ji·had·ica

Abu Ghaith and al-Qa’ida’s Dissident Faction in Iran

Vahid Brown March 11, 2013

With the recent arrest of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith (Abu Yusuf Sulayman Jasim Bu Ghayth), al-Qa’ida’s former spokesman and Bin Ladin’s son-in-law, there has been much speculation in the press about a group of senior al-Qa’ida figures who have spent much of the last decade in Iran. In this post I will revisit the writings of these men, all of whom appeared online in unusual circumstances at the end of 2010, and the light that their writings shed on the Iranian sojourn of this group of al-Qa’ida’s pre-9/11 senior leadership. Taken together, these sources suggest that these men constituted a dissident faction within al-Qa’ida, one which in recent years had become increasingly vocal in their criticism of Bin Ladin, Zawahiri, and the direction that the latter had taken al-Qa’ida since the September 11 attacks. It also emerges that Abu Ghaith, while not a member of this faction at the beginning of this period, had by 2010 joined this group in their efforts to correct the errors of al-Qa’ida’s ways.

In a 2007 study of al-Qa’ida’s leadership schisms, I discussed how disagreements over the advisability and religious permissibility of the 9/11 attacks had split the historical leadership of al-Qa’ida into two camps. Following the attacks and the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan in October of 2001, the pro-9/11 group, including Bin Ladin and Zawahiri, fled to Pakistan, while the anti-9/11 group ended up in Iran, where they were placed under house arrest by Iranian authorities. There were a couple of outliers to this explanation of the various trajectories of these leaders, however. Mustafa Abu al-Yazid (Shaykh Sa’id al-Masri) is described in the 9/11 Commission Report as having been among those opposed to 9/11, though he joined Bin Ladin and Zawahiri in Pakistan and eventually rose to the rank of commander of al-Qa’ida’s operations in Afghanistan and spokeman of the al-Qa’ida “General Command” before his death in a drone strike in Pakistan in May of 2010. The other outlier was Abu Ghaith, whose appearance in two famous videos released by al-Qa’ida via al-Jazeera following 9/11 left no question as to his support for those attacks, yet who ended up in Iran along with the most senior members of al-Qa’ida’s anti-9/11 faction.

The most important members of this latter faction were Sayf al-‘Adl, Abu Hafs al-Muritani, and Abu’l-Walid al-Masri. Sayf al-‘Adl (Muhammad Salah al-Din Zaydan al-Masri) was in charge of al-Qa’ida’s training operations in Afghanistan during the 1990s and, following the death of Abu Hafs al-Masri (Muhammad ‘Atif) in November of 2001, became the head of al-Qa’ida’s military committee, theoretically in charge of all of al-Qa’ida’s kinetic activities. In June of 2002 he sent an angry letter to Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (addressed here as “Mukhtar”) regarding the disastrous consequences that the 9/11 attacks had brought upon the organization and calling for an immediatie cessation of external activities.

Abu Hafs al-Muritani (Mahfouz Ould al-Walid) was the pre-9/11 head of al-Qa’ida’s shari’a committee, responsible for determining the religious legitimacy of its actions. According to the 9/11 Commission Report he presented Bin Ladin with a brief, backed by Qur’anic citations, arguing that the attacks would violate Islamic law.  More recently he has stated that in late 2001, after his objections were overridden by Bin Ladin, he submitted his resignation to the al-Qa’ida chief several weeks prior to 9/11 (on which more below).

Abu’l-Walid al-Masri (Mustafa Hamid) is something of an unusual case, as he was never a formal member of al-Qa’ida. An Egyptian journalist who joined the Haqqani network in Afghanistan in 1979, Abu’l-Walid was close to the al-Qa’ida leadership from the beginning and taught at al-Qa’ida camps in the 1990s, though he had been critical of Bin Ladin’s leadership abilities since at least 1989. He has been credited by two other senior al-Qa’ida figures with having helped convince Bin Ladin to redirect al-Qa’ida’s stategic focus from the “near enemy” to the “far enemy” – the United States – an issue I discuss most fully here (at p. 97f). Though not privy to al-Qa’ida’s internal disputes about the 9/11 attacks in late 2001, he has expressed nothing but the utmost contempt for those attacks in the years since, first as a grievous strategic blunder that played into the hands of the US and Israel, and more recently along the lines of “truther” conspiracy theories.

These three men, then, along with Abu Ghaith, several members of Bin Ladin’s immediate family, and a number of mid-level al-Qa’ida figures have until recently all been living in Iran, though there is conflicting information regarding the extent to which their freedom of movement had been restricted by Iranian authorities. (The most detailed account of their early conditions of confinement comes from Abu’l-Walid’s former wife Rabiah Hutchinson, who fled Afghanistan to Iran before leaving her then-husband and being repatriated to Australia in 2003). Up to 2009 little to nothing had been heard from any of them, though Sayf al-‘Adl’s operational activities popped up on the radar, so to speak, on a number of occasions during the 2000s, as mentioned here. The senior al-Qa’ida leaders among the group in Iran – Sayf, al-Muritani and Abu Ghaith – were entirely absent throughout this period from official al-Qa’ida messaging and propaganda production. As far as the rest of the world was concerned they had gone silent – until, that is, they all appeared on Abu’l-Walid’s website in late 2010.

According to his former wife, at the beginning of his stay in Iran Abu’l-Walid was under house arrest and denied any phone or internet access, but these restrictions must have eventually been relaxed, since in 2007 Abu’l-Walid began posting some of his older writings to an obscure blog. Abu Hafs al-Muritani has recently told al-Jazeera that their confinement in Iran went through several stages, with “the last stage being not house arrest but rather hospitality, albeit with some restrictions.” Beginning in 2009, Abu’l-Walid expanded his online activities, becoming a regular contributor to the Taliban’s Arabic-language online magazine al-Sumud. He also returned to issuing withering critiques of al-Qa’ida and its strategic and ideological failings, often cross-posting these essays to jihadi forums – much to the dismay of al-Qa’ida’s cyber-loyalists.

If the e-jihadis hadn’t liked what Abu’l-Walid had to say up to this point, in mid-November of 2010 he dropped a bombshell. In the middle of that year Abu’l-Walid had migrated his online activities from the blog to a new website, the now defunct mafa.asia. On November 15 he posted to the forums, as a mafa.asia exclusive, a lengthy new book by none other than al-Qa’ida’s former spokesperson Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, with an introduction by the former al-Qa’ida religious leader Abu Hafs al-Muritani. Entitled “Twenty Counsels on the Path of Jihad,” the text created a great deal of online consternation. Here were two of the most senior members of the organization’s historical leadership, who hadn’t been heard from in years, all of a sudden issuing new messages via the website of one of al-Qa’ida’s most notorious jihadi detractors.

