On the morning of September 30, 2011, Predator drones circled thousands of feet above a remote stretch of northern Yemen, monitoring a meeting of senior al-Qaeda militants. The CIA professionals operating the drones were not taking any chances. Moments after a Hellfire missile hit the car carrying “high value targets,” another missile struck it a second time.

According to Jeremy Scahill’s account in Dirty Wars, “When villagers in the area arrived at the scene of the missile strike, they reported that the bodies inside the car had been burned beyond recognition. ... Amid the wreckage, they found a symbol more reliable than a fingerprint in Yemeni culture: the charred rhinoceros-horn handle of a jambiya dagger. There was no doubt that it belonged to Anwar al-Awlaki.”

Five years after al-Awlaki’s death, the case of the American-born radical imam who became the face of the world’s most dangerous al-Qaeda affiliate continues to stir debate over the proper use of force in the war on terror. It shouldn’t.

By the time President Obama gave the order to eliminate al-Awlaki from the battlefield, the Islamist cleric and propagandist had amassed first-hand responsibility for a catalogue of plots commissioned in the service of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Before he even left America, al-Awlaki was linked to two future Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who prayed at his San Diego mosque and were seen in long conferences with him. Alhazmi even followed al-Awlaki to his new mosque in Virginia.

In 2009, al-Awlaki was in direct contact with Nidal Hasan before the Army psychiatrist went on a shooting rampage, killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. Al-Awlaki personally directed and supplied the explosives that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab hid in his underwear and tried to detonate on an airplane from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. Al-Awlaki also began the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire, which includes articles like, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

Nonetheless, a chorus of critics arose to object to the “targeted assassination” of this notorious leader of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Critics of the drone strike paint Awlaki as little more than a clerical firebrand popular on YouTube who posed no immediate danger. He wasn’t even killed on a battlefield, this argument runs, as if the U.S. government should have kept its finger off the trigger until an enemy that doesn’t wear a uniform took the field in his dress blues. Another argument posited that al-Awlaki, as a U.S. citizen, was denied due process, as if a leader of an enemy force in a unilaterally declared war against the U.S. should expect to enjoy Miranda rights.

The notion that al-Awlaki was a bit player in the jihadist movement – or that targeting him was unwarranted – is simply preposterous. AQAP was the first al-Qaeda franchise to publish in English, and, according to former U.S. Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey, al-Awlaki “has involved himself in every aspect of the supply chain of terrorism -- fundraising for terrorist groups, recruiting and training operatives, and planning and ordering attacks on innocents.” His summons to holy war reverberated throughout the global English-speaking Muslim community and his broader message of hatred for the unbelievers, especially Westerners, is among the reasons that the self-styled caliphate attracted more than 30,000 foot soldiers from dozens of nations.

What’s more, Awlaki’s message of “self-starter” violence against the West has outlived him. Ubiquitous on the Internet, al-Awlaki has since his death become the only common thread in a series of terrorist plots. The Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were both inspired by al-Awlaki’s summons to holy war against the infidel. Recent ISIS-inspired attacks on U.S. soil can also be traced back to al-Awlaki. Mateen was a known Awlaki follower and fan of his online “recruitment videos.”

Before killing 14 people with his wife last year, San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook regularly watched al-Awlaki’s lectures with his neighbor.

Underestimating the potency of al-Awlaki’s influence five years after his death would be a tragedy. The continued targeting of jihadists on the battlefields of the Middle East will reduce the terrorist threat, but not eliminate it. In a report released just last week, CEP detailed 88 U.S. and European extremists who have been directly inspired by al-Awlaki’s calls to jihad. That list will surely grow further unless al-Awlaki’s presence on the Internet is rolled back.

That possibility now exists. CEP and Dartmouth computer science professor Dr. Hany Farid have developed a technology, called eGLYPH, which can efficiently find and remove extremist content that has been determined to violate the terms of service of Internet and social media companies. It works like this. Once a person identifies an image, video or audio recording for removal, the algorithm extracts a distinct digital signature from the content, which is then used to find duplicate uploads across the Internet. Once the most noxious al-Awlaki messages are flagged and removed, they would automatically be discovered and removed whenever a subsequent upload is attempted.

With any luck, public demands for tech firms to curb al-Awlaki’s murderous message online will remind them that security is the precondition of liberty. This moment offers a welcome opportunity for Internet companies to back up their oft-expressed commitment to fight terror with deeds. They should seize it.

The rise of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) took much of the world by storm. In a 2014 interview with the New Yorker, President Obama pronounced the blood-spattered theocratic gang to be no more than a “JV squad” (compared with the varsity squad, al Qaeda) with limited capacity to fulfill its mad totalitarian vision. Within the month, ISIS’s blitzkrieg sacked Falluja and would soon conquer fully a third of Iraq in addition to bulldozing its border with Syria. By June 2014, Iraq’s well-equipped but inept army abandoned Mosul, the country’s second largest city, in the face of the ISIS onslaught. The caliphate was born.

Many observers greeted this self-declared Islamic empire as a new enemy, and its control of a nation-state did indeed set it apart from its predecessors. But, to a great extent, ISIS is an old enemy that became a new one. As Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan remind us in the most searching examination of the Islamic State to date, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, “the United States has been at war with ISIS for the better part of a decade under its various incarnations,” i.e., al-Qaeda in Iraq, (AQI).

What happened to Al-Qaeda in Iraq is revealing because in the record of its undoing lies a plausible approach to vanquishing its successor. By 2010, AQI was “dead on its feet,” as terrorism expert Michael Knights told Congress in 2013. Years after the U.S. surge and the “Anbar awakening” routed al-Qaeda in Iraq, however, two events resurrected this lifeless enemy.

First, the Assad regime in Damascus incited civil war by crushing pro-democracy protests. The Syrian revolt devolved into a clash between Bashar al-Assad’s brutal mukhabarat state and ruthless, highly-organized jihadist bands that created an opening for ISIS. Meanwhile, after the United States withdrew its military forces and diplomatic heft from Iraq, the Maliki regime reverted to the cruder instruments of sectarian rule. The corrupting effect of majority Shia tyranny hollowed out the Iraqi army, which eventually ceded territory to a considerably smaller force of Sunni holy warriors fighting under the banner of ISIS.

At its two-year mark the so-called caliphate retains wide swathes of territory and holds millions of people in bondage. Although it has suffered battlefield reverses, so far these defeats have been tactical, not strategic. Even after thousands of its fighters have been eliminated by an American-led air campaign, ISIS still boasts far more fighters (roughly 20,000) than al Qaeda had at its peak. Even after it has lost nearly half of the territory it previously held in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has created at least six functioning militias outside its homeland. ISIS “provinces” have been established in Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Afghanistan.

ISIS’s state-building project has motivated a new generation of aspiring jihadists. Recruits have flocked to the Euphrates River Valley and undertaken their own franchises in anarchic Muslim lands. What’s more, they have also used the levers of social media communication to declare their support and solidarity for ISIS and encourage “lone-wolf” (or, better put, “self-starter”) attacks on western soil.

The fact that ISIS does not pose an “existential threat” to the United States does not mean that it cannot wreak havoc on the global order. In November 2015, President Obama boasted that ISIS was “contained” a day before its agents slaughtered 130 people in Paris. White House official Ben Rhodes then declared that “there’s no credible threat to the homeland at this time.” This reassurance came after the Garland, Texas attack on a “draw Mohammed” contest and the Chattanooga shooting that killed four Marines and a Navy sailor – and before the San Bernardino attack that killed 14 people, and before Orlando, where 49 people were slaughtered in a gay nightclub. If this grisly pattern is any indication, there is good reason to believe that the power of ISIS’s example will outlive it. This is why it is crucial to diminish ISIS’s ability to market the worst of their brutality on social media, where the caliphate exerts its most powerful draw.

But first the black flags have to be furled in Raqqa. This outcome seems unlikely without a decisive change in strategy. As ISIS implemented its genocidal program in earnest and as ISIS-inspired agents launched mass-casualty operations around the globe, the Obama administration reluctantly availed itself of airstrikes and Special Forces raids, but not a cohesive strategy to address the root causes of the regional meltdown.

The conditions that birthed ISIS – the civil war in Syria and an overtly sectarian regime in Baghdad, both of which inflamed Sunni grievances – have been left to fester. In Iraq, the failure to check Iran and its Shiite proxies have allowed ISIS to offer itself as the defender of last resort to an embattled Sunni minority. In Syria, the failure to depose Bashar al-Assad from power and prevent an ever-worsening vortex of violence is likely to be judged harshly by history. 

A better strategy would act to secure legitimacy in the Sunni heartland of Iraq and Syria. Although this may entail more “boots on the ground,” this seems a moot point when President Obama has already dispatched more than 4,000 soldiers to Iraq. According to reports, U.S. military leaders are preparing requests for more troops and equipment in order to tighten the noose on ISIS. If the president is serious about his avowed objective of “degrading and defeating” ISIS, this is his moment to show it.

The rampant jihadist scourge across the Middle East is, to borrow from St. Augustine, so old and so new. For all of its technological savvy and its theatrical savagery, ISIS represents a familiar foe. But victory will not come easily, and not before taking the full measure of the enemy.

Coups are never a good thing, especially in countries that purport to be democracies like Turkey. Yet, the July 15 coup attempt would have been that country’s sixth since Kemal Ataturk enforced secularism in the 1920s after the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW I.

In the midst of the coup attempt, many media pundits characterized the events as an attack on democracy, while others online and on social media repeated conspiracy theories aimed at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For secularists, Erdogan has increasingly become a figure synonymous with Hitler, whose rise through democratic institutions resulted in democracy’s demise in Germany. The Peace and Justice Party (AKP) With Erdogan at its helm, has increasingly jailed members of the free press; discouraged women from becoming involved in politics and civil society; marginalized minorities despite promises of greater integration prior to the last election; and looked the other way as the country become a transit point to ISIS-held territory in Syria and an arms/extremist route from the Middle East back to Europe.

Erdogan famously described democracy as a bus ride that ends when you arrive at your destination. His goal has increasingly become an Islamist autocracy, not a stronger democratic Turkey. As president, Erdogan has called women who do not have children "deficient"; demanded a comedian be sued because she dared make fun of Erdogan from Germany; and jailed anyone that looks at him or his power grab over the last decade the wrong way. He has tried pro-secular generals to remove them from the military, and jailed political dissidents and human rights activists. Instead of integrating Turkey into a global community built on the principles of universal human rights, Erdogan has preferred to remove all threats to his fantastic dreams of a neo-Ottoman empire to rival the power plays of other countries in an already broken Middle East. And that was before the coup attempt gave him further excuse to strike out against perceived enemies.

With calm returning to Turkey a few days after the coup attempt failed, (despite the arrests of thousands from the military to the judiciary) – Erdogan demanded the U.S. extradite Fetahullah Gulen, an old man, retired and living in Pennsylvania. Though, Gulen is not known to many outside of academic and policy circles, he should be. Gulen, has not only funded a global Islamist movement that advocates for a reportedly democratic-friendly interpretation of Islam, he was a necessary ally to Erdogan’s rise in Turkey during the last 15 years before the two men had a falling out. Over time, it is believed that Gulen and his followers became a threat to Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic vision of leadership.

It remains to be seen whether Erdogan staged the coup so he could have an excuse to flush out the remaining cadre of secularists and pro-Gulen activists in government, the judiciary and military as some Turkish journalists believe; or if Gulen truly did try and remove Erdogan from power from the outside as the Turkish government maintains. What matters today is that Erdogan has moved one step closer to establishing a dictatorship that would end Turkey’s experiment in secularism and democracy.

No one should applaud a coup. But a democracy in name only can be even more dangerous. A true secular Turkey would not need the military to be ushered in periodically to prop up its democratic constitution. One must assume, then, that Turkey should have obsessed less about whether women wore hijabs in universities, and focused more on inculcating democratic values through its education system throughout the nation. This especially includes the countryside, where far away from the secular, westernized urban centers, families live in traditionally patriarchal societies like their neighbors to the east.  With promises of a better economy, the AKP and Erdogan was embraced in rural areas and the countryside became the backbone of the AKP for more than 10 years.

It remains to seen what impact Erdogan’s continuing purge of the police, military and judiciary will have on Turkey’s commitment to fighting ISIS or its role in controlling the flow of refugees. If Turkey’s economy continues to go downhill as fearful tourists go elsewhere, Erdogan may have to take a break from his power grab and flirting with Russia to improve his marred relationship with his own citizens and NATO allies abroad. Until then, it appears democracy’s retreat globally has reached Turkey, which will only empower extremists further in the region. 

Welcome to the View from Brussels, a perspective from the de facto capital of Europe on the state of counterterrorism, extremism, and radicalisation throughout the European Union.

The recent terror attacks across Europe and the use of social media platforms by terrorist groups to radicalize and recruit new members has provided more urgency to tackling online hate speech, which encourages violence and extremism.

With this in mind, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body headquartered in Brussels, together with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Microsoft, unveiled on 31 May 2016 a Code of Conduct that includes a series of commitments to combat the spread of illegal hate speech online in Europe.

This initiative aims to build upon the EU Internet Forum, launched in December 2015, to ensure that online hate speech is tackled in a manner similar to that of other media channels. By signing this code, the technology companies commit to continuing their efforts to eliminate online hate speech. Companies signing the code promise to review the majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to such content, if necessary. The companies also commit to strengthening their ongoing partnerships with civil society organisations, which can help flag content that promotes incitement to violence and extremism. These companies and the European Commission commit also to continue their work in identifying and promoting counter-narratives, new ideas and initiatives, and educational programmes that encourage critical thinking.

On 4 July 2016, the European Parliament voted on draft legislation to fight terrorism “by criminalising preparatory acts” such as “public incitement or praise of terrorism” online and offline.This will give Member States the responsibility to remove illegal content hosted within their borders that, for example, glorifies or justifies  suicide bombers, incites to killings, and spreads hatred. The draft legislation also criminalises traveling abroad and training for terrorist purposes as well as contributing financially to terrorism. Members of the European Parliament also stressed the need for an efficient information and good practices sharing system between EU countries.

Additionally, this coming fall, the European Parliament is scheduled to discuss how social media platforms are being exploited by terrorist groups to radicalise and recruit vulnerable young Europeans to fight in foreign wars.

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) welcomes the commitment of the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the technology companies to combating the spread of terrorist material and the exploitation of social media channels to facilitate and direct terrorist activities. These public-private commitments reflect what CEP has repeatedly called for as part of its  #CEPDigitalDisruption campaign. Specifically and among other things, CEP has sought (1) a more accessible reporting system for users to flag illegal content promoting hatred and inciting violence; (2) faster review and removal of such content on the part of IT companies; and (3) the establishment of a system of "trusted reporters" to provide high quality notifications for more reliable detection and faster removal.

While welcoming this formal adoption of our proposed measures, CEP’s European team will continue to closely monitor implementation on the part of technology companies and the EU Commission to ensure they do not become empty words, but represent a decisive step forward in the fight against online extremism.