Even as the scourge of Islamist terrorism spreads, the global war on terror stands derailed. The recent grisly jihadist attacks in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq and elsewhere are a reminder of the imperative to bring the war on terror back on track and focus attention on draining the terrorism-breeding swamps reared or tolerated by some states.
Blaming virtually all of the recent terror strikes on the Islamic State (IS) organization, even when the evidence of its involvement in some attacks is thin, as in the terrorist storming of a cafe in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, creates a simplistic narrative that helps obscure the factors behind the upsurge of jihadi violence.
For years since the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes in the United States, most acts of international terror were pinned on al-Qaida. Now, IS has taken the place of al-Qaida, with the narrative being that because IS is losing territory in the Syria-Iraq belt, it has sought to relieve pressure by staging attacks in multiple countries. While IS recently lost control of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, it still presides over large tracts of territory, and last month routed one of the last remaining CIA-backed rebel bands in Syria, the New Syrian Army, in a battle for control of the eastern town of Abu Kamal.