And it wasn’t simply the method of distribution that caused alarm. Though not naming any names, Abu Ghaith’s book and al-Muritani’s introduction were clearly part of the genre of “revisions” or “recantation” texts (muraji’at), a growing body of literature by major jihadi figures offering mea culpas for former errors and diagnosing the ills besetting contemporary jihadi activism. Introducing the text as part of a planned “revival of jihadi education” series, Abu Hafs al-Muritani explains:

“I saw that after the last three decades [of jihadi experiences around the world], the jihadi arena lacked sufficient educational guidance, and was in great and dire need of this. There is nothing aside from what the martyred mujahid shaykh ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam left in some of his audio tapes and books … but this is not enough…. So it has become necessary to issue the like of this series of educational essays to correct the path, direct the activity, treat the illnesses, apply balm to the wounds, refine the hearts, and provide the field [of jihad] and its members what they need in terms of guidance to remind and assist them and to raise them to a level that befits them.”

Here is a man best known as having been among the most senior figures in Bin Ladin’s organization saying that no worthy guidance for jihad has come out since the days of ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam, who was assassinated in 1989 – not quite a ringing endorsement of al-Qa’ida’s more recent leadership capabilities, to say the least. That he would choose to launch his effort to “correct the path” from the opposition press, as it were, is a pretty clear indication that the Iranian faction had lost any hearing within al-Qa’ida central.

The book by Abu Ghaith that these remarks introduce is quite lengthy, extending to over a hundred pages, and it sounds the same notes as al-Muritani. At first glance it appears as a straightforward pamphlet of moral maxims and general operational rules of thumb for Islamist militants, illustrated with apposite anecdotes from Islamic scripture – something like a “Twenty Habits of Highly Effective Jihadis” self help book. But one need not read too closely between the lines to see the implied criticism of al-Qa’ida’s leaders. In its first line Abu Ghaith says that in his book “I have set forth the most important topics of guidance on which I feel that giving sincere advice (tanasuh) is a matter of grave importance for the jihadi leadership and members.” Sincere advice (nasiha) is a technical term in conservative Islamic discourses for formal criticism, often of a political nature; Bin Ladin’s early broadsides against the Saudi royal family in the 1990s were issued under the name of an “Advice (nasiha) and Reform Committee.” Nor is it difficult to connect the specific issues about which Abu Ghaith offers “sincere advice” to some of the more controversial aspects of Bin Ladin’s and Zawahiri’s leadership. The book speaks of the pitfalls of love of power, autocratic leadership, overemphasis on media activities, sectarian divisiveness, ideological fanaticism, and an unwillingness to work with a broader set of Islamist actors, including non-violent political groups (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood). The journalist Jamal Isma’il pointed to some of the more obvious implied criticisms in an article in al-Hayat about Abu Ghaith’s book. Isma’il writes: “In a manner unprecedented in al-Qa’ida or the militant groups loyal to it, a new book by Sulayman Jasim Bu Ghayth … offers scathing criticism of al-Qa’ida leader Usama bin Ladin – without mentioning him by name – and the acts of jihadi groups, writing that ‘it is not permissible for one man to use the blood of others to experiment in what seems to him to be rightousness’.”

One month later, on December 17, 2010, Abu’l-Walid issued his own piece of sincere advice, though his was characteristically more direct. The title of the essay says it all, really: “Disbanding al-Qa’ida is the Best Option before Bin Ladin.” He again posted this on mafa.asia and the jihadi forums, though Shumukh, the forum most closely aligned with al-Qa’ida’s leadership, banned him from the message board and deleted his posts a week later. This was followed at the end of that month by a series of new messages from Sayf al-‘Adl – again, the first time that this al-Qa’ida leader had directly addressed the public since 9/11 – a series that I discussed at the time here. All of this was quite remarkable – a bloc of al-Qa’ida’s old guard emerging from years of silence only to undermine the legitimacy of their former employers – though it all unfolded to almost no notice in the West.

Since issuing these critiques in late 2010, this entire cast of characters has, so far as we know, left Iran. Sayf was reported to have been released from Iran in a prisoner swap arranged by the Haqqani network for an Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Pakistan, though the details surrounding that affair are still rather murky. Abu’l-Walid was repatriated to Egypt at the end of August of 2011. Abu Ghaith, as we now know, left Iran in January of this year. The last member of the faction, Abu Hafs al-Muritani, was transferred to Mauritanian custody from Iran in April of 2012 and released from jail in Mauritania last July.

Last October al-Muritani sat down for two lengthy interviews with al-Jazeera (parts one and two), shedding further light on the Iranian exile of al-Qa’ida’s dissident faction.  There is much of interest in this interview, but I will only highlight some of the statements that bear upon this post. In his interview, al-Muritani first directly addresses and confirms the 9/11 Commission Report’s characterization of him as having opposed the 9/11 attacks. When asked about his “revision” or “recantation” – i.e., the texts published by Abu’l-Walid in 2010 – he denies that his current position is a revision, stating that he had always objected to takfir (declaring other Muslims heretics) and indiscriminate violence. Aligning with other insider accounts, such as the autobiography of Fazul ‘Abdallah Muhammad, al-Muritani says that the debates within al-Qa’ida about the 9/11 attacks were not about the details of the operation – these were not known, even to the upper-level leadership – but rather over the idea of a violent attack on US territory itself. He also says that Abu Muhammad al-Masri, a senior member of al-Qa’ida’s military committee and also believed to be or to have been in detention in Iran, was of the faction opposed to the 9/11 attacks. Al-Muritani says that his objections to 9/11 were purely on religious grounds, and that ultimately it was due to the autocratic nature of Bin Ladin’s leadership that all the various objections expressed by his inner circle were dismissed and the attacks carried out. He says that he does not approve of the tactics of the branch of al-Qa’ida operting in northern Mali, saying that what they are doing is not the right way to establish an Islamic state. Regarding his stay in Iran, he says that an arrangement was made with the authorities whereby al-Qa’ida members committed to carrying out no attacks from within Iran, and he says that overall the treatment by the Iranians was good, though it had its ups and downs. Al-Muritani says that no Western or Arab governments were given access to him or other al-Qa’ida refugees, nor were they interrogated during their stay in Iran. He reiterates the criticisms from the “Twenty Counsels,” saying that the jihadi movements are wrong to denounce the political Islamist movements and that jihad means nothing if it is not the struggle of the community as a whole. He also repeats the criticisms of indiscriminate killing and sectarian devisiveness, saying that while holding some heretical views the Shi’a are nonetheless Muslims, contrary to the view taken by al-Qa’ida in Iraq under Zarqawi.

