Sometimes what we don't know can indeed hurt us. This was the case in 2006, when reporters noticed significant fighting between Iraqi insurgent factions. This confused journalists and government analysts, but the prevailing attitude was that if the insurgents were fighting each other, at least they weren't fighting us.
It turned out that the group that bore the brunt of this violence would later develop into the Anbar Salvation Front, which has proved to be one of our most important local allies in Iraq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), was trying to wipe out this fledgling movement. If analysts better understood that situation, timely U.S. intervention could have thwarted Zarqawi and allowed the Anbar Salvation Front to make a difference on the ground sooner.
Similarly, today a critically important debate is raging about whether the United States should set a timeframe for troop withdrawal. While most people seemingly have an opinion on the matter, it's difficult to figure out whether the situation is truly futile without understanding the various factions that we're fighting.
Understanding the Iraqi insurgency is less difficult than most people imagine. A report that the International Crisis Group published last year concludes that the insurgency is "no longer a scattered, erratic, chaotic phenomenon," but that insurgent groups "are well organized, produce regular publications, react rapidly to political developments and appear surprisingly centralized." This article's goal is to paint an accurate picture of the insurgency as it exists today. The insurgency may look different six months or a year from now, but this is a critical time for understanding our foes, as the withdrawal debate reaches a fever pitch.
In 2004 and 2005, Baathist and Sunni nationalist insurgent groups comprised the bulk of the resistance movement in Iraq. These groups weren't necessarily waging a sectarian war, nor did they espouse a particularly radical religious creed. By late 2005, a number of secular and nationalist groups had decided to join the political process--which is traditionally how insurgencies are ended. Some Sunni insurgent groups even provided voters with protection against AQI during the December 2005 constitutional referendum. Alarmed, Zarqawi ordered the February 22, 2006, bombing of the Askariya mosque in Samarra. Askariya's importance to the Shia community was underscored by Iraqi vice president Adel Abdul Mahdi, who likened the mosque attack to 9/11.
This single bombing dramatically reshaped the entire insurgency. Shia reprisals were swift, devastating, and largely indiscriminate. These mass sectarian killings shattered the Baathist and nationalist insurgent factions. For rank-and-file Sunni insurgents, witnessing bloody attacks orchestrated by Shias made al Qaeda's sectarian arguments seem sensible for the first time. Today, the violence caused by the remaining nationalist groups is negligible compared to that caused by AQI: intelligence sources confirm that AQI and its ideological compatriot Ansar al-Sunnah are responsible for the vast majority of violence on the Sunni side. The most significant nationalist faction is the Islamic Army of Iraq--although even that ex-Baathist group now purports to have embraced a radical Islamic ideology.
As the nationalist movement began to splinter after the Askariya bombing, Zarqawi's group consolidated power. The first step was bolstering the Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC), an umbrella organizations of Sunni insurgent groups that was formed shortly before the mosque bombing.
The MSC serves multiple purposes. Initially, its creation was Zarqawi's response to the orders of two senior al Qaeda leaders. Zarqawi was brutal and divisive, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy, warned him in a summer 2005 letter that "if the mujahideen are scattered, this leads to the scattering of the people around them." Another 2005 letter, which counterterrorism officials believe was written by senior al Qaeda leader Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, instructed Zarqawi: "You should consult with your mujahidin brothers who are with you in Iraq itself, such as our brothers Ansar al-Sunnah and others." In this manner, the MSC has helped to heal schisms between various Sunni insurgent factions. Moreover, by unifying these factions, the MSC has helped to consolidate their efforts against coalition forces.
After Zarqawi's death, the Egyptian-born Abu Ayyub al-Masri assumed the leadership of AQI. Under his guidance, AQI's roster has become dominated by Iraqis, as it has incorporated former officials from Saddam Hussein's regime who served in the intelligence services and the Republican Guard. Al-Masri has claimed that AQI has 12,000 men in arms and another 10,000 in training; military intelligence sources believe these figures are credible.
While AQI has become a more potent force under al-Masri, it is also experiencing increased resistance from fellow Sunnis. The above-mentioned Anbar Salvation Front, which formed in the traditional al Qaeda stronghold of Anbar province, has proven to be a real thorn in AQI's side. Recently it has provided some stability on the ground in Anbar through the creation of emergency response units that serve a policing function; developed an intelligence network that gives U.S. forces unprecedented access to information about insurgent activities; and has begun to mount a theological challenge to the clerics supporting AQI's jihad.
As Sunni challenges to AQI's dominance gained steam in late 2006, the MSC announced the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq. After the Islamic State of Iraq was established, al-Masri pledged his loyalty to its leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. AQI had previously been seen as a group led by foreign-born jihadists, so an Iraqi's appointment to head the Islamic State of Iraq suggests that AQI is trying to adopt an Iraqi face.
The Islamic State of Iraq is now the new umbrella organization for the Sunni insurgency. Some factions that have joined the Islamic State of Iraq have done so because of al-Masri's policy of reaching out to Sunni tribes. Zarqawi believed tribes themselves to be un-Islamic, but al-Masri is a more pragmatic leader. The Islamic State of Iraq now publishes its own declarations, and has assumed responsibility for a great deal of the violence in Iraq, including the spike in helicopter attacks that kicked off 2007.
Because of AQI's increased effectiveness through such mechanisms as the MSC and the Islamic State of Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus recently identified the group as the most important adversary we face on the Sunni side of the insurgency.
One significant group incorporated by the Islamic State of Iraq is Ansar al-Sunnah. Ansar al-Sunnah grew out of Ansar al-Islam, which was Iraq's original al Qaeda outfit, operating in the Kurdish areas even prior to the U.S. invasion. Michael Rubin notes that Ansar al-Sunnah incorporated not only Ansar al-Islam, but also "foreign al-Qaeda terrorists, and newly mobilized Iraqi Sunnis." As the group transformed from Ansar al-Islam into Ansar al-Sunnah, it morphed from being predominantly Kurdish to predominantly Sunni Arab.
Among Ansar al-Sunnah's notable attacks are a car bombing outside the Turkish embassy in October 2003, a car bombing outside a U.S. military installation in Ramadi in December 2003, parallel suicide bombings in Erbil on February 1, 2004, and the murders of countless Iraqi citizens and coalition forces.
Ansar al-Sunnah originally declined to join with AQI due to disputes with Zarqawi, and tensions between the two groups continue to this day. For example, a January 2007 letter from Ansar al-Sunnah to al-Masri demanded retribution for the killing of Ansar members by AQI fighters--a request to which al-Masri declined to respond. Nonetheless, Ansar al-Sunnah's merger with the Islamic State of Iraq benefits both. Ansar now has a vehicle for extending its influence beyond northern Iraq, while the Islamic State of Iraq has enlisted a formidable ally.
Because Ansar al-Sunnah shares with AQI an adherence to global jihadist ideology, informed intelligence sources believe it will be difficult to draw the group into Iraq's political process.
The Sunni insurgency is only part of what U.S. forces have to contend with. The Mahdi Army is the militia of Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, and by extension the militia of the Sadrist Movement--a faction that predates Moqtada al-Sadr, and that will be a force in Iraqi life for some time to come. The Mahdi Army's rank and file are largely young, desperate men who have seen no benefits from liberation. A recent Pentagon report declared the Mahdi Army "the most dangerous accelerant" of sectarian violence in Iraq.
Al-Sadr has been described as "one of the most popular leaders in the country" and "its most dangerous." But he has also been described as a less than eloquent speaker, prone to contradiction. Hazem Al-Amin wrote of al-Sadr in Al-Ahram Weekly: "The sentences he utters are awkward and incomplete, and somehow lacking in conviction . . . . The black-turbaned clergymen of Iraq are masters of rhetorical eloquence, yet it would appear that the young Moqtada does not excel in this domain. His turn of phrase is alien to his surroundings, prone to collapse into casual speech and slang. As a public speaker, he fails to rise even to the level of the average literate Iraqi."
