Al Qaeda began as a pan-Islamic movement of jihad first, in embryo, against the Soviet Union and then against the United States and the West. Before its establishment in 1989, Osama bin Laden was fighting against the Soviet Union in the tutelage of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian intellectual.| Abdullah Azzam believed in using jihad as a way of achieving world domination and designated the non-Muslim West as the enemy to be attacked. |
In 1986, Azzam arrived at the IslamabadÂ’s International Islamic University. From there he began to make his trips to Peshawar, finally opening his Afghan Bureau Service as a centre of pan-Arab jihad.
As a memory jog, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.
He could have been the father of Al Qaeda but he was – with good reason – not ready to retreat in the face of Osama bin Laden’s wealth. However, despite Azzam’s multi-volume encyclopaedia on jihad (what the world now terms terrorism), Osama let him go his own way. Azzam was murdered in Peshawar along with his two sons in 1989.
I've never heard anything on who actually dunnit. I suspect it was Ayman, but it could have been lots of other people, to include, I suppose, the Sovs, likely using Hekmatyar.
He was followed by the Egyptian Aiman Al Zawahiri, a doctor who weaned Osama from Azzam’s plan to attack only the West. Zawahiri also wanted to hit the Muslim states living in bondage to the West. This was the first departure of Al Qaeda from global to regional concerns. As part of that agenda, Zawahiri blew up the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad; Osama was in the loop and shortly thereafter fell foul of Saudi Arabia.Al Qaeda in fact absorbed its complexion from where it was located. Osama did not have an intellect like Azzam with which to mould anyone. He just drifted along among flattering followers. The lack of a grand vision also meant he allowed his ancillaries, including those in Pakistan, to indulge in sectarianism. So while he hated Saudi Arabia, Osama did not care that his protégé militias in Pakistan were getting funds from that country and killing Shias.
The next turn was foretold. Al Qaeda went into sectarian mode mainly because Osama lacked the intellectual strength to resist it but also because Zawahiri, despite his books, was narrowly focused and was even trying to live down the guilt that he had betrayed a fellow-terrorist under torture in Cairo.
There must have been a wrench when Al Qaeda turned into a sectarian organisation.
During his Sudan sojourn, Binny had actually been targeted by takfiri for not being Islamic enough. Pakistan, on the other hand, has a long tradition of Sunni-Shia killings -- more Sunni than Shia, from what we've seen lately.
Some of it also sprang from local compulsions. Al Qaeda had good relations with Iran before the Taliban spoiled them but placating the Taliban was an essential quid pro quo given that they had provided sanctuaries to the organisationÂ’s leaders and rank and file. Interestingly, Ayatollah Khomeini was acceptable to Zawahiri for having named a street in Tehran after Khaled Islamboli, the Egyptian artillery officer who assassinated President Anwar Sadat at a military parade in Cairo in 1981.
While most Wahhabi groups invoke the 13th century Muslim legist Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, the Shia in Pakistan were killed by non-Wahhabi Deobandi groups who, despite following the Hanafi fiqh, have increasingly tended to become literalists and rabidly anti-Shia. Osama let these groups indulge in sectarianism because of local compulsions. In fact he never stopped training the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and Lashkar-e Jhangvi boys in his camps. Part of this nonchalance arose from the fact that the Pakistanis slaughtered were not Arabs.
Not members of the Master Race, y'mean...
But then the youth from Jordan, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, took the killing all the way to the Arab world. And he did it single-handedly, after absorbing his first sectarian lessons from the Deobandi killers in Pakistan. This caused a lot of concern in Al Qaeda but Al Qaeda was not intellectually equipped to stop the new trend.Zarqawi was converted to killing by a fiery preacher in Jordan, Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi. Both admired each other. Maqdisi had the mind but envied ZarqawiÂ’s strength and bravery albeit sans intellect. Zarqawi also upstaged both Maqdisi and Osama. He went into Iraq against the Americans but soon began to see the Shia of Iraq as the beneficiaries of the invasion because of the new system under which democracy would lead to Shia political domination. He began by abusing the grand ayatollah of Najaf, Sistani, and then launched more attacks against the Shia than the Americans who he had gone to Iraq to kill.
At one point, Zawahiri pleaded with him not to kill the Shia but Zarqawi did not pay heed to these calls. His mentor Maqdisi also wrote to him reprimanding him for wrongdoing against Islam but Zarqawi wrote back saying Maqdisi was never his teacher and that what he was doing was right. Zarqawi then began destroying the mausoleums of the Imams in Iraq until the Americans finally got him.
Zarqawi was like Khaled Sheikh Muhammad; he would behead his victims with his own hands. But it is a measure of the compulsions as well as the internal fault-lines that Al Qaeda owned him after his death and denied that he had ever killed the Shia. This line was also taken by the rightwing in Pakistan. In owning Zarqawi, everybody was diminished, most of all Al Qaeda. But the act also completed the transformation of Al Qaeda as a sectarian organisation taking pride in killing fellow Muslims.