As with the statements issued through Abu’l-Walid’s blog in 2010, al-Muritani’s interview was not well-received by the online jihadi community. One of the main platforms of salafi jihadi pronouncements, the Minbar at-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad website, posted a lengthy denunciation of Abu Hafs for his “recantation,” refuting at length the “heresies” uttered by him in the interview (such as that the Shi’a are Muslims).  Ultimately, though, the interview simply confirmed what many on the forums had already suspected: that a group of the most famous leaders of the historical al-Qa’ida had soured on Bin Ladin, Zawahiri, and some of the more extremist tendencies of post-9/11 jihadism.

Finally, I would note that there was speculation in some of the initial reports about Sayf al-‘Adl’s release in 2009 that the Iranian diplomat prisoner swap had also included the release of Abu Ghaith and Abu Hafs al-Muritani at that time. Since we now know that wasn’t the case, it raises further questions about the current whereabouts of Sayf al-‘Adl. He, and his colleague Abu Muhammad al-Masri, may very well still be in Iran, or only recently released. I would imagine that it is the fates of these men that the US government is most eager to learn details of from Abu Ghaith, now that he is in custody.

Sayf al-‘Adl and al-Qa’ida’s Historical Leadership

Vahid Brown May 18, 2011

In light of the widely reported news that Sayf al-‘Adl (also spelled Saif al-Adel) has taken the reins of operational leadership within al-Qa’ida in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden, I thought it would be useful to Jihadica’s readers to provide a bit of context about this man and about the significance, if any, of these reports (see, e.g., Musharbash and Bergen), all of which rely on the testimony of Noman Benotman, a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

First of all, it would be more correct to say that Sayf al-‘Adl remains the operational leader of al-Qa’ida rather than that he has lately assumed this rank. (Nor is this the first time that Benotman has called attention in the press to Sayf’s operational re-emergence in al-Qa’ida. He discussed Sayf’s release from Iran and return to headquarters, as it were, with Der Speigel last October)  Several al-Qa’ida insiders have reported since 2009 that Sayf took the top slot in al-Qa’ida’s military committee after the 2001 death of Abu Hafs al-Masri (Muhammad Atef). These sources also evidence long standing tensions within the organization about Zawahiri being AQ’s second-in-command, next in line to lead should Bin Laden exit the scene.

This much can be gleaned from Abu Jandal (Nasser al-Bahri), the Yemeni former bodyguard of Bin Laden, who has much to say on both points in his 2010 memoir.  Abu Jandal broke with al-Qa’ida after 9/11, but according to him up to that point the chain of command in operational terms was clearly Bin Laden, Abu Hafs, Sayf, and then Abu Muhammad al-Masri (Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah). With Abu Hafs dead, Sayf took the operational lead as head of the military committee. As for the doubts about Zawahiri, at the end of his book Abu Jandal asks himself what would happen if Bin Laden died, and answers that while Zawahiri would theoretically replace him, “to me, Zawahiri does not possess the requisite qualities to lead the organization.” He goes on to say (translating from the French here):

“Bin Laden is a born leader. He commanded al-Qa’ida with a certain transparency, rendering him universally acceptable; he is open to dialogue; and he has historical legitimacy. Zawahiri, though, conducts his affairs in secret. There are numerous members of al-Qa’ida that would not accept Zawahiri taking over. His behavior and that of the Egyptians have generated a great deal of reserve, sometimes very harsh criticism. All of this has left its mark. His statements, as we have seen, are sometimes dismissed. I doubt he has sufficient authority for such a position, even with his well-known authoritarianism and his penchant for centralizing power in himself” (p. 281).

Much more revealing is Abdullah Muhammad Fazul’s two-volume autobiography, released online in early 2009. Fazul joined al-Qa’ida as a teenager in 1991, and his trainer at al-Faruq Camp – then located at the Haqqani compound at Zhawara, in southeastern Afghanistan – was none other than Sayf al-‘Adl. Fazul is no fan of Zawahiri, of whom he sometimes writes dismissively, as a Johnny-come-lately hanger-on. He repeatedly emphasizes that he is loyal to what he calls “mother al-Qa’ida,” and says that the “historical leadership” of this old-school al-Qa’ida did not change when Zawahiri decided in 2000 to merge up his all-but-defunct Jihad al-Islami organization with Bin Laden’s. Here are two representative excerpts, one from 2007, the other from late 2008 or early 2009, in both of which Sayf is clearly identified as al-Qa’ida’s operational boss:

“After we learned of the death of Dadullah there was a reorganization of the leadership of the old guard of al-Qa’ida. It was announced today [late May, 2007] that Shaykh Sa’id (Abu Yazid), who was in charge of al-Qa’ida’s financial affairs since its founding and was the first leader of the former Finance Committee, has been made the new Amir of al-Qa’ida’s branch in Afghanistan. This is of a new strategy to confuse the Americans and is the best way to turn the people to the new leaders…This is also to show the Americans and Westerners waging their war on us that they fail to understand our leaders and that the central leadership is fine. So the general Amir Usama bin Ladin is fine and in good health, and the financial leadership is fine and under the command of Shaykh Sa’id. As for the shari’a leadership, all of them are in Iran and living safely under the leadership of the esteemed shaykh Abu Hafs al-Muritani. As for the military and security leadership, it is no secret to anyone that the strikes in Afghanistan have proven the preparedness of these leaders. All of them are fine, and brother Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-Masri and Shaykh Sayf al-‘Adl are both well and in Iran and continue the struggle in consultation with their brothers the field commanders in Afghanistan, such as brother Khalid al-Habib and Abu Islam al-Masri known as Shu’ayb. We were gladdened by the announcement of Shaykh Sa’id’s new amir position, as it came after the capture of our beloved brother Shaykh ‘Abd al-Hadi al-‘Iraqi, may God break his bonds. So long as the heads of the committees that comprise the mother al-Qa’ida remain fine, then insha’allah all things will be fine.” (From vol. 2, p. 310)

The following excerpt is from a lengthy discussion of al-Qa’ida’s quest for nuclear weapons (vol. 2, p. 499):

“I say that the mystery of the word al-Qa’ida is one that few have understood. There is the mother al-Qa’ida, there are the collaborators, and there are the Afghan Arabs who worked together during the Afghan jihad, and now all are characterized as “al-Qa’ida.” In the same way, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad under the leadership of Ayman al-Zawahiri is referred to as “al-Qa’ida” even before the unification and integration. He is called the number two man in the organization, but we don’t have firsts and seconds in Islam, all are equal before God, and in any case I have never once taken orders from Zawahiri. Although he became the deputy of the Shaykh [UBL] after unification, and followed the same management style, the number two man in the mother al-Qa’ida organization is brother Sayf al-‘Adl, after the killing of Shaykh Abu Hafs the Commander (God have mercy on him), and we do not take orders from anyone but our historical leadership.”

