Abstract. The article questions the outdated interpretation of any regional militant-terrorist actors of the radical Islamist type as direct “products” of the process of the top-down regionalization of al-Qaeda. Instead it argues that the cutting edge of the evolution of transnational Islamist terrorism is formed by two only partially overlapping processes: the network fragmentation of the global jihad movement, including in the West, and the bottom-up, rather than top-down, regionalization of violent Islamism as demonstrated by the phenomenon of the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL).