ji·had·ica

Lesson From Kismayo

Jean-Pierre Filiu October 6, 2009

(Editor’s note: This post is the last from our guest blogger Jean-Pierre Filiu this time around. He might be back later in the year with occasional articles, but he is now leaving the stage for our next guest. Please join me in thanking Jean-Pierre warmly for his excellent contributions. And if you read French, buy his latest book, which is now out.)

A few days after they emphatically pledged allegiance to Usama Bin Laden, the Somalian Shabab clashed with their jihadi allies from Hizbul Islam in the Southern city of Kismayo. The rebel factions control the port city since August 2008 and were supposedly united in their common fight against the Mogadishu-based Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the African Union peacekeepers. The rift erupted on October 1, when the Shabab started taking over Kismayo port from Hizbul Islam, especially one of its components, the Ras Kamboni brigade. Despite mediation meetings during the last days, the tension appears to run high between the Shabab and Hizbul Islam.

What is fascinating in this Kismayo showdown is a new illustration of the dialectics between global and local jihad. By joining the global realm, even only for propaganda purposes, a jihadi group as the Shabab may try to get the upper-hand over its rival/partner, in that case Hizbul Islam. Hassan Dahir Aweys, the leader of Hizbul Islam, has long worked to incorporate the Shabab in his own organization, and he even strove to take credit for the Shabab’s wave of suicide attacks. But the Shabab refused such a merger and found in the allegiance to Bin Laden the most powerful deterrent to Aweys’ plans. Kismayo quickly became the focus of this new inter-jihadi competition.

A lot has been said and written about the very selective process through which Al-Qaeda decides to lend its franchise to local groups, how it was for instance refused to Fatah al-Islam, while it was eventually granted to the Algerian GSPC, now Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But, since it takes two to tango, one should also question the rationale that leads those groups to try and go global. The Algerian precedent as well as those most recent Somali developments underline the importance of the local dynamics: the more a group wants to stand apart from its local allies, especially under the background of mounting rivalries, the more it will be tempted to identify publicly with Al-Qaeda and its slogans. The global rhetoric can then go hand in hand with intense feuding for local positions of power, like the port of Kismayo for the Shabab. Talk globally (about AQ-led jihad) and act locally (against the rival jihadis) could be the relevant motto for such a process.

Will AQIM Aim North or South?

Jean-Pierre Filiu September 30, 2009

It appears that this year’s Ramadan was one of the least violent in the nearly two decades of jihadi activism in Algeria. While this period is hailed by militants and their leaders as the most propitious one for jihadi attacks, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) was not able to wage a major operation. The threat is still vibrant in the organization’s mountainous strongholds east of Algiers, but AQIM’s ability to strike the capital has been significantly reduced. (By contrast, the relative calm of Ramadan in 2007 was followed by the combined suicide attack against the UN headquarters and the Constitutional Court in Algiers, on December 11). This evolution fits the general trend, documented by Hanna Rogan (see also Thomas’s post on April 3), about the decreasing violent record of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), the Algerian jihadi organization that turned into AQIM in January 2007.

Going global was obviously the option adopted by the GSPC leadership to reverse this trend, but the Al-Qaida boost was only temporary. And Abd al-Malik Drukdal, AQIM’s emir, failed to live by his commitment to energize an “Islamic Maghrib” dynamics: Moroccan and Tunisian jihadi networks are operating out of his realm, while Libyan activists are looking East. So AQIM had to rely on the jihadi networks that the GSPC had already developed in the Sahara, especially in Mauritania. But the control exerted by the AQIM leadership on those desert commandos is debatable: the killing of 4 French tourists in Eastern Mauritania on the eve of Christmas in 2007 probably jeopardized the more ambitious planning of a terror attack against the Paris-Dakar car-race, that was then cancelled.

