Even as the influence of the neoconservatives seems to have waned, it must be for many of them a source of enduring satisfaction that the terms al Qaeda and terrorism have become such enduring fixtures in the American political lexicon — terms that are often used just as reflexively and mindlessly by many progressives and liberals as they are by security-obsessed figures on the right.
As Scott Lucas points out in the video below, the way the term al Qaeda has functioned is to gloss over complexities and ignore the fact that Syria is not Libya, Libya is not Iraq, Iraq is not Pakistan, and al Qaeda is not a lens through which we should persist in attempting to understand the world.
Nasser Weddady writes: When northern Mali fell to terrorists and foreign militants last April, a debate began over the causes of the country’s chaotic collapse. Many argued that it was a direct byproduct of NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, which sent thousands of well-armed men across the Sahara to Mali. Others pointed to Mali’s internal corruption and ethnic divisions. But little was said about the most important factor: Europeans have knowingly bankrolled Islamist radicals with ransom payments since at least 2003.
Sixteen years before the 9/11 attacks, the United States sold Iran weapons indirectly in the hopes of freeing American hostages held by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. The Iran-contra debacle taught America, among other things, that paying ransom money only emboldens terrorist groups and their backers. Yet when confronted with the same challenge, European leaders have failed to heed that lesson, and have filled the coffers of terrorist groups for at least a decade.
The so-called global war on terror has been hobbled by these payoffs. The same nations that until very recently had troops in Afghanistan fighting terrorism have been turning over cash to terrorists in Africa.
Over the past decade, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands have paid more than $130 million to terrorist groups, mostly through mediators, to free European hostages.
European leaders were understandably desperate to save the lives of their citizens. But their efforts have backfired because the paying of ransoms has merely turned their citizens into a lucrative commodity for cash-hungry jihadis. Groups like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa have grown accustomed to ransom payments and reacted by seeking to capture as many Europeans — from aid workers to volunteers to tourists — as they could. In contrast, terrorists know that America won’t negotiate with hostage-takers and is much more likely to use force to free its citizens.
It’s easier to identify the problem than it is to prescribe a viable solution. Weddady says: “The only thing that Mr. Belmokhtar and his ilk should expect from the international community is overwhelming force of the sort Algeria demonstrated during the hostage crisis last month.”
That reminds me of this joke: What’s worse than being taken hostage by al Qaeda? Getting rescued by the Algerians.
Given that bin Laden was shot while standing inside a pitch-black room — the Shooter could see him through his nightscopes; given that the SEAL was struck by how skinny bin Laden appeared — an indication that he was not wearing a suicide vest; and given that he was visibly confused as he groped around in the darkness, there seems little reason to believe that capturing bin Laden would have been unfeasible.
If President Obama knew that the death of the al Qaeda leader would provide a political reward of inestimable value, he also knew that the detention and trial of bin Laden could easily become a massive liability to his presidency.
Where would bin Laden be detained? Where could he be put on trial? Would there be any risk of failing to convict him on the most serious charges? If tried, convicted, and executed, would the lengthy process end up elevating his status as a martyr?
Even if Obama didn’t issue an order to kill, no one seems to have been in any doubt that this was the goal of the mission. Indeed, has not kill, don’t capture become the signature of a president who banned torture and promised to shut down Guantanamo?
The goal was to execute bin Laden and capitalize on a broadly felt desire for vengeance.
If he had still actually posed a real threat to America, he would also have been a source of invaluable intelligence. The White House’s calculation, however, seems to have been that bin Laden’s dead body was worth far more than any information he could share.
There was bin Laden standing there. He had his hands on a woman’s shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal.
The SEALs had nightscopes, but it was coal-black for bin Laden and the other residents. He can hear but he can’t see.
He looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting. He had a cap on and didn’t appear to be hit [by shots fired in his direction earlier]. I can’t tell you 100 percent, but he was standing and moving. He was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don’t know.
For me, it was a snapshot of a target ID, definitely him. Even in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them. This was repetition and muscle memory. That’s him, boom, done.
I thought in that first instant how skinny he was, how tall and how short his beard was, all at once. He was wearing one of those white hats, but he had, like, an almost shaved head. Like a crew cut. I remember all that registering. I was amazed how tall he was, taller than all of us, and it didn’t seem like he would be, because all those guys were always smaller than you think.
