Knowing Your Enemy: Mujahideen, The Strategic Tradition of Sunni Jihadism

By Brett A. Friedman

The world is in the grips of the group known as ISIS. Unable to look away but equally unable to fathom the group’s extreme violence, the civilized world marvels at a terrorist threat that is seemingly al Qaeda cranked up to eleven.  Its media blitzkrieg has recently been described by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger and its apocalyptic vision by William McCants, but its military strategy too is an outgrowth of earlier trends in jihadi thought. The military strategy of the mujahideen can be traced back to a jail cell in Egypt in the early 1960s.

Few have looked at jihadi groups in the context of classical military strategy but perhaps surprisingly the jihadis themselves view their ideas through exactly that lens. As Western national security experts deny the utility of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War in an age of jihadis, insurgents, and terrorists, the jihadis themselves seem not to have gotten the memo as his ideas appear repeatedly in their texts and he is even directly cited in jihadi instructional videos. Perhaps less surprisingly, the ideas of Mao Tse-Tung (another theorist who cited Clausewitz) are even more influential as his three stages of protracted warfare appear repeatedly in slightly modified form. Other names familiar to the student of strategic studies appear in their tracts on military issues, “Che” Guevara and Ho Chi Minh to name two. Other concepts are clear parallels to theorists like Hans Delbrück and J. C. Wylie although they go uncited.  If we better understood the terrorists’ theory of victory, perhaps we may better understand how to counter it- or at least how not to play into it.

The Sunni tradition of jihadi strategy exhibits three crests or waves of thought. The first began with the publication of Milestones by Sayyid Qutb from the depths of that Egyptian jail cell. The second is exemplified by al Qaeda, its visionaries like Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Suri, and the numerous jihadis who turned away from the Muslim Brotherhood after its failures in Egypt and Syria. The third wave is breaking on us right now as the Islamic State runs farther and faster with jihadi military strategy than their forebears ever have.

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