After the U.S. invasion, the Madhi Army consolidated its power, largely in southern Iraq. As Ahmed S. Hashim notes in Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, the Mahdi Army "easily rolled over Iraqi security forces in Kufa, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Basra and Sadr City," along the way taking over a number of government offices. The Mahdi Army also did battle with coalition forces--for example, supporting insurgent groups in Fallujah in their April 2004 confrontation with coalition forces. After the Mahdi Army consolidated power, it shifted the focus of its activities to the Baghdad area.
Like many militant factions, the Mahdi Army is not limited to a military wing, but also provides social services and participates in the political system. The Sadrist Movement controlled thirty seats in the United Iraqi Alliance (which held 128 of the 275 seats in Iraq's parliament) until al-Sadr and his allies withdrew from the Iraqi parliament in mid-April. The ability of the Mahdi Army and Sadrist Movement to shift between lethal military operations and serving as a stabilizing force made some observers think that al-Sadr had the U.S. in a catch-22. As Newsweek put it, "[i]f American troops leave Iraq quickly, militia leaders like Sadr will be unleashed as never before, and full-scale civil war could follow. But the longer the American occupation lasts, the less popular America gets--and the more popular Sadr and his ilk become."
But recent events call into question whether the Mahdi Army is really so powerful. Since al-Sadr fled to Iran following the announcement of the U.S. military's "surge," the Mahdi Army has experienced massive splintering. A senior U.S. military intelligence officer who believes that the threat of the Mahdi Army was always overstated said that "support for al-Sadr was always a mile wide but an inch deep." He believes the Mahdi Army has a dedicated core of about 3,000 Iranian-trained operatives, but that most of its members signed on not out of deep commitment, but because "it gave their families and neighborhoods protection."
Another important Shia militant faction is the Badr Organization of Reconstruction and Development, originally known as the Badr Brigade. The Badr Organization was initially formed in 1983 as the military wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an Iranian-backed group that opposed Saddam Hussein's government. The Badr Organization fought as a conventional light infantry unit against Iraq in the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s.
Shortly after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled, SCIRI chairman Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim was killed in a bombing in Najaf. This was devastating to SCIRI's leadership, and precipitated the split between SCIRI and the Badr Organization: today the two are entirely separate entities. Both SCIRI and the Badr Organization participate in Iraq's parliament, and the Badr Organization is part of the United Iraqi Alliance faction.
Today the Badr Organization is believed to have between 10,000 and 20,000 members. At times it was a force for stability, fighting against some Sunni insurgent factions and also the Mahdi Army. The problem is that the Badr Organization augmented sectarian violence. It was accused of brutality against Sunnis even prior to the Askariya bombing. For example, a secret prison uncovered at Badr's headquarters in 2005 reportedly housed over 150 inmates, "many of them malnourished and showing signs of torture; most of them were Sunni Arabs." But the Askariya bombing was the real catalyst for the Badr Organization's increased violence; thereafter the group took part in organized campaigns targeting Sunnis.
Today, Badr is having an identity crisis: according to a senior U.S. military intelligence officer, it is trying to determine whether to align with the Iranian regime or to be accountable to nobody.
Then there are the outside influences that bolster Iraq's instability. Extensive funding for the insurgency has come from private sources, many of which are concentrated in Saudi Arabia. But the insurgency also has its state sponsors.
Syrian support for the insurgency was known in 2004. As Jonathan Schanzer reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, a confidential memo produced that year detailing the interrogation of Zarqawi lieutenant Umar Baziyani revealed that Zarqawi's organization (then known as Tawhid and Jihad) had a strong military presence in the town of al-Qaim, located close to the Syrian border. One administration official told Schanzer that Qaim was "the key to understanding how Syria is involved" in sponsoring the insurgency. Baziyani's interrogation revealed that Qaim had become "a depot for weapons, cash, and fighters supplied by Zarqawi's financiers," who generally operated out of Syria. And Baziyani claimed that the military emir of Zarqawi's Baghdad cell had been smuggled into Iraq through Syria.
Anthony Cordesman noted in a report released last summer by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that both U.S. and Iraqi officials believe the Syrians overtly agree to halt support for the insurgency, but in practice "allow Islamic extremist groups to recruit young men, have them come to Syria, and then cross the border into Iraq," where many become suicide bombers. These sources believe that Syria has allowed former Baathists to direct factions of the insurgency from its territory and has allowed funds to reach the insurgency.
Terrorist training camps in Syria have been used by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Hamas in the past. Those camps will operate regardless of who is training in them, and Cordesman notes that when Baghdad television station al-Iraqiya aired taped confessions of insurgents in February 2005, "at least three said they were trained, controlled, and paid by Syrian intelligence officials."
U.S. officials believe Syria does not face a situation analogous to the U.S.'s Mexican border, which is simply unmanageable. Rather, they believe Syria has either deliberately facilitated insurgent movement or else turned a blind eye. One clear reason that Syria has supported the insurgency is that president Bashar Assad views a democratic Iraq as a threat to his own rule. Damascus may also be attempting a power play, similar to how Syria benefited for decades from instability in Lebanon.
Finally, Iran is the largest outside player behind the insurgencies in Iraq. It has attempted to garner influence in Iraq in four different ways. First, Iran has been involved in the Iraqi government, supporting such parties as SCIRI and Dawa.
Second, Iran has supported the Shia insurgency. In 2005, Time reported on Iranian operative Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, who headed an insurgent network created by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Time reported that al-Sheibani's team, which U.S. officials believed to include as many as 280 members, had introduced a new breed of more lethal roadside bombs to the country. Called the explosively formed projectile (EFP), this kind of bomb has been described as uniquely dangerous because "when it detonates, the concave end blows outward and melts into a bullet-shaped fragment that slices through armor and flesh." Al-Sheibani is known to have provided EFPs to Shia insurgent factions. His superior is none other than Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, the commanding officer of Iran's elite Qods Force.
Third, though Iran is a Shia theocracy, the New York Sun reported in January that Iranian documents captured by American forces in Iraq showed that Iran was also supporting Sunni insurgents. Iran seems to be hedging its bets, such that whichever side comes out on top, Iran can claim to have supported it.
Finally, Iran has seemingly carried out at least one direct attack against Americans in Iraq. The only public incident that has been tied to Iran to date is a January 20 attack in Karbala, where 12 men disguised as U.S. soldiers entered the Provincial Joint Coordination Center and mounted an attack that killed five soldiers and wounded three. Military blogger Bill Roggio noted in late January: "Based on the sophisticated nature of the raid, as well as the response, or cryptic non-responses, from multiple military and intelligence sources, this raid appears to have been directed and executed by the Qods Force branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps." Roggio's sources believed that the attack was "far too sophisticated an operation for the Mahdi Army or Badr Corps, while al-Qaeda in Iraq would have a difficult time mounting such an operation in the Shia south." There is currently a debate in analytic circles about whether this was a strategic shift by Iran, or simply retaliation for U.S. raids on Iranian diplomatic missions in Baghdad and Irbil.
Not only can Iran enhance its own influence through instability in Iraq, but it also gains advantage by keeping the United States tied down there. American military overstretch in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters seriously impedes the U.S.'s ability to take effective action to counter Iran's nuclear development.
As the debate over a timeframe for Iraq withdrawal rages, it is obvious that some of the most prominent debaters lack the bare minimum of knowledge necessary for serious participation. Understanding the various factions opposing us in Iraq does not settle this debate--but it is a first step to serious engagement.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Waiting for al-Qaeda's Next Bomb by E.
