By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can also be found on Substack.
This is Part I of a two part analysis about the decades long Western war on Muslims. Part II will be published tomorrow.
As the United States marks the twenty‑fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in a few days, it is also marking something far more tragic and dangerous—twenty‑five years of a Western war that has overwhelmingly targeted Muslims. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, between 4.5 million and 4.7 million Muslims have been killed in US-led wars since 2001, and 38 million have been displaced. These are staggering numbers—genocide‑scale numbers—that unlike 9/11 ceremonies, receive no annual commemoration, no solemn speeches, no national mourning. They exist in a political void, unacknowledged because acknowledging them would require admitting a truth Western governments have spent decades avoiding: the so‑called “War on Terror” has been, in practice, a war on Muslims.
This war has unfolded across continents—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen—and across Western societies themselves, where Muslim citizens and immigrants have been surveilled, stigmatized, detained, tortured, and treated as perpetual suspects. It is a war that did not begin on September 12, 2001. Its roots stretch back to the Cold War, when the United States first began constructing the ideological and military architecture that would later be weaponized after 9/11 against Muslim nations.
And Canada, despite its self‑image as a humanitarian nation, has been deeply complicit—politically, militarily, and ideologically. Islamophobia is not an aberration in Canadian politics. It is embedded in policy, normalized in (right wing) media, and expressed openly by certain political leaders.
The West’s war on Muslims is not metaphor. It is measurable, documented, it continues today, and has expanded under every US administration since 2001.
The Cold War origins of the war on Muslims
The official narrative claims the “War on Terror” began after 9/11, as a defensive response to an unprecedented attack. But the historical record tells a different story.
Beginning in the 1980s, the United States waged a cold war against Iran in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the January 1981 release of American embassy staff held hostage by Iranian radicals. Washington was also quick to align itself with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein after he launched the invasion of Iran in September 1980, initiating the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War. Throughout the conflict the US provided Iraq with billions of dollars in economic assistance, dual‑use technology, non‑US weaponry, military intelligence, and specialized training. The conflict—marked by trench warfare and mass civilian casualties reminiscent of World War I—killed more than a million people. Throughout the war, the US also offered diplomatic cover as Iraq deployed chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians. This was not counterterrorism. It was geopolitical engineering, and Muslims on both sides paid the price.
In the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf War, the United States imposed crushing sanctions on Iraq that restricted everything from medicines to basic humanitarian supplies. The result was catastrophic—an estimated half‑million Iraqi children died prematurely as a direct consequence of these sanctions. When confronted with this reality during a 1996 60 Minutes interview, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously declared that the deaths were “worth it” to achieve Washington’s geopolitical goal of containing Saddam Hussein. Her remarks exposed the underlying logic and anti-Muslim bigotry of America’s Middle East policy, a policy where Muslim suffering on an unimaginable scale was acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of Western dominance.
These pre‑9/11 policies were not isolated. They were part of a broader pattern of bigoted policy, propaganda, and racialized paranoia that had already taken shape. The modern war on Muslims began to take shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, when that nation became the West’s primary military outpost in the Middle East and Western governments panicked over the economic impact of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The crisis instigated by the actions of the Arab oil producing nations revealed a terrifying truth for Western elites—that a handful of Muslim-majority countries had the power to disrupt the West’s capitalist ambitions.
The response in subsequent years was swift—coups, occupations, sanctions, propaganda, and alliances with dictatorships and authoritarian leaders. The ideological groundwork for justifying post-9/11 wars was laid long before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The expansion of a pre‑existing project
After 9/11, the US did not suddenly invent a new Middle East policy, it simply widened and intensified one that had been decades in the making. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were presented as defensive wars, necessary to protect Americans from future terrorist attacks, conveniently ignoring the fact that the citizens of those nations had been abused and manipulated by the US and its allies for years. But these wars rested on a much older ideological foundation—a long‑standing Western narrative that cast Muslim societies as inherently violent, irrational, and barbaric. That narrative made it easy for Washington to sell the Iraq War to Americans on the basis of lies and fabrications about weapons of mass destruction—claims that were later proven false but had already served their purpose. By the time the first bombs fell on Kabul and Baghdad, the emotional and political groundwork had been laid. A worldview had taken hold within the West where Muslim-majority societies were portrayed as perpetual sources of danger, instability, and civilizational threat. Within that worldview, military intervention did not need to be justified with evidence, it only needed to be framed as the next logical step in containing an imagined Islamic menace that threatened Western civilization.