I’m just looking at him from right here [he moves his hand out from his face about ten inches]. He’s got a gun on a shelf right there, the short AK he’s famous for. And he’s moving forward. I don’t know if she’s got a vest and she’s being pushed to martyr them both. He’s got a gun within reach. He’s a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won’t have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up].
In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he’s going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight. He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.
And I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I’ve ever done, or the worst thing I’ve ever done? This is real and that’s him. Holy shit.
Everybody wanted him dead, but nobody wanted to say, Hey, you’re going to kill this guy. It was just sort of understood that’s what we wanted to do.
Reuters reports: Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri has called on Muslims to kidnap Westerners, join Syria’s rebellion and to ensure Egypt implements sharia, SITE Monitoring reported on Saturday, citing a two-part film posted on Islamist websites.
The Egypt-born cleric, who became al Qaeda leader last year after the death of Osama bin Laden, spoke in a message that lasted more than two hours.
“We are seeking, by the help of Allah, to capture others and to incite Muslims to capture the citizens of the countries that are fighting Muslims in order to release our captives,” he said, praising the kidnapping of Warren Weinstein, a 71-year-old American aid worker in Pakistan last year.
Zawahri’s message was first released on Wednesday, SITE said, just two weeks after the cleric issued a filmed statement calling for more protests against the United States over a California-made film mocking the Prophet Mohammad.
In his new message, he called on Muslims to ensure Egypt’s revolution continued until sharia law was implemented and urged fellow Muslims to join the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The release of his message had been delayed, he said, because of the “conditions of the fierce war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan where he said U.S.-led forces had intensified a bombing campaign.
U.S. President Barack Obama, whom Zawahri described as a “liar” and “one of the biggest supporters of Israel”, has stepped up the use of unmanned drones to target militants in both countries as well as in Yemen.
The fanatics who carried out the atrocities of 9/11 went out of their way to describe their motivations and outlined their objectives to anyone who would listen. America turned off its hearing aid. It’s still off. The grievances that catalyzed 9/11 remain not simply unaddressed but ignored or denied by Americans.
Al Qaeda saw 9/11 as a counterattack against American policies that had directly or indirectly killed and maimed large numbers of Muslims. Some of those enraged by our policies were prepared to die to achieve revenge. Still, there were few in the Muslim world in 2001 who sympathized with al Qaeda’s attack on us. There are many more now. It is not our values that they hate. It’s what we have done and continue to do. We won’t stop terrorists by trying to impose our narrative on them while ignoring theirs, however politically expedient it may be to do so. We can’t fight anti-American extremists effectively or otherwise fend off the menace they present if we refuse to consider why they attacked us and why they still want to do so.
The chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, testified under oath that a primary purpose of al Qaeda’s criminal assault on the United States was to focus “the American people . . . on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people . . . .” In so-called “fatwas” in 1996 and 1998, Osama Bin Ladin justified al Qaeda’s declaration of war against the United States by reference to the same issue, while levying other charges against America. Specifically, he accused Americans of directly murdering one million Muslims, including 400,000 children, through the U.S. siege and sanctions against Iraq, while “occupying” the Muslim heartland of Saudi Arabia.
Al Qaeda members have described the war strategy they ultimately adopted as having five stages. Through these, they projected, the Islamic world could rid itself of all forms of aggression against it.
In stage one, al Qaeda would produce massive American civilian casualties with a spectacular attack on U.S. soil in order to provoke American retaliation in the form of the invasion of one or more Muslim countries. In stage two, al Qaeda would use the American reaction to its attack to incite, energize, and organize expanding resistance to the American and Western presence in Muslim lands. In stage three, the U.S. and its allies would be drawn into a long war of attrition as conflict spread throughout the Muslim world.
By stage four, the struggle would transform itself into a self-sustaining ideology and set of operating principles that could inspire continuing, spontaneously organized attacks against the U.S. and its allies, impose ever-expanding demands on the U.S. military, and divide America’s allies from it. In the final stage, the U.S. economy would, like that of the Soviet Union before it, collapse under the strain of unsustainable military spending, taking the dollar-dominated global economy down with it. In the ensuing disorder, al Qaeda thought, an Islamic Caliphate could seize control of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East.
This fantastic, perverted vision reflected al Qaeda’s belief that if, against all the odds, faith-based struggle could bring down the Soviet Union, it could also break the power of the United States, its Western allies, and Israel. This strategy seemed ridiculous when al Qaeda first proclaimed it. It is still implausible but, frankly, has come to sound a bit less preposterous than it once did.