The young men debated endlessly how best to carry out their attack. Co-ordinated explosions on Britain's gas-distribution network were a “beautiful plan”, but difficult. Poisoning London's water supplies was a “weak idea”. Seizing an airliner and crashing it would be “easy”, while blowing up the “slags” (loose women) dancing in the Ministry of Sound nightclub would have a “crazy” impact.
This was no idle bravado from disenchanted Muslims. Omar Khyam, now 25, and six fellow plotters had stashed away 600kg of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, the main ingredient for one or several remote-controlled bombs. At one point, during a conversation in a house in west London, one plotter asked: “Bruv, you don't think this place is bugged, do you?” No, replied Mr Khyam: “Do you know, I think we give them too much credit, bruv.”
As it turned out, their words were being recorded by Britain's domestic intelligence agency, MI5. The fertiliser had been secretly switched with an inert substance, and an MI5 agent posed as a receptionist at the storage centre where it was kept.
Mr Khyam was arrested within weeks, as he was preparing to leave for Pakistan. Six others were also arrested, and an eighth suspect is awaiting trial in Canada. During a trial lasting more than a year, the court heard of other possible targets, such as blowing up the British Parliament (“a joke”, claimed Mr Khyam). On April 30th, Mr Khyam and four other suspects were sentenced to life in prison. Two others were acquitted.
“Operation Crevice”, as the investigation was known, was at the time the biggest anti-terrorist operation in Britain. At its peak in February and March 2004, it consumed some 34,000 man-hours of intelligence and police work. The plotters' homes and cars were bugged, hidden cameras recorded them in internet cafés and undercover agents followed their movements around the clock.
The British authorities' ability to neutralise the bombing campaign is an important success, but it will also be remembered for a catastrophic failure: two of the four suicide-bombers who blew themselves up in London on July 7th 2005, at first said to have come “out of the blue”, had in fact been spotted with Mr Khyam's gang several times. But they were thought to be peripheral and were not followed up.
Relatives of some of the 52 victims want an independent inquiry into the London bombings. The government says this would “divert” the security services from their real job of seeking terrorists. MI5 took the unusual step of issuing a detailed rebuttal of “myths” surrounding the case. “The Security Service will never have the capacity to investigate everyone who appears on the periphery of every operation,” said its head, Jonathan Evans.
The Limits of Intelligence
In contrast with the small, tightly organised bombing cells of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which did everything to protect their own and often gave warnings to reduce casualties, MI5 and the police now have to contend with an opposite threat: a diffuse nebula of overlapping jihadi groups, ready to destroy themselves in order to kill as many people as possible. “We are seeing networks within networks, connections within connections and links between individuals that cross local, national and international boundaries,” said Peter Clarke, the head of the counter-terrorism branch of London's Metropolitan Police, on April 24th. More than 100 people are currently awaiting trial in Britain on terrorism charges. But in Mr Clarke's view, “The only sensible assumption is that we shall be attacked again.”
Britain is a particularly attractive target for global jihadists because of an unfortunate coincidence of factors: its prominence as America's ally in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fact that al-Qaeda's resurgent core leadership, based in Pakistan's frontier region, has easy access to the thousands of Britons who visit their ancestral country every year.
Other Western governments are closely watching developments in Britain. Europeans are worried that their own Muslim minorities could become radicalised as al-Qaeda seeks to exploit other diaspora links—Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain and Italy, Turks in Germany. The violent re-emergence of Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (known by its French acronym, the GSPC), which has rebranded itself as al-Qaeda's branch in the Maghreb, is particularly alarming. Muslims farther south, across the largely ungoverned Sahara desert, might be indoctrinated, trained and sent back to Europe.
For America, the worry is that “clean skin” European citizens, with no known record of radicalism, could be used to attack the United States. The alleged conspiracy last summer to blow up as many as ten aircraft flying between London and the United States with liquid explosives, if proven in pending trials, would reinforce the belief that al-Qaeda has regenerated and is growing again in ambition.
The first line of defence is intelligence, not least because very little information on extremists is being provided by Muslim minorities. In Britain MI5 is expanding substantially, from 1,800 staff in 2001 to a projected 3,500 in 2008. But the number of suspected terrorist networks is growing exponentially, roughly doubling every year since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, MI5's recently departed head, said in November that her service was tracking more than 1,600 known active militants (up from 250 in 2001, according to a parliamentary report). Those extremists operated in a pool of perhaps 100,000 sympathisers who, according to one poll she cited, thought the London bombings were justified. Referring to a popular British television series about MI5, Dame Eliza said: “I wish life were like ‘Spooks’, where everything is (a) knowable and (b) soluble by six people.”
In fact, surveillance uses manpower intensively. Dozens of people are required to keep track of a single suspect 24 hours a day. Those deemed to pose a “threat to life” take precedence, but these days there are so many of them that MI5 has to decide which threat to life appears to be the most acute. Indeed, some security officials suspect al-Qaeda may be deliberately flooding Britain with terrorist plots in the hope of overwhelming its defences.
Shadows on the Path
Operation Crevice was a turning point in the British authorities' understanding of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Until early 2004, the main terrorist danger to Britain was deemed to come from extremists outside the country. At most, some British Muslims were thought to be supporting such groups abroad and sometimes setting out to join them in jihad.
PA Khyam inspecting the fertiliser...
In April 2003 two Britons of Pakistani descent set off explosive belts outside a beach-front bar in Tel Aviv, killing three Israelis. At the time, says Mr Clarke, Britain was “a net exporter of terrorism”. The worst fears of the police came true on July 7th 2005, when four Britons (three of Pakistani descent, one of West Indian) blew themselves up on the London Underground and on a bus. Although security forces had been expecting attacks, the fact that they were dealing with suicide-bombings came as a surprise. Just a month earlier the Joint Intelligence Committee, which draws up assessments from information gathered by several intelligence services, had concluded that suicide-attacks were not likely and would not become the norm in Europe. After all, the Madrid bombs in 2004 had been detonated with mobile telephones, while Mr Khyam and his plotters also planned to use a remote-controlled device.
More surprises were to come. During the investigation into the July 7th bombings (and into the alleged attempted bombings two weeks later), MI5 soon discovered that the two main instigators of the successful attack, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, had crossed their path before, particularly on the fringes of Operation Crevice. Khan had been spotted on five separate occasions and had even been followed, but was not identified. MI5 picked up some of Khan's conversations with Mr Khyam, and said these dealt mainly with financial scams. But a transcript shows that during one rambling conversation they also talked about doing “operations” from Pakistan. At one point Khan asks Mr Khyam: “Are you really a terrorist, eh?”
After the arrest of the Crevice plotters in March 2004, MI5 drew up a list of 55 suspects who had come into contact with Mr Khyam's group. Fifteen were deemed “essential” targets; Khan and Tanweer were on the lower-priority list of 40 “desirable” suspects who should be followed up when resources permitted.
By July 2004, however, MI5 and the police diverted their manpower into another, even bigger investigation in which one suspect, Dhiren Barot, a Hindu convert to Islam, pleaded guilty last November to planning several possible attacks and received a 40-year prison sentence. Mr Barot had considered a series of attacks, including a radioactive “dirty bomb” and a plot to blow up limousines filled with gas cylinders in London. He had also planned attacks in America. Six others have pleaded guilty to assisting him, while a seventh alleged conspirator is standing trial.
Mr Clarke admitted that at the time of Mr Barot's arrest police did not have any evidence admissible in court. Only at the end of the 14-day detention period then allowed by law did police find the required evidence on Mr Barot's computers.
