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Al-Qaeda's star is falling in Iraq but rising in the Maghreb
Grit, determination, an eleventh-hour change of tactics and the Sunni tribal movement helped America to avoid the defeat in Iraq that seemed perilously close less than two years ago. Al-Qaeda is not so much fighting to beat America in Iraq but to survive. Increasingly, say Western officials, foreign fighters now prefer to take themselves to Pakistan. But counter-terrorism experts worry about the consequences of America's success. Might Iraq now start exporting seasoned veterans, as Afghanistan did in the 1990s? Optimists say the danger is less acute than many fear, for three reasons. First, many of the foreign jihadists went to Iraq on a one-way ticket: to die as suicide-bombers. Second, governments are more aware of the danger of returning jihadists. And third, Zarqawi's death seems to have removed the main impetus behind exporting Iraq's violence. Zarqawi's decision to bomb three hotels in Amman in November 2005 backfired badly, causing a wave of revulsion, especially in his native Jordan. Among the bombed-out ruins of his hideout, American forces found a letter from a man calling himself Atiyah who said he spoke on behalf of the whole of al-Qaeda's leadership. Written just weeks after the Amman bombs, it warned Zarqawi that his actions were alienating potential supporters. He risked repeating the jihadists' ruinous bloodletting in Algeria during the 1990s when, Atiyah said, "their enemy did not defeat them, but rather they defeated themselves, were consumed and fell." The savagery of the Algerian jihad took the lives of more than 100,000 people through the 1990s. The worst of the fighting was waged by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which denounced democracy and embraced jihad as the only means to power. The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), broke away in 1998. It had always been close to al-Qaeda, with strong links to fighters in Iraq. In September 2006, thanks in part to matchmaking by Zarqawi, the GSPC rebranded itself as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and introduced suicide tactics, attacking a series of foreign targets, including the United Nations office in Algiers. It also kidnapped Western tourists in Mauritania and Tunisia. The jihadists use the vast expanse of the Sahara to train recruits from across the region. Other al-Qaeda offshoots have emerged, for instance, in Yemen and Lebanon. Whether these franchises will fare any better than Algeria's earlier kind of jihadism, or than the troubled one in Iraq, remains to be seen. Mr Jazairi, for one, thought the bombings in his native Algeria were "sheer idiocy". Better to fight in Iraq, he said. Still, it may be only a matter of time before AQIM, in particular, leaps across the Mediterranean into Europe. Posted by: Fred 2008-07-18 |
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