Al-Qaeda’s star is falling in Iraq but rising in the Maghreb
Jul 17th 2008
THE “Islamic State of Iraq”, as al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies in that country like to call themselves, pumps out a stream of triumphant videos showing its fighters blowing up American Humvees. But these days the swagger has gone as the jihadists have been greatly weakened by the Americans and Sunni tribesmen. Their predicament was summed up in an interview by a man calling himself Abu Turab al-Jazairi. Described as one of al-Qaeda’s leaders in northern Iraq, the movement’s last bastion, he acknowledged losing several cities “because a large number of tribal leaders betrayed Islam”. And some of al-Qaeda’s fighters “got carried away with murdering and executions”.
One of America’s justifications for invading Iraq in 2003 was that Saddam Hussein was supporting al-Qaeda. That claim, like the one that he had weapons of mass destruction, has been discredited. In fact, it was the invasion of Iraq that revived al-Qaeda after its eviction from Afghanistan in 2001. By early 2006, America’s National Intelligence Assessment on terrorism concluded that the Iraq conflict was “breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement”.
The war in Iraq has cost the lives of more than 4,000 American soldiers, done grievous harm to the country’s reputation and run up a bill of hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions of dollars. Al-Qaeda can claim a large part of the credit for inflicting this damage. It grafted itself onto a local Sunni insurgency and carried out many of the bloodiest suicide-bombings that wrecked the prospect of an early political settlement and provoked a sectarian war.
In June 2006 American forces tracked down the organisation’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and killed him in a bombing raid on his hideout north of Baghdad. Even so, a bleak Marine Corps intelligence report in the summer of 2006 found that American and Iraqi troops were “no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in Anbar”.
Al-Qaeda hoped to create a base in the heart of the Islamist world from where it could extend the war to neighbouring countries and, ultimately, take on Israel itself. An intercepted letter to Zarqawi in October 2005 from Mr Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s co-founder, predicted that the Americans would withdraw “soon” and urged him to prepare to fill the void. But Mr Zawahiri also advised Zarqawi, who was known as “Sheikh of the Slaughterers” because he liked to behead enemies, to go easy on the bloodletting because it was putting off ordinary Muslims.
Al-Qaeda had initially been welcomed as a champion of the Sunni cause against the Americans and the Shia. But many Sunnis soon came to see the organisation as a brutal imposition, killing anybody it considered a traitor or insufficiently pious. Some tribes in Anbar province had tried to turn against al-Qaeda in 2005, but their leaders were killed.
When Colonel Sean MacFarland of the 1st Armoured division took charge of Ramadi, Anbar’s capital, in early 2006, he felt that the city was in “enemy hands”. To retake it he needed more Iraqi recruits, so he decided to woo local leaders who had wasta, or influence. His first task was to protect those sheikhs who had moved over to the Americans. They became the conduits of American humanitarian assistance. In neighbourhoods where security was improving, the Americans also got the infrastructure repaired and the machinery of government restored.
The Americans and their new Iraqi allies pushed into al-Qaeda’s strongholds, retaking Ramadi neighbourhood by neighbourhood, combining American firepower and Iraqi knowledge. This started a virtuous circle in which tribal sheikhs felt secure enough to join in, in turn increasing security. This “Awakening” has since spread beyond the original province of Anbar, pushing al-Qaeda further northward.
The other engine of violence in Iraq, Shia sectarian killings, has also lost power, thanks to American security measures and the ceasefire declared by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical cleric, in August 2007. Insurgent attacks are now at their lowest level since 2004; the number of American soldiers killed dropped to 19 in May, the lowest monthly total since the invasion of Iraq (see chart 2).
A turn for the better
Grit, determination, an eleventh-hour change of tactics and the Sunni tribal movement helped America to avoid the defeat in Iraq that seemed perilously close less than two years ago. Al-Qaeda is not so much fighting to beat America in Iraq but to survive. Increasingly, say Western officials, foreign fighters now prefer to take themselves to Pakistan.
