The Importance of Terrorist Networks

By Douglas Farah

One think I find particularly missing in the current look at several important terrorist-related areas-Somalia, the role of the international Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda's growing efforts in Africa, Viktor Bout-is the discussion of the networks that connect different Salafist/Islamist groups that make them so lethal and so important.

While there is some discussion of networks and their importance in the structures of non-state actors in intelligence and policy circles, there is no broad recognition that networks are what make non-state actors threats of the same order of magnitude or greater, than most states.

This is not a new concept. Jonathan Winer and others in the mid-1990s began to seriously push policy and intelligence to focus on networks, leading Winer and others to do the first serious studies of the Muslim Brotherhood's financial links to different groups. Bout, in his weapons supplies, was viewed through the same lens, making him, in the waning years of the Clinton administration, a high-value, multi-agency target.

Networks are also vitally important in the newly-emerging "self-starting" Islamist groups. Most of these groups, in Spain, Great Britain etc. that are known have received significant help from the existing jihadi networks, in developing concepts, obtaining material and ideological orientation.

Networks also provide the ability to move across national bounderies, find expertise, share knowledge and exploit the existing strengths of each group. The lack of understanding of networks, for example, that led to the long-standing belief that Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims could not work together. But they did, repeatedly, and by the admission of in their own writings. My full blog is here.

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