By the time of the London bombings in July 2005, investigators still did not know (or had not tried hard enough to find out) Khan's name. The first clues came from the wreckage of the London Underground. A SIM card identified a smashed mobile telephone as belonging to one of the men who had been in contact with Mr Khyam (although at the time the owners of pre-paid phones did not have to provide identity details). The picture from a passport found at the site was circulated among surveillance staff, who identified Khan as one of those seen during Operation Crevice. After the London bombings Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani-American computer programmer now in jail in America on terrorism-related charges, identified newspaper pictures of Khan as someone called “Ibrahim”, who attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan with Mr Khyam (alias “Ausman”). But there is some dispute over whether he was shown the right surveillance pictures of Khan in 2004.
Critics of MI5 say it should have been able to join the dots. The House of Commons' Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) concluded last year that the decision not to give Khan greater priority was, given limited resources, “understandable”. Not everyone is convinced, however, that the committee saw all the material the security agencies had. Rather than agreeing to an independent inquiry, Tony Blair, the prime minister, has asked the ISC to take another look instead.
The Pakistan Connection
As MI5 went back through its records, it found it had other information on Khan (but under a slightly different spelling) dating back to 2003, when he was identified as a “facilitator” for extremists in Pakistan. Mr Khyam, too, had originally come to the attention of counter-terrorism officials in 2003 as a suspected “courier” carrying cash and outdoor equipment for Kashmiri militants. Clearly the security agencies had, and still have, great difficulty in identifying who, among the many sympathisers and supporters of jihadi causes abroad, will make the transition to carrying out attacks in Britain. There is no obvious profile of a suicide-bomber, and both Mr Khyam and Khan were comparatively well integrated into British society.
AFP ...and training in Pakistan.
A central factor in radicalising some British Muslims has undoubtedly been Britain's involvement in the war in Iraq, but other factors are at play. Militant preachers, and the proliferation of jihadi websites and internet chat rooms, have helped to create a climate in which many Muslims accept al-Qaeda's simple unifying narrative: Muslims across the world are being attacked, from Algeria to Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya and Kashmir; Muslims everywhere must therefore rise up against their principal oppressor, America, and its fellow Western “crusaders”.
Security sources say jihadi activity has moved away from mosques to clubs, gyms and private homes, where it is harder to monitor. The internet has proved to be an “ungoverned space” where al-Qaeda and its followers have thrived. On April 23rd, a British court started hearing the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism overseas. They include Younis Tsouli, of Moroccan origin, who is alleged to be a prolific internet propagandist going by the name of “Irhabi 007”, or “Terrorist 007”. He and another suspect are also accused of conspiracy to murder in a case linked to suspects arrested in Bosnia. “Of all the things I have seen over the past few years,” says Mr Clarke, “one of the most worrying has been the speed and apparent ease with which young men can be turned into suicidal terrorists.”
Self-starting terrorism is an ever-present danger. But over several investigations, counter-terrorism officials have usually found direct links leading back to Pakistan, often to al-Qaeda figures. Key British suspects travel back to Pakistan for training and indoctrination. Mr Khyam and Khan are alleged to be linked, through a British middleman, to Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the alleged number three in al-Qaeda, who was taken to Guantánamo Bay last week.
This is both reassuring and alarming. It indicates that, for the moment, British networks still need outside help. At the same time, it shows that al-Qaeda has regenerated itself despite its eviction from Afghanistan and the killing or arrest of several key figures. Its networks, says Mr Clarke, “are large, fluid, mobile and incredibly resilient”. Counter-terrorism experts disagree on what is more important: the “push” provided by al-Qaeda leaders seeking to mastermind attacks in the West, or the “pull” of local extremists who adopt al-Qaeda's ideology and modes of action.
Either way, in Britain al-Qaeda has found an easy source of recruits. Sometimes they are amateurish, but even unsophisticated attacks can cause devastation. In any case, security sources say, other networks are learning from the mistakes of their peers, and from the information gleaned in court prosecutions.
The British government has reorganised its counter-terrorism effort. Four joint police and MI5 regional offices are being established to strengthen counter-terrorism work outside London. Meanwhile, the Home Office is losing responsibility for probation and prisons to a separate ministry of justice, freeing it, in theory, to focus on security, terrorism and immigration. Within the department a special office for security and counter-terrorism has been created, while the prime minister will chair monthly meetings of a national security committee.
The Struggle for Muslim Allegiance
However, the problem goes far beyond the security bureaucracy. The effort to counter radicalisation in Britain has barely begun. The secretary of state for communities and local government, Ruth Kelly, has announced a “hearts and minds” campaign. It includes strengthening moderate imams and preventing mosques from being taken over by extremists.
But extremist thinking is often best confronted on its own terms. In countries such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the authorities send Muslim scholars into prisons to try to convince jihadi detainees that their actions run counter to Islamic jurisprudence. In Britain, though, prisons are still a recruiting ground for jihadi groups.
Those fighting terrorism are acutely aware that much of their work, based on intelligence, is regarded with suspicion. Tensions with many Muslims have been exacerbated by raids, searches and incidents such as the shooting of a man (accidentally, say police) during a raid in the Forest Gate neighbourhood of London in 2006, when police searched in vain for evidence of a chemical bomb.
Counter-terrorism officials feel frustrated that the succession of court cases, such as the conviction of Mr Khyam and his fellow plotters, is failing to build more public trust. Partly this is because it can take two years for cases to come to court, and partly it is because of legal restrictions on public reporting before trials (and increasingly during and even after them, to avoid prejudicing other prosecutions).
Greater public trust is vital to improving the flow of information about extremists. For the moment, says Mr Clarke, most terrorism-related investigations begin with intelligence gathered from foreign governments, intelligence agencies or electronic eavesdropping. In other words, many Muslims are reluctant to report co-religionists to the police, even if they disagree with their militant views. Unless the code of silence is broken, more bombers will inevitably get through.
This was no idle bravado from disenchanted Muslims. Omar Khyam, now 25, and six fellow plotters had stashed away 600kg of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, the main ingredient for one or several remote-controlled bombs. At one point, during a conversation in a house in west London, one plotter asked: “Bruv, you don't think this place is bugged, do you?” No, replied Mr Khyam: “Do you know, I think we give them too much credit, bruv.”
As it turned out, their words were being recorded by Britain's domestic intelligence agency, MI5. The fertiliser had been secretly switched with an inert substance, and an MI5 agent posed as a receptionist at the storage centre where it was kept.
Mr Khyam was arrested within weeks, as he was preparing to leave for Pakistan. Six others were also arrested, and an eighth suspect is awaiting trial in Canada. During a trial lasting more than a year, the court heard of other possible targets, such as blowing up the British Parliament (“a joke”, claimed Mr Khyam). On April 30th, Mr Khyam and four other suspects were sentenced to life in prison. Two others were acquitted.
“Operation Crevice”, as the investigation was known, was at the time the biggest anti-terrorist operation in Britain. At its peak in February and March 2004, it consumed some 34,000 man-hours of intelligence and police work. The plotters' homes and cars were bugged, hidden cameras recorded them in internet cafés and undercover agents followed their movements around the clock.
The British authorities' ability to neutralise the bombing campaign is an important success, but it will also be remembered for a catastrophic failure: two of the four suicide-bombers who blew themselves up in London on July 7th 2005, at first said to have come “out of the blue”, had in fact been spotted with Mr Khyam's gang several times. But they were thought to be peripheral and were not followed up.
Relatives of some of the 52 victims want an independent inquiry into the London bombings. The government says this would “divert” the security services from their real job of seeking terrorists. MI5 took the unusual step of issuing a detailed rebuttal of “myths” surrounding the case. “The Security Service will never have the capacity to investigate everyone who appears on the periphery of every operation,” said its head, Jonathan Evans.
