topple Assad.
Image credit: (Johnny Harris/Vox)
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Iraq alienates its Sunnis
Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made several errors that contributed to ISIS's rise. Corrupt and authoritarian, he empowered fellow Shiites and marginalized Sunnis. By 2012, infuriated Sunnis launched protests with grew through 2013. Maliki's security forces killed 56 people at protest in the northern town Hawija alone in April 2013. The crackdowns left many Sunnis alienated and fearful of their own government — fertile ground for the once-defeated AQI to return by claiming to defend Sunnis.
Image credit: (Institute for the Study of War)
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ISIS breaks away from al-Qaeda
In April 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared he now controlled all al-Qaeda operations in Syria and Iraq, renaming his group "the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria" — ISIS — which then sent its own forces into Syria. Al-Qaeda rejected the power grab and eventually exiled Baghdadi. ISIS went to war with al-Qaeda and with Syria's other rebel groups, taking over vast territory there. The images above show control of territory in Syria in March 2014, at left, with June 2014's battle lines (ISIS is in gray-black) at right.
Image credit: (Thomas van Linge)
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ISIS's march across northern Iraq in June 2014
On June 10, 2014, about 800 ISIS fighters marched across northern Iraq, capturing Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. This blitzkrieg built on months of ISIS momentum. In January, ISIS had seized control of Fallujah, a former AQI stronghold in western Iraq. The conquest of Mosul and much of northern Iraq led a triumphant Baghdadi to declare his territory a "caliphate" on July 4. This was, in retrospect, the high-water mark of ISIS's conquests — a moment at which the group truly appeared capable of doing anything.
Image credit: (Institute for the Study of War)
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The rush of foreigners into Iraq and Syria
The Syrian civil war, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan before it, attracted many foreign fighters: A total of 12,000 arrived by June 2014. After ISIS's big victories in June 2014, another 15,000 and 19,000 have arrived, for a total of 27,000 to 31,000 fighters. Many are thought to have joined ISIS. These foreigners tend to be more radical and brutal than local fighters, and could theoretically use their foreign passports to return home and plan attacks. While few North Americans are among these fighters, Europeans and Middle Easterners are numerous.
Image credit: (BBC)
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ISIS is now losing territory
In both Iraq and Syria, ISIS is being beaten back: It has lost about 25 percent of its total territory since its peak in June of last year. The group is simply fighting too many enemies with an untenable war plan. Because ISIS is so obsessed with governing its caliphate as if it were a real state, it can't hide among civilians as other insurgent/terrorist groups might. It's waging a conventional war against a number of conventionally stronger opponents, and so is in serious territorial decline.
Image credit: (IHS Jane's 360)
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The Western war plan against ISIS
The US-led coalition is taking a cautious approach: weakening ISIS's ability to maneuver through airstrikes, pressuring ISIS on the edges of its caliphate, and strengthening its local partners in Iraq and Syria until they're ready to make major pushes. "Right now — and I approve of this — we're moving at a very deliberate rate," Michael Knights, the Lafer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says. "We're pushing forward nice and slowly, snipping off little bits of the caliphate, [and] building our confidence."
Image credit: (CENTCOM)
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The global jihadist movement is dividing
These images show the allegiances among jihadist groups in March 2014 (left) and April 2015 (right), as assessed by terrorism scholar Clint Watts, who summarizes the findings succinctly: "ISIS has kicked al-Qaeda's ass." ISIS has grown a network of supporters and allies, largely at al-Qaeda's expense. ISIS's establishment of what it says is the caliphate and its flashy military victories looked to many like the culmination of the jihadist dream. The global jihadist movement, once unified under the al-Qaeda banner, has split in two.
Image credit: (Clint Watts)
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ISIS's global turn and the threat to Europe
ISIS appears to have decided to answer battlefield defeats with al-Qaeda-style attacks on foreign targets, both to impress its recruits and to scare off foreign powers. But many attacks are planned and executed by sympathizers, without any input or coordination from ISIS's leaders. "What ISIS understands, more than al-Qaeda before, is that even fairly limited acts of violence can be very terrorizing," Neumann, the radicalization scholar, says. Even if ISIS loses its caliphate, this may be a threat for some time to come.
Image credit: (Institute for the Study of War)