TOP 6 TERROR ORGANIZATIONS IN THE WORLD

 HAMAS

Hamas is a militant movement and one of the Palestinian territories’ two major political parties. It governs more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, but the group is best known for its armed resistance to Israel. Dozens of countries have designated Hamas a terrorist organization, though some apply this label only to its military wing. Iran provides it with material and financial support, and Turkey reportedly harbors some of its top leaders. Its rival party, Fatah, which dominates the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and rules in the West Bank, has renounced violence. The split in Palestinian leadership and Hamas’s unwavering hostility toward Israel have diminished prospects for stability in Gaza.

WHAT ARE THE GROUP'S ORIGIN?

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”), was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian cleric who became an activist in local branches of the Muslim Brotherhood after dedicating his early life to Islamic scholarship in Cairo. Beginning in the late 1960s, Yassin preached and performed charitable work in the West Bank and Gaza, both of which Israel occupied following the 1967 Six-Day War. Yassin established Hamas as the Brotherhood’s political arm in Gaza in December 1987, following the outbreak of the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. At the time, Hamas’s purpose was to counter Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), another organization whose commitment to violently resisting Israel threatened to draw Palestinians’ support away from the Brotherhood. In 1988, Hamas published its charter, calling for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic society in historic Palestine. In what observers called an attempt to moderate its image, Hamas presented a new document in 2017 that accepted an interim Palestinian state along the “Green Line” border established before the Six-Day War but that still refused to recognize Israel.

ISLAMIC STATE

Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Arabic al-Dawlah al-Islāmiyyah fī al-ʿIrāq wa al-Shām, Arabic abbreviation Dāʿish or Daesh, also called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and, since June 2014, the Islamic State, transnational Sunni insurgent group operating primarily in western Iraq and eastern Syria. First appearing under the name ISIL in April 2013, the group launched an offensive in early 2014 that drove Iraqi government forces out of key western cities, while in Syria it fought both government forces and rebel factions in the Syrian Civil War. In June 2014, after making significant territorial gains in Iraq, the group proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate led by the leader of ISIL, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. International efforts to defeat the group led to its decline, and both Syria and Iraq considered ISIL effectively defeated by November 2017, though ISIL continued to hold a small amount of territory until March 2019. Certain affiliates with only weak ties to ISIL leadership, most notably Islamic State–Khorasan Province (ISKP; also called ISIS-K), remained active elsewhere.

ROOTS IN IRAQ

ISIL has its origins in the Iraq War of 2003–11. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), its direct precursor, was one of the central actors in a larger Sunni insurgency against the Iraqi government and foreign occupying forces. Under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, AQI was responsible for some of the most spectacular and brutal attacks of that conflict. Shortly after Zarqawi’s death in 2006, the group combined with several smaller extremist groups and renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), a change that reflected the group’s efforts to hold and control territory as well as its ambition to obtain universal leadership of the Islamic community. The group’s activities were greatly diminished when many of the Sunni tribes of western Iraq turned against it, however, beginning in 2007. The reasons for that reversal included the ISI fighters’ harsh treatment of the populace in areas under their control and a new counterinsurgency strategy that paid Sunni tribal leaders not to participate in attacks. AQI/ISI was also weakened by the loss of several of its senior leaders in attacks by U.S. and Iraqi forces. In 2010 leadership of the group was taken over by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (birth name: Ibrāhīm ʿAwwād Ibrāhīm ʿAlī al-Badrī al-Sāmarrāʾī), a militant recently released from a five-year detention in a U.S.-run prison in southern Iraq.

AL-Qa'ida (AQ)

al-Qaeda, Arabic al-Qāʿidah (“the Base”), broad-based militant Islamist organization founded by Osama bin Laden in the late 1980s. Al-Qaeda began as a logistical network to support Muslims fighting against the Soviet Union during the Afghan War; members were recruited throughout the Islamic world. When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the organization dispersed but continued to oppose what its leaders considered corrupt Islamic regimes and foreign (i.e., U.S.) presence in Islamic lands. Based in Sudan for a period in the early 1990s, the group eventually reestablished its headquarters in Afghanistan (c. 1996) under the patronage of the Taliban militia.

