• 5–23 January 2003: British police arrested eight men—six Algerians, an Ethiopian, and a Moroccan—and one woman in London. They found equipment for a chemical laboratory and traces of the toxin ricin in one of the raided apartments. The British suspected the group might be tied to Algerian Islamists in France and the Islamist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was allied with al Qaeda.
• 12–15 February 2003: Bahrain’s National Security Agency arrested five al Qaeda–associated Bahrainis for plotting terrorist attacks. It also recovered four AK-47s, two handguns, ammunition, chemical “powders,” and a bomb-making manual on a CD-ROM.
• 13 February 2003: Police in Quetta arrested Mohammed Abdul Rahman, son of jailed Gama’a al-Islamiyya’s spiritual leader Shaykh Omar Abdul Rahman. Bin Laden had cared for him after his father’s arrest in the United States.
• 24 February 2003: Kuwaiti police arrested three Kuwaiti nationals who were planning to attack U.S. military convoys in Kuwait. One had been in Afghanistan in 2001, and all three expressed support for bin Laden after their arrest.
• 1 March 2003: A car bomb killed EIJ leader Abd-al-Sattar al-Masri in Ayn al-Hilwah refugee camp in Lebanon. Al-Masri—true name Mohammed Abdel-Hamid Shanouha—was an explosives expert and an Afghan veteran. He was al Qaeda’s leader in the camp and was killed by the Israelis or their proxies.
• 1 March 2003: Pakistani police arrested al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Shaykh Mohammed in an upscale section of Rawalpindi. They also seized his computer, cell phones, and documents. Mohammed designed the 11 September attacks, was involved in the East Africa and Cole bombings, and participated in Ramzi Ahmed Yousef’s 1995 plot to destroy U.S. airliners flying Pacific routes.
• 1 March 2003: Pakistani police arrested al Qaeda financial officer Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawai. Al-Hisawai funded the 11 September attackers via wire transfers.
• 15 March 2003: Pakistani authorities arrested Moroccan national Yasser al-Jazeri, who, according to U.S. officials, was a “trusted subordinate of Osama bin Laden.” He was responsible for facilitating communications among al Qaeda leaders and was captured in a “posh” neighborhood in Lahore.
• 29 April 2003: In Karachi, Pakistani police arrested Tawfiq bin Attash and Amar al-Baluchi, Khalid Shaykh Mohammed’s nephew. A Saudi citizen of Yemeni origin, bin Attash was a close friend of bin Laden, had fought with him in Afghanistan—where he lost a leg—and had run the attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole. Al-Baluchi was an al Qaeda financial officer and had sent nearly $120,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 11 September attacks.
• 6 May 2003: Saudi security raided an al Qaeda safe house in Riyadh near an expatriate housing compound. The Saudis captured no one but recovered more than eight hundred pounds of explosives, fifty-five hand grenades, dozens of assault rifles, other weapons, disguises, twenty-five hundred rounds of ammunition, and eighty-thousand dollars in cash. Some of the weapons were traced to stocks owned by the Saudi National Guard.
• 31 May 2003: Saudi police killed Yusuf bin Salih al-Ayiri, al Qaeda’s senior propagandist, and captured his deputy Abdullah ibn Ibrahim Abdullah al-Shabrani. The shootout occurred near the town of Ha’il; two Saudi officers were killed and three wounded. Al-Ayiri ran al Qaeda’s Al-Neda Web site and was said to be the group’s “unknown soldier.” The UK-based EIJ exile and specialist on Islamism Hani al-Saba’i said al-Ayiri provided Islamic guidance “for al Qaeda inside the Gulf region.” al-Ayiri was a close friend of bin Laden and traveled on the same plane when al Qaeda’s chief flew from Afghanistan to Sudan in 1991.140
• 12 June 2003: U.S. forces raided and destroyed a base for non-Iraqi mujahedin at Rawah, Iraq, about thirty miles from the Syrian border. The attack killed more than eighty foreign Muslims in Iraq to fight the U.S.-led occupation. Among the dead were Saudis, Yemenis, Syrians, Afghans, and Sudanese.
• 12 August 2003: Thai police arrested JI operations chief Nurjaman Ridwan Isamuddin—a.k.a. Hambali—in Ayuttahya, north of Bangkok. U.S. officials said he played an “important role” in the October 2002 Bali attack and was al Qaeda’s “top strategist” in Southeast Asia. Before Thailand, Hambali lived in the Muslim community of Phnom Phenn, Cambodia, from September 2002 to March 2003. Hambali fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, worked in the 1990s with Khalid Shaykh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, and was one of the few non-Arabs in al Qaeda authorized to make independent decisions.
