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The New Mastermind of Jihad
A taste.
A recently freed Islamist thinker has long advocated small-scale, independent acts of anti-Western terror

Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Islamist gunman who hunted down three Jewish children and a rabbi after murdering three French paratroopers in Toulouse last month, didn't act alone. In his journey from the slums of Toulouse, to the local mosques, to the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan that he described to French police, to filming his murder of the terrified children in order to post video clips on the web, Mr. Merah was following a path marked out years earlier by the coldblooded jihadist theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri.
According to the baby naming sites, Musab is an uncommon name in Islamic communities. It is a masculine name of Arabic origin and is said to mean 'Undefeatable'. In Islamic belief Musab was the name of a 'Sahabah', a disciple of the prophet Mohammed. Perhaps that last is why al Zarqawi's full nom de guerre was Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
Once called "the most dangerous terrorist you've never heard of" by CNN, Mr. al-Suri, whose real name is Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, served in the days before 9/11 as the facilitator who took Western reporters to meet with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Photographs of him from those trips show a well-built man with pale white skin, a red beard and blue eyes who--Afghan garb aside--would not look out of place in an Irish pub or a cafe in Brussels.

Mr. al-Suri's plans for a wave of "individual jihad" in the West are contained in "A Call to a Global Islamic Resistance," a 1,600-page book that he published on the Web in 2005, shortly before he was apprehended in Pakistan with a $5 million CIA bounty on his head. The manifesto combines strikingly clearheaded historical analysis with trenchant commentary on what he saw as two decades of strategic and operational failures by jihadists. The destruction of the World Trade Center was a short-term public-relations success for al Qaeda, Mr. al-Suri conceded, but American cruise missiles had made short work of the group's havens in Afghanistan, and Western special forces and intelligence agencies had decimated the ranks of its fighters and crippled the global jihadist movement.

What Mr. al-Suri learned from the Afghan debacle and from al Qaeda's subsequent defeat in Iraq was that jihadists were all but helpless in battle against modern Western armies. In place of old-fashioned hierarchical terror organizations, which had failed, he called for a global struggle in which shadowy motivators and facilitators would prompt jihadists to train and arm themselves in independent, self-generating terror cells that would target Western civilians. His goal: a relentless campaign of exemplary acts of violence under a single ideological banner, culminating in the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Read the whole thing. Also click on each name to see more articles on the gentleman in the Rantburg archives -- we've been following his exploits for quite some time. And for the really curious, Mr. al-Suri has a nice write-up in Wikipedia.

Posted by: trailing wife 2012-04-12
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=342603