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| Terror Networks |
| Special report: Is Al Qa'ida in pieces? |
| 2008-06-22 |
| Long, but worth going to the link to read. It seems Al Qaeda is no longer popular with many of their former jihadis. They've murdered too many Muslims they labelled takfiri, and the jihadis are getting older and more sensible than they were back in the go-go '90s, before 9/11 and 7/7. The article is based on interviews with a number of former jihadis who are now speaking out against the whole thing. This article gives depth and background to discussions here and elsewhere about the anti-Al Qaeda book released by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, aka Dr. Fadl. Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard – 17 hours in a Toyota pick-up truck, bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by Bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since al-Qa'ida had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalised by Qaddafi, had known Bin Laden from their days fighting the communist Afghan government in the early 1990s, a period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Bin Laden was trying to win over other militant groups to the global jihad he had announced against the West in 1998. Over the next five days, Bin Laden and his top aides, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, met with a dozen or so jihadist leaders. "This was a big strategy meeting," Benotman told one of us late last year, in his first account of the meeting to a reporter. "We talked about everything, where are we going, what are the lessons of the past 20 years." Despite the warm welcome, Benotman surprised his hosts with a bleak assessment of their prospects. "I told them that the jihadist movement had failed. That we had gone from one disaster to another, like in Algeria, because we had not mobilised the people," recalls Benotman, referring to the Algerian civil war launched by jihadists in the 1990s that left more than 100,000 dead and destroyed whatever local support the militants had once enjoyed. Benotman also told Bin Laden that the al-Qa'ida leader's decision to target the West would only sabotage attempts by groups such as Benotman's to overthrow the secular dictatorships in the Arab world. "We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere," Benotman recalls, "but they laughed when I told them that America would attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it." After the [9/11] attacks, Benotman, now living in London, resigned from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, realising that the United States, in its war on terrorism, would differentiate little between al-Qa'ida and his organisation. Benotman, however, did more than just retire. In January 2007, under a veil of secrecy, he flew to Tripoli in a private jet chartered by the Libyan government to try to persuade the imprisoned senior leadership of his former group to enter into peace negotiations with the regime. He was successful. This May, Benotman told us that the two parties could be as little as three months away from an agreement that would see the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group formally end its operations in Libya and denounce al-Qa'ida's global jihad. At that point, the group would also publicly refute recent claims by al-Qa'ida that the two organisations had joined forces. This past November, Benotman went public with his own criticism of al-Qa'ida in an open letter to al-Zawahiri. In the letter, Benotman recalled his Kandahar warnings and called on al-Qa'ida to end all operations in Arab countries and in the West. The citizens of Western countries were blameless and should not be the target of terrorist attacks, argued Benotman. Although Benotman's public rebuke of al-Qa'ida went unnoticed in the United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic press. In repudiating al-Qa'ida, Benotman was adding his voice to a rising tide of anger in the Islamic world toward al-Qa'ida and its affiliates, whose victims since 11 September have mostly been fellow Muslims. Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious scholars, former fighters, and militants who had once had great influence over al-Qa'ida's leaders, and who – alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, senseless killings in Muslim countries, and barbaric tactics in Iraq – have turned against the organisation, many just in the past year. Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by al-Qa'ida's leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because al-Qa'ida and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al-Qa'ida's Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: first, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where al-Qa'ida's suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, al-Qa'ida in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the Islamic world's Sunni majority. Additionally, al-Qa'ida and its affiliates have killed thousands of Muslim civilians elsewhere since 11 September: hundreds of Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, dozens of Saudis killed by terrorists since 2003, scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a US hotel in Amman in November 2005. Even those sympathetic to al-Qa'ida have started to notice. "Excuse me Mr Zawahiri but who is it who is killing, with Your Excellency's blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria?" one supporter asked in an online Q&A with al-Qa'ida's deputy leader in April that was posted widely on jihadist websites. All this has created a dawning recognition among Muslims that the ideological virus that unleashed 11 September and the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid is the same virus now wreaking havoc in the Muslim world. Ultimately, the ideological battle against al-Qa'ida in the West may be won here in Britain. It is in this country that many leaders of the jihadist movement have settled as political refugees, and the capital has long been a