Crusades

I think the highlighted non-capitalized "crusades" in the following context mean simply "wars" rather than "the Medieval wars between Christians and Muslims". Am I right?

Context:

The powerful machinery of mass propaganda is the unfortunate legacy of the twentieth century’s world wars. This has made possible unimaginable degrees of confrontation between incompatible and passion-laden ideologies that resemble the crusades of the long-distant past. Often religious, these confrontations are also based on tribal and ethnic differences, as evinced in the Yugoslav Wars. The current war on terror is directed at the religious extremists who threaten the security of the western allies, in particular the USA. But the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century civil wars in Rwanda, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, the examples cited here among the many, many possible examples, are, in their own right, wars of terror and, in the case of the latter country, linked to the larger crusade, the US-led war on terror. Experience of these wars of terror on the part of observers and participants has resulted in a range of art that has been both officially commissioned and personally motivated, as we see below.