The 9/11 Wars (28 page)

Al-Sadr was not to appear again in public for many months and was never again to directly engage coalition troops on such a scale. Recognizing that at the very least al-Sistani’s policy of conditional cooperation with the occupation authorities was leading to polls which would inevitably imply a vast shift of power to the Shia, al-Sadr made a strategic choice. ‘The Sadrist movement first resorted to peaceful resistance, then to armed resistance and finally to political resistance. This does not present a problem: every situation requires its own response,’ he told one interviewer.
⁸¹
For the national assembly elections in January 2005 al-Sadr joined the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a grand coalition of Shia parties supported by al-Sistani. The ayatollah told his millions of followers: ‘Voting is a religious duty like prayers and fasting and your abstention constitutes disobedience of God Almighty.’ An aged Iran-born senior cleric who had always refused to meet any representatives of the occupying powers and had simply insisted on nothing more than a rapid move to polls had become American’s greatest helper in the effort to bring democracy to Iraq.
⁸²
Al-Sistani’s assistance was far from unconditional however. His message to Bremer had been simple, acutely pertinent and unanswerable in its logic: ‘You are an American, I am Iranian. Why not let the Iraqi people decide?’

The Shia UIA coalition won 48 per cent of the vote and 140 of the 275 seats available. A total of 23 were won by candidates linked to Muqtada al-Sadr, who, as a self-styled senior cleric, distanced himself from active involvement in electioneering.
⁸³
The respectable moderates of incumbent prime minister Ayad Allawi received 14 per cent of ballots cast. The turn-out was higher than expected even if scores of polling stations were attacked, and the pictures of patient Iraqis standing in long lines protected by local security forces provided a welcome morale boost for increasingly concerned Western populations and politicians. But Iraq’s Sunnis had largely boycotted the vote. In Anbar, less than 2 per cent of those eligible participated. Whether this was from fear or from a genuine disaffection with a process which many Sunnis felt was dominated by their ethnic rivals was unclear. The newly elected body now had to form a government and draft a constitution in an increasingly divided country that continued to slide towards yet worse chaos and violence.

7
Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 Wars

THE 9/11 WARS EXPAND

The invasion of Iraq saw the extension of the 9/11 Wars to an entirely new theatre that previously, if not at peace, certainly had not been an integral part of the conflict. It resulted too in a higher level of overall daily violence, conventional or otherwise, than had yet been seen anywhere or at any time since September 11, 2001. By the end of 2004 more people were dying every month in Iraq than had been killed in any of the bloodiest terrorist attacks of the period excepting those of 9/11 itself.
¹
But the war in Iraq saw more than simply the expansion of the 9/11 Wars in geographic terms to include both south-west Asia and a major state in the core of the Middle East. It provoked a wave of radicalization and mobilization in the Middle East not seen since the Arab–Israeli conflicts of 1967 and 1973. This wave of heightened political consciousness, anger and frustration did not just affect the countries close to Iraq but extended throughout almost the entire Islamic world, exacerbating many of the trends which had contributed to the surge of militancy through the 1990s and the broadening radicalization seen since the 9/11 attacks. It also reinforced the credibility of the extremists’ key message that a belligerent West led by America was set on the subordination, exploitation and humiliation of Muslim lands and it boosted further the image of the extremists as the legitimate defender of a beleaguered community. The images of American tanks in front of mosques in Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium and the scene of some of the most glorious chapters in Islamic history, had enormous emotional impact.
²
According to the Pew Global Attitudes survey, in Pakistan the proportion of Muslims seeing Islam as threatened – often by the West – more than doubled in twelve months to reach a level of 64 per cent in March 2003, in Indonesia the proportion went from 33 to 59 per cent, in Turkey from 35 to 50 per cent. The same poll found that 77 per cent of Moroccans said they felt ‘more solidarity with other Muslims these days’ and 49 per cent said they had confidence in bin Laden to ‘do the right thing in world affairs’.
³

