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The Qur’an is clear: “And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah.” (8:39) This amounts to an open-ended declaration of war against those whose religion is not “for Allah,” and since the beginnings of Islam, Muslims have energetically waged that war. In our age, the key flash points of that war, the front lines of the global jihad, can be found in Israel, Nigeria, India, and a state where the jihad is little understood and seldom recognized as such: Armenia.

The 1,400-year history of jihad is one long tale of military aggression, territorial expansion, ethnic cleansing, cultural appropriation, and enslavement. In a few places it was rolled back, but for the most part the jihad has been an illustration of what Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev said of socialism as he sent troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968: “What we have, we hold.” In the case of Islam, this is due in large part because of its utter ruthlessness in dealing with conquered populations; once Islamic rule has been consolidated, there is little left with which to mount a resistance.

That ruthlessness is on abundant display these days in Armenia. In the fall of 2023, Azerbaijan forced over 100,000 Armenians to flee from Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh), an Armenian enclave that is only part of Azerbaijan because Stalin made it so. When both Azerbaijan and Armenia were part of the Soviet Union, Stalin decided that Artsakh would be part of Azerbaijan, despite its long Armenian history and Armenian population, as part of his strategy of keeping tensions high among Soviet republics. This prevented unity among the occupied territories and justified an ongoing Soviet military presence.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the border was not corrected, and so tens of thousands of Armenians lived in Azerbaijan. But no more. And now the Azerbaijanis are systematically erasing all traces of an Armenian Christian presence in the land they have ethnically cleansed. International Christian Concern reported last week that “the 2024 annual report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) underlined the ongoing Azerbaijani destruction of Armenian Christian heritage in Artsakh. This comes as USCIRF recommended that the State Department name Azerbaijan as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ (CPC), a designation under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), which applies to ‘countries that commit systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.’”

Like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, this is a religious conflict that is widely misunderstood to be a dispute over land. Just as the Palestinians and their allies will not accept the existence a Jewish state of any size, because they believe that the entire region is Islamic land, so also the Azerbaijanis and their allies (which include Turkey) will not accept any Armenia of any size. As is always the case with jihad, a victory is only a prelude for more aggression: Azerbaijan and Turkey have already begun to make new territorial demands against Armenia for a corridor that will link the two countries. The ultimate goal is to create a Turkish-dominated Islamic bloc stretching from Istanbul to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan; Armenia is the only non-Muslim entity standing in the way, and so it must be destroyed.

Why, then, is Armenia not generally recognized as the primary jihadi target that it is? Primarily because the global jihad is still widely ignored, denied, and misunderstood. Few people, and none of them are in the U.S. State Department, recognize that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a jihad. This analytical failure has deformed the American response to this conflict for decades, and continues to do so. The Israelis themselves have never demonstrated any serious awareness of the fact that they’re dealing with an enemy with whom there can be no lasting negotiated settlement, and ultimately no peaceful coexistence, no matter how many concessions they make.

That may be one reason why Israel is allied not with Armenia, but with Azerbaijan. The Israeli government is not infallible, but its friendship with Azerbaijan is an understandable exercise in realpolitik: Azerbaijan is continually at odds with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which of course would love above all else to destroy Israel. So for Israel to aid Azerbaijan and try to force Iran to have to worry about something other than how to go about eradicating the Jewish state is simple common sense, at least for the short term.

In the long run, however, it could be disastrous. Azerbaijan will accept Israel’s help as long as it is useful, but as it continues its jihad against Armenia, it demonstrates that it is committed to principles that are ultimately incompatible with its alliance with Israel. Will Azerbaijan give up Israel or Islam? Anyone who is aware of the history of Islam and the trajectory of nations that relax Islamic rules and appear more secular for a period will not bet that Azerbaijan will ultimately give up Islam.

Meanwhile, free people everywhere should recognize the uniformity of the Islamic jihad threat against Israel, the United States, Armenia and elsewhere. The motivating ideology behind these threats is the same in each case, and is the same as the ideology that has fueled 1,400 years of jihad. One day, the free world may recognize that it faces a common jihad threat, and unite against it for the defense of humane values. That recognition, however, is not on the horizon.