AHC: A modern international inter-faith terrorist group

euromellows

This is probably a tall order, but what if there was an international inter-faith terrorist group that united to attack secularism, democracy, feminism and/or modernity (add in some other categories I may have forgotten here)? Ie, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Jews (admittedly very difficult to get the latter in the same tent) committing acts of terror together.

It seems to me that quite a lot of the religious fundamentalist groups have many goals in common, albeit worshiping different versions of god. Certainly once they win "the war" their weapons would be turned on each other, but is there any scenario where these groups feel their back is against the wall so much they decide to hold their noses and cooperate with each other?

What tactics and targets would this group use? How would world governments respond?
 

Veiovis

they would have little reason to cooperate. apart from weakening their own ideology,most damage is done from lone gunmen who radicalized,and they only need to strike locally. lets say there is a true,relevant christian terrorist group active in the USA,with at least a couple hundred hard members. what possible benefit could they have cooperating with say ISIS,that would offset the cost?
 

Kyro92

The only way I could see this working is if it excluded Muslims and was both anti-secularism and anti-Muslim.
 

Napoleon IV

Fundamentalists hate other religions just as much (if not more) than they hate secularism, so getting them to work together is fairly ASB.
 

Halagaz

The premise seems to be based on an outsider (secular/atheist) perspective on religions and fundamentalism, which would be wholly alien to these groups. From that standpoint, these groups may seem to have a lot in common, but from their own perspective they're as different as night and day, and it would make very little sense.
 

Soup

I could imagine that some sort of secular/Communist regime holding the Levant could do this, albeit only for the Abrahamic faiths. That's a challenge in itself, though.
 

overoceans

I think the best you could do for this would be to get a sort of terrorist "Anti-Comintern Pact", where various groups with divergent and probably even contradictory worldviews(Nazis did not likely regard swarthy Italians as racial kin, eg) enter an alliance where they agree to leave each other alone, or even assist each other from a distance, against something or someone viewed as a bigger enemy.

But you'd need a real unifying issue, and I don't know if that's possible. Say religious people in some country go REALLY berzerk against same-sex marriage, for example. Maybe a Christian terrorist in a largely Christian region guns down a politician who supports SSM, gets caught, tried, and jailed/executed. In response to the verdict, a Muslim gunman in a largely Muslim region mows down a few cops. And an informal alliance sort of goes from there.

Probably a pretty tall order, but in a world where the Israeli Likud aligned itself with the fascist Falange in a civil war, I wouldn't rule anything out.
 

overoceans

FWIW, anti-abortion terrorism in the USA was an example of a loosely-knit militant group consisting of Catholics and fundamentalist protestants, many of whom would probably have been at each other's throarts just a generation earlier. This book gives a rundown on how that came about.
 

riggerrob

What about the "temporary Taliban" business model where Saudi "investors" pay locals to lay roadside bombs or shoot up police stations?
Temporary Taliban are often poor, illiterate, dirty-farmers who engage in a little smuggling, moonshine distillation or murder-for-hire to make ends meet. Most of them are fiercely local to family and tribe but only give lip-service to religion. Many would not recognize a Koran if you slapped them upside the head with the holy book.
They don't care who hired them as long a bosses pay for bloody video evidence of "jobs" completed.
 

Alexander the Average

Whilst a bit of a long-shot, and probably not quite what you had in mind, I do think I have a possible scenario. Basically there was this movement in British India founded in 1931 called the Khaksars, who wanted to overthrow British rule and establish a Muslim-Hindu government. Whilst I haven't been able to find out a great deal about them, from what I can see, although they were largely Muslim and supported an Islamic revival, their ideology placed a pretty large emphasis on non-communalism and religious tolerance. Whilst quite popular for a time IOTL the movement eventually declined due to a mixture of state-repression and the partitioning of India

Now, in a timeline where India isn't partitioned, or better yet where Britain still rules India, it wouldn't be hard to see the Khaksars, or an off-shoot of theirs, evolving into a more terroristic organisation. Throw in an anti-Communist streak and a concious drive to reach out to Hindus and other religious groups, and the ideology could develop into a movement that is explicitly multi-faith, anti-Colonial, and anti-Communist/Atheist. In terms of giving it an international scope, it could pick up adherents in the Indian diaspora throughout the British Empire and beyond, and maybe even adapted by other colonised peoples.
 

JVM

Create a situation where freedom of religion is threatened on a significant scale - a world where no individual of any faith feels free to express that. It sounds alien in our reality, and that's because it's difficult to create a historical situation where outright anti-theism dominates the world, but if the religions of the world truly felt the concept of faith itself was at stake, they would band together for the freedom to practice what they believe in... and once the victory was won, of course, they would turn back to which religion is best.

It's obviously not possible to insert a global atheist takeover into history, but in a reality where such a thing takes place, we could see this.
 

Alon

Terrorists in the West who pledge allegiance to ISIS are often not really devout, e.g. Omar Mateen, Mohammed Merah, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. So they're not meaningfully attacking secularism; and once you remove the requirement that your interreligious terrorist group be anti-secular, you can look at any number of communist and nationalist groups.
 

Asp

The PLO qualifies. Arab Christians were a huge part of it along with Muslims, though they're less involved in Palestinian militant organizations now that radical Islam has become the driving force behind most of them instead of Arab nationalism.
 

Alon

Oh, speaking of the Palestinians... there's some tacit alliance between Palestinian nationalism and Neturei Karta. Neturei Karta don't engage in terrorism, but they interfaced a lot with Arafat due to shared opposition to secular Zionism, and at one point in the Second Intifada Arafat prohibited attacks on Mea Shearim, which has a significant Neturei Karta presence.
 

riggerrob

"Temporary ISIS" terrorists follow a similar business model to "temporary Taliban."
Recruits tend to be troubled young men, usually sons of immigrant families who cannot fit into western secular society. They vent their frustration by smoking and drinking and casual sex and wife beating and bar room brawling and petty crime. Though I suspect that losing too many bar-room brawls gives them a sense of inadequacy.
As for dragging their hung-over asses to mosque for Friday prayers????? Forget about it! Most of these "temporary ISIS recruits are too lazy to attend mosque.
Their experience with petty crime makes them most valuable to ISIS. They already know how to steal cars, smuggle drugs, sell drugs, beat innocent women and children, etc.
Now ISIS uses the Internet to recruit temporary soldiers to do their dirty work. ISIS recruiters often recruit temporary terrorists purely through the Internet, minimizing the change of arrested temporary terrorists exposing recruiters.

So creating an inter-faith terrorist network merely requires a skillful recruiter to post invitations (to a new religion) aimed at insecure youths.
 
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