After September 11, the hunt for “enemies of humanity” became global across borders

When Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated with a remote-controlled bomb in Iran in July, the already precarious situation in the Middle East was in jeopardy. Israel, which was widely blamed for the attack, has neither confirmed nor denied its responsibility.

While the consequences of Haniya's assassination for the war in Gaza and Iran's possible response are still unclear, the deeper meaning of the assassination is already becoming clear: There is a growing trend for states to target threats to their internal security outside their own territory.

During the year, there were several cases of states directly violating the sovereignty of their Middle Eastern neighbours, orchestrating attacks from afar against individuals, groups and populations, often without comprehensive protection for their citizens in the host country.

Building on the logic and technologies that drove George W. Bush’s hunt for transnational terror networks “wherever we find them,” political leaders in the Islamic world are attacking irredentist and transnational groups across borders with increasing impunity.

Earlier this year, Iran fired missiles at Pakistan targeting anti-Iranian separatist groups in Balochistan. Pakistan responded shortly thereafter by launching a similar attack on separatist groups in Balochistan that were allegedly hiding in Iran.

Although both countries initially made bombastic threats to compromise their borders, they soon made peace and renewed friendly relations, perhaps realizing that the only real harm was to the populations on the fringes of both countries, who had long been treated as expendable on both sides of the border.

Like the Baloch, the stateless Kurdish population scattered across Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey is increasingly the target of attacks planned across international borders. In January, Iranian ballistic missiles struck a house and several other locations in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

The US called the attacks “reckless”. However, when Iran claimed responsibility for the attacks, it cited Bush's efforts to pursue enemies wherever they may be. It claimed the house was an intelligence centre of Israel's Mossad and the other targets attacked were “sites of Iranian opposition groups”.

In May, a Turkish drone killed four Kurdish soldiers and members of the Syrian Democratic Forces in northern Syria. This was not the only cross-border attack by the forces' Kurdish units this year. Since the Syrian government was either complicit in or indifferent to these attacks, it is unlikely that these attacks will provoke a backlash.

Separatist groups such as the Baloch and Kurds are not the only ones targeted by cross-border attacks in the Middle East.

Since May 2023, Jordan has carried out several airstrikes against suspected drug smugglers in Syria, operating as part of local militias and in cooperation with Bedouin networks that move flexibly between borders. Of course, as in the heady days of the so-called “global war on terror,” transnational Muslim extremist networks remain one of the most popular targets due to their high threat stature.

The US has used drone strikes to target extremist groups and individuals in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen. But now, more and more countries are pursuing their own terrorist goals, wherever their identified targets may be. Iran is targeting ISIS and so-called “anti-Iranian terrorist groups in the occupied territories of Syria” with airstrikes. Pakistan is pursuing similar goals with counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.

In the shadow of the two major wars in Ukraine and Gaza, these incidents have dominated world headlines for only a short time. Taken individually, they appear as fluctuations on already tense borders with a history of skirmishes, terrorist attacks and war. But taken together, the development represents a far more worrying threat to the existing rules-based international order that was destabilized by the US response after 9/11.

After 9/11, America went full steam ahead in pursuing terrorists, conducting ground operations and air strikes across multiple sovereign borders. Borrowing from the old Dutch definition of “enemies of humanity” – developed to unite European empires in the fight against early modern pirates – the US created an ideological justification and technique of war for fighting those it viewed as a threat to its general security and political interests, no matter where they were located.

This concept has evolved over the centuries. It was originally applied to pirates as stateless actors who threatened the economic interests of multiple nations. It was then applied to communist insurgencies during the Cold War. After 9/11, its scope was dramatically expanded to include transnational terrorist networks.

We are currently witnessing an evolution of this concept as new states take up the ready-made ideological (and legally questionable) justifications and continue to catch up in the development of drone and missile technologies.

A worrying number of states are now labelling a wider range of groups as “enemies of humanity”: separatists, dissidents, smugglers and even vulnerable populations such as refugees or stateless persons. This trend is likely to intensify, putting even more lives at risk.

Terrorists could be eliminated, but only at the cost of countless civilian deaths and a progressive erosion of the international rules-based order.

Ameem Lutfi is Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Kevin L. Schwartz is Deputy Director of the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Together they direct the 9/11 Legacies Project.

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