• 20 September 2003: Pakistani security arrested fifteen Asian Islamic seminary students in Karachi—two Malaysians, thirteen Indonesians—and charged them with being linked to JI.
• 25 November 2003: Yemeni authorities announced the arrest of Abu-Asim al-Makki, a leading member of the al Qaeda organization in Yemen. The Yemenis also announced the earlier arrest of al Qaeda leader Hadi Dalqam.
• 15 and 23 January 2004: In Iraq, U.S. authorities captured al Qaeda operatives Husam al-Yemeni and Hasan Ghul. Ghul was known to have been a senior aide to 11 September planner Khalid Shaykh Mohammed.
• 15 March 2004: Saudi security forces killed two senior al Qaeda operatives—Khaled Ali Ali Haj and Ibrahim al-Mezeini—in Riyadh when they tried to run a roadblock. The dead Yemeni nationals had six grenades, two AK-47s, three 9mm pistols, and $137,000 in cash in their car.
• 31 March–2 April 2004: Ten Islamist fighters were arrested in Canada and Britain after a long police investigation; all were Pakistanis and naturalized Canadians or Britons. British police also seized eleven hundred pounds of fertilizer suitable for making a bomb. UK intelligence sources told the media that the eight men arrested in London were tied to al Qaeda members in Pakistan.
• 4 April 2004: Spanish police cornered six members of the al Qaeda cell that conducted the 11 March 2004 railway bombings in Madrid. The six fighters blew themselves up rather than be captured. The leader of the railway attack—the Tunisian Sarhane Abdelmajid Fakhet—was one of the dead. Police recovered twenty-two pounds of explosives identical to those used in the railway bombing.
• 22 April 2005: The Spanish government began the trial of the reputed al Qaeda leader in Spain, the Syria-born Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas. Yarkas was charged with aiding the 9/11 hijackers, and he, Al-Jazirah journalist Taysir Alouni, and twenty-two others were charged with supporting al Qaeda.141
• 2 May 2005: Reputed al Qaeda third-in-command Abu Ashraf al-Libi (a.k.a. Dr. Taufeeq) was arrested by Pakistani security in Mardan, north of Peshawar. A longtime confident of bin Laden, al-Libi was said to have been in recent contact with the al Qaeda chief and had been serving as al Qaeda’s chief of operations since the capture of Khalid Shaykh Mohammed. Washington said al-Libi’s capture was a “critical victory” in the war on terrorism.142
• 5 June 2005: The library of al-Azhar University, the Muslim world’s oldest, most respected school, became available on the Internet in an effort to “promote a moderate image if Islam” and offset the militant Islamists’ use of only portions of religious texts. Eventually, 6 million pages of rare manuscripts and 37,000 books would be mounted on the site in facsimile and digitized copies.143
• 7 August 2005: Turkish police arrested Syria-born Luia Sakra in southeast Turkey as he tried to board a plane for Istanbul. Sakra was trained in Afghanistan as an explosives expert and was al Qaeda’s chief in Turkey. He was said to have had preknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and to have played a key role in the November 2003 al Qaeda attacks in Istanbul. He recently cooperated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s forces in Iraq.144
• 27 September 2005: Spain’s National Court convicts eighteen of twenty-four al Qaeda defendants, including Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the group’s reputed chief in Spain, and Al-Jazirah journalist Taysir Alouni. Yarkas received a twenty-seven-year sentence for participating in plans for the 9/11 attacks; Alouni was sentenced to seven years from supporting al Qaeda.145
Although not precisely quantifiable, it is unlikely that any Islamist group, or coalition of groups, has ever suffered such a series of setbacks in a comparable period. And mat
ters might have been worse. In late 1997, police in Dagestan arrested EIJ leader Zawahiri and several other EIJ members, including Zawahiri’s number two, Thirwat Shihata, as they crossed the border from Azerbaijan. Zawahiri and his colleagues spent several months in prison but were misidentified because they carried false documents and ultimately were freed when bin Laden sent an operative to purchase their release from his contacts among Dagestani officials. According to Al-Watan Al-Arabi, senior Dagestani officials had been planning to turn the group over to the United States.
In addition, the foregoing does not account for the human, financial, and material resources bin Laden and his allies have expended in Afghanistan and in the Islamic insurgencies they support. This amount of damage done to what the West defines as a “terrorist” group would have caused its demise, or at least its paralysis. This has not happened to bin Laden’s organization, because of bin Laden’s even-keel leadership style, al Qaeda’s structure as an Islamist insurgent vice a terrorist organization and its resulting resilience and capacity for absorbing attrition, and the powerful motivation for devout Muslims—in both theological and historical terms—of the concept of a defensive jihad. In the wake of several severe losses in the 1996–1998 period, for example, bin Laden simply shrugged and told ABC in late 1998, “There are ups and downs in war. One day we win and one day we lose.” In terms of structure, al Qaeda is like Lebanon’s Hizballah, Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, and the Philippine’s Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which are similarly resilient because they are insurgent organizations that have been trained to fight and have been bloodied, in the insurgencies they are waging against Israeli, Sri Lankan, and Philippine armed forces, just as bin Laden’s fighters are gaining combat experience against guerrilla and conventional forces in Kashmir, the Philippines, Kosovo, Chechnya, Dagestan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. As a result, Hizballah, the Tamils, and the Moros, like al Qaeda, always have a “ready reserve” to call on when fighters fall or are captured. Indeed, the fact that guerrilla organizations must have a deep bench to survive, helps to explain U.S. terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman’s marveling in the Los Angeles Times over al Qaeda’s “enormous replicating ability” despite being, as the Washington Post said, “constantly pressured and compromised.” At the same time, al Qaeda’s recuperative powers make the claim of a senior U.S. counterterrorism official “that we’re picking it [bin Laden’s organization] apart limb by limb. We’re not done yet but we will be…. We’ve been winning for a few years now,” sound like nothing so much as an arrogant ninny whistling past the graveyard.146
Not to be lost in the mix, moreover, is the simple but powerful fact that in Islam the prophet Muhammad “preached the legitimacy of war … [and] most orthodox Islamic jurists and theologians would place jihad very high on the scale of religious obligations.” Thus, by articulately appealing to the concept of defensive jihad, bin Laden has tapped a force that amplifies the resiliency and durability of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups. The concept of jihad, Emmanuel Sivan has explained, is an essential element of Islam’s “foundation myth.”
It is indeed in the sphere of motivation that one can detect jihad’s major contribution to the historic Islamic experience of warfare. It has guaranteed for fourteen centuries that wars waged by Muslims against external enemies will almost always be perceived by meaningful segments of the [Islamic] polity as having a transcendental dimension closely interwoven with the “foundation myth” of the culture to which the society belongs.
The motivational dimension of the jihad has not only a cognitive function, but an affective one as well. It ensures a sense of solidarity with one’s own and, almost ineluctably, generates zeal, steadfastness, and readiness for self-sacrifice.147
Even with this demonstrated resiliency, the losses outlined are far from inconsequential. The loss of such senior leaders as Tayyib, Abu Hajir, Talat Fuad Qassim, Mabruk, Khalid Fawwaz, and al-Najjar, as well as talented operatives like Wadih el-Hage, Ibrahim Saqr, and Ibrahim Eidarous, is extremely debilitating and will be felt across the organization for years. Moreover, many of the Islamist fighters apprehended and taken to Egypt were members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, one of bin Laden’s most important allies. Coming either from Zawahiri’s group or the EIJ’s Vanguards of Conquest (VOC) faction, these fighters ranged from foot soldiers to senior leaders. As U.K.-based EIJ leader Hani al-Siba’i has said, the EIJ “had the lion’s share of the security chases, abductions, extraditions, imprisonment, military trials, and death.” In addition to fighters deported to Egypt, Egypt’s security and police forces—using the returnees’ confessions, statements in court, and documents—have struck additional blows against the organizations in Egypt. Soon after the return of the EIJ operatives from Albania and the Caucuses, for example, Egyptian police arrested twenty-two VOC members in the northern al-Sarqiyah Governorate. Then, in late 1998, Egyptian authorities in al-Minuifiyah Province “arrested thirteen members of the [Egyptian Islamic] Jihad organization.” The cell was tied to Albanian returnee al-Najjar, and information about it was disclosed by two of al-Najjar’s fellow defendants. More recently, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that the return to Egypt of three EIJ fighters from the UAE and Kuwait led to the arrest of “23 people suspected of setting up an illegal group in Cairo” with the advice of the EIJ returnees.148 Parenthetically, these domestic arrests again illustrate the appeal of jihadist messages like bin Laden’s to educated Muslims: all twenty-three were “professional people from Cairo’s affluent Al-Ma’adi district.” In terms of Egypt’s internal stability, then, the domestic anti-jihadist operations made possible by information from the “Returnees from Albania” and other Islamist fighters captured abroad are more important than the apprehension of the overseas Egyptian Islamist leaders themselves.149
