Abu Musab al-Suri
February 9th, 2010
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Jarret Brachman, Abu Musab al-Suri Still Matters Online, 6 Feb 2010 "Al-Suri’s work is still running rampant through the forums"
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Why Algeria’s Jihadist defectors don’t matter
September 22nd, 2009
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Jarret Brachman and Jihadica have both been covering the “revisions” (i.e. Jihadi self criticisms) of the largely defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (PDF). This has been widely presented in the media as a case of a group merged into al-Qaida breaking out again, in protest of bin Ladin’s extremism. A very appealing idea, but not at all true.
In fact, the group of jailed leaders now issuing “revisions” (supported & publicized by the Libyan state) is not representative of the group that has merged into al-Qaida. Most (all?) of them never took part in the decision of others, still at large, to join bin Ladin post-9/11. They may well have opposed it from the start, even though LIFG-AQ relations were good throughout the 90s. In sum, the “revisionists” are not so much pulling back from AQ as advising their former comrades-in-arms to do so. Quite significant, still, from a “war of ideas” standpoint, but not what it’s been made out to be.
* * *
This “revisions” business is now an old game, whether formally portrayed in those terms or not. First, it was the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiya, then various hardliner “Sahwa” clerics in Saudi Arabia (eg. Salman el-Awda), then sections of the Jihad Islami, Ayman el-Zawahiri’s group — most notably & recently, Seyyid Imam el-Sharif, its former ideologue-in-chief and a Jihadi star theorist. And now the Libyans.
Interesting fact: they’re not the first Maghrebi Jihadis to recant. Long before that, we’ve seen Abdelhaqq Laayada (fmr. GIA head) and Hassan Hattab (GSPC founder), as well as most of the ex-FIS leadership (Ali Belhadj still won’t budge) back down from their challenge to the Algerian state. But that hasn’t got much attention outside of the country, despite Algeria’s civil war having been a major scene of Jihadist activity in the 90s (in fact a formative influence on much of the London & Afghanistan-based travelling Jihadi ideologue circus: Abu Qatada, Abu Moussab el-Suri. etc). Why is that?
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The main reason is probably that the global Jihadi movement had its fingers burned in Algeria at an early date. The country’s politics have always been quite incomprehensible to outsiders, as well as to Algerians, and no less so to Jihadis. The bin Ladin/Zawahiri kind of people — the Salafi Jihadi mainstream if you will — pulled away from the conflict already about 1996, when the GIA began its descent into total madness (they ended up declaring that 99.9% of Algerian Muslims were apostates and should be put to death; it was a pretty hard sell, propaganda-wise). International Jihadis were understandably cautious in engaging with the country after that. You’ll recall it took until 2006 for the GIA’s comparatively sane breakout faction, GSPC, to gain approval as an AQ wing (AQIM), despite it having signalled the intention to join much earlier.
Another reason is the level of manipulation of Islamists by the Algerian secret services. Now, the wild accusations of certain Algerian exiles, who (profess to) believe that the entire war was staged by the DRS to scandalize those poor Jihadi boy scouts, don’t seem to have much currency in the global movement — there, Algeria seems to be cited more as an example of a good cause gone bad, due to takfiris taking command, than as a case of hostile manipulation. But certainly, even disregarding the local conspiracy mania, there was a lot of infiltration, provocation and false flag operations in Algeria. Presumably the change of heart among Algeria’s militant Islamists has lost some of its effect on outside Jihadis, because it could so easily (and sometimes correctly) be explained away as just another conspiracy.