Yet if this new anger was welcome to the senior leadership of al-Qaeda, the situation emerging in the aftermath of the loss of their haven in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq posed serious challenges as well as opportunities. Militant thinkers and leaders, like Western policy-makers and strategists, found themselves struggling desperately to grasp the contours and dynamics of the complex and chaotic new circumstances. The 9/11 attacks had been controversial among extremists, with many within al-Qaeda itself concerned that, by risking the safe haven the group had secured in Afghanistan, they could prove counter-productive. Outside al-Qaeda, the strikes had been by no means universally welcomed, with many long-term militants deeply concerned that the attacks might jeopardize any gains that the extremist movement had made over previous years. When in the aftermath of the Afghan campaign the fractious community of foreign militants in Afghanistan had dispersed they had divided often along ideological lines. A febrile debate was already underway by the summer of 2002 over how best to deal with the coming invasion of Iraq – a development that no extremist ideologue, strategist or propagandist had actually predicted. Though the arrival of large numbers of Western troops to fight a war in the core of the Middle East, particularly in a part of the region with as long and resonant a history as Iraq, was a chance for many radicals to realize long-held strategic aims, the new situation was not without its potential pitfalls. Equally, the new radicalization provoked by the war needed to be successfully managed if it was to benefit the jihadis. In these changed circumstances the thinking that had evolved during the 1990s was clearly no longer relevant. The period of 2002 to 2004 was thus one of particular intellectual activity within militant circles as major ideologues and strategists tried to formulate and impose different responses to the rapidly evolving situation.

The most obvious tension among them pitted once again the global against the local. Two broad schools of thought developed among radicals, with bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, faithful to their vision of al-Qaeda as an overarching, unifying and directing structure for disparate groups and strands, trying to find middle ground and struggling continually to overcome personality clashes, deep ideological divisions, reluctance among many to accept their leadership and the very real practical problems posed even by communicating with other major figures and thinkers in the world of Islamic militancy. The most prominent advocate of the ‘global’ approach, which rejected attempts to carve out actual chunks of ‘liberated’ territory in favour of launching the ultimate decentralized campaign based on individuals and self-radicalizing and self-organizing cells, was the Syrian Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, better known as Abu Musab al-Suri. Those who held true to a more ‘local’ strategy which sought to find, fight for, clear and hold physical bases for jihad and eventually for a new caliphate, were best represented by Jordanian-born Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh, who was to become infamous across the globe under the
nom de guerre
or
kunya
of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
⁴
Both men had been among those who had escaped Afghanistan at the end of 2001, and the ideological contest between them was to be critical in shaping the form of Islamic militancy and thus of the 9/11 Wars over the coming years.

ABU MUSAB AL-SURI

As the bombs had fallen on Tora Bora, al-Suri, forty-three in 2001, had headed west into Iran before looping back to reach the dry mountains and valleys north of the Pakistani city of Quetta by the end of the year.
⁵
Al-Suri appears to have been convinced he was likely to be either captured or killed in the imminent future and thus spent much of his time in an unspecified ‘mountainous retreat’ finishing a huge volume distilling decades of strategic criticism, historical analysis and theory that he hoped would be a template for a new form of structure for the radical Islamic militant movement. The work,
The Call for Global Islamic Resistance
, was finally published on extremist websites in late 2004. It was only then that al-Suri’s significance as one of the primary strategists of contemporary Islamic militancy was genuinely understood in the West.

