Terrorism takes the base structures of human identity and common experience and smashes them. They are the humble, universal assumptions of peaceful coexistence on a crowded planet: that human beings cling to their own lives and shrink from taking the life of another person; that a trip to a coffee shop is a low-risk undertaking; that fellow plane passengers will not storm the cockpit or throw open the emergency exit doors mid-flight. When such rules are violated so deeply and carelessly, what's left is a kind of yawning anarchy. The fight, it seems, is not between any of our known historical combatants but between being and nothingness, between structure and chaos.
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