In the course of relatively few years, jihadism has burgeoned from a low-key movement seeking the ouster of corrupt regimes in the Muslim world, into a global phenomenon that seeks to eradicate Western influence from that world. Though the movement is encapsulated in the minds of the public by the person of Osama bin Laden, it is important to understand that the phenomenon is not restricted to a particular group or brand of groups, but rather is a broad ideological movement to which many disparate groups — separated by geography, individual motivations and even immediate political goals — may belong. For our purposes, jihadism is defined as an ideology espoused by a fringe minority of various extremist Muslim groups, all operating on the periphery of the Islamist political spectrum.