I didn't write radical Islamic terrorism didn't exist before 2001, I wrote it emerged at never before seen scales.
And I have plenty of data to back that statement. In Western Europe Islamic terrorism was pretty much a non-issue [0].
It only started becoming an issue after 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, when AQ conducted attacks on Madrid and London, respectively Spain and UK, both countries being part of the coalition of the "willing" that invaded Iraq.
That was very much a direct response, one that previously wouldn't have been possible as AQ lacked the resources and people in Western Europe to conduct these kinds of operations. They got these resources and people when the US declared them "enemy #1" and started bombing and invading Muslim countries, displacing Muslims as refugees deep into Western Europe [1], many of them holding resentments over what happened to them and their countries as their worst fears about what an "American crusade" [2] would actually entail in reality.
Over time AQ Iraq, which under Saddam wasn't even a thing, would ultimately turn into ISIS, an ISIS that parades its prisoners around in very similar uniforms [3] to those the US paraded them around, which is not a coincidence, it's a direct reference [4].
Even when you look at the global picture, this "war on terrorism" did the same as the "war on drugs" had; It didn't end terrorism, it made it thrive [5].
Anybody who looks at that and declares it "settled" does not understand the kind of impact this had on literally the whole world.