Al-Qaeda merged with a number of other militant Islamist organizations, including Egypt’s Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, and on several occasions its leaders declared holy war against the United States. The organization established camps for Muslim militants from throughout the world, training tens of thousands in paramilitary skills, and its agents engaged in numerous terrorist attacks, including the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (1998), and a suicide bomb attack against the U.S. warship Cole in Aden, Yemen (2000; see USS Cole attack). In 2001, 19 militants associated with al-Qaeda staged the September 11 attacks against the United States. Within weeks the U.S. government responded by attacking Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. Thousands of militants were killed or captured, among them several key members (including the militant who allegedly planned and organized the September 11 attacks), and the remainder and their leaders were driven into hiding.

The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 challenged that country’s viability as an al-Qaeda sanctuary and training ground and compromised communication, operational, and financial linkages between al-Qaeda leadership and its militants. Rather than significantly weakening al-Qaeda, however, these realities prompted a structural evolution and the growth of “franchising.” Increasingly, attacks were orchestrated not only from above by the centralized leadership (after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, based in the Afghan-Pakistani border regions) but also by the localized, relatively autonomous cells it encouraged. Such grassroots independent groups—coalesced locally around a common agenda but subscribing to the al-Qaeda name and its broader ideology—thus meant a diffuse form of militancy, and one far more difficult to confront.

With this organizational shift, al-Qaeda was linked—whether directly or indirectly—to more attacks in the six years following September 11 than it had been in the six years prior, including attacks in Jordan, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Israel, Algeria, and elsewhere. At the same time, al-Qaeda increasingly utilized the Internet as an expansive venue for communication and recruitment and as a mouthpiece for video messages, broadcasts, and propaganda. Meanwhile, some observers expressed concern that U.S. strategy—centred primarily on attempts to overwhelm al-Qaeda militarily—was ineffectual, and at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, al-Qaeda was thought to have reached its greatest strength since the attacks of September 2001. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was killed by U.S. military forces after U.S. intelligence located him residing in a secure compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, 31 miles (50 km) from Islamabad. The operation was carried out by a small team that reached the compound in Abbottabad by helicopter. After bin Laden’s death was confirmed, it was announced by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, who hailed the operation as a major success in the fight against al-Qaeda. On June 16, 2011, al-Qaeda released a statement announcing that Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s long-serving deputy, had been appointed to replace bin Laden as the organization’s leader.

Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)

Lashkar-e-Taiba, (Urdu: “Army of the Pure”) also spelled Lashkar-e-Tayyiba or Lashkar-e-Toiba, Islamist militant group, begun in Pakistan in the late 1980s as a militant wing of Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad, an Islamist organization influenced by the Wahhābī sect of Sunni Islam. It sought ultimately to establish Muslim rule over the entire Indian subcontinent. Though based in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba initially operated in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, on the Pakistan-India border, but by the first decade of the 21st century the group had expanded its reach farther into India. Jammu and Kashmir was claimed by both India, a largely Hindu country, and Pakistan, a largely Muslim country, and the dispute gave rise to many armed groups within Jammu and Kashmir.

One of the largest groups operating in Jammu and Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Taiba was extremely pro-Pakistan regarding control of the region. The group opposed any concessions to India. Further, its leaders expressed the desire to establish Islamic rule throughout India. The group took part in several attacks targeting non-Muslim civilian populations in Jammu and Kashmir in an effort to create a Muslim state. Many of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s members were Pakistani or Afghan. It was believed that the group had ties with Afghanistan’s Taliban government and with the wealthy Saudi extremist and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Fighters from Lashkar-e-Taiba and another militant Muslim group, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, were killed in August 1998 when U.S. cruise missiles struck bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan, and a senior al-Qaeda official was captured in a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Pakistan in March 2002.