Al-Suri never fitted the standard stereotype of the extremist, though his route into radicalism was relatively typical of his generation. His long career took him through many of the most significant locations of late twentieth-century Islamic extremism. Born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958 to a well-off, socially conservative and religious family whose economic and social status as well as cultural values were threatened by the new modernizing nationalist, secular Ba’athist regime, al-Suri became involved in underground ‘Islamic resistance’ groups when young.
⁶
Trained as an engineer like so many militants at the time, he escaped the bloody crushing of Syrian Islamists in 1982 and fled first to France and then to Spain, where he married a convert and had three children. By 1988, he was in Peshawar, where, he later claimed, he became involved in the foundation of al-Qaeda and worked as a trainer in camps for the ‘Arab Afghan’
mujahideen
.
⁷
Even at this early stage, his relations with bin Laden were cool. Al-Suri did not like leaders of any type, and his own intellectual curiosity and contrarian spirit contrasted strongly with bin Laden’s carefully cultivated asceticism and dogmatic rigour. After four years spent instructing militants in explosives and urban guerrilla warfare techniques, he left for Spain, where he spent three years in the southern city of Granada before finally arriving in London in 1995.
⁸
In the British capital, he collaborated with Algerian militants and the Jordanian-born radical scholar Abu Qutada, running propaganda operations for the Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA), whose battle against Algerian security forces was reaching a climax.
⁹
Al-Suri, however, broke with GIA leaders over their policy of sowing terror through indiscriminate massacres and started working for other groups active at the time, including al-Qaeda. The decision appears to have been based as much on personal pique as anything else.
¹⁰
By 1998, after a brief incarceration by British police when his involvement with senior active militants including bin Laden was revealed, al-Suri moved with his family to Afghanistan, which he described as ‘the best example of a Muslim state on earth today’.
¹¹
There, he appears to have become close to Mullah Omar. Confident of his own understanding of the West after fifteen years living in Europe and of his standing among fellow militants, al-Suri established his own training camp, prepared propaganda tracts for the Taliban, ran a rudimentary think-tank in Kabul and ‘wrote thousands of pages in ideology, political, military and martial science and sharia studies’.
¹²
He kept away from bin Laden and, he claimed, was unaware of the 9/11 plot. This distance from al-Qaeda was not due to any moderation. In his lectures in Afghanistan he told listeners: ‘Kill wherever and don’t make a distinction between men, women and children.’
¹³
One of the many criticisms he subsequently levelled at the 9/11 attacks was that, if they were going to be done at all, they should have been done properly, i.e. with weapons of mass destruction.
¹⁴
Neither a gifted organizer nor an orator nor a particularly experienced fighter, al-Suri theorized the evolution of al-Qaeda post-9/11 into something much more contemporary, much less conventional and much more effective. ‘Al-Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be,’ he wrote in his 1,600-page final magnum opus. ‘It is a call, a reference, a methodology.’

As mentioned briefly in
Chapter 1
, al-Qaeda had always been in part a ‘methodology’. The word al-Qaeda itself comes from the Arabic root
qaf-ayn-dal
and, though it can mean ‘a base’, as in a camp or a home, a military installation, a foundation such as that beneath a house or a pedestal that supports a column, it has a range of other meanings as well.
¹⁵
It can, for example, be used to indicate the revolutionary vanguard envisaged by early thinkers and activists – the
al-qaeda al-sulbah
– and, crucially, can also mean a precept, rule, principle, maxim, model or even pattern.
¹⁶
The al-Qaeda phenomenon had always incorporated these three elements, a physical base, the vanguard or leadership element and a free-floating worldview and ideology. These elements had interacted with each other in a dynamic way, each becoming more dominant depending on the circumstances, each influencing the others’ evolution. In the 1988–96 period, without a base or a coherent ideology, al-Qaeda had largely meant its senior leadership, the vanguard. From the return to Afghanistan until the end of 2001, as al-Qaeda acquired a geographical base, this latter physical element came to acquire much greater significance. Through this period too the ideology of al-Qaeda was honed and then disseminated, first through press conferences, tapes and press releases and then increasingly through acts of spectacular violence such as the strikes against American embassies in east Africa, on the USS
Cole
and finally in America in September 2001. In 2002, 2003 and 2004, with the physical structures of the group overrun and the leadership scattered, it was logical that the ideological component of al-Qaeda would take its turn as dominant. Al-Suri’s thinking not only shaped the evolution of al-Qaeda or international violent Islamic extremism in the early years of the twenty-first century but described it too.