(For more on Fazul and the al-Qa’ida succession question, see Nelly Lahoud’s recent article here.)

That Sayf has been hands-on with al-Qa’ida field operations since 2001 is well-known; some of the evidence was rehearsed in a backgrounder put out by longwarjournal today.  (See also my profile of Sayf as of 2007, here at p. 119.) Sayf was responsible for forging al-Qa’ida’s ties with Zarqawi, as we know from Sayf’s own memoir on this published by Fu’ad Hussayn in 2005.  More recently, US military intelligence claimed to have intercepted letters in 2008 between al-Qa’ida leaders – including Sayf, who is referred to as a second-in-command in this context – and AQI, which show al-Qa’ida Central struggling to clean up Zarqawi’s mess in Iraq.  Less well known is Sayf’s role in the killing of Daniel Pearl. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad told FBI interrogators in 2007 that it was Sayf who tipped him off about Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and directed him to make an al-Qa’ida propaganda coup out of it.

During all this time, then, Sayf and Abu Muhammad al-Masri retained operational leadership of al-Qa’ida from their hideouts in Iran, but more recently Sayf and other members of the “historical leadership” have gone public again. Readers of Jihadica will know this already; I wrote about Sayf’s first batch of new letters here and Will has begun to shed light on the newest batch of letters here. What changed?

The story goes something like this. In late 2008, Iranian diplomat Heshmat Attarzadeh was kidnapped in Peshawar, and then sold down the river to Pakistani Taliban custody in South Waziristan. Iran, in pursuit of his release, sought the good offices of the Haqqani network leadership, who engineered a swap in 2009: Attarzadeh for Sayf and a number of other “house arrested” al-Qa’ida figures, including Abu Hafs al-Muritani, Sulayman Abu al-Ghayth, and several members of Bin Laden’s family. The story first broke in the Afghan press at the beginning of April, 2010, in a story in Pastho on Weesa.net (no longer available online). Abu’l-Walid al-Masri then posted a translation of the story to a forum, and at the end of the month Syed Saleem Shahzad came through with one of his characteristically colorful stories about the whole affair. Some of the details remain slightly fishy – why, for example, would Iran trade such potentially valuable bargaining chips for a minor diplomat? – but whatever the case it was only after this that all of the above-named folks began releasing statements via Abu’l-Walid’s blog. That al-Qa’ida’s operational commander, top religious cleric and former spokesman all released new statements on the website of one of al-Qa’ida’s most virulent critics, and not through official al-Qa’ida channels, does indicate a certain amount of distance between these men and Zawahiri, commander-in-chief of al-Qa’ida TV.

This is already a too-long blog post, so I’ll leave it at that and try to return this weekend with some comments on Sayf’s strategic outlook and what it might mean for al-Qa’ida if he, and not Zawahiri, were to become the face of global jihad.

UPDATE – May 19, 2011

Two further points of interest. Asra Nomani today shared further details about Sayf al-‘Adl’s role in the Daniel Pearl case, pointing out that Sayf had advised KSM not to kill the journalist.

Secondly, Sayf al-‘Adl is not Muhammad Ibrahim Makkawi. Colonel Makkawi is ten years older than Sayf and a number of insiders who knew both men in Afghanistan – including Abu Jandal, Noman Benotman, Abu’l-Walid al-Masri and Yasir al-Sirri – have confirmed numerous times over the years that they are two different people. Both were officers in the Egyptian military; Sayf was a paratrooper and colonel in the Egyptian special forces before his 1987 arrest. Both fought at the infamous battle of Jalalabad in 1989, and around that time Sayf joined Bin Laden’s group and Makkawi remained with Zawahiri’s EIJ, though in the early 1990s he had a falling out with Zawahiri and quit the group. Sayf himself, at the end of the fifth letter in his most recent batch of communications posted on Abu’l-Walid’s blog, also emphatically states that Colonel Makkawi and Sayf are two different people.  The one photo we have and which has become ubiquitous in the press lately is indeed of Sayf, not Makkawi, though since that photo was taken Sayf was injured in his right eye. It is surprising that the Makkawi-Sayf confusion persists, given that Muhammad al-Shafi’i drew attention to this case of mistaken identity seven years ago.

Al-Qa’ida Revisions: The Five Letters of Sayf al-‘Adl

Vahid Brown February 10, 2011

The jihadi forums have seen some rather heated and confused debate over the past several months after the publication online of a series of writings from senior leaders of the pre-9/11 al-Qa’ida organization whom we’ve not heard from in years, and which are bringing back into the open serious disagreements over strategy and ideology that had divided al-Qa’ida prior to the 9/11 attacks. The online imbroglio over this growing al-Qa’ida revisions literature – even the existence of the literature itself – has, to my knowledge, escaped the notice of Western audiences. My aim here is to draw attention to this new “crack in the foundation” of the movement, focusing on the most recent salvo: five letters written, under a pseudonym, by Sayf al-‘Adl (also spelled Saif al-Adel), the second-in-command of al-Qa’ida’s historical leadership. These letters are the latest addition to a significant recent body of work by al-Qa’ida figures that directly challenges the claims to the al-Qa’ida legacy made by the more familiar faces of the post-9/11 al-Qa’ida organization – Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya al-Libi in particular – a challenge that has not gone unnoticed by al-Qa’ida’s online constituency.

The Five Letters

The letters in question (here and here) were posted by Mustafa Hamid (Abu al-Walid al-Masri) to his website on December 31, 2010, and Hamid introduces them as “five articles, full of frankness and ardor, sent to me by one of the brothers in jihad, an old comrade in arms from Afghanistan.” He describes the author as having adopted the new nickname “’Abir Sabil” (lit., wayfarer or passer-by), and places him among that first generation of jihadis that has “weathered the treachery and betrayals of two decades of activity.” Hamid says the essays are written in a tone “much different from the convulsive tension which has become the predominant characteristic of those who belong to or attach themselves to the jihadi current,” whose vision of jihad “is a mixture of violent hysteria, harm of oneself and others, fighting without guidance or insight, and the killing of as many human beings as possible.” The letters themselves are not dated, but appear to have been written around November 19, 2010, as they refer in one place to the Lisbon Conference as “now underway.” Hamid presents them in the hopes that they will lead to an internal Islamic dialogue that would seek to come to terms with the past mistakes of jihadi activism, and in this sense he frames them as part of the larger trend of jihadi revisions – though, as will be seen below, the five letters do not call for a cessation of violence, a point on which the five letters differ from the broader revisions literature.

Who is ‘Abir Sabil?