But counter-terrorism experts worry about the consequences of America’s success. Might Iraq now start exporting seasoned veterans, as Afghanistan did in the 1990s? Optimists say the danger is less acute than many fear, for three reasons. First, many of the foreign jihadists went to Iraq on a one-way ticket: to die as suicide-bombers. Second, governments are more aware of the danger of returning jihadists. And third, Zarqawi’s death seems to have removed the main impetus behind exporting Iraq’s violence.
Zarqawi’s decision to bomb three hotels in Amman in November 2005 backfired badly, causing a wave of revulsion, especially in his native Jordan. Among the bombed-out ruins of his hideout, American forces found a letter from a man calling himself Atiyah who said he spoke on behalf of the whole of al-Qaeda’s leadership. Written just weeks after the Amman bombs, it warned Zarqawi that his actions were alienating potential supporters. He risked repeating the jihadists’ ruinous bloodletting in Algeria during the 1990s when, Atiyah said, “their enemy did not defeat them, but rather they defeated themselves, were consumed and fell.”
The savagery of the Algerian jihad took the lives of more than 100,000 people through the 1990s. The worst of the fighting was waged by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which denounced democracy and embraced jihad as the only means to power. The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), broke away in 1998. It had always been close to al-Qaeda, with strong links to fighters in Iraq.
In September 2006, thanks in part to matchmaking by Zarqawi, the GSPC rebranded itself as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and introduced suicide tactics, attacking a series of foreign targets, including the United Nations office in Algiers. It also kidnapped Western tourists in Mauritania and Tunisia. The jihadists use the vast expanse of the Sahara to train recruits from across the region.
Other al-Qaeda offshoots have emerged, for instance, in Yemen and Lebanon. Whether these franchises will fare any better than Algeria’s earlier kind of jihadism, or than the troubled one in Iraq, remains to be seen. Mr Jazairi, for one, thought the bombings in his native Algeria were “sheer idiocy”. Better to fight in Iraq, he said. Still, it may be only a matter of time before AQIM, in particular, leaps across the Mediterranean into Europe
Jul 17th 2008
THE “Islamic State of Iraq”, as al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies in that country like to call themselves, pumps out a stream of triumphant videos showing its fighters blowing up American Humvees. But these days the swagger has gone as the jihadists have been greatly weakened by the Americans and Sunni tribesmen. Their predicament was summed up in an interview by a man calling himself Abu Turab al-Jazairi. Described as one of al-Qaeda’s leaders in northern Iraq, the movement’s last bastion, he acknowledged losing several cities “because a large number of tribal leaders betrayed Islam”. And some of al-Qaeda’s fighters “got carried away with murdering and executions”.
One of America’s justifications for invading Iraq in 2003 was that Saddam Hussein was supporting al-Qaeda. That claim, like the one that he had weapons of mass destruction, has been discredited. In fact, it was the invasion of Iraq that revived al-Qaeda after its eviction from Afghanistan in 2001. By early 2006, America’s National Intelligence Assessment on terrorism concluded that the Iraq conflict was “breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement”.
The war in Iraq has cost the lives of more than 4,000 American soldiers, done grievous harm to the country’s reputation and run up a bill of hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions of dollars. Al-Qaeda can claim a large part of the credit for inflicting this damage. It grafted itself onto a local Sunni insurgency and carried out many of the bloodiest suicide-bombings that wrecked the prospect of an early political settlement and provoked a sectarian war.
In June 2006 American forces tracked down the organisation’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and killed him in a bombing raid on his hideout north of Baghdad. Even so, a bleak Marine Corps intelligence report in the summer of 2006 found that American and Iraqi troops were “no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in Anbar”.
Al-Qaeda hoped to create a base in the heart of the Islamist world from where it could extend the war to neighbouring countries and, ultimately, take on Israel itself. An intercepted letter to Zarqawi in October 2005 from Mr Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s co-founder, predicted that the Americans would withdraw “soon” and urged him to prepare to fill the void. But Mr Zawahiri also advised Zarqawi, who was known as “Sheikh of the Slaughterers” because he liked to behead enemies, to go easy on the bloodletting because it was putting off ordinary Muslims.
