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| Terror Networks |
| Mastermind Revealed |
| 2006-05-23 |
| FROM hideouts in South Asia, the Spanish-Syrian al-Qaeda strategist published thousands of pages of internet tracts on how small teams of Islamic extremists could wage a decentralised global war against the US and its allies. With the Afghanistan base lost, he argued, radicals would need to work primarily on their own, though sometimes with guidance from roving operatives acting on behalf of the broader movement. Last October, Pakistani agents seized Mustafa Setmariam Nasar in a friend's house in the border city of Quetta and turned him over to US intelligence operatives, according to two Pakistani intelligence officials. With Spanish, British and Syrian interrogators lining up to question him, he is a prize catch: he is not a bombmaker or operational planner but one of al-Qaeda's prime theorists for the post-September 11, 2001 world. Counterterrorism officials and analysts see Nasar's theories in action in terrorist attacks in Casablanca in 2003, Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. In each case, the perpetrators organised themselves into local, self-sustaining cells that acted on their own but also likely accepted guidance from visiting emissaries. Nasar's masterwork, a 1600-page volume titled The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance written under the pen name Abu Musab al-Suri, has been circulating on websites. Nasar, 47, outlines a strategy for a global conflict on as many fronts as possible and in the form of resistance by small cells or individuals, rather than traditional guerilla warfare. "The enemy is strong and powerful, we are weak and poor, the war duration is going to be long and the best way to fight it is in a revolutionary jihad way for the sake of Allah," he said in one paper. Intelligence officials said Nasar's doctrine has made waves in radical Islamic chat rooms and on websites about jihad. "He is probably the first to spell out a doctrine for a decentralised global jihad," said Brynjar Lia, a counterterrorism researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, who is writing a book on Nasar. "In my humble opinion, he is the best theoretician among the jihadi ideologues and strategists out there. Nobody is as systematic and comprehensive in their analysis as he is. His brutal honesty and self-criticism is unique in jihadi circles." After the bombings in Madrid and London, investigators fingered Nasar as the possible organiser because he had lived in both cities. But so far, investigators have unearthed no hard evidence of his direct involvement in those attacks or any others. Nasar was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958 and studied engineering. In the early 1980s he took part in a failed revolt by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood against the Syrian strongman, Hafez al-Assad. According to his written accounts, he fled the country after that, then trained in camps in Jordan and Egypt. He arrived in Spain in 1985, married a Spanish convert to Islam, and spent the next 16 years in Europe - where he set up al-Qaeda groups in Italy and France, and attracted the attention of the Spanish and British authorities - and Afghanistan where he forged close ties with the Taliban. In London, he did publicity work for al-Qaeda, helping to arrange interviews with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan for CNN and the BBC. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #5 The salient point isn't the body count, it's whether the majority (preferably large majority) were affiliated with or sympathized with the other side. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2006-05-23 22:15 |
| #4 "Provocative, No?" No. Go amaze your coffee-shop friends. |
| Posted by: Fordesque 2006-05-23 21:19 |
| #3 Provocative? No. Especially since if we were trying to wipe them out, there wouldn't be any left long since. And I think it can be said categorically that Saddam Hussein and his family have lost, those who used to benefit from them being in power have lost, and all those associated with Al Qaeda who've been captured or killed, simply because Osama bin Laden went to an open war footing a decade too soon, have lost. Of course, I'm just a little housewife -- what do I know? Perhaps the CIA open source experts have more substantiated opinions of the winners and losers thus far. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-05-23 16:34 |
| #2 Oh come on, if you're going to base your argument on statistics, at least use ones that haven't been repeatedly debunked. holds up card .... 2.5 on a 10 point scale. |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-05-23 13:58 |
| #1 What can you say about Al-Q? They have killed maybe 6,000 since 2000. The countries in the WOT have killed 100,000 arabs in our quest to wipe them out. Who has really won here? What have they achieved in the past? What are they likely to get in the future? Provocative, No? |
| Posted by: Omoluque Gralet4660 2006-05-23 13:16 |