AI, Younger Recruits and State-Style Warfare Are Redefining Terrorism, New ICT Chief Warns
In his first interview since taking over the ICT counterterrorism institute, Moghadam told The Jerusalem Post that four converging trends are eroding the old boundaries of what counts as terrorism.
By Marina Weber ·
Terrorism is being reshaped by artificial intelligence, a younger generation of recruits and the erosion of the line between terror and conventional war, the new director of the ICT institute said in his first interview since taking the job, describing to The Jerusalem Post four trajectories of change, each eroding a boundary that once defined terrorism.
Moghadam joined ICT in 2011 and has replaced Boaz Ganor, who founded the institute in 1996 and is now the university's president. He came from the US Military Academy at West Point, where he directed terrorism studies, held fellowships at Harvard and taught at Columbia, West Point and UMass Lowell. Dean of the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy from 2019 to 2024, he heads the university's MA program in Counterterrorism and Intelligence and its BA track in Security Studies and Counter-Terrorism, with books covering terrorism, global jihad, insurgency, ties between militant organizations and proxy wars.
The first trajectory is artificial intelligence, which he said has created a cat-and-mouse game affecting terrorists and counter-terrorists alike while lowering the barrier of entry into terror. Social media began that shift; AI reduced the barriers even more. Terrorists are also getting younger: in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, young suicide bombers used to be 18- or 19-year-olds, but now radicalized 12- and 13-year-olds are involved, and in Europe radicalization involves even younger children.
The second is the diversification of terrorism: beyond classic organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS, the spectrum now spans lone actors, informal networks and greater state involvement. Past eras had one dominant ideology, he said: anarchist terror, then religious terror after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, a period in which a religious extremist assassinated former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, then mostly Sunni jihadism. Today jihadism remains potent alongside far-right and far-left violence, such as recent riots in Paris and Milan, with cross-pollination among ideologies.
"Anti-Zionism has really evolved into the new and most popular militant ideology of today," he said, adding that under a horseshoe effect the extreme right and left converge, glued by antisemitism and a shared disdain for government. Airline hijackings are back after a September 30 incident involving the UAE carrier flydubai, he warned, and terror is attempting to enter the mainstream, becoming more socially acceptable and even celebrated in some quarters. He cited the April 30, 2024, takeover of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, when rioters broke property, barricaded themselves inside and roughed up two security guards in a parallel incident: "a broadening of tactics, going from ultra-violence to mainstreaming."
The third trajectory erodes the boundary between terrorism and other political violence: groups like Hamas, ISIS and al-Qaeda have moved beyond single hijackings, rammings or bus bombings; Islamic State could attack a marketplace of innocent civilians and five minutes later be fighting Iraqi army forces, he said. The October 7 attacks, he said, were "a military invasion with acts of terrorism," including guerrilla attacks on IDF bases. Non-state actors now fight like states, he added, pointing to Hezbollah's 2023 arsenal of 150,000 rockets, beyond most state arsenals, plus tunnels, command and control centers, drone warfare paired with infantry attacks and complex underground engineering.
The fourth trajectory erodes the difference between local and international conflicts: the civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya are all partial proxy wars, he said. Iran sent Hezbollah to support the Assad regime, the Americans and Turkey are involved, and Yemen has drawn Saudi, UAE and Iranian involvement. The war spawned by October 7 began as a localized conflict but quickly took on an international character: on October 8, Hezbollah launched missiles as Iran's ultimate proxy, then came the Houthis, a sequence Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar engineered by design.
Moghadam said these overarching trends are backed by data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which has charted most of the world's conflicts for two decades and describes civil wars with international dimensions, such as proxy wars.
