Global terrorism… pain and hope

The year 1988 represents a great paradox between East and West. That year was the first step in building the Al-Qaeda organization, and in the same year the first intercontinental Internet line was established between the United States and Europe, and with it the first online chat application was launched, and the idea of ​​the global “Wide Web” was discussed for the first time at the CERN laboratory. » European laboratory, which is the largest laboratory in the world in particle physics.
Thus, the launch of the Internet era in the Western world paralleled the launch of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic world.
In the following decades, layers of darkness continued in the Islamic world, until a parallel geography was established… extending from the “Taliban” in the east to “Boko Haram” in the west, and from “ISIS” in the north to “Al-Qaeda” in the south. Later, Al-Qaeda split, and ISIS emerged from among its branches, which announced the establishment of its state in areas of Syria and Iraq in 2014.
In 2017, ISIS was defeated in Iraq, in 2019 it was defeated in Syria, and in 2024 the organization wants to return strongly on the tenth anniversary of the announcement of its alleged creation. “Terrorism” took the “Internet” as its “path companion” from the first year of mobilization and recruitment, and work via the Internet became the basis for uninterrupted waves of blood from the Indian to the Atlantic.
The Islamic world had to stand up and build a military and intellectual vision to confront this great challenge. Long strides have been made on this path, and in 2015 the “Islamic Military Alliance to Combat Terrorism” was established under the leadership of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which included Egypt, the Emirates, Turkey, Malaysia, and more than thirty Islamic countries. In February 2024, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman opened the second meeting of the Council of Defense Ministers of the Islamic Military Coalition to Combat Terrorism, in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
Integrating intellectual efforts with media efforts, and paralleling military action with policies of drying up funding sources, was a very important vision, because military confrontation alone is not enough. Rather, confrontation must be of a comprehensive nature, besieging the enemy, and leaving him no intellectual outlet or media windows through which to confront pressures. Military.
The flexible organizational framework of the coalition, placing cooperation and coordination within the framework of respect for the sovereignty of member states, and setting the goal of protecting the national state in the Islamic world as a major goal in the fight against terrorism have helped strengthen the coalition’s work over a full decade. The Islamic Military Coalition to Combat Terrorism received the support of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Al-Azhar Al-Sharif, and the Council of Muslim Elders in Abu Dhabi.
According to the Sky News Arabia website, terrorism has become more deadly by (50%) in 2022, and in general – according to the Global Terrorism Index – terrorism has doubled (2000%) in (15) years.
Terrorism wants to push the Islamic world towards a black hole that swallows everything, and the Islamic Military Coalition to Combat Terrorism presents a basic square of confrontation: intellectually, medially, financially and militarily.
If some of the battle against terrorism is the responsibility of the world, most of the battle lies in an equation for which there is no alternative: protecting Muslims with Muslims.

*Egyptian writer