So severe were the EIJ’s losses of senior leaders that in April 1999, Al-Wasat reported, the question being asked in Cairo was “What is left of the ‘Jihad Organization’?” The journal’s answer was that “Egyptian security services” had concluded that in 1998 the EIJ had “sustained massive losses among its elements and military cadres who belong to the al-Zawahiri generation.” Al-Sharq Al-Awsat also said the Egyptian authorities’ success against “the financial and armament sources abroad for the group’s military elements inside the country … [had] reduced the fugitive leaders’ opportunities for implementing their objectives inside Egypt.” The services warned, however, that the EIJ “does not lack strong fighters, although its condition today can hardly be compared with what it was between 1981 and 1997.”150 In addition, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported in early 1999 that Zawahiri had not taken the setbacks sitting down. The daily said Zawahiri had “established a financial and administrative program for reviving the organization and issued responsibilities to its [EIJ’s] station officers in Yemen, Albania, Azerbaijan, Sudan, and Afghanistan to assist the al-Jihad organization in Cairo in creating a new generation of zealous young fundamentalists.” In Egypt, Zawahiri had an “extensive plan” to revive the EIJ “at the universities.”151
Still, rebuilding takes times and money, and so Zawahiri appears to have made a virtue of necessity, joining bin Laden’s World Front and later apparently merging the EIJ into al Qaeda and agreeing to make U.S. targets the top priority. That said, Zawahiri also had a solid EIJ-specific reason to attack Americans: the EIJ blamed the United States for the capture of some of its most senior operatives. At New Year’s 1999, Zawahiri and the EIJ stood with a score to settle, one that had to be squared to maintain the group’s pride and morale. Zawahiri and the EIJ expressed this motivation, as follows, in communiqués issued in late 1998 and early 1999.
• August 1998: When EIJ members were caught in Albania, the EIJ published a statement called “About the Extradition of Three of Our Brothers.” “We are interested in briefly telling the Americans,” the statement said, “that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being [prepared], because we—with God’s help—will w
rite it in the language they understand.”152
• November 1998: After an EIJ fighter was killed in a gunfight with Albanian police, the EIJ published a statement, titled “The Jihad Announces the Death of One of Its Heroes,” which mixed the EIJ’s eagerness for revenge with the goals of bin Laden’s World Front. “We pledge to Almighty God,” the statement said, “to take revenge against the enemies of this religion…. We remind them [the mujahedin] that this Muslim Mujahid was killed by the United States and its agents…. And revenge for him against the United States and its agents is the duty of every Muslim, because he [the dead EIJ fighter] followed the jihad path just for the sake of defending his nation, on whose Sharia, holy sites, land, and riches the United States has encroached.”153
• February 1999: Citing Kuwait’s repatriation of fifteen Islamists to Egypt in January 1999, an EIJ communiqué said, “We reiterate here that the United States should pay the price for all this: Blood for Blood and destruction for destruction. The United States and its agents are well aware of the Jihad Group, which will not give up retaliation even if a long time passes…. the Jihad Group is aware of the extent of U.S. cowardice and the fact that the so-called superpower is only a myth. The coming days have many things in store.”154
In addition to solidifying the bin Laden-Zawahiri alliance, the actions of bin Laden’s adversaries, especially U.S. actions, focused the Muslim world not on the inherent right of the United States to self-protection—even preemptively—but on what is widely perceived as Washington’s double standard when dealing with Muslims. In this category, the U.S. cruise missile raids on Afghanistan and Sudan appear to have been the primary actions that swung Islamic opinion toward bin Laden in a way that was increasingly sympathetic, if not yet fully approving. In short, bin Laden’s survival into the twenty-first century and defiant response appear to have transformed America’s stealthy and impressive flexing of superpower muscle into a propaganda defeat. In April 1999, Frontline’s unattributed biography of bin Laden described the clarifying effect of the U.S. attacks for an Islamic world already prone to believe that the United States habitually maltreats Muslims.
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