Why were the offices of Charlie Hebdo targeted Wednesday in Paris? It’s too soon to know for sure, but if it’s correct that the gunmen told bystanders they were from al-Qaida in Yemen, then a possible hypothesis emerges: This is an old-style, al-Qaida jihadi attack against a Western capital designed to create global attention — and its major aim is to compete with the new style of sovereignty-creating jihadism that has been so successful for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
The phenomenon that is Islamic State hasn’t been a surprise just to Western observers. It has caught the traditional jihadi terrorist organizations by surprise, too. Islamic State has created a new paradigm for attracting Muslim sympathy and support. The al-Qaida affiliates are playing catch-up — and Wednesday’s attack should probably be understood as an attempt to get back in the headlines and draw attention away from Islamic State by using the old techniques.
Recall that from the Sept. 11 attacks onward, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida created a powerful paradigm of terrorist violence that captured global attention and drew a degree of international sympathy from a subset of radical Muslims worldwide.
At the core of the al-Qaida paradigm was the capacity to generate major international headlines by targeting major Western cities: New York, London and Madrid are the three most prominent examples. Killing a large number of people is the most effective way to gain such attention, but it also helps to target the news media itself. Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, fits that targeting pattern. Not only will the deaths draw headlines, but the rest of the media can be counted upon to comment on the attack on one of their own.
Islamic State is doing something completely different from al-Qaida — and in a short time it has attracted much greater attention from non-Muslims as well as support from radical Muslims worldwide. The core of Islamic State’s strategy is to use force and violence to conquer territory — and set up a functioning sovereign state. That’s why Islamic State was able to declare the creation of the caliphate, which al-Qaida was never able to do. The caliphate requires the governance of actual territory; the other paraphernalia of governance are meant as proof that the sovereignty is real.
Islamic State, of course, also uses spectacular violence, most prominently beheadings of Western journalists, to gain global attention. But those beheadings have taken place in Islamic State-controlled territory. They therefore draw attention not simply to hatred of the West, but also to the group’s central message — it has a state of its own where it can execute whomever it wants.
This strategy amounts to a new jihadi terrorist model that goes far beyond al-Qaida’s — and it’s been working. The U.S. and European media and governments spend their time fretting about Islamic State. Among radical Muslims, Islamic State has drawn thousands of supporters to its territory. Al-Qaida once enjoyed this sort of popularity, but it has diminished.
If indeed the Paris attack is the work of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, then its purpose is almost certainly to regain public attention from Islamic State and remind the world, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, that the old jihadi terrorist paradigm is still effective.
Bloomberg View columnist Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University.
