ji·had·ica

Fizazi Letter Published

Thomas Hegghammer October 29, 2009

Der Spiegel has just published a full version of Fizazi’s letter, as well as a good article by Yasin Musharbash and Andreas Ulrich.

Upon reading the letter it seems to me that Fizazi is speaking primarily about terrorism in Germany and by extension about terrorism in Europe. His statements do not amount to a renunciation of violence, but to a moderation of his previous views regarding where and against whom violence can be used. By saying that Germany is not a legitimate area of operation, he is implicitly rejecting al-Qaida’s global jihad doctrine.

Unfortunately Fizazi does not elaborate on his views on violence elsewhere. I am speculating, but I suspect he still views attacks on Western targets in Afghanistan and Iraq as legitimate, not to mention the jihad in Palestine. It is not clear what he might think about attacks in the US or attacks on Arab regime targets. While all this makes Fizazi less of a moderate than many would have hoped, it makes his statement seem all the more genuine.

Fizazi Joining Recantation Club?

Thomas Hegghammer October 26, 2009

Der Spiegel reports that the imprisoned Moroccan scholar Muhammad Fizazi has issued a letter to Muslims in Germany declaring Germany “not a battle zone”. The letter, which was allegedly issued on 21 July, has not yet been made public.

Without knowing the precise content, it is difficult to assess its importance. We don’t know whether he is discouraging operations in Germany only, in Europe more broadly, or renouncing violence altogether.

But Fizazi is one of the most influential ideologues in the European/North African jihadi sphere, so this could be quite significant.

Of course, all the caveats of recantations from prison apply. Moreover, as I have said before, no individual recantation is going to end jihadism, but a critical mass of such declarations will have an influence.

In any case, Berlin must be relieved. After the latest barrage of anti-German al-Qaida statements, here is finally a jihadi with nice things to say about Germany.

New FFI Report on Jundullah

Thomas Hegghammer October 20, 2009

Not surprisingly, the recent bombing in Iran has received a lot of attention in the media and the security blogosphere (for good commentaries, see here, here, and here). But with a few exceptions, everyone has missed the new FFI Report by Audun Wiig. It is the best profile of Jundullah you will find in open sources, so go ahead and read it.

Al-Qaida and the German Elections

Thomas Hegghammer September 25, 2009

Usama Bin Ladin has just released a new audio statement to the European peoples.  It is relatively short (under 5 minutes) and basically tells the Europeans to get out of Afghanistan.  The statement is subtitled in German and is clearly timed to coincide with the German elections this coming Sunday.

Bin Ladin’s statement comes in addition to a series of three statements from Bekkai Harrach threatening Germany. I have not seen this kind of jihadi media offensive in connection with any other non-US election. Of course, I, like everyone else, can’t help thinking of the Spanish elections in 2004.

Peter Neumann at FREEradicals has a good analysis where he reveals that German intelligence are very nervous. Should they be?

Personally I think al-Qaida would not issue all these messages if something really big was in the making in the next few days, precisely because media offensives put intelligence services on high alert.

My guess is that these messages are primarily intended to influence German public opinion at a crucial juncture in the Western campaign in Afghanistan. Germany is a pivotal player in the coalition; her withdrawal could initiate a vicious (or virtuous, depending on one’s preferences) circle of European withdrawals from the Afghanistan enterprise. Al Qaida is focusing the weakest link in the coalition, just as the Madrid bombers were advised to do.

Another function of messages such as this is to set the stage for attacks that may be several months away. By warning Germans before the elections, al-Qaida can punish them afterwards for not doing as he said.

Finally, Bin Ladin and Harrach are probably also hoping that these messages will inspire some independent initiatives from grassroots jihadists in Europe. Today’s arrest of a man in Stuttgart suspected of distributing the video suggests there are people inside Germany who are thus inclined. On a related note, Leah at All Things CT has a post about forum reactions to the Bin Ladin message.

In short, there are good reasons for German analysts to be working some overtime this weekend.

