Jihad is the Arabic term for struggle. For most of the world's 1 billion Muslims, it means the inner struggle to live life according to the teachings of the Koran.

But Islam makes no distinction between the spiritual and political orders. For Islamic extremists the world over, the concept of jihad has come to mean the struggle to create a fully Islamic society and to expunge the influence on such societies of non-believers.

The totality of this struggle, and the intensity of the religious education that precedes it, has elevated suicide in pursuit of jihad to the realm of glorious martyrdom. A poor family earns honour, and the martyr earns paradise, when death comes in the cause of jihad.

Yusuf and his fellow students, their natural innocence and idealism moulded by the madrasah to fanatical ends, will form the next cadre of suicide terrorists being trained in their hundreds in Afghanistan and Pakistan today.

In its most recent annual report the US State Department says that the centre of terrorism has shifted from the Middle East to South Asia.

Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida group is today the biggest, most sophisticated, most international and best organised terrorist network.

Their peculiar genius is to fuse the religious enthusiasm of the madrasah, the concept of jihad, the cult of suicide and a mastery of modern technology.

The world has never seen their like before.

The al-Qa'ida network is based originally on Mujaheddin veterans of the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This struggle drew thousands of Arab militants to help drive out the Soviet infidel.

At the same time the madrasah movement in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan was educating thousands of youngsters whose parents had been killed in the Soviet war. They imbibed there not traditional Afghan religious practice, which had been practical and co-operative in a typical village style, but a highly stylised, extreme, paranoid version of Islam.

I have seen this style of Islam even in rural Malaysia, where one activist once confided that Vladimir Putin worked for the CIA.

Bin Laden brought together the elements of the new terrorist network. He was a Saudi millionaire who brought his share of the family money to Afghanistan. He also has a personal army of about 20,000 mostly Arab followers. He shares the same Islamic vision as the Taliban, who gave him sanctuary and access to new recruits.

At the same time Pakistan, for its own regional purposes, supported the Taliban with money, arms, training and logistics.

"Money has never been a problem for bin Laden," says Clive Williams, lecturer in terrorism at the Australian National University.

Arab financial transactions are opaque, to say the least. Saudi Arabia has a culture of donating money to Islamic causes abroad. It is easy for bin Laden and other Islamic terrorist organisations to tap rich Arab businessmen for donations. Beyond that, both the Taliban and bin Laden have reaped enormous profits from poppy growing and drug running.

Afghanistan and Pakistan provide training for Islamic terrorists the world over, from Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Tayiba, Islamic terrorist groups Pakistan sponsors in Indian Kashmir, the Abu Sayyaf group in The Philippines, which specialises in kidnap for ransom, Laskar Jihad in Indonesia, and groups in Chechnya, Bangladesh and a raft of Central Asian countries.

Of course it is wrong to see a global Islamic conspiracy. Specific operations are tightly organised, but the overall picture is much looser, much more a federation of groups, who may at times fight each other, who may have wildly differing agendas, but who are united in their anti-Americanism, anti-Israeli sentiment, and overarching sense of Islamic identity and historical Islamic grievance.

It cannot be emphasised too often that the vast majority of Muslims have nothing to do with this, and these groups are as representative of Islamic values as the IRA is of Christian values.

The second great pole of international terrorism remains the Middle East. The State Department lists seven countries as state sponsors of terrorism: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and Sudan. It also lists Pakistan as of increasing concern. It does not list Afghanistan, only because it does not recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government.

As Amin Saikal of the Australian National University points out, most Middle East terrorism has been confined to Israeli targets in recent years, certainly since the Oslo peace process got under way.

But Palestinian groups such as the PFLP, and before that Fatah, have a long history of international operations. They were dominant in the last wave of airline hijackings in the '70s.

Part of bin Laden's genius has been to fuse Arab and non-Arab Islamic radicalism.

The terrorist groups of the Middle East are numerous, extensive, well-armed, with plenty of recruits and plenty of money.

The State Department names Iran as the most active sponsor of international terrorism, partly because of its support for Lebanese Hezbollah. Syria also facilitates Hezbollah, Hamas and others.

Here's the rub. There is absolutely no reason, beyond fear of US retaliation on the part of their state sponsors, why these groups could not go international again. This is made much more likely by the hideous success of the operation this week in the US, and the collapse of the Middle East peace process.

In other words, there are now at least two great centres of well-financed international terrorism, and countless groups around the world eager to tap their money and their terrorist expertise.