In the history of irregular warfare, a form of conflict that has dominated violence between humans, insurgents are rarely defeated when they have a sanctuary. And so it is with the global Islamist insurgency that has created a sanctuary right here in Australia, enabled by successive governments. In other words, we willingly allowed this to happen. No one forced us to behave like this and act against our own interests. Consequently, future governments will be like a king upon an anthill, never at ease, because of the angry and bitter proponents of Salafi-jihadist ideology threatening our security and stability.

In the dusty annals of counterinsurgency, French colonel Roger Trinquier warned in his 1964 classic Modern Warfare that the real battle isn’t just about guns and territory – it’s about controlling the population’s mind and soul. David Galula, his contemporary, hammered home that insurgents thrive by turning the people into their shield and sword, making the civilian populace the centre of gravity.

While going back further, British colonel Charles Edward Callwell in his classic work, Small Wars (1896) described how ‘savages’ (his term for irregular fighters) exploit the weaknesses of civilised armies by blending into the landscape, using mobility and local sympathy to outlast superior forces.

These lessons, forged in dust-ups from Algeria to the North West Frontier, scream relevance. We’ve allowed the global Islamist insurgency – al-Qaeda, Isis remnants, Hamas sympathisers, Hezbollah supporters, and others – to carve out a sanctuary right here in Australia. They then co-opted and recruited many key nodes of influence or centres of gravity within our society. That’s how you take a village. They even managed to convince many white, liberal women into rationalising the rape and murder of women during Hamas’s 7 October 2023 massacre on Israel.

In Australia, virtuous government policy opened our doors to proponents of a protracted, ideologically driven military struggle who employ terrorism, propaganda, subversion and local insurgencies to achieve political objectives. The movement predominantly acted through evolution, with moments of revolutionary zeal, such as the Bondi terrorist attack.  These terrorist attacks are as much about creating an overreaction by opponents, so the leaders of the insurgency can exclaim, ‘See, they are Islamophobic!’ leading to more people joining the cause. We could call this moral manoeuvrability. Now we are about to be receiving more Isis wives.

Isis brides and families aren’t hapless victims; they’re participants in a death cult that beheaded Yazidis, enslaved women, and burned pilots alive. They should be left to find a home in other Islamist extremist lands. Yet we’ve repatriated dozens from Syrian camps, cloaking it in humanitarianism. Remember, these people were part of the Isis foreigner fighter recruits who burned their Australian passports, flew 10,000 kilometres to join the caliphate, and now the caravan is over, they demand re-entry with all the rights they once rejected.

It’s like expecting a donkey to return from Mecca transformed – it’s still the same donkey. These returnees bring back not just trauma but ideology, seeding communities with narratives of oppression and jihad. Galula warned that allowing insurgents back into the fold without deradicalisation is suicidal. And to this day it is hard to find a single case study of a successful deradicalisation program. We forget how that was all the rage with academics, NGOs and policy elites.

Through weak policies, moral equivocation, and a misguided embrace of ‘multiculturalism’, we’ve welcomed them through every door and window. As Pericles exclaimed in the History of the Peloponnesian War, ‘I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices.’ It is said that an intelligent enemy is better than a foolish friend.

The Islamist global insurgency isn’t always crude suicide bombers or lone wolf knife attackers; it’s also a sophisticated, patient network. As Abu Musab al-Suri, al-Qaeda’s shadowy strategist arrested in 2005, envisioned, jihad morphed from hierarchical terror cells into a decentralised, ideological virus. It infects minds, exploits grievances, and turns Western freedoms against us. Trinquier would recognise this as ‘subversive warfare’, where the enemy organises parallel structures within society – mosques, schools, community groups, even university encampments – to erode loyalty to the state. Which is interesting because politicians on all sides have got it into their minds that eventually they will love us; that their good deeds will be rewarded. That they will prove the silent majority wrong. Callwell noted that in small wars, the foe’s sanctuary is often not a mountain cave but the hearts of the locals. In Australia, we’ve provided this sanctuary, turning our sunburnt country into a breeding ground for Western-hating, violent Islamist radicalism.

Immigration policy is the torpedo below the waterline. A 2015 Pew study predicted Australia’s Muslim population would grow faster than non-Muslims and quadruple by 2035. Now, groups like The Muslim Vote boast of swinging elections in key seats, while demanding and achieving policy shifts on Gaza and Israel. This isn’t integration; it’s infiltration.  Adversaries like Iran and Islamist networks use migration as a weapon, flooding the West with fighting-aged males. Check out the boat, after boat, after boat of fighting-aged males storming British beaches. If only Napoleon knew how easy England was to invade.

Callwell described how tribes used porous frontiers to raid and retreat. Today, it’s visa loopholes and refugee claims and Isis wives’ sob stories. We’ve imported grievances: anti-Semitism, honour killings, child marriages and sharia advocacy. If you want to know where this is going, just check out Britain, where instead of countering this insurgency, British government policy is to criminalise those who point it out.

Parallel societies are now forming in the West. In Lakemba or Broadmeadows, and up and down UK boroughs, radical preachers thrive, unchallenged by a political class fearing ‘Islamophobia’ labels, and now we have new ‘hate speech’ laws. Result? A fifth column, as Trinquier feared, where loyalties may lie abroad or with a revolutionary religious, militant ideology that has no place in Australia.

The global Islamist insurgency never ended with the fall of Isis. Instead, it pivoted to subversion and building a sanctuary to the point where jihad is now mainstreamed into our society. The Islamist global insurgency does not need a caliphate in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan when its members are being allowed to build one in our own backyard.

Our security and stability will now be more and more dependent on demographic shifts, ideological infiltration and policy cowardice.

The global Islamist insurgency is not a movement of peace. It’s time to work this out, before the next frenzy on the anthill.