The immediate objective of the 9/11 attacks was explicitly to provoke the United States into military overreactions that would enrage and arouse the world’s Muslims, estrange Americans from Arabs, stimulate a war of religion between Islam and the West, undermine the close ties between Washington and Riyadh, curtail the commanding influence of the United States in the Middle East, and overthrow the Saudi monarchy. The aftershocks of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist operation against the United States have so far failed to shake the Saudi monarchy but – to one degree or another – it has realized all its other immediate goals. Among other things, it has burdened future generations of Americans with about $5 trillion in debt from the Afghan and Iraq wars, helping to thrust the United States into fiscal crisis.
Mao Zedong observed that “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” His point was that, when conditions arise that can be exploited to favor a cause, it can spread with frightening speed and ferocity. The U.S. response to 9/11 has inflamed Islamist anti-Americanism in a widening swath of the Muslim world. By the time he died, Osama Bin Ladin surely felt entitled to pronounce the first stages of his mission accomplished. Islamist terrorism did not die with him. It lives on. One cannot decapitate a network. Nor can one shrivel an ideology by military means alone.
The Associated Press reports: The Pentagon’s top lawyer has informed the former Navy SEAL who wrote a forthcoming book describing details of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden that he violated agreements to not divulge military secrets and that as a result the Pentagon is considering taking legal action against him.
The general counsel of the Defense Department, Jeh Johnson, wrote in a letter transmitted Thursday to the author that he had signed two nondisclosure agreements with the Navy in 2007 that obliged him to “never divulge” classified information.
“This commitment remains in force even after you left the active duty Navy,” Johnson wrote. He said the author, Matt Bissonnette, left active duty “on or about April 20, 2012,” which was nearly one year after the May 2011 raid.
By signing the agreements, Bissonnette acknowledged his awareness, Johnson wrote, that “disclosure of classified information constitutes a violation of federal criminal law.” He said it also obliged the author to submit his manuscript for a security review by the government before it was published. The Pentagon has said the manuscript was not submitted for review, although it obtained a copy last week.
Johnson said that after reviewing a copy of the book, “No Easy Day,” the Pentagon concluded that the author is in “material breach and violation” of the agreements.
The Guardian reports: Five times a day for more than 15 years, Aphadi Wangara has led prayers at Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu, one of three in the ancient Malian desert town. But the day after hardline Islamists attacked and damaged the 15th-century mosque, the softly spoken imam had no consoling words to offer.
“I prefer to keep my silence. What is in my heart cannot be said,” said Wangara, who is in his late 60s.
Barely 24 hours earlier, a group of Islamist militants had appeared outside the clay-coated mosque, armed with pickaxes and shouting “Allahu Akbar”. They broke down the entrance and destroyed a door locals believed had to stay shut until the end of the world. The militants, who belong to the al-Qaida-linked Ansar Dine, had already defaced mausoleums and tombs of local Sufi saints, prompting Unesco to declare Timbuktu an endangered world heritage site.
“There is a door that absolutely cannot be opened at the entrance of the [Sidi Yahya] mosque,” said Haidrata, a resident who gave only his first name. “We believe it is a profanity to open this door; it can only be opened on the day the world will end. The militants broke it down. They were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. When I asked them why, they said [it was] because they were being accused of destroying endangered monuments when they hadn’t done so – they wanted to show what they were really capable of.”
Ansar Dine and the Tuareg separatist MNLA movement say the local monuments and distinctive sun-baked mosques renowned for palm trees protruding from earthen walls, sprinkled throughout Mali, are idolatrous and contrary to their strict interpretation of Islam. Sanda Banama, an Ansar Dine spokesman, said the monuments were “un-Islamic”.
“In Islam, there are strict laws about the way and size in which tombs are built,” Banama said.
Timbuktu locator
Ansar Dine, who have seized the northern two-thirds of Mali after a coup toppled the southern Bamako-based government, continue to control Timbuktu, residents said. “People are still leaving their houses to go to the market but they are scared,” said Fatima Sow, who fled to Bamako on Sunday as pickup trucks with Ansar Dine militants prowled the city. “A while back the militants whipped a couple who they said were fornicating before marriage.”
Almost 1,000 kilometres south in Bamako, a transitional government struggling to exert control over the vast territory amid violent demonstrations and counter-coup attempts has appeared powerless to stop the attacks. But the assault on the Sidi Yahya mosque has prodded festering anger among ordinary Malians.