Early Activities

Lashkar-e-Taiba made its first incursions into Jammu and Kashmir in 1993. In the late 1990s it was alleged that Lashkar-e-Taiba received funding from agencies of the Pakistani government, an allegation the government denied. The group began operating in the Jammu region, which had large numbers of non-Muslims. Working in conjunction with Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba began a program of attacks against Hindus and Sikhs. Lashkar-e-Taiba attacks were often aimed at civilians. Beginning in 1999, Lashkar-e-Taiba conducted a series of suicide attacks against Indian security forces, often targeting seemingly secure headquarters. In such attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba forces were outnumbered and eventually killed, though not before killing Indian troops and causing extensive damage.

In 2000 Lashkar-e-Taiba had a falling out with Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, which had declared a short-lived cease-fire with India. The group lost more allies in 2001, after the September 11 attacks on the United States led to the removal of the Taliban government in Afghanistan by U.S.-led military forces. On December 13 that year, Lashkar-e-Taiba undertook a suicide attack on India’s parliament complex in the capital, New Delhi, in conjunction with Jaish-e-Mohammed, another militant group. In response, the United States government froze the U.S. assets of Lashkar-e-Taiba and declared it a terrorist organization. Under pressure from the United States to crack down on such militant groups and to avoid a war with India, the government of Pakistan banned the group in January 2002 and arrested its leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, but he was released a few months later. He established a charity organization known as the Jamaat ud-Dawa, which became widely viewed as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Following a cease-fire accord between India and Pakistan in 2003, Lashkar-e-Taiba was believed to have moved most of its operations to northwestern Pakistan, an area bordering Afghanistan over which the central government did not have control. The organization also increasingly focused its activities on India itself.

TALIBAN

Taliban, Pashto Ṭālebān (“Students”), also spelled Taleban, ultraconservative political and religious faction that emerged in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s following the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the collapse of Afghanistan’s communist regime, and the subsequent breakdown in civil order. It began as a small force of Afghan religious students and scholars seeking to confront crime and corruption; the faction owes its name, Taliban (Pashto: Ṭālebān, “Students”), to this initial membership.

ORIGIN AND FIRST REGIME

The Taliban emerged in the aftermath of the Afghan War (1978–92). Afghanistan’s new government failed to establish civil order outside of Kabul, and much of the country was subject to frequent extortion and assault from local militias and warlords. Facing mass displacement during the war, many Afghans found solidarity in the religious rhetoric of the mujahideen resistance and opportunity in schools of Islamic sciences (called madrasahs) in southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. In 1994 a group of former fighters, associated with a madrasah in a village of Kandahār province, successfully subdued a local warlord and began pacifying nearby areas. The faction, which enjoyed popular support with its promise of security and its religious fervour, quickly grew into the movement now known as the Taliban. By late 1996 the Taliban had seized the capital, Kabul, and gained effective control over some two-thirds of the country.

The Taliban faced significant resistance, especially after it asserted its own interpretation of law and order. It combined a strict religious ideology—a mixture of Deobandi traditionalism and Wahhābī puritanism—with a conservative Pashtun social code (Pashtunwali) to create a brutally repressive regime. Its policies included the near-total exclusion of women from public life (including employment and education), the systematic destruction of non-Islamic artistic relics (as occurred in the town of Bamiyan), and the implementation of harsh criminal punishments. Resistance was particularly pronounced among non-Pashtun ethnic groups—namely, the Tajik, the Uzbek, and the Hazara—in the north, west, and central parts of the country, who saw the power of the predominantly Pashtun Taliban as a continuation of the traditional Pashtun hegemony of the country. By 2001 the Taliban controlled all but a small section of northern Afghanistan, and only Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates ever recognized the regime.