Al-Qaeda had initially been welcomed as a champion of the Sunni cause against the Americans and the Shia. But many Sunnis soon came to see the organisation as a brutal imposition, killing anybody it considered a traitor or insufficiently pious. Some tribes in Anbar province had tried to turn against al-Qaeda in 2005, but their leaders were killed.
When Colonel Sean MacFarland of the 1st Armoured division took charge of Ramadi, Anbar’s capital, in early 2006, he felt that the city was in “enemy hands”. To retake it he needed more Iraqi recruits, so he decided to woo local leaders who had wasta, or influence. His first task was to protect those sheikhs who had moved over to the Americans. They became the conduits of American humanitarian assistance. In neighbourhoods where security was improving, the Americans also got the infrastructure repaired and the machinery of government restored.
The Americans and their new Iraqi allies pushed into al-Qaeda’s strongholds, retaking Ramadi neighbourhood by neighbourhood, combining American firepower and Iraqi knowledge. This started a virtuous circle in which tribal sheikhs felt secure enough to join in, in turn increasing security. This “Awakening” has since spread beyond the original province of Anbar, pushing al-Qaeda further northward.
The other engine of violence in Iraq, Shia sectarian killings, has also lost power, thanks to American security measures and the ceasefire declared by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical cleric, in August 2007. Insurgent attacks are now at their lowest level since 2004; the number of American soldiers killed dropped to 19 in May, the lowest monthly total since the invasion of Iraq (see chart 2).
A turn for the better
Grit, determination, an eleventh-hour change of tactics and the Sunni tribal movement helped America to avoid the defeat in Iraq that seemed perilously close less than two years ago. Al-Qaeda is not so much fighting to beat America in Iraq but to survive. Increasingly, say Western officials, foreign fighters now prefer to take themselves to Pakistan.
But counter-terrorism experts worry about the consequences of America’s success. Might Iraq now start exporting seasoned veterans, as Afghanistan did in the 1990s? Optimists say the danger is less acute than many fear, for three reasons. First, many of the foreign jihadists went to Iraq on a one-way ticket: to die as suicide-bombers. Second, governments are more aware of the danger of returning jihadists. And third, Zarqawi’s death seems to have removed the main impetus behind exporting Iraq’s violence.
Zarqawi’s decision to bomb three hotels in Amman in November 2005 backfired badly, causing a wave of revulsion, especially in his native Jordan. Among the bombed-out ruins of his hideout, American forces found a letter from a man calling himself Atiyah who said he spoke on behalf of the whole of al-Qaeda’s leadership. Written just weeks after the Amman bombs, it warned Zarqawi that his actions were alienating potential supporters. He risked repeating the jihadists’ ruinous bloodletting in Algeria during the 1990s when, Atiyah said, “their enemy did not defeat them, but rather they defeated themselves, were consumed and fell.”
The savagery of the Algerian jihad took the lives of more than 100,000 people through the 1990s. The worst of the fighting was waged by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which denounced democracy and embraced jihad as the only means to power. The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), broke away in 1998. It had always been close to al-Qaeda, with strong links to fighters in Iraq.
In September 2006, thanks in part to matchmaking by Zarqawi, the GSPC rebranded itself as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and introduced suicide tactics, attacking a series of foreign targets, including the United Nations office in Algiers. It also kidnapped Western tourists in Mauritania and Tunisia. The jihadists use the vast expanse of the Sahara to train recruits from across the region.
Other al-Qaeda offshoots have emerged, for instance, in Yemen and Lebanon. Whether these franchises will fare any better than Algeria’s earlier kind of jihadism, or than the troubled one in Iraq, remains to be seen. Mr Jazairi, for one, thought the bombings in his native Algeria were “sheer idiocy”. Better to fight in Iraq, he said. Still, it may be only a matter of time before AQIM, in particular, leaps across the Mediterranean into Europe
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