In an introductory note appended by Mustafa Hamid to each of the letters, we are told that the author “is a long-time member of the al-Qa’ida Organization. He joined the organization at the end of 1989, when the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, and the famous battle of Jalalabad had entered the phase of gradual attrition. Though not one of its founders, he assumed some of the most important roles in the organization, including operational leadership in the areas of training, the administration of the camps, and general security and military activity. In 1995 he played a major role in Somalia, supervised the training of the Somali groups, and worked to set in motion their operations in the field. He also played a prominent role in the battle of Kandahar at the end of 2001…. After the martyrdom of Abu ‘Ubayda al-Banshiri in 1996 and then Abu Hafs al-Masri in 2001 – two co-founders, with Usama bin Ladin, of the al-Qa’ida Organization – “Abir Sabil” became the most senior and important member in the uppermost rank of the field leadership of that organization.”

All of these details are consistent with what is known of Sayf al-‘Adl – who also happens to be Mustafa Hamid’s son-in-law.  Jamal Ismail, who reported on the five letters the day after they appeared on Mustafa Hamid’s website, also identifies Sayf as the author. Without naming sources, Ismail further reported that Ayman al-Zawahiri had contacted Sayf, whom Ismail claims is living inside Afghanistan, to urge him against releasing his letters. Ismail’s story does not refer to Mustafa Hamid’s website as the medium of distribution, but there can be little doubt that he is referring to the five letters signed ‘Abir Sabil. (See also this piece for further context.)

The Five Letters as Revisions Texts

Though Ismail’s story is subtitled “Sayf al-‘Adl issues revisions against violence,” Ismail does not repeat or detail anything specific in the article that portray the five letters in this light. In fact, the letters do not appeal to the jihadi community in general nor to al-Qa’ida in particular to renounce violence, though they do contain other characteristics of the jihadi revisions “genre”: they argue that the jihadi movement has made fundamental mistakes, has refused to acknowledge or learn from them, and is in dire need of some re-evaluation. The letters do not get into specifics about what those mistakes are or how to correct them, but they are nonetheless quite damaging to al-Qa’ida’s current leadership.

First of all, not only did Sayf bypass al-Qa’ida’s official channels for distribution, he elected to release these letters via Mustafa Hamid, the most well-known jihadi insider to have come out in no uncertain terms against al-Qa’ida’s current leadership and strategic vision, going so far as to call on its North Waziristan-based bosses to disband the group altogether. In the fifth letter, Sayf admits that his connection to Mustafa Hamid may provoke some controversy, and he claims to have had disagreements with Hamid, old and new. However, Sayf says he also agrees with Hamid on many issues, adding that “we are both sons of the same current, both on one path in which there is no retreat and no surrender. Shaykh Abu al-Walid has a track record that nobody can deny.”

The first three letters are devoted to Afghanistan, and basically present arguments for that country’s unique suitability as a graveyard of empires. There is some dissonance with al-Qa’ida’s ideological messaging within these letters – he speaks highly of the fact that the Afghans are united in their adherence to the Hanafi school of Islamic law, for instance, a notion that al-Qa’ida’s Salafis would find abhorent – but it is really in the last two letters that Sayf takes exception, if often only implicitly, with al-Qa’ida’s current approach.

The fourth letter is addressed to the preachers and scholars of the ummah, and while he has some bones to pick with Muslim religious leaders for distracting the community with irrelevant minutia and for being all-too-willing to legitimize corrupt and oppressive regimes, the main message of this letter is one of conciliation, and Sayf devotes just as much space to criticizing the religious failings of the mujahidin as he does to clerical hypocrisy. He is willing to acknowledge the good in a variety of Muslim leaderships typically condemned in the harshest terms by al-Qa’ida’s current leadership. He ends with an appeal to Islam’s preachers and scholars and to “all who belong to the Islamist trends: we are not enemies of one another. Rather you are our partners in changing the world…. We are not claiming that there is only one way, but rather that there are two paths: preaching (da’wa) and jihad. Our view is that the importance of jihad lies in preparing the ground and clearing the way for the call (da’wa)… The conclusion that must be drawn – no matter whether you were with us but became lost and perplexed, or are of those who think we seek worldly gain – is that our enemy is clear, and our swords must be drawn against him alone for the liberation of the ummah. Islam is coming, so be with us and we will secure the victory together, and will realize the caliphate of God on earth. Da’wa and jihad together – this is our strategy.”

The final letter begins by bemoaning al-Qa’ida’s failure to fess up to and learn from its mistakes, and then turns to outlining a strategic theory for anti-imperialist jihad that Sayf credits Mustafa Hamid with introducing to al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan. This echoes ‘Abdallah Muhammad Fazul’s 2009 autobiography, which makes the provocative claim that Mustafa Hamid “convinced the al-Qa’ida leadership to confront the United States.” (I discuss this briefly here). Basically, Sayf says that Hamid, using the metaphor of pack mules and the mule driver, explained how American imperialism is a project that distributes the burden of subjugation upon various agent regimes, who are thus divided, ruled, and made to serve the interests of empire even in their internal and external conflicts. The implication is that violent opposition to what in most jihadi literature are called the “apostate regimes” is ultimately counter-productive. Sayf concludes by appealing to the “youth of the ummah” to focus their jihad on the mule driver and not the mules – to fight the US, not its client states.

In its broad strokes, none of this is radically different from what we’ve come to expect from al-Qa’ida’s official statements. But in a number of respects – its manner of distribution, its call for review, its relatively ecumenical appeal to Islamists, and its implicit rejection of state-focused revolutionary violence – these messages do present a challenge to Zawahiri and the current leadership of al-Qa’ida, a challenge made all the more serious by the author’s stature in the world of jihadism.

(For background on the revisions literature, Jihadica has followed this genre in a number of posts, and see also this more lengthy study by Omar Ashour. On the cast of characters mentioned here, see my now somewhat dated Harmony profiles of Sayf, Mustafa Hamid, and Fazul).

CIA Bomber a Jihadi Blogger?

Vahid Brown January 4, 2010

UPDATE: 1/6/2010 – Al-Qa’ida has issued a statement on the forums this evening, signed by Mustafa Abu’l-Yazid on behalf of AQ General Command, and dated January 2, 2010, affirming that Abu Dujana al-Khurasani, “the famous propagandist and writer on the jihadi forums,” carried out the attack in Khost. The statement also claims that Abu Dujana left a martyrdom testament saying that he acted in revenge for the killings of Baitullah Mehsud, Salih al-Somali, ‘Abdallah Sa’id al-Libi “and their brothers.”  The statement also promises the release of further information in due course. AFP has more on the release here.