AQIM dreams of striking the French or Spanish “Crusaders” on their own turf, while Al-Qaida central fuels the anti-European intensity of the jihadi propaganda. But Spanish and French security are well aware of this, and a large number of the jihadi networks dismantled North of the Mediterranean had Algerian connections (Javier Jordan concluded that 13 out of the 28 jihadi cells neutralized in Spain in the four years following the Madrid bombings were linked to GSPC/AQIM). So AQIM, frustrated so far in its “infidel” plotting, and contained in its Algerian safe havens, increasingly looked southward. After years of abducting Western tourists in the Sahara and releasing them against ransoms (quite a profitable activity for a relatively poor organization, see the jihadica posting on February 24), AQIM decided to sharpen its “jihadi” profile and executed a British hostage, at the very end of last May. AQIM also intensified its activities in Northern Niger, and even more in Northern Mali, where it suffered heavy losses in July at the hand of the regular army.

AQIM is therefore facing quite a dilemma: emir Drukdal is focusing his public attacks against the “Crusaders” and what he describes as their puppet or “apostate” regimes in North Africa. His mid-2008 New York Times interview was a fascinating and delusive piece of global rhetoric.

But the organization has to find a way to address the growing confrontation with local forces in the Sahel. Although AQIM has already proclaimed “jihad” against the Mauritanian regime, it is much less vocal about Mali and Niger. The opportunistic logic of global jihad, which exploits any available room to maneuver, can prove hard to package.

Eid News from the Shabab

Jean-Pierre Filiu September 21, 2009

The Somali Shabab al-Mujahidin just released its “Eid gift” to all Muslims: a video dedicated and pledging allegiance to Usama Bin Laden. (The video is also on youtube).

The production is subtitled in English and features the now famous Abu Mansour al-Amriki. One of the targeted audiences is obviously the English-speaking one, which makes sense now that the number of Somali-Americans killed fighting for the Shabab has reached six. But the main message is the commitment to al-Qaida’s global jihad, which  is not new in essence, but was never previously expressed with such emphasis. My initial analysis is that the Shabab, despite its conspicuous allegiance to Al-Qaida’s emir, is meeting the latter halfway, while echoing his harsh attack, last March, against the Somali president. The release of the video may also be an effort to counter the negative impact of the killing of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan on 14 September (even though the video was produced before the US strike).

Calendars

Jean-Pierre Filiu September 12, 2009

So we all managed to survive a new celebration of 9/11. But why should Al-Qaida commemorate 9/11 in the first place? I am not referring to the heavy debates that raged among its leadership about the strategic relevance of striking US territory and that Vahid Brown documented in his landmark study Cracks in the foundation. I am talking about the very un-Islamic way Bin Laden’s network focuses on the number 11 and sticks to the Gregorian calendar.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon opened a series of Al-Qaida suicide bombings on the eleventh day of a Christian month: in April 2002, against the Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba; five years later, in April 2007, against the government palace and two security stations in Algiers; in December 2007, again in Algiers, this time against the Constitutional court and the UN headquarters. And Fernando Reinares described how the Madrid bombings were planned months in advance to take place on March 11, 2004.

But I would welcome any satisfactory explanation to this al-Qaeda obsession with “eleven”. My guess is that it is a sinister branding of a terror outfit that wants indeed to commemorate its major strike on 9/11, while demonstrating its sustained ability to control timing.

The fact remains that al-Qaida keeps on computing time according to the “infidel” enemies’ calendar. The simultaneous attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, on August 7, 1998, were supposed to mark the eight anniversary of the US military deployment on Saudi soil (the same way the Egyptian Islamic Jihad attack against the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, on November 19, 1995, was intended to “celebrate” the eighteenth anniversary of President Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem). And the recent bombings that Al-Qaida in Iraq combined against ministries in Baghdad marked the sixth anniversary of the destruction of the UN headquarters in Iraq by Zarqawi’s group. When jihadis strike, they tend to follow the “kuffar’s” calendar.

