Part III considers fixers as moral actors caught between competing expectations from local interests on the one hand and foreign reporters on the other. In the context of growing acrimony against the foreign press in Turkey and the outright murder or abduction of numerous journalists in Syria, these chapters show how fixers reconcile or circumvent conflicts in the relationships they broker, and how they save face when conflict cannot be avoided. Stories of newsmaking on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and on the collapse of peace in Kurdish regions of both Turkey and Syria in 2014–2015 demonstrate how fixers tap into expansive social networks to matchmake compatible source–reporter pairs, establish forms of reciprocity with sources that are invisible to their clients, and evade the attention of violent state and non-state actors, all with mixed success. When they fail, fixers lose clients or sources, status or trust. When they succeed, fixers create trading zones in which knowledge can be exchanged across political and cultural divides.

This chapter examines the 9/11 terrorist attack, invasion, regime change in Afghanistan, and the start of the Global War on Terrorism. To secure America from further terrorism, the George W. Bush government invaded the Taliban-ruled mountainous country to destroy Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. US and NATO forces quickly toppled the Taliban and put al Qaeda to flight by using innovative tactics, anti-Taliban militias, and Special Operations Forces (SOF) The United States and its allies tried to create a democracy where chaos, decentralism, tribal rule, polarization, sectarianism, and a shattered state existed. They installed a democratic government with the help of the United Nations. Many Afghans joyously greeted the new tolerant order. By 2005, Taliban insurgents drifted back from their sanctuaries in Pakistan to raise havoc in rural Afghanistan. From the start, the Pentagon lacked adequate numbers of “boots on the ground” to carry out an effective occupation to ensure stability and security. Other problems plagued the pacification effort, including an ineffective overall nation-building blueprint. Decisively, the Bush administration took its eye off Afghanistan and reduced military and civilian resources for its nation-building endeavors, while it prepared for invasion of Iraq. By the time, George Bush left office in 2009, Afghan counterinsurgency was floundering.

Competition is commonplace among militant groups. Although political scientists have begun recognizing its importance, they lag behind other fields in the general study of competition. This is critical due to the strategic depth that competition brings. How one group behaves affects another group, and vice versa. Moreover, target governments and international organizations can manipulate the environment in which the groups must then interact. This chapter argues that building models to examine these issues is a useful strategy, but that the literature on political violence has not yet explored the implications. We then set the stage for the results we develop throughout the book.

In the winter of 2016 I partook in a tour of the front lines facing the Dawla al Islamia, the Islamic State, in northern Iraq. Two years earlier ISIS had burst on to the world stage and conquered vast swathes of territory in a now borderless region known as ‘Syraq’. In 2014, Iraq alone suffered a third of the world’s terrorism fatalities. But not all these deaths came at the hands of ISIS or its predecessor ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’. With Sunni ISIS garnering attention as the world’s most deadly terrorist group, less attention has been paid to the terror campaign carried out by Shiite groups that was launched, in part, as a response to the terror campaign by Sunni Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and ISIS. Many observers who commented on this wave of terrorism described the spectacular rise of ISIS in 2012–14 and emergence of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite terrorist groups as coming ‘out of the blue’. But there was a long and rarely studied prehistory to the rise of terrorism in this land that begins with the 2003 US–British invasion of this secular, Baathist-dominated country that had previously served as ‘firewall’ against both Shiite and Sunni sectarian radicalism. An understanding of this background history and the role of 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom in opening the Pandora’s box of sect-based terrorism in Iraq is crucial to explaining the origins, goals, tactics and local and global impact of the terrorists operating in this land.

‘We do not negotiate with terrorists.’ For decades world leaders have asserted this principle. The historical record demonstrates otherwise, however. Contrary to their public pronouncements, statesmen have repeatedly engaged in diplomacy with terrorist organisations, and conferring with militants has sometimes led to progress, if not to peace. Or has it? The record of government officials engaging with terrorist organisations is ambiguous. Yes, inclusive dialogue has coincided with reductions in political violence in places like Colombia, Aceh, the Basque region of Spain, and Northern Ireland. But is that the only cause of these declines? What about other locations? In the Middle East, the path to peace since President Clinton’s historic meeting with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat has been rocky, with no permanent settlement in sight. Against this unsettled background, the question arises: what does a comprehensive historical analysis of the intersection of armed extremism and statecraft reveal? This chapter’s central argument asserts that historically the interrelationship of terrorism and diplomacy has often been like entering into a labyrinth. Its conceptual apparatus consists of three supporting arguments. Some participants have accrued benefits; others have incurred costs; and they have occasionally encountered limits to the efficacy of diplomacy as a vehicle for achieving their objectives. The concepts of benefits, costs and limitations provide a useful analytical framework for assessing the experiences of protagonists at the crossroads of militancy and mediation.

An exploration of terrorism through the frameworks offered by a case study on Osama bin Laden’s life and al Qaeda. By understanding bin Laden’s life, motivations, and the operation of al Qaeda as a terrorist organization, we see how understanding human behavior and the logic of violence through an economic lens offers more insight to a solution than a rote labeling of bin Laden, and his followers, as terrorists.