 * * *

The jihadi forums are in a frenzy today over breaking news that one of their own may have been the suicide bomber that killed seven CIA employees in Khost, Afghanistan on December 30, 2009. First reported by al-Jazeera yesterday, and picked up in the Wall Street Journal today, it appears that a spokesperson of the Pakistani Taliban has claimed that the suicide bomber at Forward Operating Base Chapman was Jordanian national Hammam Khalil Abu Milal, famous in the jihadi blogosphere as Abu Dujana al-Khurasani. If true, this news is sure to galvanize the online jihadi community, and would represent the most dramatic case to date of the potential for virtual-to-actual jihadi activism.

Even before his alleged role in the Khost attack, Abu Dujana was well known to jihadis for having made the transition from keyboard to Kalashnikov earlier last year. He quickly rose to prominence – and eventually an adminstrator position – on the elite al-Hisba forum in 2007, and has long been widely regarded for a series of popular essays he wrote on the forums, especially on the course of the jihad in Iraq and in praise of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. In September of 2009, it was announced on the forums that Abu Dujana had joined the mujahidin in “Khurasan” (Afghanistan and western Pakistan), and the al-Qa’ida magazine “Vanguards of Khurasan” ran an interview with Abu Dujana about his jihadi career that same month in its fifteenth issue.  Another famous cyber-jihadi and former Hisba admin, Ziad Abu Tariq, posted a glowing encomium to Abu Dujana soon thereafter. In October, a compilation of his essays was produced in high-quality pdf format and distributed on the forums, an extremely unusual mark of distinction for an e-jihadi with otherwise no religious or military credentials.

In his interview with Vanguards, Abu Dujana described himself as in his early thirties, originally from the north of the Arabian Peninsula, married and with two daughters. He charts his jihadi trajectory in a familiar manner; outraged by the violent repression of Muslims in Palestine, Iraq and Pakistan (he specifically cites the summer 2007 attack on the Red Mosque in Islamabad), Abu Dujana felt increasingly alienated from mundane existence and nurtured a violent vengefulness. “How,” he asks, “after all of this [repression], can we be expected to just carry flowers and don festive clothes? No, by God! We will carry nothing but weapons and don naught but military vests and bomb belts!” He found a community of common sentiment in the online jihadi forums, meeting virtual “brothers” whom he came to “love more than some of my own family.” He says that his early postings on the Iraq conflict were noted by the Hisba adminstrators, who encouraged him to write more and eventually invited him to become an administrator himself. Ultimately, says Abu Dujana, devoting his time to inciting and recruiting for jihad left him facing the obvious question, “how can I urge others to the battle while I sit idly by?” By autumn of 2009, Abu Dujana had answered that question, and was somewhere on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

All of the major forums have active threads right now on this story, though no confirmation from anything resembling an “official” source has yet been released. The Pakistani Taliban source cited by al-Jazeera – one al-Haj Ya’qub – has promised to release a video that he claims will prove Abu Dujana’s role in the attack.  A number of well-informed sources, such as Abu al-Hawra, a functionary of the Falluja forum, have pointed out that Abu Dujana represented himself online as having come from the Arabian Peninsula, not Jordan, while in the same thread “al-Dusari,” a Falluja regular, writes cryptically that he has personal knowledge on which he cannot elaborate that leads him to believe that the bomber could not have been Abu Dujana. The Afghan Taliban, meanwhile, have issued claims that conflict with the Abu Dujana story. In press releases on the official Taliban-IEA website, as well as in their Arabic magazine al-Sumud, the Afghan Taliban have stated that the Khost suicide bomber was one Samiullah, a soldier in the Afghan National Army.  Given the symbolic and instrumental significance of the attack, a variety of interested parties, including the Taliban-IEA, the TTP, al-Qa’ida and the Haqqani Network (Taliban-IENW) will perceive an advantage in laying claim to this jihadi “victory,” and we can reasonably expect further claims and counter-claims in the coming days.

Al-Qa’ida in Arabian Peninsula Issues Claim of Responsibility

Vahid Brown December 28, 2009

The Malahim Foundation, the media wing of al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has issued a statement on the forums today claiming responsibility for the attempted attack on a Detroit-bound commercial airplane on Christmas Day. 

The statement claims that the “martyrdom-seeking mujahid brother ‘Umar Faruq” attempted the attack “in coordindation with mujahidin in the Arabian Peninsula” in retaliation for US airstrikes on AQAP targets in Yemen.  The message boasts that Faruq’s successful negotiation of airport security in getting on the plane was further proof that the AQAP had perfected its detection-resistant bomb technology, claims that a technical fault frustrated Faruq’s attempt, and vows that “we will continue on this path with God’s permission until we have obtained our objective.”

The message then addresses appeals to various audiences to take up arms against Americans and American interests. “All Muslims of fervid faith and belief” are called upon to help expell infidels from the Arabian Peninsula, by killing “Crusaders” in their embassies or elsewhere.  All soldiers and others employed by Crusader and Crusader-puppet governments are called on to follow the example of Nidal Hassan, who “won a victory for the religion of God” by seeking to “kill the Crusaders will all available means.”  Americans are warned of retribution for the killing of Muslims by their leaders, ominously promising that women and children are fair targets, for “as you kill so shall we kill.”

The message ends with calls on God for the safety and release of Umar Faruq and all Muslim prisoners everywhere, and is signed Qa’idat al-Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula, 9 Muharram 1431 (12/26/2009).

Waziristan of Arabia

Vahid Brown December 27, 2009

In what has turned out to be a rather prescient quip, the Arab journalist Abd al-Ilah Sha’i, who has conducted interviews for al-Jazeera with both Nasir al-Wuhayshi and Anwar al-Awlaqi and who is an occasional commentator on the jihadi forums, wrote last week on the Falluja forum that South Yemen was becoming the “Waziristan of the Arabian Peninsula.” This comment was made in connection with the US-supported airstrike on an alleged AQAP training camp in Abyan, Yemen, early on December 17, corresponding with the Islamic calendar’s New Year’s day (1 Muharram 1431).  Events that have unfolded since then have unfortunately only strengthened the aptness of the comparison.

This past Wednesday, December 23, Abu ‘Umayr Muhammad Ahmad bin Salih ‘Umayr al-‘Awlaqi, described variously as a “mid-level figure” in AQAP, or as the “al-Qa’ida leader for Shabwa Province,” appeared in an al-Jazeera video taken at a protest rally in Abyan, seeking to stoke the audience’s ire against “America and its lackeys”[1].  The following morning, a second US-backed airstrike against what were reportedly AQAP targets was carried out, this time in the Rafd valley of Shabwa Province.  Early reporting suggested  that Anwar al-Awlaqi and the top two leaders of AQAP, Nasir al-Wuhayshi and Sa’id al-Shihri, were among the thirty or more people killed in the strike, but local sources only mention five victims [1]; [2].

