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| Terror Networks & Islam |
| Strategypage: Arab Illusions and Modern Terrorism |
| 2004-11-05 |
| Long, but since the webpage is slow, posting the whole text. November 5, 2004: Al Qaeda is more of an idea than an organization, and this has been increasingly the case since September 11, 2001. Efforts to find al Qaeda connections to the Islamic terrorist violence in the last few years has been difficult, and often impossible. While the people behind many recent terror attacks got their start during the 1980s fighting Russians in Afghanistan, that's not where the terrorism comes from. Few Arabs actually fought in Afghanistan, and only about 40 were actually killed. The Afghans did most of the fighting, and the Arabs came in with money, guns and eagerness to get involved. But the Afghans were not interested in taking these eager amateurs into action with them. So Arab volunteers in Afghanistan spent most of their time in Pakistan, posing for pictures and discussing world Islamic conquest. More Arabs died in Afghanistan in the year before September 11, 2001, than during the 1980s. Al Qaeda was a real organization in Afghanistan for a few years, until is was tossed out in late 2001. During that Golden Age, al Qaeda trained thousands of eager Islamic radicals, and got hundreds of them killed trying to keep the Taliban government in power. The Taliban never conquered all of Afghanistan, and in the last few years, their most reliable troops were a brigade of Arab (and other foreigners). These young men were trained, by al Qaeda, in the techniques of terrorism, and then asked to volunteer for a year or so of service in the 55th Infantry Brigade. Many did so, got some combat experience, and then went home to get the Islamic revolution going. But others were killed, or disillusioned at being asked to fight fellow Moslems. It was fairly obvious that the 55th Brigade existed to force other Afghans to submit to Taliban rule. And those other Afghans were all Moslems. The Taliban and al Qaeda insisted that these hostile Afghans were "bad Moslems," but many of the al Qaeda recruits saw through this. |
| Posted by:ed |