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| Africa North |
| Saving the Libyan Islamists |
| 2011-03-21 |
| 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 Libya’s 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 |
| #2 Sudan was relatively quiescent on the jihadi front internationally because it was Fixed it for you, Zhang Fei. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2011-03-21 16:47 |
| #1 It would be amusing if Obama, in choosing to intervene from 50,000 feet, removes Gaddafi only to see Islamists take over. I have always been against intervention because I saw Gaddafi as the lesser of two evils. Intervention without ground troops runs the risk of enabling a Taliban state with its own oil reserves. Some might argue that we already have that in Saudi Arabia. Not true. We're not concerned about the troglodyte tendencies of the population so long as their leaders don't allow anti-American terrorist groups to train on their soil for things like 9/11. We invaded Afghanistan not because they were (and are) 7th century troglodytes, but because they helped bin Laden kill 3000 Americans. It's not all bad. The Sudan is an Islamist oil-producing state and it's not sponsoring* terrorists to strike at US targets. The problem is that the Sudan wasn't a leading source of al Qaeda-ists striking at US troops in Iraq. Libya was. Whatever they put in Libya's water, it seems to be - at the present time - a real font of Muslim revanchists of the kind who are willing to kill large numbers of people to make their point. * One could argue, of course, that Sudan was relatively quiescent on the jihadi front internationally because it was fending off threats of internal secession with the animist, Christian and racially-black south. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2011-03-21 14:26 |