The Limits of Intelligence
In contrast with the small, tightly organised bombing cells of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which did everything to protect their own and often gave warnings to reduce casualties, MI5 and the police now have to contend with an opposite threat: a diffuse nebula of overlapping jihadi groups, ready to destroy themselves in order to kill as many people as possible. “We are seeing networks within networks, connections within connections and links between individuals that cross local, national and international boundaries,” said Peter Clarke, the head of the counter-terrorism branch of London's Metropolitan Police, on April 24th. More than 100 people are currently awaiting trial in Britain on terrorism charges. But in Mr Clarke's view, “The only sensible assumption is that we shall be attacked again.”
Britain is a particularly attractive target for global jihadists because of an unfortunate coincidence of factors: its prominence as America's ally in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fact that al-Qaeda's resurgent core leadership, based in Pakistan's frontier region, has easy access to the thousands of Britons who visit their ancestral country every year.
Other Western governments are closely watching developments in Britain. Europeans are worried that their own Muslim minorities could become radicalised as al-Qaeda seeks to exploit other diaspora links—Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain and Italy, Turks in Germany. The violent re-emergence of Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (known by its French acronym, the GSPC), which has rebranded itself as al-Qaeda's branch in the Maghreb, is particularly alarming. Muslims farther south, across the largely ungoverned Sahara desert, might be indoctrinated, trained and sent back to Europe.
For America, the worry is that “clean skin” European citizens, with no known record of radicalism, could be used to attack the United States. The alleged conspiracy last summer to blow up as many as ten aircraft flying between London and the United States with liquid explosives, if proven in pending trials, would reinforce the belief that al-Qaeda has regenerated and is growing again in ambition.
The first line of defence is intelligence, not least because very little information on extremists is being provided by Muslim minorities. In Britain MI5 is expanding substantially, from 1,800 staff in 2001 to a projected 3,500 in 2008. But the number of suspected terrorist networks is growing exponentially, roughly doubling every year since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, MI5's recently departed head, said in November that her service was tracking more than 1,600 known active militants (up from 250 in 2001, according to a parliamentary report). Those extremists operated in a pool of perhaps 100,000 sympathisers who, according to one poll she cited, thought the London bombings were justified. Referring to a popular British television series about MI5, Dame Eliza said: “I wish life were like ‘Spooks’, where everything is (a) knowable and (b) soluble by six people.”
In fact, surveillance uses manpower intensively. Dozens of people are required to keep track of a single suspect 24 hours a day. Those deemed to pose a “threat to life” take precedence, but these days there are so many of them that MI5 has to decide which threat to life appears to be the most acute. Indeed, some security officials suspect al-Qaeda may be deliberately flooding Britain with terrorist plots in the hope of overwhelming its defences.
Shadows on the Path
Operation Crevice was a turning point in the British authorities' understanding of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Until early 2004, the main terrorist danger to Britain was deemed to come from extremists outside the country. At most, some British Muslims were thought to be supporting such groups abroad and sometimes setting out to join them in jihad.
PA Khyam inspecting the fertiliser...
In April 2003 two Britons of Pakistani descent set off explosive belts outside a beach-front bar in Tel Aviv, killing three Israelis. At the time, says Mr Clarke, Britain was “a net exporter of terrorism”. The worst fears of the police came true on July 7th 2005, when four Britons (three of Pakistani descent, one of West Indian) blew themselves up on the London Underground and on a bus. Although security forces had been expecting attacks, the fact that they were dealing with suicide-bombings came as a surprise. Just a month earlier the Joint Intelligence Committee, which draws up assessments from information gathered by several intelligence services, had concluded that suicide-attacks were not likely and would not become the norm in Europe. After all, the Madrid bombs in 2004 had been detonated with mobile telephones, while Mr Khyam and his plotters also planned to use a remote-controlled device.
More surprises were to come. During the investigation into the July 7th bombings (and into the alleged attempted bombings two weeks later), MI5 soon discovered that the two main instigators of the successful attack, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, had crossed their path before, particularly on the fringes of Operation Crevice. Khan had been spotted on five separate occasions and had even been followed, but was not identified. MI5 picked up some of Khan's conversations with Mr Khyam, and said these dealt mainly with financial scams. But a transcript shows that during one rambling conversation they also talked about doing “operations” from Pakistan. At one point Khan asks Mr Khyam: “Are you really a terrorist, eh?”
After the arrest of the Crevice plotters in March 2004, MI5 drew up a list of 55 suspects who had come into contact with Mr Khyam's group. Fifteen were deemed “essential” targets; Khan and Tanweer were on the lower-priority list of 40 “desirable” suspects who should be followed up when resources permitted.
By July 2004, however, MI5 and the police diverted their manpower into another, even bigger investigation in which one suspect, Dhiren Barot, a Hindu convert to Islam, pleaded guilty last November to planning several possible attacks and received a 40-year prison sentence. Mr Barot had considered a series of attacks, including a radioactive “dirty bomb” and a plot to blow up limousines filled with gas cylinders in London. He had also planned attacks in America. Six others have pleaded guilty to assisting him, while a seventh alleged conspirator is standing trial.
Mr Clarke admitted that at the time of Mr Barot's arrest police did not have any evidence admissible in court. Only at the end of the 14-day detention period then allowed by law did police find the required evidence on Mr Barot's computers.
By the time of the London bombings in July 2005, investigators still did not know (or had not tried hard enough to find out) Khan's name. The first clues came from the wreckage of the London Underground. A SIM card identified a smashed mobile telephone as belonging to one of the men who had been in contact with Mr Khyam (although at the time the owners of pre-paid phones did not have to provide identity details). The picture from a passport found at the site was circulated among surveillance staff, who identified Khan as one of those seen during Operation Crevice. After the London bombings Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani-American computer programmer now in jail in America on terrorism-related charges, identified newspaper pictures of Khan as someone called “Ibrahim”, who attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan with Mr Khyam (alias “Ausman”). But there is some dispute over whether he was shown the right surveillance pictures of Khan in 2004.
Critics of MI5 say it should have been able to join the dots. The House of Commons' Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) concluded last year that the decision not to give Khan greater priority was, given limited resources, “understandable”. Not everyone is convinced, however, that the committee saw all the material the security agencies had. Rather than agreeing to an independent inquiry, Tony Blair, the prime minister, has asked the ISC to take another look instead.
The Pakistan Connection
As MI5 went back through its records, it found it had other information on Khan (but under a slightly different spelling) dating back to 2003, when he was identified as a “facilitator” for extremists in Pakistan. Mr Khyam, too, had originally come to the attention of counter-terrorism officials in 2003 as a suspected “courier” carrying cash and outdoor equipment for Kashmiri militants. Clearly the security agencies had, and still have, great difficulty in identifying who, among the many sympathisers and supporters of jihadi causes abroad, will make the transition to carrying out attacks in Britain. There is no obvious profile of a suicide-bomber, and both Mr Khyam and Khan were comparatively well integrated into British society.
AFP ...and training in Pakistan.
A central factor in radicalising some British Muslims has undoubtedly been Britain's involvement in the war in Iraq, but other factors are at play. Militant preachers, and the proliferation of jihadi websites and internet chat rooms, have helped to create a climate in which many Muslims accept al-Qaeda's simple unifying narrative: Muslims across the world are being attacked, from Algeria to Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya and Kashmir; Muslims everywhere must therefore rise up against their principal oppressor, America, and its fellow Western “crusaders”.
Security sources say jihadi activity has moved away from mosques to clubs, gyms and private homes, where it is harder to monitor. The internet has proved to be an “ungoverned space” where al-Qaeda and its followers have thrived. On April 23rd, a British court started hearing the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism overseas. They include Younis Tsouli, of Moroccan origin, who is alleged to be a prolific internet propagandist going by the name of “Irhabi 007”, or “Terrorist 007”. He and another suspect are also accused of conspiracy to murder in a case linked to suspects arrested in Bosnia. “Of all the things I have seen over the past few years,” says Mr Clarke, “one of the most worrying has been the speed and apparent ease with which young men can be turned into suicidal terrorists.”