“Everybody is absolutely frustrated; everybody is angry. Many of those people will be willing to take to the streets and push the government into doing something,” said Tiégoum Maiga, who is organising a march through the capital on Wednesday. “The government says it can’t do anything but people in Timbuktu are using sticks and stones to defend themselves.”
Cheick Oumar Cisse, a former culture minister and one of Mali’s most famous film-makers, said: “It’s good that these things are being labelled crimes but it is not even the worst thing these terrorists have done. In January they attacked and disembowelled 100 Malian soldiers and the international community said nothing.
Just as I believe was the case when the Taliban (under Osama bin Laden’s direction) destroyed the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, the current bout of vandalism is not simply an expression of religious fanaticism. Attacks on cultural sites serve the political purpose of highlighting the hypocrisy of the West. We generally have little concern or interest in the lives of people living in countries like Mali and reserve our passion for the protection of cultural sites. This hypocrisy will be easy to exploit by those who want to stir up simmering anti-Western sentiment.
Here’s why Obama’s campaign to kill as many al Qaeda suspects as possible is ill-conceived: with every “success” the opportunities for gathering vital intelligence diminish.
Obama’s biggest trophy — the death of Osama bin Laden — might have been the biggest failure of all. News of the capture of Naamen Meziche demonstrates why suspected terrorists are worth vastly more alive rather than dead.
BBC News reports: A French man who is suspected of being a key militant working for al-Qaeda has been arrested close to the border with Iran, officials say.
Naamen Meziche was detained during a security operation in the area.
He is described as being an associate of senior al-Qaeda leader Younis al-Mauritani, who was detained in 2011 accused of planning attacks on Europe.
Born in 1970 and of Algerian descent, Meziche is an “important” al-Qaeda member in Europe, experts say.
He is believed to have belonged to the Hamburg cell that the US says masterminded the 9/11 attacks.
Meziche reportedly recruited jihadists at a radical mosque in the northern German city, which authorities closed in 2010 because they said it was encouraging fanaticism.
Three of the 9/11 hijackers, including ringleader Mohammed Atta – who piloted the first plane into New York’s World Trade Centre – met regularly at the mosque before moving to the US.
A Pakistani official told the AFP news agency that Meziche was “among the very close associates” of Mauritani who was himself arrested on 5 September 2011 by Pakistani agents – believed to have been co-operating with the CIA – in the city of Quetta.
Mauritani was believed to have been ordered by Osama Bin Laden – before his death last year – to plan attacks on Australia, Europe and the United States.
Correspondents say that Meziche’s arrest highlights the key role played by the Pakistani security forces in the anti al-Qaeda campaign of the US, even though Washington and Islamabad are going through one of the rockiest stages in their relationship since the 9/11 attacks.
Tensions are also high because of continuing Pakistani resentment over the US decision to kill Bin Laden in May 2011 without telling Pakistan.
They have become further strained over US drone strikes on Pakistani soil and Islamabad’s refusal to re-open a Nato supply route to Afghanistan which it closed down in November after 24 of its soldiers were killed on the border in a Nato air strike.
Neither Meziche nor Mauritani feature on the US FBI list of most wanted terrorists.
This must be a very, very important story. Why else would I be getting an email alerting me to this very, very important story from Jennifer Scoggins, a senior publicist for CNN in Washington?
“Do you believe high officials in Pakistan knew bin Laden was hiding for years in A — at that compound in Abbottabad?”
We can be in no doubt that this is a very, very serious question because it’s coming from Wolf Blitzer hunkered down in his Situation Room.
Pakistan is costing the U.S. $100 million a month by depriving NATO of its right to transport supplies to Afghanistan by the cheapest route. On top of that they had the audacity to jail Dr Shakil Afridi after he had demonstrated his ability to be an indispensable asset to the CIA, leading to the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
So, it’s understandable that Washington and CNN have run out of patience. It is indeed time for Pakistan to come clean and admit that bin Laden was under the protection of the ISI… or something like that. After all, there can be absolutely no doubt that someone knew he was in Abbottabad.
Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t watch CNN but I do know that CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, widely touted as al Qaeda expert supremo, rejects the idea that any Pakistani officials knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad. Why? Bin Laden had clearly gone to great lengths to keep his whereabouts secret. Why would he have taken the risk of revealing his location to anyone who did not need to know?