Annual Jihadi Cyberbattle Sees Return of Ikhlas

Thomas Hegghammer September 11, 2009

Like last year, this year’s 9/11 anniversary is the occasion of a major cyberbattle over jihadi forums. At least three of the top jihadi discussion forums – Faloja, Shouraa, Shumukh – have been down for the past couple of days, and I bet my left arm they have been hacked for the occasion. Other big forums such as Ana Muslim and Ansar were reportedly down for a while (though I didn’t see it and they are back up again now). Minor forums such as Tamkin, Madad al-Suyuf and al-Tahaddi seem to have been untouched.

The other fascinating development, which must be connected in some way to the former, is that the good old Ikhlas forum is back up again after an absence of – guess what – a year.  The old passwords are still working. The return of Ikhlas is being presented by the administrators as “Usama bin Ladin’s Ramadan gift to the Umma”. The online jihadi community is suspicious, and people are warning against using Ikhlas. Frankly, I would be suspicious too – something fishy is going on.

Naturally, Haganah is on the ball and I am counting on Aaron to solve this mystery for us.

PS: You will see that for once I have included direct links to all the forums. It is my departure gift to our readers as I leave the stage for a while.

Apologies and Introductions

Thomas Hegghammer September 9, 2009

I have some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that I will have to stop blogging for a while, due to a combination of personal and professional reasons. From the end of this month till some time next spring, I will be posting very infrequently, although I will be working behind the scenes as editor.

The good news is that I have recruited a very exciting team of guest bloggers who will be writing for Jihadica a month or two at the time throughout this coming academic year.  I won’t reveal the whole list, but I can say that they are all established and brilliant academics who have been working on jihadism and Islamism for many years. I chose them because I admire their work.

The first one out is Jean-Pierre Filiu (see also here) a professor at Sciences-Po Paris and a leading French expert on jihadism. The scholar-diplomat Filiu has written many books, notably Les Frontieres du Jihad (2006), L’Apocalypse dans l’Islam (2008) and Les neuf vies d’al-Qaida (forthcoming). Fun fact: Filiu is also the French biographer of Jimi Hendrix. Filiu’s many articles include a piece on Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in the latest issue of the Middle East Journal.  He will start blogging for us this week.

Libyan Jihad Revisions

Thomas Hegghammer September 8, 2009

There is a very significant development taking place in the so-called war of ideas. Senior leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), who recently laid down their arms, are publishing a Dr. Fadl-like treatise revising their previous understanding of jihad. The text, entitled “the Book of Correctional Studies” (kitab al-dirasat al-tashihiyya), is being published as a nine-part series on the website www.oealibya.com. You can find the first three chapters here, here and here. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to look at it in detail, but Jarret Brachman will be covering the story. He already has some interesting background info and analysis.

The text in itself is probably not a landmark work of Islamic jurisprudence, but it is important because it adds to what may now be called a corpus of treatises by former militants challenging al-Qaida on theological grounds. The trend started with al-Gamaa al-Islamiya in Egypt, continued with Dr Fadl and now it’s the LIFG’s turn. Credible MB figures like Yusuf al-Qaradawi have also chipped in. Of course, no one text is going to change the world, but put together, these treatises will constrain al-Qaida’s recruitment pool somewhat. The Libyan text has yet to make a big splash on the forums, though it is talked about. It will be very interesting to see if and how the AQ leadership will respond to the latest salvo.

New Articles on al-Maqdisi and Bin Nayif

Thomas Hegghammer September 6, 2009

Just a quick note to say that there is a new article on the idelogy of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi in the latest issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. The author is of course Joas Wagemakers, the world’s leading Maqdisi expert and an occasional Jihadica commentator. While I am at it, I should mention that Wagemakers published two other excellent articles on related topics last year, one on al-Maqdisi’s Qur’an interpretation and another on al-wala wa’l-bara in Salafi discourse.

For more relevant academic articles, see the indispensible overview of current contents of periodicals on the Middle East by the GLORIA Center in Herzlia, Israel.

On the current affairs side of things, there are two new articles on the Bin Nayif operation. Greg Johnsen of Waq al-Waq has an excellent piece in the National which gives you the big picture of the operation. Then there is a great analysis by Saud al-Sarhan in the Saudi newspaper al-Watan. Al-Sarhan traces in detail the long history of Saudi al-Qaida’s targeting of government figures, and argues that the main novelty in the Bin Nayif attack was the tactics. The attack does not herald a new wave of violence, he concludes (and I agree). Al-Sarhan, for those of you who don’t know him, is a Saudi intellectual and PhD candidate at Exeter University in the UK. He writes frequently in Arab media and occasionally in the Western press (see e.g. this New York Times piece).