Self-starting terrorism is an ever-present danger. But over several investigations, counter-terrorism officials have usually found direct links leading back to Pakistan, often to al-Qaeda figures. Key British suspects travel back to Pakistan for training and indoctrination. Mr Khyam and Khan are alleged to be linked, through a British middleman, to Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the alleged number three in al-Qaeda, who was taken to Guantánamo Bay last week.
This is both reassuring and alarming. It indicates that, for the moment, British networks still need outside help. At the same time, it shows that al-Qaeda has regenerated itself despite its eviction from Afghanistan and the killing or arrest of several key figures. Its networks, says Mr Clarke, “are large, fluid, mobile and incredibly resilient”. Counter-terrorism experts disagree on what is more important: the “push” provided by al-Qaeda leaders seeking to mastermind attacks in the West, or the “pull” of local extremists who adopt al-Qaeda's ideology and modes of action.
Either way, in Britain al-Qaeda has found an easy source of recruits. Sometimes they are amateurish, but even unsophisticated attacks can cause devastation. In any case, security sources say, other networks are learning from the mistakes of their peers, and from the information gleaned in court prosecutions.
The British government has reorganised its counter-terrorism effort. Four joint police and MI5 regional offices are being established to strengthen counter-terrorism work outside London. Meanwhile, the Home Office is losing responsibility for probation and prisons to a separate ministry of justice, freeing it, in theory, to focus on security, terrorism and immigration. Within the department a special office for security and counter-terrorism has been created, while the prime minister will chair monthly meetings of a national security committee.
The Struggle for Muslim Allegiance
However, the problem goes far beyond the security bureaucracy. The effort to counter radicalisation in Britain has barely begun. The secretary of state for communities and local government, Ruth Kelly, has announced a “hearts and minds” campaign. It includes strengthening moderate imams and preventing mosques from being taken over by extremists.
But extremist thinking is often best confronted on its own terms. In countries such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the authorities send Muslim scholars into prisons to try to convince jihadi detainees that their actions run counter to Islamic jurisprudence. In Britain, though, prisons are still a recruiting ground for jihadi groups.
Those fighting terrorism are acutely aware that much of their work, based on intelligence, is regarded with suspicion. Tensions with many Muslims have been exacerbated by raids, searches and incidents such as the shooting of a man (accidentally, say police) during a raid in the Forest Gate neighbourhood of London in 2006, when police searched in vain for evidence of a chemical bomb.
Counter-terrorism officials feel frustrated that the succession of court cases, such as the conviction of Mr Khyam and his fellow plotters, is failing to build more public trust. Partly this is because it can take two years for cases to come to court, and partly it is because of legal restrictions on public reporting before trials (and increasingly during and even after them, to avoid prejudicing other prosecutions).
Greater public trust is vital to improving the flow of information about extremists. For the moment, says Mr Clarke, most terrorism-related investigations begin with intelligence gathered from foreign governments, intelligence agencies or electronic eavesdropping. In other words, many Muslims are reluctant to report co-religionists to the police, even if they disagree with their militant views. Unless the code of silence is broken, more bombers will inevitably get through.
Terror and Internet: Mapping Online Jihad by Animesh Roul
Of late, there is a spurt of literatures regarding the threat of ‘online Jihad’ (threat about the use of internet web space in fueling, fostering Jihadi terrorism). Terrorist organizations and their sympathizers do maintain Web sites taking advantage of the unregulated, anonymous, and easily accessible nature of the Internet. Thanks to Web logs, discussion groups and social networking groups and free upload servers where one doesn’t need to hire a webmaster or to book a server space to run the agenda. It is in common knowledge now that they target a variety of audiences to exploit for raising funds, recruitment, and to spread propaganda, even plan and launch attacks and to publicize their mind-blowing results. Even they have web journals like “Technical Mujahid” (first ever released late November 2006 al-Fajr Information Center) with a detailed know-how of computer and Internet knowledge and security designed for terrorists only.
It is a major concern now in Western Counter terror circle. Large chunks of funding have been channelized to track, translate and thwart jihadi plans before they unleash any mayhem. However, it was non existent in US, UK and Europe before 9/11 and it is now under debate in South Asia and SE Asia. Of course fellow CTBlogger and expert Evan F. Kholman has observed earlier in his work(s) [e.g in “The Real Online Terrorist Threat” Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2006] that even CIA and FBI leaderships gave internet a second thought in their activities in the past. But however, they have mended their misgivings soon after. Also works and observations of Gabriel Weimann (Haifa University Professor, Israel) on Online Jihad are noteworthy and kind of path breaking in this regard.
Early last month I had a chance to be part of a discussion on Online Jihad movement, in New Delhi [at a Government funded think tank (April 04: Jihadi Propaganda in Cyberspace]. The deliberation largely focused on the global scenario and how India is vulnerable, who are the players and potential outfits that pose a threat to India and is there an online threat lurking or not in the subcontinent. Though the threat has been acknowledged in the forum, the larger threat is either overlooked or underestimated as the region is yet to witness this kind of development in cyberspace and largely on the premise that Arabic language Jihadi portals won’t have much impact in the Hindi, Urdu and Bengali speaking Jihadi elements (from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). The discussions though touched upon many issue regarding the online threat, possible actors, target groups and last but the least regarding how to monitor and map these phenomenon. Most part of it agreed on the DOS format IP address tracking, to use Alexa.com and Ranking.com to find out Unique users, visting sessions and page views and most importantly geographic locations (physical distribution of memberships/visitors) where most of the hits are coming.
Coincidentaly, when these discussion and brain stormings were underway in Delhi, there has been one important work going on in Singapore which later published as a three page commentary. I would like to highlight Rebecca Givner-Forbes and Clay Shwery’s paper on Mapping the Electronic Jihad (Originally published on April 25, 2007 in RSIS, Singapore). The authors did analysis using Alexa.com’s tools and reached the conclusion that bulk of visits to jihadi websites come from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (with 78 per cent) than previously speculated European countries (4.8 percent), where there are large Muslim Diaspora communities with high internet penetration. The generated data also indicated around forty countries around the globe have some percentage (even if negligible) of representation. However, they didnt provide information on the 10 most influential and important jihadi web forums used in the research.
In an analysis of 10 of the most influential and important jihadi web forums, we observed that 78.1 percent of visits came from Middle Eastern and North African countries. Visits from nations in the Americas were at a distant second, at around 5.9 percent. Visits originating in European countries made up 4.8 percent of the total. Only 1.4 percent of visits to jihadi websites came from East Asia. Roughly 1.5 percent came from Pakistan, and another 1 percent from Australia (the remaining came from countries whose visit numbers on each site were too small to produce data in the alexa.com program).
Although the authors gave a description of ‘intensity of users’ and accepted the limitation of this tool admitting the data derived from the Alexa analysis cannot be precise. Nevertheless, as rightly mentioned elsewhere in the paper, it truly provides some sort of image of these growing virtual jihadi communities.
By mentioning this study along with some of my thoughts here, I would like to spur a discussion and research on this issue here.. It is always ideal to read the transcript of (purported) Osama or Zawahiri videos and audios and tracking web related jihadi activities. Also, it is equally imperative to go underneath, probing who are reading it, who are following the developments, where they are based and how much impact these jihadi websites have on the people.
