After 9/11, hunting ‘enemies of humanity’ across borders went global

When Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated with a remotely operated bomb in Iran in July, an already precarious situation in the Middle East was set on a knife’s edge. Israel, which was widely blamed for the attack, has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility. 

While the implications of Haniyeh’s assassination for the war in Gaza and Iran’s possible response are unclear, its larger significance is already in focus: a growing trend of states targeting internal security threats outside their own territory. 

There have been several instances this year of states directly contravening their neighbors’ sovereignty in the Middle East. They have orchestrated attacks on individuals, groups and populations from a distance, often living without full citizen protections in the host state. 

Building on logic and technologies driven by George W. Bush’s hunt for transnational terrorist networks “wherever we find them,” political leaders in the Muslim world are attacking irredentist and transnational groups across borders with growing impunity.

At the start of the year, Iran fired missiles into Pakistan, targeting anti-Iranian Baloch separatist groups. Pakistan responded soon after with a mirrored attack on Baloch separatist groups claimed to be hiding in Iran. 

Although both initially thumped bombastic threats about challenges to their borders, they soon made peace and recommitted to friendly relations. Perhaps both realized that the only real damage was to populations on the peripheries of both nations, with long histories of being treated as expendables on either side of the border. 

Like the Baloch, the stateless Kurdish population divided across Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey has been increasingly attacked through plans orchestrated across international borders. In January, Iranian ballistic missiles struck a home and several other locations in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq. 

The U.S. called the attacks “reckless.” However, in declaring its responsibility for the attacks, Iran invoked Bush’s efforts to go after enemies wherever they may be, claiming the house was an intelligence center for the Israeli Mossad, and that the other targets struck 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 this year for the force’s Kurdish units. With the Syrian government either complicit or indifferent to these attacks, it is unlikely that the transgressions will receive any blowback. 

Separatist groups like the Baloch and Kurds are not the only ones being targeted through cross-border attacks in the Middle East. 

Since May 2023, Jordan has carried out multiple airstrikes against suspected drug smugglers in Syria operating as part of local militias and in collaboration with bedouin networks nimbly moving between borders. Of course, transnational Muslim extremist networks, like the heady days of the so-called “global war on terror” remain one of the most popular targets due to their high threat level. 

The U.S. uses drone strikes to pursue extremist groups and individuals in places like Syria, Iraq and Yemen. But now, more countries are following terrorism pursuits of their own, wherever their identified targets may be. Iran targets ISIS and what it calls “anti-Iran terror groups in the occupied territories of Syria” through aerial strikes. Pakistan follows similar pursuits through counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.

In the shadows of the two larger wars in Ukraine and Gaza, these incidents have only occupied global headlines for fleeting moments. Seen separately, they appear as a fluctuation around already tense borders with a history of skirmishes, terrorist attacks and war. But when seen together, the development is a much more alarming threat to the existing rules-based international order destabilized by the U.S. response post-9/11. 

After 9/11, America went into overdrive in pursuit of terrorists through ground operations and air strikes across multiple sovereign borders. Channeling the old Dutch framing of “enemies of humanity” — developed to bring European empires together to fight early modern pirates — the U.S. created an ideological justification and martial technique for combating those deemed dangerous to its larger security and political interests, no matter where they were found. 

This concept evolved over the centuries. Originally applied to pirates as stateless actors threatening the economic interests of multiple nations, it was adapted to target communist insurgencies during the Cold War. Post-9/11 actions dramatically expanded its scope to include transnational terrorist networks. 

We are now witnessing further evolution of the concept as new states catch on to the ready-made ideological (and questionably legal) justifications and continue to catch up in developing drone and missile technologies. 

An alarming number of states are now applying the “enemy of humanity” label to a broader range of groups: separatists, dissidents, smugglers and even vulnerable populations such as refugees or stateless persons. The trend is likely to multiply, placing more lives at risk. 

Terrorists may be eliminated, but only at the cost of scores of civilian deaths and the continued corrosion of the international rules-based order.  

Ameem Lutfi is an assistant professor of History and Anthropology at Lahore University of Management Sciences. Kevin L. Schwartz is deputy director of the Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences. Together they direct the 9/11 Legacies project.