The Afghanistan War and removal from power

Apart from the Taliban’s unsettling disregard for human rights, many countries were concerned about the Taliban allowing refuge to Osama bin Laden, who had helped organize a network of foreign-born Muslim fighters during the Afghan War. That network, al-Qaeda, had evolved into a network of Islamist militants who sought a violent struggle to free the Islamic world from non-Muslim influence and had orchestrated several attacks against the United States. Even after bin Laden and al-Qaeda were found responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and on the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., that had occurred on September 11, 2001, the Taliban refused to extradite bin Laden. The United States and its allies began bombarding Afghanistan in October and supported the efforts of the Northern Alliance, a group of anti-Taliban factions in Afghanistan that had been resisting the Taliban’s takeover of the country. In early December the Northern Alliance succeeded in toppling the Taliban regime.

HAQQANI NETWORK

Haqqani network, Pashtun militant network based in eastern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan. The Haqqani network originated during the Afghan War (1978–92), and, after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, it participated in an insurgency against U.S. and NATO forces and the Afghan government.

ESTABLISHMENT

The founder of the Haqqani network, Jalaluddin Haqqani, rose to prominence as a guerrilla leader in the 1970s and ’80s. A member of the Pashtun Jadran (Zadran) tribe from Paktiyā province in southeastern Afghanistan, Haqqani was educated in religious schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After participating in an unsuccessful Islamist guerrilla campaign against the government of Afghan Pres. Mohammad Daud Khan in 1975, Haqqani built his reputation as a shrewd and determined commander during the Afghan War, in which Islamist guerrilla fighters known as mujahideen (from Arabic mujāhidūn, “those engaged in jihad”) battled the communist government of Afghanistan and the Soviet force that invaded the country in 1979 to defend the government. 

Haqqani marshalled a large militant network based on tribal and ideological bonds in the strategically important region of eastern Afghanistan known as Lōyah Paktiyā, which comprises the modern provinces of Paktiyā, Paktīkā, and Khōst. The mujahideen received extensive covert support from the United States and other countries opposed to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan; Haqqani worked closely with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, launching attacks and facilitating the flow of fighters and supplies into Afghanistan from Pakistan. He also sought to enlist the wider Islamic world in the fight in Afghanistan, cooperating with networks of foreign Muslim militants traveling to Afghanistan and sending representatives to the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf to raise funds. During those years, Haqqani developed close ties to foreign militant financiers and leaders, including Osama bin Laden, the future head of al-Qaeda.

RELATIONSHIP WITH TALIBAN

Following the capture of the Afghan capital, Kabul, by the mujahideen in 1992, Haqqani served as minister of justice in the interim cabinet formed by leaders of the mujahideen. In 1995 he allied with the Taliban movement, which captured the capital from the new government the following year. He served as minister of tribal affairs under the Taliban government.

In 2001 a U.S.-led invasion forced the Taliban from power. Leaders of the Haqqani network took shelter in the tribal regions of Pakistan and soon joined the reconstituted Taliban’s insurgency against international forces and the government of Afghan Pres. Hamid Karzai. Responsibility for directing the operations of the network was transferred from Haqqani, aging and reportedly ill, to his son Sirajuddin. The network was blamed for a number of high-profile attacks, including bombings, assassinations, and commando-style raids on important sites in Kabul. 

Throughout the period of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the Haqqani network was a source of tension between the governments of the United States and Pakistan. U.S. officials accused the Pakistani government of abetting the network in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, a charge that Pakistani officials fervently denied. Upon the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban regained control of the country. Haqqani leaders with senior ranks in the Taliban, including Sirajuddin (appointed deputy leader of the Taliban in 2015) and his brother Anas, had enormous influence in matters of security and in negotiations with other Afghan leaders. Although estimates varied, especially with the shifting situation on the ground, the number of fighters in the Haqqani network was believed to be as many as 10,000 in the 2010s.