key barometer of future Islamist trends. There are probably more supporters of al-Qa'ida in Britain than any other Western country. Over the last half-year, we have been interviewing London-based militants who have defected from al-Qa'ida, retired mujahideen, Muslim community leaders, and members of the security services. Most say that, when al-Qa'ida's bombs went off in London in 2005, sympathy for the terrorists evaporated. In Leyton, the local mosque is on the main road, a street of terraced houses, halal food joints, and South Asian hairdressers. Around 1,000 people attend Friday prayers there each week. Usama Hassan, an imam at the mosque, has a PhD in artificial intelligence from Imperial College in London, read theoretical physics at Cambridge, and now teaches at Middlesex University. But he also trained in a jihadist camp in Afghanistan in the 1990s and, until a few years ago, was openly sympathetic to Bin Laden. And, in another unusual twist, he is now one of the most prominent critics of al-Qa'ida. Raised in London by Pakistani parents, Hassan arrived in Cambridge in 1989 and, feeling culturally isolated, fell in with Jam'iat Ihyaa Minhaaj Al-Sunnah (Jimas), a student organisation then supportive of jihads in Palestine, Kashmir and Afghanistan. In December 1990, Hassan travelled to Afghanistan, where he briefly attended an Arab jihadist camp. Later, as a postgraduate student in London, Hassan played a lead role in the student Islamic Society, then a hotbed of radical activism. "At the time I was very anti-American... It was all black and white for us. I used to be impressed with Bin Laden. There was no other leadership in the Muslim world standing up for Muslims." When 11 September happened, Hassan says the view in his circle was that "al-Qa'ida had given one back to George Bush". As al-Qa'ida continued to target civilians for attacks, Hassan began to rethink. His employment by an artificial intelligence consulting firm also integrated him back toward mainstream British life. "It was a slow process and involved a lot of soul-searching... Over time, I became convinced Bin Laden was dangerous and an extremist." The July 2005 bombings in London were the clincher. "I was devastated by the attack," he says. "My feeling was, how dare they attack my city." Three days after the London bombings, the Leyton mosque held an emergency meeting; about 300 people attended. "We explained that these acts were evil, that they were haram [unlawful]," recalls Hassan. It was not the easiest of crowds; one youngster stormed out, shouting, 'As far as I'm concerned, 50 dead kuffar is not a problem.'" In Friday sermons since then, Hassan has hammered home the difference between legitimate jihad and terrorism, despite a death threat from pro-al-Qa'ida militants: "I think I'm listened to by the young because I have street cred from having spent time in a [jihadist] training camp." This spring, Hassan helped launch the Quilliam Foundation, an organisation set up by former Islamist extremists to counter radicalism by making speeches to young British Muslims about how they had been duped into embracing hatred of the West. In December, al-Qa'ida's campaign of violence reached new depths in the eyes of many Muslims, with a plot to launch attacks in Saudi Arabia while millions were gathered for the Hajj. Saudi security services arrested 28 al-Qa'ida militants in Mecca, Medina and Riyadh, whose targets allegedly included religious leaders critical of al-Qa'ida, among them the Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, who responded to the plot by ruling that al-Qa'ida operatives should be punished by execution, crucifixion or exile. Is al-Qa'ida going to dissipate as a result of the criticism from its former mentors and allies? Despite the recent internal criticism, probably not in the short term. Al-Qa'ida, on the verge of defeat in 2002, has regrouped and is now able to launch significant terrorist operations in Europe. And, last summer, US intelligence agencies judged that it had "regenerated its [US] Homeland attack capability" in Pakistan's tribal areas. Since then, al-Qa'ida and the Taliban have only entrenched their position further, launching a record number of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year. Afghanistan, Algeria and Iraq also saw record numbers of suicide attacks in 2007 (though the group's capabilities have deteriorated in Iraq of late). Meanwhile, al-Qa'ida is still able to find recruits in the West. In November, Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, said that record numbers of UK residents are now supportive of the group, with around 2,000 posing a "direct threat to national security and public safety". However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups such as al-Qa'ida are the seeds of their own long-term destruction: their victims are often Muslim civilians; they don't offer a positive vision of the future (but rather the prospect of Taliban-style regimes from Morocco to Indonesia); they keep expanding their list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't share their precise world view; and they seem incapable of becoming politically successful because their ideology prevents them from making the real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in genuine politics. The scholars and fighters now criticising al-Qa'ida, in concert with mainstream Muslim leaders, have created a powerful coalition countering the organisation's ideology. According to Pew polls, support for al-Qa'ida has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the past five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 per cent now have a favourable view of al-Qa'ida, according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide operations among Pakistanis has dropped to 9 per cent (it was 33 per cent five years ago), while favourable views of Bin Laden in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed to be hiding, have plummeted to four per cent from 70 per cent in August 2007. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |