Global Jihad: temi, piste di diffusione e il fenomeno del reducismo ...

Islamists also viewed this collapse as a consequence of their contribution to the
Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, and many Arab volunteers in that war sought to
continue the momentum of their victory in other places. Hence, a pattern Islamist
involvement emerged in various religious-national conflicts around the world:
Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, Chechnya, Dagestan, Macedonia, Kashmir, and elsewhere.
The war in Iraq and the Jihadi insurgency that follows it, served also as a waking call
for other disputes, within the Muslim world itself, primarily the Sunni-Shi`i one.
Many observers have come to view this phenomenon of “Afghan Arabs,” “Arab
Chechens,” or Arab volunteers in Iraq—what the Islamists call Ansar—as a kind of
“Islamist Internacional,” similar in many ways to the “International Brigades” of
socialist and communist volunteers in the Spanish civil war during the 1930s. Jihad
was no longer simply a matter of separate groups fighting to defeat the secular
regimes in their homelands and to establish a “true” Islamic state; it has become a
war against “Satanic” and “Crusader” forces worldwide. As the scope of nationalist
and religious conflict expanded beyond the Israeli-Palestinian arena and into various
parts of Europe and Asia, the center of Islamist struggle moved from the Arab world
to the margins of the Middle East. From the Balkans to the Philippines, Malaysia, and
East Timor, the globalization of Islamist movements eventually consolidated in
Afghanistan, the meeting point between Arab and Asian Islamists.
This trend was compounded by two phenomena: the oppression that most Arab
regimes brought to bear on various Islamist groups and individuals, and the growing
Muslim population in the Western World, mainly in Europe and North-America.
Many of the Islamists who survived persecution in their homelands were pushed to
find refuge in “the lands of the enemy”, where they found democracy, liberal
attitude, political asylum, freedom of activity and speech, and even citizenship. The
growing Muslim population in these lands provided Islamists with a sympathetic
environment for their political and religious rhetoric, fundraising efforts,
publications, communications, recruitment, and so forth.
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