More crucial, however, was the political and deeply corrupt character of the war — not at all the glorious Jihad its adherents had hoped it would become. The true believers among the Islamist warriors never gave up. They’re still at it, in the mountains of Kabylie, and in the deep Sahara. But of the movements and leaders that formed in the early 90s, and ran the main fighting, most have withdrawn ungracefully in deals with the government. Many of these people, formerly self-proclaimed Jihadi purists, now seem to live quite comfortable lives, rubbing elbows with their former enemies. Some of them regularly appear in the media (which, while freewheeling otherwise, tends to be well-monitored on serious security issues) to throw accusations at Algeria’s enemy du jour – like Laayada, who comes forth to tell of Moroccan support for his madcap movement every other week. What they aren’t much doing, on the other hand, is to formulate a serious religious response to Jihadism, i.e. attacking the concept of war against the rulers in Algeria on its theoretical/theological merits. Probably because they never managed to formulate many such arguments in favor of it, either, back when they were fighting — they just ran with what poured in from the ideologues in London and Saudi Arabia. And that’s the fourth reason: their “revisions” aren’t even proper counter-arguments, they’re just defections from a manifestly failed cause.
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The shadowy dealings of the state, the gruesome war and its amoral aftermath, and the way patronage has supplanted ideology for so many former Jihadi luminaries, has contributed greatly to the air of nihilist resignation that rules today’s politically devastated Algeria. This is also the case for pro-Jihadi non-Algerians looking at the country’s Islamist scene from the outside: they’re not going to like what they see. The defections of Hattab, Medani Mezrag, Rabeh Kbir, Laayada and others have much local importance, because of the ties these men have or had to local opposition movements, armed or otherwise. But their “revisions” are at heart shallow political arguments, meaningful only in a local Algerian context. And that context, i.e. the Algerian civil war, inspires, from the very start, a sense of disgust and weariness among Jihadis and anti-Jihadis alike. This being the case, Algerian Islamists turning in their weapons and accepting a government amnesty — as they’ve been doing at irregular intervals for over ten years now — is not going to have any serious impact outside the country at all, until it gets to the point where the Islamist rebellion is extinguished altogether.
So, to conclude: the news, however untrustworthy, of Mokhtar Belmokhtar readying to turn himself in, are of course welcome for anyone who hopes to see al-Qaida’s North African franchise crash and burn. But the effect of that and other defections will be local (on his Saharan network), national/regional (he’s a widely known name in AQIM), but not at all global or ideological in a wider sense.
Categories: Arab Blogs Abu, Afghanistan, Algeria, Ali Belhadj, GIA, group, hassan hattab, jihad islami, Jihadi, London, Sahara, Saudi Arabia, Sharif, Suri, War
Hamas cracks down on Islamist extremists in Rafah
August 16th, 2009
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At noon prayers yesterday in a mosque in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah, a salafist (Islamist extremist) preacher called Abdul-Latif Musa made a fiery appearance surrounded by heavily armed guards– and the Hamas police in the city cracked down hard on this show of defiance.
A lengthy gun-battle ensued, in which, according to Ehab Al-Ghussain, the spokesman of the PA interior ministry in the Gaza Strip, Musa, nine of his supporters, six Palestinian police officers, and six civilians were killed.
Some other reports said two of the dead were young girls– also, that around 120 people were injured in these firefights. Another report said that among those killed in the fighting was Mohammed al-Shamali, the Hamas military chief for southern Gaza,
Musa was the head of a small faction, called Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the partisans of God), which was generally affiliated with Al-Qaeda and first surfaced in Gaza in mid-2008. JAA militants were reported as having acted for some months as a tough ‘morality police’ at various places in the Strip, threatening to close internet cafes and other public places and terrorizing Gazans sitting in mixed groups on the beach, etc.
In June, they launched a fairly large-scale– but unsuccessful–attack against the Israeli crossing point at Nahal Oz. In it they used suicide bombers riding horses and trucks.
In today’s JAA action, Musa and his armed followers went into the mosque in Rafah and announced the establishment of an “Islamic emirate (princedom)” in Gaza, under his control.
This open challenge to the authority of the elected Hamas government in the Strip made a Hamas crackdown inevitable. In his announcement Ghussain said that Interior Ministry officials and local preachers and Ulamas had previously “tried to convince the militants to return to the straight way, and to lay down their arms but to no avail.”
Ghussain also said that Musa “had good relationship and coordination with the PA security forces in Ramallah city [and accused] those forces of attempting to destabilize peace and order in the besieged Strip after they failed to enter the tiny Strip.”
For their part, the newly elected Central Committee of Fateh blamed Hamas for having allowed all kinds of foreign fighters to enter into the Gaza Strip.