It is a major concern now in Western Counter terror circle. Large chunks of funding have been channelized to track, translate and thwart jihadi plans before they unleash any mayhem. However, it was non existent in US, UK and Europe before 9/11 and it is now under debate in South Asia and SE Asia. Of course fellow CTBlogger and expert Evan F. Kholman has observed earlier in his work(s) [e.g in “The Real Online Terrorist Threat” Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2006] that even CIA and FBI leaderships gave internet a second thought in their activities in the past. But however, they have mended their misgivings soon after. Also works and observations of Gabriel Weimann (Haifa University Professor, Israel) on Online Jihad are noteworthy and kind of path breaking in this regard.
Early last month I had a chance to be part of a discussion on Online Jihad movement, in New Delhi [at a Government funded think tank (April 04: Jihadi Propaganda in Cyberspace]. The deliberation largely focused on the global scenario and how India is vulnerable, who are the players and potential outfits that pose a threat to India and is there an online threat lurking or not in the subcontinent. Though the threat has been acknowledged in the forum, the larger threat is either overlooked or underestimated as the region is yet to witness this kind of development in cyberspace and largely on the premise that Arabic language Jihadi portals won’t have much impact in the Hindi, Urdu and Bengali speaking Jihadi elements (from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). The discussions though touched upon many issue regarding the online threat, possible actors, target groups and last but the least regarding how to monitor and map these phenomenon. Most part of it agreed on the DOS format IP address tracking, to use Alexa.com and Ranking.com to find out Unique users, visting sessions and page views and most importantly geographic locations (physical distribution of memberships/visitors) where most of the hits are coming.
Coincidentaly, when these discussion and brain stormings were underway in Delhi, there has been one important work going on in Singapore which later published as a three page commentary. I would like to highlight Rebecca Givner-Forbes and Clay Shwery’s paper on Mapping the Electronic Jihad (Originally published on April 25, 2007 in RSIS, Singapore). The authors did analysis using Alexa.com’s tools and reached the conclusion that bulk of visits to jihadi websites come from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (with 78 per cent) than previously speculated European countries (4.8 percent), where there are large Muslim Diaspora communities with high internet penetration. The generated data also indicated around forty countries around the globe have some percentage (even if negligible) of representation. However, they didnt provide information on the 10 most influential and important jihadi web forums used in the research.
In an analysis of 10 of the most influential and important jihadi web forums, we observed that 78.1 percent of visits came from Middle Eastern and North African countries. Visits from nations in the Americas were at a distant second, at around 5.9 percent. Visits originating in European countries made up 4.8 percent of the total. Only 1.4 percent of visits to jihadi websites came from East Asia. Roughly 1.5 percent came from Pakistan, and another 1 percent from Australia (the remaining came from countries whose visit numbers on each site were too small to produce data in the alexa.com program).
Although the authors gave a description of ‘intensity of users’ and accepted the limitation of this tool admitting the data derived from the Alexa analysis cannot be precise. Nevertheless, as rightly mentioned elsewhere in the paper, it truly provides some sort of image of these growing virtual jihadi communities.
By mentioning this study along with some of my thoughts here, I would like to spur a discussion and research on this issue here.. It is always ideal to read the transcript of (purported) Osama or Zawahiri videos and audios and tracking web related jihadi activities. Also, it is equally imperative to go underneath, probing who are reading it, who are following the developments, where they are based and how much impact these jihadi websites have on the people.
Monday, May 07, 2007
The Amazing Deception in the Muslim Brotherhood's Charm Offensive by Douglas Farah
Almost since the beginning of the current debate over the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and engagement vs. confrontation policy with the “moderate” group, one theme has been repeated by those who favor dialogue with the group. Unfortunately, the central argument is a fabrication, spun by the Muslim Brothers seeking to blunt the history of its support for violent jihad.
The campaign to portray the Brotherhood as a moderate, non-violent political force is predicated on the notion that the Brotherhood has turned away from the radical teaching of Sayyid Qutb and embraced a more moderate theology that now supposedly holds sway. Unfortunately, this line, while demonstrably untrue, has been seized on by academics and policy makers anxious for some type of engagement with the “moderate” Muslim world.
In a nutshell, the argument, put forth by Leiken and Brooke in their controversial Foreign Affairs piece, as well as James Traub in the New York Times Magazine and others is this: That the radical tract Milestones , written from prison by Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb calling for violent jihad against non-Muslims, particularly the West, and apostate Muslim regimes, has been repudiated, at least tacitly, by the current Brotherhood.
Replacing Milestones, the argument goes, was a book written by a fellow prisoner named Hassan al-Hudaybi called Preachers, Not Judges.
As Leiken and Brooke wrote, “But from his own (prison) cell, Hudaybi disputed Qutb’s conclusion. Only God, he believed, could judge faith…Within the Brotherhood, Hudaybi’s tolerant view, in line with (Hassan al-Banna’s) founding vision-prevailed, cementin the group’s moderate vocation.”
This is a strange argument, given that Milestones has been in print since 1964, in many languages. It is printed in the United States, taught as part of curriculum of various Islamist groups here, and has been one of the best selling books of all time in Arabic.
In contrast, Preachers was printed twice, in 1977 and 1985, in Arabic, was not printed in other languages and has not appeared anywhere in Arabic world since 1985.
(Much of the following, including finding and passing on the key texts, was initially done by Patrick Poole, whose research, who went further and faster on the topic than I did and will have a more lengthy piece forthcoming shortly. Additional information and insights were provided by other readers, who found what I had, and what Patrick elaborated on).
But there is a far larger problem with Preachers. Hudaybi never wrote Preachers. Poole and others have unearthed academic findings written before 9-11, that is, before the Brotherhood was fighting the image of the primary organization from which almost all violent Islamist movements spring, showing that Preachers can credibly be attributed to Egyptian intelligence, written to divide the Brotherhood members jailed by the Egyptian regime.
At a conference held at Georgetown University in March on the theme of Islamist Politics: Contemporary Trajectories in the Arab World, Barbara Zollner, Director of Islamic Studies at Birbeck College, University of London, summarize her extensive research on the subject of Hudaybi and his role, as follows:
“There are a number of writers who argue that Du’at la Qudat, (Preachers, not Prophets), when it was published in the 1970s… that it is an evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood’s turn away from radical thinking, and that it evidences a shift of the Muslim Brotherhood’s stance towards a centrist Islamist ideology…What I want to say today are two things. Overall my argument is that Preachers, Not Judges was not written by Hassan al-Hudaybi, and secondly, it is not written as a response to Sayyid Qutb.”
Dr. Zollner noted that:
“As we know all you have to do is go on their [the Muslim Brotherhood] website today you still have a sub-section where Qutb is referred to and reference is made to his work; Qutb is still held in the Brotherhood’s memory, the Brotherhood did not turn away or against Qutb. To say that it that the Muslim Brotherhood issued a refutation in the 1970s rejecting Qutbian thinking, that would contradict exactly that.”
Zollner’s research, along with that of Sayed Khatab of the University of Melbourne, Australia, found is that rather than being the product of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, the book was most likely a collaborative effort by the Egyptian security apparatus and scholars of Al-Azhar University.
In his 2001 work titled “Al-Hudaybi’s Influence on the Development of Islamist Movements in Egypt,” (The Muslim World, Fall, 2001) , Khatab quotes a series of 1995 interviews by Brig. Gen. Fu’ad Allam, an official of the Security Apparatus of the (Egyptian) State from 1962-1971. In it, Allam describes how the state security apparatus wrote the book in part to divide the Brotherhood members in prison, using Khatab’s son as a key interlocutor.
As Khatab wrote: “With regard to the reliability of Allam’s claims, neither Hudaybi, his son nor al Azhar have decided to challene Allam’s account. We may thus presume it is accurate.”
