Egypt: Terror and Repression

This chapter charts the growth of violent Islamism through the prism of strategic scripts introduced in the first chapter. It focuses on the Muslim Brotherhood’s emergence and development of the Secret Apparatus, before looking at the lesser-known organizations of the 1960s such as Takfir wal-Hijra and the Military Academy Group, who resorted to terrorist violence to gain critical mass for their confrontation with the regime. The remainder of the chapter looks at groups like Tanzim al-Jihad, Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) [al-Jihad al-Islami] and the Egyptian Islamic Group (EIG) [al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya], charting their use of different strategic scripts in their conflict with the regime.

The Seduction of Terror

This chapter looks at terrorism as a strategic choice. It looks at the calculations that terrorists make, and how terrorism is an attempt to bridge the very limited resources available to terrorists with their large political objectives. In this context, it introduces the idea of strategic scripts: stereotypical responses to given situations. It also introduces the eight broad categories of terrorist scripts explored in the following chapters: survival, power play, mobilization, provocation and polarization, de-legitimization, attrition, co-operation, and de-mobilization.

Conclusion: Scripts of Terror

This chapter concludes the volume. It begins with a description of the strategic scripts encountered in the three case studies (Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) before moving on to a more in-depth discussion about why terrorist scripts (and terrorism) invariably fail. It looks at scripts as forms of narrative, and argues that as stories scripts are compelling, but as strategies they are unrealistic. It argues that terrorists are particularly susceptible to ‘narrative delusion’, but that it can affect all strategists, because the future is inherently unpredictable, and strategy is necessarily about coping with uncertainty.

Yemen: Coalitions of Terror

This chapter looks at Yemen’s violent Islamist groups, and explores their emergence in the early 1990s, their merger with Saudi Arabian violent Islamist groups in the mid-2000s and their eventual internationalization, largely through the personality of Anwar al-Awlaki. Like previous chapters, this one focuses on the strategic scripts deployed by Yemeni violent Islamist groups, and how these scripts unfolded in the Yemeni political context. The chapter also looks at two unique strategic moves deployed by Yemen’s violent Islamist groups: their preference for coalitions and mergers, and their subsequent internationalization and decentralization.

Saudi Arabia: Terror and Legitimacy

This chapter examines the Saudi violent Islamist movement and the strategic scripts it resorted in the early 2000s. It explores how its’ strategists envisaged these scripts reaching their desired outcomes and how their strategies unfolded in practice. It begins by focusing on the way in which the attitudes of both bin Laden and Saudi Arabia’s non-violent Islamist movement towards the regime changed throughout the 1990s and how these changes significantly influenced his strategic vision for the Peninsula. It then examines the emergence of two contrasting strategic visions in the networks of Yusuf al-Uyayri and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and examines how these two visions were derived from scripts whose assumptions were flawed. The third section focuses on the ‘campaign of violence’ used by AQAP between 2003 and 2005 under the leadership of Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin and explores the structure and flaws in his three-stage script. The chapter concludes by examining the flaws and assumptions in these scripts Islamists and examines how these assumptions were translated into failed strategy, producing the ‘strategic gap’.