Most likely Abbottabad offered a secure hideout for the al Qaeda leader not because he had been offered some official or semi-official sanctuary there but because he could have reasonably assumed that it was an area that could not so easily come under CIA surveillance.
Neither in Pakistan nor the United States does government truly have all-seeing eyes.
Does the Secret Service know the owner and occupant of every vehicle currently operating within a two mile radius of the White House? Does it run background checks on every property owner, tenant and sub-tenant in this area? I don’t think so.
Is it possible that right now someone is living in Washington DC whose presence and identity might be a cause of great alarm for the FBI, but they have no idea what’s going on under their noses? No doubt.
ABC News reports: A new video surfaced online Tuesday featuring al Qaeda commander Abu Yahya al-Libi — the same terrorist that American officials declared dead last week — but the video doesn’t appear to reveal whether it was made before or after his reported death.
In the new footage, which was posted in jihadi forums with captions referring to al-Libi in honorific titles generally reserved for the living, al-Libi discusses the ongoing violence in Syria but makes no specific reference to any dates or significant events there. A bloody struggle between Syrian opposition groups and the government has been ongoing for over a year, since well before al-Libi’s reported death.
Al-Libi was declared dead by U.S. and Pakistani officials last week following a series of drone strikes in Pakistan. Other al Qaeda leaders have not confirmed nor denied al-Libi’s death, and an analyst with the terrorist tracking group IntelCenter said that it is “not unknown for groups to release videos of key figures that were filmed prior to their death but had not yet been released.”
The campaign to eliminate al Qaeda certainly appears to be building up to some kind of “mission accomplished” moment.
Will that come when Ayman al-Zawahiri is assassinated? And will it come just as the November U.S. presidential election approaches?
It’s hard not to get the distinct impression that President Obama is itching to claim the political reward of being able to declare that al Qaeda has been defeated.
Obama’s latest trophy is the killing of Abu Yahya al-Libi who CNN’s Paul Cruickshank says “is universally admired in jihadist circles and among the younger generation of al Qaeda leaders. Charismatic, intelligent, a religious scholar – and with the extra qualification of having escaped from U.S. custody in Afghanistan – his loss is ‘a cataclysmic blow’ to al Qaeda, according to analysts who follow the group.”
I wonder if those who think this is a victory (and those supporting the strategy of extrajudicial killings more generally) have given ample thought to the fact that he along with others who have been assassinated were actually a moderating force within a far more virulent current that has taken hold in the milieu. And yes, given his teachings I do note a certain irony in this, but sadly, it’s true.
What is coming next is a generation whose ideological positions are more virulent and who owing to the removal of older figures with clout, are less likely to be amenable to restraining their actions. And contrary to popular belief, actions have been restrained. Attacks have thus far been used strategically rather than indiscriminately. Just take a look at AQ’s history and its documents and this is blatantly clear.
In the years to come, owing to this generation being killed off, this type of restraint will disappear; in fact it is clearly already heading in this direction. A significant part of this change is directly attributable to the counter terrorism strategies being employed today.
In the early years of George Bush’s presidency when it was easy to question the intellectual abilities of a commander in chief who so frequently mangled his sentences, his neoconservative advisers often attributed to Bush a key “insight” that he had immediately after the 9/11 attacks: that America was at war. The neocons’ rather transparent aim was to portray Bush as an astute wartime leader rather than a dumb neocon puppet.
As Barack Obama ran to replace Bush, he had his own “insight”: that the ill-defined war on terrorism could be won if narrowed to the more specific goal of defeating al Qaeda. Moreover, defeating al Qaeda, as far as Obama was concerned, had less to do with winning an ideological struggle for hearts and minds. Al Qaeda could be defeated simply by systematically assassinating its leaders and upper ranks. And although Obama had the political sophistication not to employ a clownish gimmick as had Bush with his set of most-wanted playing cards for identifying Iraq’s Baathist regime, Obama seems to have shared Bush’s view that his enemies were finite in number and could be defeated through a process of elimination.
Obama does not seem to be troubled by the question that Donald Rumsfeld famously and sensibly posed: “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?”
When Obama started implementing his strategy of eliminating al Qaeda, relying principally on drone missile attacks, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula barely existed. But as Obama’s drone war has expanded from Pakistan to Yemen, AQAP has not only grown but in size as a militant fighting force but it now also controls significant areas of territory. And it isn’t just winning in the battlefield but also winning popular support.
If Obama sticks to his strategy of trying to kill his way to victory, he may eventually feel forced to adopt a tactic that would be impossible to justify politically or ethically: large-scale bombing of al Qaeda-controlled cities.
Across the vast, rugged terrain of southern Yemen, an escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.
After recent U.S. missile strikes, mostly from unmanned aircraft, the Yemeni government and the United States have reported that the attacks killed only suspected al-Qaeda members. But civilians have also died in the attacks, said tribal leaders, victims’ relatives and human rights activists.
“These attacks are making people say, ‘We believe now that al-Qaeda is on the right side,’ ” said businessman Salim al-Barakani, adding that his two brothers — one a teacher, the other a cellphone repairman — were killed in a U.S. strike in March.
Since January, as many as 21 missile attacks have targeted suspected al-Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen, reflecting a sharp shift in a secret war carried out by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command that had focused on Pakistan.
But as in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where U.S. drone strikes have significantly weakened al-Qaeda’s capabilities, an unintended consequence of the attacks has been a marked radicalization of the local population.
The evidence of radicalization emerged in more than 20 interviews with tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from four provinces in southern Yemen where U.S. strikes have targeted suspected militants. They described a strong shift in sentiment toward militants affiliated with the transnational network’s most active wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.
“The drone strikes have not helped either the United States or Yemen,” said Sultan al-Barakani, who was a top adviser to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. “Yemen is paying a heavy price, losing its sons. But the Americans are not paying the same price.”
In 2009, when President Obama was first known to have authorized a missile strike on Yemen, U.S. officials said there were no more than 300 core AQAP members. That number has grown in recent years to 700 or more, Yemeni officials and tribal leaders say. In addition, hundreds of tribesmen have joined AQAP in the fight against the U.S.-backed Yemeni government.
As AQAP’s numbers and capabilities have grown, so has its reach and determination. That was reflected in a suicide bombing last week in the capital, Sanaa, that killed more than 100 people, mostly Yemeni soldiers.
On their Web sites, on their Facebook pages and in their videos, militants who had been focused on their fight against the Yemeni government now portray the war in the south as a jihad against the United States, which could attract more recruits and financing from across the Muslim world. Yemeni tribal Web sites are filled with al-Qaeda propaganda, including some that brag about killing Americans.
“Every time the American attacks increase, they increase the rage of the Yemeni people, especially in al-Qaeda-controlled areas,” said Mohammed al-Ahmadi, legal coordinator for Karama, a local human rights group. “The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes.”
In a PBS Frontline report which first aired last night, the intrepid reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad ventured into al Qaeda territory.
Is AQAP destined to self destruct in a similar way that al Qaeda in Iraq ended up defeating itself, as David Ignatius suggests?
Yemen’s own secular militants who have been leading a separatist movement do not see AQAP’s support diminishing. Indeed, Jemajem, a militant leader with nom de guerre of “the Guevara of south Yemen,” predicts that it won’t be long before al Qaeda gains control of Aden — a strategically placed port city with one million residents.
Earlier this month, Abdul-Ahad described how Jemajem recently counseled fellow fighters.
“Look at our brothers the mujahideen in Ja’ar,” he said to the group gathered in Aden. “They carried weapons and liberated their lands and they have created order. They created something out of nothing. Do you know how? Because the youth of al-Qaida fight for a cause while we in the Hirak haven’t put our beliefs in our hearts. We have to sacrifice and die.”
At this, some of the assembled young revolutionaries rolled their eyes: most are secular activists who chew qat and smoke, and have little to do with religion.
“Do you want a sharia state?” asked one. “We are fighting for a civil state here. The jihadis won’t bring us that.”
“I don’t want an Islamic state but the jihadis are coming,” said Jemajem. He drew a circle on a cushion. “Look, the jihadis are surrounding Aden, they have taken the east [Zanjibar and Ja’ar] and are now attacking checkpoints in the north. Some of their men are already inside the city.”
The battle for Aden was coming soon, Jemajem said, and the separatists would be making a mistake to resist them.
“I told our leaders that when the jihadis take Aden, I won’t send my men to die fighting them,” he said.
“If young men lose hope in our cause they will be looking for an alternative. And our hopeless young men are joining al-Qaida.”
Faisal Devji writes about an aspect of al Qaeda and Taliban communications that most terrorism analysts overlook: the interest that bin Laden and others have in poetry.
Readers going through the cache of letters that were released early this month from Osama bin Laden’s hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan, may have been taken aback by a reference — in the midst of discussions of tactics, regional politics and exchange rates for ransom money — to poetry.
