Twenty-five years ago, the attacks of Sept. 11 exposed the depth of the ties between some citizens of the Gulf states and jihadist movements that had begun taking shape years earlier in the fight over Afghanistan. The attacks would mark a turning point, forcing governments across the Gulf to confront a phenomenon that had long been intertwined with regional conflicts, religious networks and foreign battlefields.
The investigations into the attacks found that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Two others were from the United Arab Emirates, while one was Egyptian and another Lebanese.
Since the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, thousands of “volunteers” from the Gulf states had traveled to foreign battlefields. Many later joined jihadist organizations such as al-Qaida, while subsequent waves moved to Iraq after 2003 and then to Syria after the outbreak of war in 2011 and the rise of ISIS and the Nusra Front. All three groups have long been designated as terrorist organizations by the United States and European countries.
Over those decades, the organizations, battlefields, recruitment methods and financing networks changed — and so did the Gulf states’ response to the phenomenon. Governments that had initially turned a blind eye began in recent years to pursue cells and individuals, tighten oversight of financial transfers and charitable activity, revisit aspects of education and religious discourse, and develop rehabilitation programs.
Today, a quarter-century after the Sept. 11 attacks, it would be difficult to say that jihadist extremism has disappeared from the Gulf. But it would be equally difficult to argue that the environment that produced its earlier waves remains unchanged.
“The underlying prerequisites for the growth of indigenous terrorist groups remain in the Middle East,” said James Jeffrey, a former ambassador to Iraq and distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute. They include “overall instability, deep ideological and state – state conflicts, ungoverned areas.”
There is “a small percent of a very large population of Muslims who subscribe to an “extreme” or absolutist Muslim creed,” he added in comments to MBN. Such beliefs, he said, “are not necessarily supporting violence could become tolerant of violence or recruited to it.”
Afghanistan: The First Networks
Afghanistan was among the first conflicts to see a large influx of Arab volunteers in the 1980s, including significant numbers from the Gulf.
Not everyone who went to Afghanistan became a member of an extremist organization. But the war created a space where fighters and volunteers from different countries met, forging relationships and networks whose members would later emerge in new jihadist groups.
A study by Thomas Hegghammer, a researcher of jihadist movements, examined 161 Saudis who traveled to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Tajikistan and Chechnya before 1996. Most of those in the sample were men in their early 20s from urban, middle-class backgrounds, although their social and educational backgrounds varied.
Estimates of the number of Saudis who traveled to Afghanistan vary. Some have put the figure at about 20,000, while Hegghammer estimates that between 1,000 and 5,000 received actual military training.
Those networks later provided one of the environments that al-Qaida drew on as it built a transnational organization, before the confrontation entered a far more dangerous phase when the group attacked the United States in September 2001.
Iraq: A New Battlefield
Two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Iraq emerged as one of the most prominent destinations for foreign fighters. Jihadist networks shifted from Afghanistan to a new battlefield at the heart of the region.
The so-called Sinjar Records, internal Al Qaeda in Iraq documents seized by U.S. forces in 2007, offer a glimpse into one stage of that movement. Of the 576 fighters whose nationalities were identified in the documents, 235 were Saudi, or about 41%.
Those figures do not represent all foreign fighters in Iraq, nor do they mean that all Saudis who traveled there followed the same path. But they show the continuing role played by some Gulf citizens in the post-9/11 wave of foreign fighters.
The evidence suggests that the networks formed during the Afghan phase did not disappear entirely. Instead, they were able to adapt to different political and security conditions and operate on a new battlefield.
Syria: A New Wave
When civil war erupted in Syria, that country became the new center of gravity for foreign fighters.
According to a senior Saudi official quoted by CNN in March 2014, about 1,200 Saudis had traveled to Syria, around 200 of whom later returned to the kingdom.
Leaked ISIS documents analyzed by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London provided data on 759 Saudis, including citizens and residents. Most had entered areas controlled by the group in Iraq and Syria during 2013 and 2014.
The movement into extremist organizations was not limited to Saudis.
In the United Arab Emirates, the Federal Supreme Court in October 2018 issued rulings in cases involving citizens convicted of joining ISIS and the Nusra Front and fighting alongside them in Syria. One case involved an Emirati convicted of fighting with both groups and recruiting others on their behalf.
In Bahrain, Turki al-Bin’ali rose to a more influential position within ISIS, becoming one of the group’s prominent religious ideologues and taking part in its preaching and recruitment activities. He was killed in Syria in 2017.
This generation differed from the Afghan generation in many respects, but shared with it a willingness to fight on foreign battlefields, the ability to turn regional conflicts into transnational recruiting tools, and an uncompromising religious ideology.
