|
Saving the Libyan Islamists
For weeks as international pressure built against him, Muammar al-Gaddafi insisted again and again that the rebel forces that he was fighting in eastern Libya were linked to al-Qaeda. The mere fact that Gaddafi said it was seemingly enough for virtually all commentators to dismiss the claim out of hand. And in case doubts about the source were not enough, then we had the New York Times to send a reporter to Darnah [1], one of the eastern Libyan towns at the heart of the supposed Islamist uprising, and to assure us that there was nothing to see there, move along.But the problem is that it is not only Muammar al-Gaddafi who has identified the coastal cities of Libyas eastern Cyrenaica region as al-Qaeda strongholds. The analysts of the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point have as well. The findings of the latter are based on the so-called Sinjar Records: captured personnel records identifying foreign combatants who joined al-Qaeda in Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007. (The full study is available online here [2]. The relevance of the study to the current situation in Libya was first pointed out by Andrew Exum in a blog post here Posted by: tipper 2011-03-21 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=318665 |