Conference Bonanza

Thomas Hegghammer September 4, 2009

Conference season has begun, and there is an unusually high number of jihad-related academic meetings taking place this autumn. To give you an idea of what people in our field are working on at the moment, I figured I should give you an overview of the main ones that have come to my attention.

3-6 September: The American Political Science Association Annual Meeting began yesterday in Toronto and will go on all weekend. There are a number of panels and papers on jihadism and Islamism; just search for jihad or Islam in the online program.

4-6 September: This weekend there is also a three-day conference on “Islamic Resurgence in the Age of Globalization:Myth, Memory, Emotion” in Trondheim, Norway. The conference is co-sponsored by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Haifa University (Israel), and Aarhus University (Denmark). I was supposed to be there, but I had to cancel in the last minute for personal reasons. It is a shame, for I was looking forward to meeting the many great scholars in the program, especially Dale Eickelman, Itzchak Weismann and Reuven Paz, whose work I deeply respect.

7-9 September: Early next week the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World at the University of Edinburgh is hosting a conference on “Rethinking Jihad”. The program looks terrific, not least because it includes both prominent scholars and leading Islamist activists.

9 September: The Counterterrorism Center at West Point is organizing a conference in Washington DC next Wednesday on “Al-Qaida: Context and competition”. It should be fantastic – the list of presenters speaks for itself.

30 September-2 October: While not directly jihad-related, the upcoming conference in Brussels on Sunni-Shia contemporary relations is worth noting because of its very impressive line-up of speakers, including Laurence Louer, Reidar Visser, Thomas Pierret, Stephane Lacroix, Stephane Dudoignon and many others – basically the cream of the crop of young European scholars of the Middle East.

12-14 November: Princeton University and Sciences-Po Paris will be organizing a workshop in Princeton on “The State of Saudi Arabia”. It will feature many of the world’s leading experts on Saudi politics and there will be panels on Saudi jihadism and Islamism.

21-24 November:  Finally there is of course the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, to be held this year in Boston. By searching the program for “jihad” and related keywords you should find some interesting papers.

Keep in mind that this overview does not give you the full picture of the academic activity in our field. There are bound to be conferences that I don’t know about or that I forgot about. Moreover, I know of at least three extremely interesting workshops taking place this autumn that are not publicised, in most cases because there is a government sponsor.

Unfortunately I won’t be attending any of the above conferences except the Saudi one in Princeton in November. But I will be waiting impatiently to read the many publications that will no doubt come out of them.

By the way, if anybody knows of any other relevant conferences or workshops, please mention them in the comments.

AQ Claims Bin Nayif Attack

Thomas Hegghammer August 29, 2009

This Saturday evening, Al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula issued a statement claiming the assassination attempt on Muhammad Bin Nayif (hat tip: Evan). See here for an automatic translation. By the way, Michael Dunn has a good roundup of Saudi media reports on the attack.

The statement identified the attacker as “Abu al-Khayr” alias Abdallah Hasan Tali’ Asiri, a Saudi national who was number 40 on the list of 85 wanted militants issued on 3 February 2009. The statement includes a picture of Asiri, who looks very young indeed. I don’t know much about him except the obvious, ie that he or is family is originally from the south, and that he is not a Guantanamo alumnus.

The statement says the operation was the result of “unique intelligence work”, and it insinuates that Asiri flew from Najran (near the Saudi-Yemen border) to Jidda to carry out the operation. This suggests that he may have been dispatched from QAP headquarters in Yemen.

If this is the case, I am somewhat relieved, because it would mean that a) the firepower of QAP HQ is smaller than I feared, and b) there still isn’t a significant organisation inside the Kingdom proper. But then again, the statement may be a deliberate attempt to deceive.

By the way the declaration also says the organization has uncovered a network of Saudi spies in Yemen operating without the knowledge of Yemeni authorities. More “interesting details” are to follow, the statement says. Let’s just hope we don’t have an Iraq-style “captured spy” scenario.

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