Cracks in the Jihad

Global Jihad Evolving Into Conventional Criminality

Thomas Rid has written an interesting piece in the latest Wilson Quarterly on the current state of jihad and the decline of Al Qaeda. Below is a summary of some of the more interesting observations.

1. Al Qaeda's popularity in the islamic world is falling quite dramatically.

In the years since late 2001, when U.S. and coalition forces toppled the Taliban regime and all but destroyed Al Qaeda’s core organization in Afghan­istan, the bin Laden brand has been bleeding popularity across the Muslim world. The global jihad, as a result, has been torn by mounting internal tensions.

2. Jihadism has now split into three distinct ideological and organisational niches. Al Qaeda has been unable to spread itself across all three, or link all three together.

The first niche is occupied by local Islamist insurgencies, fueled by grievances against “apostate” regimes that are authoritarian, corrupt, or backed by “infidel” outside powers (or any combination of the three). Filling the second niche is terrorism-cum–organized crime, most visible in Afghanistan and Indonesia but also seen in Europe, fueled by narcotics, extortion, and other ordinary illicit activities. In the final niche are people who barely qualify as a group: young second- and third-generation Muslims in the diaspora who are engaged in a more amateurish but persistent holy war, fueled by their own complex personal discontents.

Al Qaeda’s challenge is to encompass the jihadis who drift to the criminal and eccentric fringe while keeping alive its appeal to the Muslim mainstream and a rhetoric of high aspiration and promise.

It is a challenge that Al Qaeda has failed to meet, and will likely continue to do so.

3. The outcome of the "war" in Afghanistan is now made irrelevant, since it will not affect in any significant way, the splintering of these three niches, nor Al Qaeda's inability to coalesce them into a coherent global jihad.

The most visible divide separates the local and global jihadis. Historically, Islamist groups tended to bud locally, and assumed a global outlook only later, if they did so at all. All the groups that have been affiliated with Al Qaeda either predate the birth of the global jihad in the early 1990s or grew later out of local causes and concerns, only subsequently attaching the bin Laden logo. . . .

By joining Al Qaeda and stepping up violence, local insurgents have long risked placing themselves on the target lists of governments and law enforcement organizations. More recently, however, they have run what may be an even more consequential risk, that of removing themselves from the social mainstream and losing popular support.

This is what happened to Al Qaeda in Iraq during the Sunni Awakening, which began in 2005 in violence-ridden al-Anbar Province [in Iraq] and its principal city, Ramadi. Al Qaeda had declared Ramadi the future capital of its Iraqi “caliphate,” and by late 2005 it had the entire city under its control. But even conservative Sunni elders became alienated by the group’s brutality and violence. One prominent local leader, Sheikh Sattar Abdul Abu Risha, lost several brothers and his father in assassinations. Others were agitated by the loss of prestige and power to the insurgents in their traditional homelands. In early 2006, Sattar and his sheikhs decided to cooperate with American forces, and by the end of the year they had helped recruit nearly 4,000 men to local police units. “They brought us nothing but destruction and we finally said, enough is enough,” Sattar explained.

4. Local islamic jihadi groups are increasingly branding Al Qaeda as un-islamic.

One after another, former firebrand imams, in so-called revisions, have started questioning the theological justifications of holy war. The trend may have begun with Gamaa al-Islamiya, Egypt’s most brutal terrorist group, which was responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 and the slaughter of 58 foreign tourists in Luxor in 1997. As the Iraq war intensified during the summer of 2003, several of Gamaa al-Islamiya’s leaders advised young men not to participate in Al Qaeda operations and accused the organization of “splitting Muslim ranks” by provoking hostile reactions against Islam “and wrongly interpreting the meaning of jihad in a violent way.”

Another notable revision came in September 2007, when Salman al-Awda, an influential Saudi cleric who had previously declared that fighting Americans in Iraq was a religious duty, spoke out against Al Qaeda. He accused bin Laden in an open making terror a synonym for Islam.” Speaking on a popular Saudi TV show on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, al-Awda asked, “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed . . . in the name of Al Qaeda?”

Other ideologues have followed, including Sajjid Imam al-Shareef, one of Al Qaeda’s founding leaders, who used the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl. “Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers,” he wrote in the London-based newspaper Asharq Al Awsat.

5. Local tribal concerns bear most weight and importance in Afghanistan. In fact, so localised and splintered is the country that one can speak of valleys, rather than tribes, as the primary identity of locals.

In the remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan that produce many of today’s radicals, however, local and tribal affiliations are powerful. One U.S. political adviser who worked in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, a hotbed of the insurgency, describes prevailing local sentiment as “valleyism” rather than nationalism. It is a force that drives the tribes to oppose anybody who threatens their traditional power base, foreign or not—a problem not just for the Taliban and Al Qaeda but for any Afghan government.

Remind us again why the US is fighting a war in Afghanistan?

6. Young disaffected Muslims who are part of the diaspora in Europe are susceptible to Al Qaeda's global jihad propaganda.

The grievances and motivations of European extremists and the rare American militants tend to be idiosyncratic, the product of unstable individual personalities and a history of personal discrimination. Many take the initiative to join the movement themselves, and because they are not recruited by a member of the existing organization, their ties to it may remain loose.

7. Many isolated jihadi groups are morphing into criminal gangs.

A budding insurgency has only a limited window of opportunity to grow into a serious political force. If the cause withers and loses its popular gloss, what remains as a rump may be nothing but a criminal organization, attracting a following with criminal energy rather than religious zeal, thus further damaging jihad’s status in the eyes of the broader public. For some groups, this already appears to be happening. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb funds itself through the drug trade, smuggling, extortion, and kidnappings in southern Algeria and northern Mali. Indonesia’s Abu Sayyaf Group and the Philippines’ Jamiyah Islamiyah engage in a variety of criminal activities, including credit card fraud. The terrorist cell behind the 2004 Madrid bombings earned most of its money from criminal activities; when Spanish police raided the home of one of the plotters, they seized close to $2 million in drugs and cash, including more than 125,000 Ecstasy tablets, according to U.S. News and World Report.

If the analysis Rid presents is accurate it implies that responses to jihad need to reflect actual local conditions and the kind of jihad being promoted and by whom, and will therefore vary widely from locale to locale. The remaining threat would appear to be disaffected islamic youth throughout Europe and counter terrorism efforts should focus upon them. It is likely that increasingly these recruits will turn to more traditional forms of lawlessness and crime.

Local terrorist insurgencies, such as Hamas, should be largely ignored as far as concerns over global jihad are concerned. After all, Hamas executed Al Qaeda operatives pronto when they turned up in Gaza.