I would argue that the Brotherhood, in granting access to selected scholars and journalists in an effort to make their case for moderation, planted the Preachers story of rejection of radicalism as a deliberate part of their ongoing campaign of deception. They were banking, correctly in the initial phases, that no one could dig up the relatively obscure text that is in Arabic and long out of circulation, and so would simply take the Brotherhood statements as fact.
A good strategy, as it netted them the results they hoped for. A lie exposed late will often live on. I would bet we see the Brotherhood canard repeated again and again. Denial and deception on our part is a lost art. Too bad the Brotherhood keeps honing its skills in that department.
The campaign to portray the Brotherhood as a moderate, non-violent political force is predicated on the notion that the Brotherhood has turned away from the radical teaching of Sayyid Qutb and embraced a more moderate theology that now supposedly holds sway. Unfortunately, this line, while demonstrably untrue, has been seized on by academics and policy makers anxious for some type of engagement with the “moderate” Muslim world.
In a nutshell, the argument, put forth by Leiken and Brooke in their controversial Foreign Affairs piece, as well as James Traub in the New York Times Magazine and others is this: That the radical tract Milestones , written from prison by Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb calling for violent jihad against non-Muslims, particularly the West, and apostate Muslim regimes, has been repudiated, at least tacitly, by the current Brotherhood.
Replacing Milestones, the argument goes, was a book written by a fellow prisoner named Hassan al-Hudaybi called Preachers, Not Judges.
As Leiken and Brooke wrote, “But from his own (prison) cell, Hudaybi disputed Qutb’s conclusion. Only God, he believed, could judge faith…Within the Brotherhood, Hudaybi’s tolerant view, in line with (Hassan al-Banna’s) founding vision-prevailed, cementin the group’s moderate vocation.”
This is a strange argument, given that Milestones has been in print since 1964, in many languages. It is printed in the United States, taught as part of curriculum of various Islamist groups here, and has been one of the best selling books of all time in Arabic.
In contrast, Preachers was printed twice, in 1977 and 1985, in Arabic, was not printed in other languages and has not appeared anywhere in Arabic world since 1985.
(Much of the following, including finding and passing on the key texts, was initially done by Patrick Poole, whose research, who went further and faster on the topic than I did and will have a more lengthy piece forthcoming shortly. Additional information and insights were provided by other readers, who found what I had, and what Patrick elaborated on).
But there is a far larger problem with Preachers. Hudaybi never wrote Preachers. Poole and others have unearthed academic findings written before 9-11, that is, before the Brotherhood was fighting the image of the primary organization from which almost all violent Islamist movements spring, showing that Preachers can credibly be attributed to Egyptian intelligence, written to divide the Brotherhood members jailed by the Egyptian regime.
At a conference held at Georgetown University in March on the theme of Islamist Politics: Contemporary Trajectories in the Arab World, Barbara Zollner, Director of Islamic Studies at Birbeck College, University of London, summarize her extensive research on the subject of Hudaybi and his role, as follows:
“There are a number of writers who argue that Du’at la Qudat, (Preachers, not Prophets), when it was published in the 1970s… that it is an evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood’s turn away from radical thinking, and that it evidences a shift of the Muslim Brotherhood’s stance towards a centrist Islamist ideology…What I want to say today are two things. Overall my argument is that Preachers, Not Judges was not written by Hassan al-Hudaybi, and secondly, it is not written as a response to Sayyid Qutb.”
Dr. Zollner noted that:
“As we know all you have to do is go on their [the Muslim Brotherhood] website today you still have a sub-section where Qutb is referred to and reference is made to his work; Qutb is still held in the Brotherhood’s memory, the Brotherhood did not turn away or against Qutb. To say that it that the Muslim Brotherhood issued a refutation in the 1970s rejecting Qutbian thinking, that would contradict exactly that.”
Zollner’s research, along with that of Sayed Khatab of the University of Melbourne, Australia, found is that rather than being the product of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, the book was most likely a collaborative effort by the Egyptian security apparatus and scholars of Al-Azhar University.
In his 2001 work titled “Al-Hudaybi’s Influence on the Development of Islamist Movements in Egypt,” (The Muslim World, Fall, 2001) , Khatab quotes a series of 1995 interviews by Brig. Gen. Fu’ad Allam, an official of the Security Apparatus of the (Egyptian) State from 1962-1971. In it, Allam describes how the state security apparatus wrote the book in part to divide the Brotherhood members in prison, using Khatab’s son as a key interlocutor.
As Khatab wrote: “With regard to the reliability of Allam’s claims, neither Hudaybi, his son nor al Azhar have decided to challene Allam’s account. We may thus presume it is accurate.”
I would argue that the Brotherhood, in granting access to selected scholars and journalists in an effort to make their case for moderation, planted the Preachers story of rejection of radicalism as a deliberate part of their ongoing campaign of deception. They were banking, correctly in the initial phases, that no one could dig up the relatively obscure text that is in Arabic and long out of circulation, and so would simply take the Brotherhood statements as fact.
A good strategy, as it netted them the results they hoped for. A lie exposed late will often live on. I would bet we see the Brotherhood canard repeated again and again. Denial and deception on our part is a lost art. Too bad the Brotherhood keeps honing its skills in that department.
European GPS Rival Transmits First Navigation Data by Wolfgang Gruener
Galileo, a European project that aims to create a civilian global navigation infrastructure, has reached a major milestone as the European Space Agency (ESA) today reported that the Giove-A satellite has transmitted the first navigation message.
Giove-A is the first of 30 satellites that the ESA and the European Commission plan to deploy at an altitude of 23,222 km to build “Galileo”, a global navigation system that is compatible with the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS. However, while Galileo will be compatible with these two older systems, it does not have a military background and is intended to secure Europe’s independence from GPS and GLONASS.
According to the ESA, a first navigation message including a navigation signal and a navigation message was uplinked to Giove-A on May 2 from the Guildford ground station. The organization explained that the message was similar to those that will be sent by the operational Galileo system and contained the information needed to measure the distance from the satellite to the user receiver.
Giove-A has been transmitting general signals since January 12 of last year, ESA said.
According to the organization, Galileo will be able to provide navigation data with an accuracy of about 1 meter or about 3 ft. When fully installed, Galileo will consist of 30 satellite, organized at an inclination of the orbital planes of 56 degrees. 27 of the satellites will be operational and three will act as active spares. ESA expects that the navigation system will provide coverage up to the North Cape.
Galileo is expected to be fully deployed by 2012, with operation beginning in 2008. Compared to today’s GPS, Galileo will also have a commercial component, allowing technology firms to create fee-based, “value-added” services for the system.
Giove-A is the first of 30 satellites that the ESA and the European Commission plan to deploy at an altitude of 23,222 km to build “Galileo”, a global navigation system that is compatible with the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS. However, while Galileo will be compatible with these two older systems, it does not have a military background and is intended to secure Europe’s independence from GPS and GLONASS.
According to the ESA, a first navigation message including a navigation signal and a navigation message was uplinked to Giove-A on May 2 from the Guildford ground station. The organization explained that the message was similar to those that will be sent by the operational Galileo system and contained the information needed to measure the distance from the satellite to the user receiver.
Giove-A has been transmitting general signals since January 12 of last year, ESA said.
According to the organization, Galileo will be able to provide navigation data with an accuracy of about 1 meter or about 3 ft. When fully installed, Galileo will consist of 30 satellite, organized at an inclination of the orbital planes of 56 degrees. 27 of the satellites will be operational and three will act as active spares. ESA expects that the navigation system will provide coverage up to the North Cape.
Galileo is expected to be fully deployed by 2012, with operation beginning in 2008. Compared to today’s GPS, Galileo will also have a commercial component, allowing technology firms to create fee-based, “value-added” services for the system.
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