Aside from an urgent request for prayers for the mujahidin of AQAP, the only confirmation from jihadi sources about AQAP losses in the Shabwa strike came in a “tidings of martyrdom” post that appeared on the Shamikh and Falluja forums late on Friday.  This post confirmed what had already been reported in Arab news sources: that the Shabwa strike killed Abu ‘Umayr al-‘Awlaqi and two of his younger kinsmen.  This and many subsequent posts have refered to Wuhayshi and Anwar al-Awlaqi with the traditional invocation may God protect him, indicating that they survived the strike.

The first official communication from AQAP regarding these events was released via al-Fajr Media this morning on the forums, but the statement, entitled “A Message Regarding the Massacre of Muslims in the State of Abyan,” is about the December 17 Abyan strike and says nothing about the Shabwa attack.  The statement asserts that around fifty civilians were killed in the airstrikes; expresses condolences to the Bakazim tribe, identified as having suffered the worst losses; charges that a conspiracy between the governments of the US, Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is behind these current instances of a “war on Islam” in the Arabian Peninsula, which the statement links to broader conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Waziristan; says the strikes show up the Yemeni authorities as un-Islamic puppets of America; and vows that the blood of Muslims killed in the strikes will not go unavenged.

So far there has been little chatter on the forums regarding the news of a possible AQAP link in the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airplane on Christmas, though Arabic-language news reports on these events have been posted to the forums.  Early this morning a regular on Falluja posted an open letter to Wuhayshi and AQAP’s media organization (the “Malahim Foundation”) urging them to capitalize on popular sentiment against the US and put out a short video on the strikes as soon as possible.  One can expect that the AQAP will be loath to pass up the opportunity presented by the week’s events to make Abu Basir Nasir al-Wuhayshi a household name worldwide.

A Mujahid’s Bookbag

Vahid Brown December 21, 2009

Earlier this month a new and expanded edition of a popular jihadi text collection was released on the forums (e.g., here). Called “A Mujahid’s Bookbag” (Haqibatu’l-Mujahid), the collection of over 2000 jihadi texts was compiled by Zubayr al-Ghazi, a functionary of the Falluja forums, and consists of searchable, indexed Word files. Some of these texts are thousands of pages long, others are brief letters, fatwas or interview transcripts.  The list of authors whose works are compiled here is of note, and provides a useful benchmark for currently-influential ideologues in the Arabophone Salafi jihadi movement.  When cross-referenced to the Militant Ideology Atlas (MIA), our best benchmark of influence circa 2006, I found that 21 of the 53 named authors in this collection were not cited in the works we canvassed for the MIA. I also cross-referenced the list of 19 scholars identified by Zawahiri in the Exoneration as supportive of al-Qa’ida; 8 of those scholars are included in the Mujahid’s Bookbag.

Most of the prominent new names not found in the MIA research have emerged on the Salafi jihadi scene since 2006. These include Abu’l-Nur al-Maqdisi, the late ideologue of the Jund Ansar Allah jihadi tanzim in Gaza.  Several of the new names come out of al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI), indicating that al-Qa’ida’s Iraqi jihad has lead to the rise of some influential jihadi voices.  There are however no new voices here from AQAP, AQIM or the Horn of Africa, nor are any contemporary South Asian authors included. Note also that Mustafa Abu’l-Yazid is missing from this list, underlining his operational rather than ideological importance in the movement. Other al-Qa’ida senior leadership (AQSL) voices represented here include Bin Ladin, Zawahiri, Abu’l-Walid al-Ansari (not to be confused with Abu’l-Walid al-Masri), Abu Hamza al-Muhajir (AQI), Abu Yahya al-Libi, and Sulayman Abu’l-Ghayth (in GITMO); one could add a few more to this list, such as QAP’s ‘Uyayri, but of course the lines quickly get blurred in this select group of jihadists. The prominent presence of Dr. Fadl (as ‘Abd al-Qadir ‘Abd al-‘Aziz) underscores the continued importance of his massive literary output for the jihadi movement, despite the recent disavowal of his earlier positions; not surprisingly, his newer “revisionist” writings are not included in the Bookbag.

As in the MIA, three names stand out – here for their disproportionate share of the total volumes collected: Abu Basir al-Tartusi, with nearly 200 titles represented; Abu Qatada al-Filistini, with about 180; and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, with around 175 titles. Maqdisi continues to have the highest profile in the Salafi jihadi movement, and has emerged lately as a distinct pole of influence vying with AQSL within the larger Salafi jihadi milieu. Zawahiri’s recent output via al-Sahab has taken a noticably Maqdisian tone, and is very clearly echoing Maqdisi’s seminal work Millat Ibrahim in its articulation of an Abrahamic model for shari’a-state revolutionaries.  For instance, in both of his recently-released messages “The Idol of National Unity” and The Dawn and Lamp, Zawahiri prominently uses the opening verses about Abraham from Qur’an 60 (surat al-mumtahinah) to situate his position vis-à-vis the illegitimacy of constitutional politics, the same verses from which Maqdisi developed his ideologically innovative positions on these issues in Millat Ibrahim in mid-’90s Peshawar.

The following is the list of authors in the Mujahid’s Bookbag, in the table of contents’ alphabetical order of appearance. Authors not cited in MIA are indicated with an asterisk after their names, while authors appearing in Zawahiri’s Exoneration list are identified with a “(Z)”. The number of works by each author included in the Mujahid’s Bookbag are also indicated:

Abu Ahmad ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Masri*
21 works

Abu’l-Ala al-Mawdudi
9 works

Abu’l-Nur al-Maqdisi*
3 works

Abu’l-Walid al-Ansari* (Z)
31 main works, 7 letters, 12 articles from a series of lectures

Abu Basir al-Tartusi
161 main works (with 12 smaller works of excerpts from these); 19 volumes of compendia of legal opinions on a variety of issues; 28 further collections of legal opinions on various issues.