One letter written by Bin Laden and perhaps an associate went from criticizing the news media’s coverage of Al Qaeda to commenting on a pre-Islamic tradition of satirical poetry called hija, which Arab tribes once used to mock their enemies. It’s easy to imagine that counterterrorism analysts wondered how to interpret that one.
In fact, poetry has long been a part of Muslim radicalism; the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, for example, was the author of a large collection of verse. Today, the Taliban’s Web site features poems written by the group’s members and sympathizers, both men and women. Recitations are frequently recorded and stored on cellphones and transferred from one person to another by way of Bluetooth technology.
Many Afghan and Al Qaeda poems — which come from distinct but hybrid literary traditions — are, as might be expected, political. In a statement broadcast on Al Jazeera in December 2001, Osama bin Laden quoted the following verses from one of his favorite contemporary poets, Yusuf Abu Hilala, changing the last line and replacing the word “castles” in the original with “towers,” as a reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center:
Though the clothes of darkness enveloped us and the poisoned tooth bit us,
Though our homes overflowed with blood and the assailant desecrated our land,
Though from the squares the shining of swords and horses vanished,
And sound of drums was growing
The fighters’ winds blew, striking their towers and telling them:
We will not cease our raids until you leave our fields.
If Al Qaeda’s writers tend to be preoccupied with what they see as Islam’s long and global history of conflict with Christendom, from the Crusades to the war on terror, Taliban poets tend to refer to the literature produced in their part of the world by nationalist and socialist movements over the course of the 20th century. And if Al Qaeda poems are characterized by the swords, charging horses and fiery deserts of pre-Islamic lore, Taliban poets praise more recent warriors like Malalai, a 19th-century battlefield heroine. The chief examples of historical conflict in Taliban poetry are the Anglo-Afghan wars, of which today’s United States-led war in Afghanistan is seen as a pale reflection.
CNN reports: The chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee expressed dismay that someone leaked information about a double agent who infiltrated al Qaeda and helped foil a plot to blow up a U.S.-bound plane.
“It’s really, to me, unfortunate that this has gotten out, because this could really interfere with operations overseas,” Rep. Peter King of New York told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday. “My understanding is a major investigation is going to be launched because of this.”
The double agent, who volunteered as a suicide bomber for the terrorist group, was actually working as an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia, a source in the region familiar with the operation told CNN.
The man left Yemen, traveled through the United Arab Emirates and gave the bomb and information about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to the CIA, Saudi intelligence and other foreign intelligence agencies, the source said.
The agent works for Saudi intelligence, which has cooperated with the CIA for years, the source said.
“Indeed, we always were the ones managing him,” the source told CNN.
The suspected bomb-maker is a Saudi called Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri.
Richard Barrett, who heads the al Qaeda-Taliban sanctions monitoring committee at the United Nations, told Reuters he was “pretty certain” Asiri was the top suspect in the latest plot.
Saudi intelligence presumably knows a lot about him since he served nine months in jail in Saudi Arabia for attempting to join a militant group in Iraq to fight U.S. troops there.
He later moved to Yemen and joined AQAP, providing the bomb that killed his younger brother in a failed bid to assassinate Saudi counter-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in 2009.
Later that year, security sources say, Asiri was behind the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day. Both the Detroit airliner bomb and the bomb used in the failed attack on the Saudi prince turned out to have been sewn into the would-be bombers’ underwear…
In the latest plot, although an unnamed Saudi agent is said to have infiltrated AQAP, it’s hard not to wonder whether he was already a member of the group and he was then recruited by the Saudis. Given that in a previous plot, Asira used his own brother as a suicide bomber, the agent in the current case might also have had close ties to the bomb maker. Moreover, given the political unrest in Yemen and the existence of a Shia insurgency, it’s also reasonable to ask whether the Saudis see al Qaeda as both a threat and an asset.
“We always were the ones managing [the agent],” CNN quotes their source saying, and although this source is merely identified as “a source in the region familiar with the operation,” the “we” in this quote presumably refers to Saudi intelligence.
“It’s really, to me, unfortunate that this has gotten out, because this could really interfere with operations overseas,” says Rep. Peter King. Indeed. But it could prove more than unfortunate but acutely embarrassing if it turned out that the U.S. has become an occasional beneficiary of Saudi Arabia’s ambiguous relationship with al Qaeda.
