The Rise of “Neo-Jihad”: How Washington Is Engineering a New Breed of Islamists

The U.S. is actively constructing a new category of Islamist actor: a hybrid movement that is Salafi-jihadist in religious identity and military function, and Muslim Brotherhood in its political posture. It is a deliberately engineered creature, part warrior and ideologue, and part bureaucrat, packaged as a pragmatic alternative to both ISIS and Iran.

In other words, Washington is building a neo-jihad.

The theory is that if you take a hardened Salafi fighter, give him political handlers who think like the Muslim Brotherhood, draw a small box around his battlefield, and impose a media operation that speaks Western language, you can create a “responsible jihadist”: a militant who still carries the same theology, but uses it in ways that can be domesticated, managed, or redirected.

To understand how misguided this is, you have to understand the two traditions the U.S. is merging.

Salafi-jihadism is the puritanical wing of Islam that insists God’s law must be enforced immediately and everywhere. It rejects borders, secular rule, parliaments, elections, constitutions, compromise, and human sovereignty. Its claim is simple: only Allah legislates, and the role of the believer is to impose that legislation with force if necessary.

That is the worldview of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and every faction that splinters from them. And it is the same worldview held by al-Jolani, the current president of Syria, which he has publicly affirmed multiple times.

The Muslim Brotherhood is different in method, but not in destination. It preaches the same end-state, Islamic governance and the supremacy of the divine law, but pursues it through institutions, elections, media, social networks, and the slow capture of civil society. The Brotherhood thinks in decades and centuries. It is patient where the Salafis are impulsive, strategic where the Salafis are absolutist, political where the Salafis are battlefield-driven.

Historically, these two camps have distrusted each other. One thinks the other moves too slowly; the other thinks the one is too reckless. But the end goal, the desired political order, the theological scaffolding, these remain the same.

Washington’s current policy imagines that if you take the discipline of Salafi fighters and place them under the political moderation of the Muslim Brotherhood-style leadership, you get a third option: a jihadist you can negotiate with. A jihadist who can fight ISIS, contain Iran, police his own radicals, and manage his territory, yet still maintain credibility among the Islamist masses because he shares their creed.

The problem is that every time the West has empowered Islamists, whether in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Gaza in the 1990s, Syria in the 2010s, Libya after 2011, or Iraq’s Sunni triangle after 2003, those movements have eventually turned their guns toward Western interests. That is a feature of the ideology itself.

Salafi-jihadism and the Muslim Brotherhood share a single theological claim: sovereignty belongs to God, not to the people. Anyone who stands in the way of that sovereignty, whether dictator or democrat, Arab or American, becomes an obstacle to be removed.

Washington keeps pretending it can remodel this theology into a useful tool. It cannot. You cannot take a doctrine that sees compromise as sin and ask it to become a stabilizing force. You cannot take a movement that rejects national borders and ask it to preserve territorial order. You cannot take a worldview that demands the supremacy of Sharia and ask it to operate inside a secular framework. You can delay its ambitions or redirect them temporarily, but you cannot rewire its purpose. This is outsourcing regional order to ideological actors whose long-term vision contradicts the very foundations of Western civilization.

Neo-jihad won’t stabilize the Middle East. It will fracture it further. It won’t contain extremism. It will professionalize it. It won’t create partners. It will create future adversaries who are stronger, more organized, and more politically legitimate than before.

If the U.S. truly wants stability, it must stop building new forms of jihad and start confronting the ideology that produces it.