Farrall in Foreign Affairs:How al Qaida Works

With no coherent ideology or manhaj to encourage unification under his leadership, bin Laden instead pursued a predatory approach. He endeavored to buy the allegiance of weaker groups or bully them into aligning with al Qaeda, and he attempted to divide and conquer the stronger groups. In the late 1990s, he tried and failed to gain control over the Khalden training camp, led by the militants Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Abu Zubaydah, and over the activities of Abu Musab al-Suri and Abu Khabab al-Masri, senior militant figures who ran their own training programs. Bin Laden’s attempts in 1997-98 to convince Ibn al-Khattab, a Saudi militant who led an international brigade in Chechnya, to come under al Qaeda’s banner also failed. His efforts in 2000-2001 to gain control over a brigade of foreign fighters in Afghanistan met a similar fate: the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who had supreme authority over the brigade, instead handed the leadership of it to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, another group bin Laden was attempting to convince to align with al Qaeda. Around the same time, bin Laden also unsuccessfully lobbied the Egyptian Islamic Group and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group to join al Qaeda’s efforts. And although al Qaeda supported the militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in his establishment of an independent training camp in Afghanistan, bin Laden was unable to convince him to formally join the organization.

The only real success during this period was al Qaeda’s mid-2001 merger with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s second-in-command. The merger was possible thanks to Egyptian Islamic Jihad’s weakened position and its reliance on bin Laden for money. The decision was nevertheless contentious within Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and several of its members left rather than join with al Qaeda. In the end, al Qaeda’s only successful merger during its Afghanistan years added just five people to its core membership. Compared to this dismal record, the past decade has been highly successful….

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First, I’d like to say congratulations to Ms. Farrall who has been working hard researching the nuances of ideological, theological, tactical and organizational differences and personal rivalries that existed within the mutable and murky subterranean world of professional Islamist revolutionaries. It’s important work. Her recognition in FA is deserved and American terrorism experts should give her arguments close scrutiny.

Secondly, I will say her article shows the extent to which our takfirist enemies, not just al Qaida,  take seriously the ideas behind their global insurgency and that, to them, it is both global and local. The “internationalist” jihadis like Bin Laden seek to weld themselves together with the parochial “Nationalist-Islamists” and David Kilcullen’s local “accidental guerrillas” with a “eucumenical” radical Islamism. As many USG officials seek to ignore or promote an official line of ignoring the ideological and theological motivations of our enemies, they will probably dismiss Farrall unless she gains enough media prominence that this is no longer feasible – at which point, they will make nasty and anonymous criticism about her on background to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Thirdly, Farrall has a very important point here when she wrote:

….They drew from takfiri thought, which justifies attacking corrupt regimes in Muslim lands, and on materials that outline the Muslim requirement to target the global enemy: in this case, the United States and the West. (This was framed in the context of defensive jihad, the need for which was reinforced by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.) The hybrid ideology and manhaj that emerged make little distinction between targeting local enemies and targeting global ones and have a one-size-fits-all solution — jihad. Partnering with al Qaeda does not, therefore, require a local group to abandon its own agenda, just broaden its focus. This helped assuage other groups’ fears that merging with al Qaeda would mean a loss of autonomy to pursue their own local goals.

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