There has been no suggestion, however, that Musa himself is not Palestinian, and no evidence that any of his followers are (were) non-Palestinian, apart from one of his aides, known as Abu Abdullah al-Suri, said to be a Palestinian from Syria.
The tensions between on the one hand Hamas and on the other Al-Qaeda and its affiliates go back a long way. Al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman Zawahiri has frequently criticized Hamas for being far too moderate. For their part, Hamas’s leaders have always been at great pains to differentiate themselves from Al-Qaeda.
Indeed, the content of Hamas’s programs is very different from Qaeda’s. Hamas has numerous very experienced social-service arms that have provided much-needed services to Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere for many years now. It actively supports the inclusion of women in public life (and has four elected women MPs.) Oh yes, it also participates in elections at both the local and national levels, and has expressed a clear desire to be included in the US-led peace diplomacy in the region.
Also, Hamas has shown its ready and willing on numerous occasions to abide by a ceasefire with Israel, sometimes on a unilateral basis, sometimes on an indirectly negotiated reciprocal basis, and sometimes– as since last January– on the basis of an exchange of un-negotiated ceasefires with Israel.
The JAA’s demonstrated willingness to break that ceasefire and thus risk bringing the wrath of Israel’s military once again upon all of Gaza must have been a special concern for the Hamas leaders.
How should westerners think about an organization like Hamas that cracks down, with apparent success and at considerable cost to itself, on an armed salafist organization like the AAJ?
Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation observed today that, “Anywhere else but in the Israel-Palestine context Hamas would be the US ally getting training, equipment, and covert ops help, and Washington would mount a PR campaign to explain why Hamas is the moderate alternative fighting Al-Qaeda.”
He pointed, by way of example, to Sec. Clinton’s recent meeting in Nairobi with Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. The US military waged a tough war against the Islamic Courts Union, which Sheik Ahmed heads– until it became clear that the ICU was the only force in Somalia capable of standing up against the extreme-Islamist Al Shabaab movement.
But Palestine is different. There, the dictates of US politics have determined– until now– that the US government has to continue to quarantine, exclude, and actively oppose Hamas.
The JAA’s emergence in Gaza over recent months is not really a surprise. Hamas was indeed weakened to a noticeable extent by the assault Israel launched against it– and the whole of gaza– last winter. Israel inflicted some non-trivial damage on the police formations with which Hamas has tried to police its side of the border and of the ceasefire, though now, seven months later, they have had some time to rebuild.
Many westerners and Israelis have expressed the hope in the past that if only Hamas could be weakened, then the forces of the US-backed Fateh movement would get stronger. That has always been a dubious proposition. The well-informed International Crisis Group has warned for some time (e.g. in this March 2008 report) that if Hamas gets weakened in the Gaza Strip, then the forces that take up the slack are far more likely to be Islamist groups that are far more extreme than Hamas, rather than Fateh.
That report also noted that after Hamas’s expulsion of Fateh’s armed forces from the Strip the preceding June, Hamas was able to restore public security to those areas of the Strip that, while Fateh was there, were riddled with various forms of crime, inter-clan feuding, and other violence.
Over the past 4-5 years Hamas has made some significant moves towards a political/diplomatic stance of considerably more flexibility than hitherto. Including, it participated in– and succeeded in– the PA’s parliamentary elections of 2006.
But over that same period, Hamas’s most significant political base, in Gaza, has been subjected to repeated hardships, attacks, and gross indignities. So from the sociological/psychological viewpoint, too, it is not surprising that some Gazans are tempted to start criticizing the Hamas leaders from the extremist viewpoint.
Categories: Arab Blogs Abdul-Latif, Abu, Ahmed, Al Shabaab, Al-Ghussain, Clinton, Daniel Levy, Gaza Strip, God, hamas, Israel, mohammed, morality police, Musa, Nairobi, Oz, Palestine, Qaeda, Rafah, Sheik Ahmed, Sheik Sharif Sheik, Somalia, southern Gaza, suicide bombers, Suri, Syria, US, Washington
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