Why Did They Join?
Mohammed Al-Wahib, a professor of contemporary and political philosophy at Kuwait University, told Alhurra that many people who joined extremist groups were educated members of the middle class. Economic prosperity does not necessarily eliminate the search for identity, meaning and belonging.
The desire to belong to a “greater cause,” the psychological effects of global political events, and social, family and religious relationships can all contribute to an individual’s decision to join a terrorist cell, Al-Wahib said.
He also points to the nature of some religious and educational discourse in earlier periods, arguing that some of it presented a stark view of people who differed by religion or sect. Extremist groups, he said, were able to exploit those ideas even when the original discourse did not call for violence.
Al-Qaida and ISIS did not create extremist thought from nothing, Al-Wahib said. Rather, they took ideas that already existed and transformed them into political and military projects, drawing on propaganda and recruitment networks and later exploiting the conflicts that swept the region.
As years passed in Afghanistan and later in Iraq and Syria, pressure on jihadist groups intensified. The Gulf states, in turn, began to experience a reverse flow of jihadists.
After 9/11, Gulf states themselves suffered attacks linked to al-Qaida. ISIS later emerged as a new security threat inside the region.
For Gulf governments, the issue had become a serious crisis involving the sources of recruitment, financing and extremist ideas within their own societies.
As the threat expanded, Gulf states tightened rules governing charitable donations, financial transfers and charitable organizations, alongside laws targeting money laundering and terrorist financing.
Retired Col. Khalil Mulla Yusuf, a former adviser to Kuwait’s National Security Bureau, said Gulf states had achieved major success in cutting off traditional financing and money-transfer channels, estimating that their success in this area exceeded 95%.
Mulla Yusuf attributed that progress to fines and restrictions imposed on banks, exchange houses and the movement of cash, as well as regulations governing fundraising and specifying which organizations can collect money and which accounts can receive it.
But “the sources of financing have not and will not dry up,” Mulla Yusuf said. Extremist groups change their methods as traditional channels come under greater scrutiny.
Among the methods he cited are the use of gold and precious stones, or the purchase of goods and commodities in one location and their resale elsewhere to generate liquidity. In his view, combating such methods requires greater cooperation among countries in the region.
Have the Sources Dried Up?
In Saudi Arabia, authorities have strengthened the country’s framework for to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international money laundering watchdog, said in 2020 that the kingdom had taken a number of steps to address shortcomings the group had identified in a 2018 assessment.
In Qatar, FATF said in its 2023 assessment that the country had made “substantial improvements” to its anti-money-laundering and counterterrorist-financing framework. Its level of technical compliance had become strong, the group said, while noting the need for further improvements in areas related to the judicial response to terrorist financing.
Kuwait has also amended its framework for combating money laundering and terrorist financing. A follow-up report issued by FATF and the Middle East and North Africa Financial Action Task Force in June 2026 noted progress in addressing several technical deficiencies identified in a 2024 assessment.
At the Gulf-wide level, all six Gulf states, together with the United States, participate in the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center, established in 2017. The center has carried out joint measures targeting networks and individuals linked to the financing of extremist organizations.
“The lack of a successful terrorist movement, signal an enhanced willingness of regional powers supported by the U.S. and at times European states to react vigorously against any sign of renewed terrorist activity,” Jeffrey, the former U.S. diplomat, said.
Some Gulf states have also made changes in education and religious discourse in recent years, alongside rehabilitation programs for people influenced by extremist ideas.
In Saudi Arabia, a review of 371 school textbooks published between 2019 and 2024 found changes that included removing or modifying material considered encouraging of violent jihad, as well as revisions concerning the portrayal of religious and sectarian differences.
Saudi writer and researcher Wahid al-Ghamdi, author of “The Story of Saudi Religiousness,” argues that the transformation extends beyond changes to school curricula and encompasses religious discourse and society itself.
Extremist groups have lost much of their organizational structure and leadership, making it more difficult to rebuild networks capable of operating in the same way as those of earlier periods, he said.
But Maher Farghali, a writer and researcher specializing in Islamist movements, focuses on another dimension of the response: people who had previously joined extremist groups or been influenced by their ideas.
Farghali estimates the success rate of rehabilitation programs at about 50%. Some programs place too much emphasis on severing an individual’s ties to an organization and not enough on addressing the ideas that led the person to join in the first place, he said.
In his view, both steps are required. Ultimately the goal should be to reintegrate people back into society and give them meaningful roles to help prevent a return to their extremist pasts.
Adapted and translated from the original Arabic.