At a time that the issue of possible ties between the Saudi government and the 9/11 attacks are once again being raised, the Saudis clearly have an incentive to present evidence that their fight is strictly against al Qaeda.
Barbara Slavin writes: Newly released correspondence from Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan contradicts U.S. assertions that al-Qaeda has a close relationship with Iran.
According to a U.S. analysis of letters found in the Abbottabad compound when U.S. Special Forces killed bin Laden a year ago, “the relationship is not one of alliance, but of indirect and unpleasant negotiations over the release of detained jihadis and their families, including members of bin Laden’s family.”
The report by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, released Thursday, goes on to say that Iran’s detention of some prominent al-Qaeda members who fled Afghanistan after 9-11 “seems to have sparked a campaign of threats, taking hostages and indirect negotiations …that have been drawn out for years and may still be ongoing.”
Iran and the group that became al-Qaeda have had some sort of ties for more than two decades, but the nature of the relationship has been subject to considerable speculation and hype. The newly released documents suggest that the two are largely antagonistic and underline the view that the George W. Bush administration missed what could have been a major opportunity to work with Iran against the Sunni militant group responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
Iran and al-Qaeda did establish a relationship in the 1990s in Sudan when Khartoum was a terrorist haven. According to the 9/11 Commission, the two reached an “informal agreement to cooperate in providing support — even if only training — for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States.”
Eight of the 10 Arab “muscle hijackers” who took part in the 9-11 attacks entered Afghanistan via Iran between October 2000 and February 2001 but the commission “found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.”
However, after the attacks, Iran turned against al-Qaeda and detained hundreds of Arab fighters fleeing the U.S. war in Afghanistan. According to research I did for my book, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies, Iran extradited a number of these detainees to their home countries.
But Iran held on to high-profile detainees including several children of bin Laden and Saif al-Adel, then al-Qaeda’s number three, for insurance against al-Qaeda and as potential bargaining chips. [Continue reading…]
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports: Driving east out of Aden, we were just a few hundred metres past the last army checkpoint when we saw the black al-Qaida flag. It flew from the top of a concrete building that had been part-demolished by shelling.
From here into the interior, all signs of control by the government of Yemen disappeared. This is the region of newly proclaimed jihadi emirates in south Yemen that are run by affiliates of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemeni franchise of the movement founded by Osama bin Laden.
AQAP has existed in this ragged, mountainous terrain for years, but in the last 12 months the jihadis have moved down from the high ground to take control of cities in the lowlands. They are in the process of setting up an al-Qaida utopia here, where security is provided by jihadis, justice follows sharia law and even the administration of electricity and water supplies is governed by the emir.
Azzan, a market town in Shabwa province a year ago, is one of the three proclaimed Islamic emirates in south Yemen. When the Guardian approached it, the town entrance was defended by more than a dozen fighters equipped with armoured vehicles that had been commandeered from the government. We were met by three young jihadis and taken to the spot where the 17-year-old son of AQAP’s spiritual leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed, presumably by an American drone. Awlaki himself was killed in a separate strike last year.
At a small store on the side of the road, young men sat at computers copying the sermons of Awlaki, the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and other household names of the global jihad. A poster on the wall advertised a film called The Survivors, featuring accounts of leaders who had survived drone strikes.
The city’s old police station has been converted into a sharia court. Inside, in a room whose walls were hung with the symbols of the jihadi court – a black flag, a kalashnikov and a long stick used for delivering corporal punishment – sat the judge. He opened a small notebook as a demonstration of how the al-Qaida justice system had resolved 42 cases in a fortnight.
“People come to us from parts we don’t control and ask us to solve their problems,” he said. “The sharia justice system is swift and incorruptible. Most of the cases we solve within the day.”
Had they had cut off any hands in dispensing justice?
“Cutting the hand of the thief is not to punish the thief, it is to deter the rest of society,” he said.
Driving out of Azzan to the west for 100 miles we came to the centre of another Islamic emirate, at Jaar. Jihadi fighters met us with their newly commandeered armoured vehicle, freshly painted with their insignia and furnished with the black flag.
We threaded a way through the crowded market, past stalls of vegetables and live chickens, as gunmen on motorbikes patrolled the dusty potholed streets. Many of the town’s buildings appeared to have been reduced to concrete rubble by air strikes.
In this wretched place, AQAP and their affiliates are attempting to build a new society. Unlike in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, in Yemen they are trying to implement sharia by winning over the hearts and minds of the people. [Continue reading…]
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