By contrast, the references to Islamic calendar are few, seldom operational and sometimes pointless. Ramadan is hailed as the favored month for “jihad”, but it is difficult to prove a systematic surge in violent activity during that period. The two ‘Id, and sometimes the Prophet’s birthday, are often chosen for public display of self-confidence by Al-Qaida leadership. But the most common landmark echoes the battle of Badr that the Prophet won on the seventeenth day of Ramadan, during the second Islamic year. The siege of Tora Bora, in December 2001, matched that Islamic timing, but certainly not what the jihadi propaganda celebrated as “Badr of New York” (9/11) or “Badr of the Maghrib” (the triple suicide-bombing in Algiers in April 2007). And the AQAP attacks in the Saudi capital on November 9, 2003, occurred during Ramadan and were glorified as “the Badr of Riyadh”, but the heavy toll of Muslim casualties generated an anti-jihadi backlash.

So the “eleven” riddle is still to be solved, but the practical acculturation of Al-Qaida, and its deep alienation from Islamic references, seems once more obvious.

Zawahiri, France and Napoleon

Jean-Pierre Filiu September 10, 2009

Allow me to briefly go back to the last Zawahiri interview, put on-line through Sahab media on 5 August 2009. To my knowledge, this is the first time Bin Laden’s deputy has expressed such articulate hatred for France:

“France claims secularism, while her heart pours grudge towards Islam. Napoleon Bonaparte announced his famous statement to the Jews in 1799 in Akka, in which he promised to support the Jews in stealing Palestine. France is the one whose soldiers went with their horses into al-Azhar University and stood on its Qur’anic Books, and they took it as a stable to their horses. France is the one who fought Islam and Arabs in Algeria, and France is the one who supplied Israel with a nuclear reactor, and France fights Muslims in Afghanistan, and France fights hijab, and France will pay for all her crimes”.

Zawahiri has long be known for his French-bashing. In the late eighties, when he launched a vicious campaign against Ahmad Shah Mas’ud among the jihadi community in Peshawar, he accused the Tajik leader to be a French agent and to be surrounded by French women (in fact humanitarian workers who had walked their way up to Panjshir).

In his pamphlets, he repeatedly branded colonial France for carving up the Middle East through the Sykes-Picot agreement. During the Algerian civil war, he endorsed the attacks against the “French party” (hizb Fransa), as the secular camp came to be known in the jihadi propaganda. And he listed consistently the French among the “enemies of Islam”, along with the Americans, the Jews and the British. He was the first one to threaten France in February 2004, after a law banning the veil at government schools was passed.

What is fascinating in Zawahiri’s recent outburst against France is his ideological focus on Napoleon Bonaparte, who was only a general at the time he invaded Egypt in 1798. He insists on the sacrileges perpetrated by the French revolutionary armies (although they were probably more respectful of the Arab mosques than of the European churches) and he gives utmost credit to a “famous” letter to the Jews of Palestine, a standard of anti-Zionist propaganda, that French historians have proved to be a forgery (originating from European messianic Jewish circles). The key to the argument is that Napoleon embodies the innate hostility of France against Islam, in its two secular and Zionist dimensions. France becomes in Zawahiri’s rhetoric a new brand of Crusader state, more “secular” than Christian.

Apart from Zawahiri’s Egyptian obsessions, two other developments could have contributed to this aggressive emphasis against France. First, Barack Obama’s Cairo speech on 4 June makes it more difficult to portray America as waging an all-out war against Islam, no matter how hard jihadis propagandists try, so France provides a welcome alternative target for his secular commitment (that even Obama indirectly criticized in Cairo).

Second, and probably more important, the merging of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) into Al-Qaida as its branch for the “Islamic Maghrib” (AQIM) has introduced more anti-French content to the global jihadi propaganda, with Zawahiri himself taking the lead. (Incidentally, a similar process occurred after the incorporation of Zarqawi’s network in Iraq, when al-Qaida’s media coverage included more anti-Shi’a rhetoric). Drukdal, AQIM’s emir, went as far as labeling France “mother of all evils”, on 30 June this year. And those are not just empty words, since Zawahiri’s “Napoleonic” interview was followed, three days later, by a foiled AQIM suicide attack against the French embassy in Mauritania.

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