The toppling of the Saddam statue in April 2003 was equivalent to opening a Pandora’s box in a volatile West Asia. Many socio-political and intra-Islamic contestations that had remained embedded for centuries came to the fore with unanticipated virulence. Complex regional strategic cultures that owed allegiance to ethnicity and tribe which were fettered during the colonial era and cynically managed in the Cold War decades are now unshackled. At the core is a radical Islamist ideology which has become more potent and determined in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War and the signs were unmistakable in the events leading up to 9/11.

The decade of the 1990s was punctuated by the abortive terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, a more deadly strike on US embassies in East Africa and finally on a US warship in the Persian Gulf. An ideology of violence predicated on the distortion of Islamic tenets spread insidiously across the crescent from West Asia through Afghanistan-Pakistan to Indonesia and was remarkably successful in attracting converts. One of its many victims,Tawfik Hamid, who has since rejected this ideology, now recounts: “As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by Al-Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological rootlets of Islamism, the tap root has a name — Salafism, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.”

... contd.