For generations, Western publics were conditioned to absorb and accept whatever anti‑Muslim narratives that came their way. Long before 9/11, the cultural groundwork had already been laid. Since the earliest days of Hollywood, Western popular culture churned out hundreds of films that caricatured and dehumanized Arabs and Muslims, teaching audiences to see Muslim societies as violent, backward, and alien. As documented by scholar Jack Shaheen in Reel Bad Arabs, these portrayals were never mere entertainment—they functioned as cultural indoctrination, normalizing the idea that Muslims were foreign, dangerous, inherently unstable, and barbaric.
By the time the War on Terror began in the fall of 2001, Western publics had already been desensitized to decades of Muslim suffering at the hands of Western nations. They had been trained—through movies, news coverage, political rhetoric, and academic discourse—to view more than 1.6 billion people as a civilizational threat against whom mass violence was not only permissible but necessary. In that climate, even the blatant lies used to justify the Iraq War were readily believed, because they fit seamlessly into a narrative that had been cultivated for years. This cultural conditioning made it easy for Western publics to accept the slaughter of Muslims abroad and the mass surveillance of law‑abiding Muslims at home, leaving a legacy of distrust and fear.
The consequences of that conditioning are evident in both the scale and the character of the violence that followed. In the twenty‑five years since 9/11, US-led wars have killed up to 4.7 million Muslims and made refugees of more than 38 million, a level of destruction, chaos and human suffering that would have been politically unacceptable without Western publics already primed to see Muslim lives as expendable. What happened was not an unforeseen tragedy but the predictable outcome of a worldview in which Muslim societies had long been portrayed as backward, disposable, and merely providers of critical resources or geopolitical assets whose governments could be manipulated to the advantage of the West.
The devastation of entire nations across the Middle East and North Africa was not an accident. It was the direct result of policies pursued with full knowledge of their outcomes. Washington and its allies understood that invading, occupying, and destabilizing multiple Muslim‑majority countries would shatter political systems, collapse economies, and tear apart social fabrics. They knew it would turn vast regions into permanent refugee corridors, but they simply did not care. Countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen were not merely attacked—they were pushed into such profound instability that their pollitical and social institutions destabilized, their infrastructures disintegrated, creating openings for extremist groups like ISIS, and their populations were left to navigate Western inflicted chaos that continues to weaken their societies to this day.
At the same time, new forms of warfare were normalized. Drone strikes—marketed as precise tools for eliminating “suspected terrorists”—became routine, even though the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians, and they operated outside any meaningful legal framework. Torture, once universally condemned, was openly justified as a necessary instrument of national security. Secret prisons were established across multiple continents, places where innocent people were detained, brutalized, and denied due process. And while Muslims abroad were subjected to military violence, Muslims in Western countries faced their own form of warfare—mass surveillance, entrapment operations, discriminatory policing, and the constant presumption of guilt.
None of this emerged spontaneously after 9/11. The War on Terror was not just a sudden response to an unprecedented attack—it was the continuation and expansion of a project that had been decades in the making. The cultural narratives that dehumanized Muslims, the political ideologies that framed Islam as a civilizational threat, and the foreign policies that treated Muslim‑majority nations as disposable had all been firmly in place long before the Twin Towers fell. The 9/11 attacks did not create the war on Muslims, they merely provided the pretext for accelerating it and making it state policy in many Western nations. What changed after 9/11 was not the underlying ideology, but the speed, scale, and brutality with which it was finally unleashed on Muslims around the world.
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