[CBSNEWS] Senior U.S. intelligence officials are concerned about the growing presence of al Qaeda hard boyz in civil war-torn Syria. I think we've been "concerned" about it here for awhile.
In a statement released over the weekend, the State Department said the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has moved himself and the group's operations to Syria. A State Department spokesperson also noted that the deadly suicide kabooms and boom-mobileings carried out in Iraq in recent days can be attributed to AQI.
We routinely attribute anything that explodes in Iraq to AQI. Occasionally we're wrong, but exploding things and themselves seems to currently be a strictly Sunni tactic. The Shiites, being in power, have an army to oppress the Sunnis. Any non-AQI kabooms are probably mafia wars.
CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell warned of the risk of the collapse of the Syrian government -- which possesses a considerable stockpile of chemical and advanced weapons -- namely, a power vacuum which would leave room for al Qaeda to take hold and take advantage of their weapons cache and technical capabilities.
Pencilneck and his govt collapsing was a good thing, until the alternative became the cannibals.
The al Qaeda movement is very much "based on ideology and has very little to do with the kind of organization" that the U.S. is accustomed to, according to CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan, who cited Syria's "massive stockpile of chemical weapons" and depth of knowledge about employing those weapons as a unique threat compared to other, previous al Qaeda training havens.
Syria is a much more dangerous Afghanistan than Afghanistan was when it was controlled by AQ. It's got a higher level of technological development. It also presents more problems for AQ: the Salafists will have to digest all those Shiites.
"The people who know the most about chemical weapons in the United States say that what is scary about Syria is not just the presence of chemical stockpiles ...it's the technical knowledge and training and know-how and the delivery system required to deliver those weapons," Logan said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning."
I thought I just said that?
"Nobody knows yet who's going to win the peace in Syria," she added, "It might very well be al Qaeda."
Currently there are, broadly speaking, four sides: Pencilneck, the rebels, al-Qaeda, and the Kurds. The rebels are so fragmented they haven't been able to form a shadow govt. Pencilneck is a loathsome specimen, The Kurds aren't going to govern the entire country, but they don't want to be pushed around. And the Qaeda groups are the latest butt-insky grab by international Salafism. Not a lot of choice there. Best we just supply plenty of ammunition to all parties concerned.
Maybe the Kurds get a little extra?
The threat is "dangerous enough for the Deputy Director of the CIA to say there are more imported muscle flooding into Syria to fight for al Qaeda today than there ever were at the height of the war with Iraq," Logan said on "CBS This Morning."
Zarqawi hadn't totally looned out at the beginning of the war with Iraq. But it's the same machine sending the same people in to inflict that Olde Tyme Religion on the place, whether wanted or not.
Many of the fighters now based in Syria likely came from Afghanistan, North Africa, Yemen and Iraq, where they learned to fight the U.S., Logan explained.
What'd they learn in Yemen? "Look out! Here comes another one!" maybe?
"That organization [in Syria] is in very close contact with Ayman al-Zawahri, who is in the Pakistain-Afghanistan region," she said.
Probably in Miranshah.
Al-Zawahri is the late Osama bin Laden's
... who was laid out deader than a mackerel, right next to the mackerel...
successor, who in 2001, laid out his long-term plan for the global jihadi movement. The al Qaeda group currently based in Syria has been known as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and recently changed their name to The Islamic State of Iraq,
They've been going under "Islamic State of Iraq since about 2006, though my memory may be off by a year or two.
to reflect their growing ambitions. AQI is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is now based in Syria.