anti-US propaganda value of the horrific situation in Iraq.

This claim, however, is a half-truth at best. The reality has not been fully explored, perhaps because most of us only started paying attention to Iraq after 2003.

Historically, jihadist factions have arisen from Islamist groups that have failed to seize power through political and non-terrorist means. In Egypt, Tanzeem-ul-Jihad (TuJ) was made up of the remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood after the latter gave up violence in the late-1970s. TuJ was the precursor to two jihadist groups that were prominent in the 1980s and 90s, Islamic Jihad and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, with the latter waging a jihadist insurgency against the Egyptian government during the mid-1990s.

Many prominent jihadists in Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia began their careers as non-terrorist Islamiststhat eventually tipped over into jihadism after becoming frustrated with Islamist attempts to seize power and galvanise the masses. These include Usama bin Laden and the current leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, who were devotees of the Muslim Brotherhood leader Syed Qutb.

In the UK, the jihadist group al-Muhajiroun, led by Anjem Choudary and Omar Bakri Muhammad, emerged from Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group that ostensibly operated in a non-terrorist fashion. Iraq is no exception to this norm.

The Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK) was founded in 1979 as an ultra-conservative Islamic movement based in Northern Iraq. The group initially stayed out of politics, preferring to build its own infrastructure and support base. By the early 1990s, however, it began participating in local politics and came third in a regional election