Abu Bakr Naji*
4 works

Abu Jandal al-Azdi (sometimes Azadi)
20 works

Abu Hafs al-Jaza’iri*
6 works

Abu Hamza al-Muhajir*
4 works

Abu Sa’d al-‘Amili
42 works

Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Athari Sultan al-‘Utaybi*
10 works

Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Tunisi*
9 works

Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Sa’di*
13 works

Abu ‘Umar al-Sayf
15 works

Abu ‘Amr ‘Abd al-Hakim Hasan* (Z)
25 works

Abu Qatada al-Filistini (Z)
81 main works; 98 articles under the title “articles between the two ideologies” (maqalat bayn minhajayn); 13 collections of hadith

Abu Mariya al-Qurashi*
10 works

Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (Z)
4 interviews; 18 collections of poetry; 35 collections of fatwas and polemics (rudud); 23 books and studies; 2 pamphlets; 60 articles and letters; 9 works drawn from Maqdisi’s prison diaries; 7 works of jihadi hagiography; 4 debates; 5 personal letters; 3 addresses to imprisoned comrades; 7 statements on ideology/methodology (minhaj) 

Abu Mus’ab al-Suri (‘Umar ‘Abd al-Hakim) (Z)
51 works

Abu Hajir al-Libi*
3 works

Abu Humam Bakr bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Athari*
23 works

Abu Yahya al-Libi* (Z)
32 works

Abu Yunis al-‘Abbasi*
40 works

Abi Anas al-Shami (‘Umar Hadid, ‘Umar Yusuf Jum’a)*
15 works

Ahmad bin Hammud al-Khalidi
11 works

Ahmad Shakir
4 works

Usama bin Ladin (“God protect him”)
26 works

Ayman al-Zawahiri (“God protect him”)
37 works

Bakr Abu Zayd
36 works

Jama’at al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad and Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi*
4 works

Juhayman bin Sayf al-‘Utaybi
8 works

Hamid al-‘Ali
39 works

Husayn bin Mahmud
57 works

Hammud bin ‘Uqla al-Shu’aybi
59 works, 20 hagiographies about Shu’aybi

Khalid ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Husaynan*
3 works

Dr. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al ‘Abd al-Latif
19 works

Rifa’i Surur*
12 works (one of them – “On the Soul and Preaching” – broken out into nine separate files/parts)

Sulayman Abu’l-Ghayth*
9 works

Sulayman al-‘Alwan (“may God break his bonds”)
101 works

Sayyid Qutb
10 works (with “In the Shade of the Qur’an” broken out into 18 files)

‘Abd al-‘Aziz bin Salih al-Jarbu’
20 works

‘Abd al-‘Aziz bin Nasir al-Jalil
9 works

‘Abd al-Qadir ‘Abd al-‘Aziz  (Z)
14 works (with al-Jami’ – “The Compendium” – broken into 8 files)

‘Abd Allah al-Rashud
13 works

‘Abd Allah bin Nasir al-Rashid
24 works

‘Abd Allah ‘Azzam
50 works

‘Ali bin Khudayr al-Khudayr
45 works

Muhammad Qutb
21 works

Muhammad Mustafa al-Muqri*
23 works

Nasir al-Fahd (Z)
46 works

Hani al-Siba’i
33 works

Wasim Fath Allah*
36 works

Yusuf al-‘Uyayri [sometimes ‘Ayiri, etc.]
30 works, and 13 biographies and hagiographies

[A further 197 miscellaneous works are then listed, many of them written anonymously]

Al-Qa’ida and the Afghan Taliban: “Diametrically Opposed”?

Vahid Brown October 21, 2009

Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders have been issuing some very mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an uproar, with some calling these developments “the beginning of the end of relations” between the two movements.  Beginning with a statement from Mullah Omar in September, the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta-based leadership has been emphasizing the “nationalist” character of their movement, and has sent several communications to Afghanistan’s neighbors expressing an intent to establish positive international relations.  In what are increasingly being viewed by the forums as direct rejoinders to these sentiments, recent messages from al-Qa’ida have pointedly rejected the “national” model of revolutionary Islamism and reiterated calls for jihad against Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan and China.  However interpreted, these conflicting signals raise serious questions about the notion of an al-Qa’ida-Taliban merger.

The trouble began with Mullah Omar’s message for ‘Eid al-Fitr, issued on September 19, in which he calls the Taliban a “robust Islamic and nationalist movement,” which “wants to maintain good and positive relations with all neighbors based on mutual respect.”  Mullah Omar further stated that he wishes to “assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan … will not extend its hand to jeopardize others, as it itself does not allow others to jeopardize us.”  A week later, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, one of the most influential living Salafi jihadi ideologues, released an angry rebuke to these “dangerous utterances” of the Taliban amir, pointing out that they were of the same order as Hamas leader Khaled Mashal’s statement that the Chechen struggle is a Russian “internal matter.” For a person of Maqdisi’s stature to equate the Taliban with Hamas, especially in light of the recent jihadi media onslaught  against Hamas for its “crimes” against the Jund Ansar Allah, is an extremely serious charge.  Maqdisi ends his statement with the hope that he has misunderstood Mullah Omar’s message and that some clarification from the Taliban leadership will be forthcoming; more on this below.

A week after the Maqdisi message was posted, al-Sahab issued Ayman al-Zawahiri’s eulogy for Baitullah Mehsud (on which, see my earlier post). Midway through that speech, Zawahiri turns to the Palestinian issue, arguing that the mujahidin in Palestine should destroy the “laws of Satan” being imposed upon them, among which he singles out the notion that there should be “national unity with the traitors and those who sold out the religion and the homeland.” He goes on to lambast Hizbullah as representing a model of “turning jihad into a national cause,” a model which “must be rejected by the umma, because it is a model which makes jihad subject to the market of political compromises and distracts the umma from the liberation of Islamic lands and the establishment of the Caliphate.”

On October 6, Abu Yahya al-Libi’s al-Sahab video, “East Turkestan: The Forgotten Wound,” was released, which calls for support for the defensive jihad in northwestern China, one of those neighbors with whom Mullah Omar expressed a hope for “good and positive relations.” As in Zawahiri’s Baitullah eulogy, al-Libi emphasizes the dangers of dividing the umma into nations and ethnicities. He says that “East Turkestan [Xinjiang, China] is part of the Islamic lands that cannot be divided”; that it is the duty of all Muslims to support the Uighurs in their fight against the Chinese state; and that all who would appease China are “apostates.”  In these messages, then, both al-Libi and Zawahiri are denouncing, in the strongest possible terms, a political strategy being enunciated by the Taliban’s supreme leaders.

A week later, on October 12, Jordanian jihadi writer Ahmad Bawadi posted an exchange of correspondence that he’d recently had with the editors of the Taliban’s al-Sumud magazine. Bawadi, without naming names, points out that Mullah Omar’s ‘Eid message had engendered significant controversy, leading some to say that the Taliban supported making the same sort of compromises as Hamas.  The “clarification” sent in response by al-Sumud and posted by Bawadi pretty much dodged the question. Amid some tortuous sophistry about words being like a double-edged sword, the al-Sumud editors defended Mullah Omar’s position by comparing it to the Prophet Muhammad’s divide-and-conquer strategy of distinguishing between different groups of enemies: What’s wrong, as-Sumud asks, with saying we don’t want to fight the Buddhists (read: China) now, since the aim is to divide them from the Christians (read: ISAF/NATO forces) in order to weaken the latter?  Regardless of how one reads the al-Sumud  “clarification,” any doubts that the controversies were causing the Quetta Shura to rethink its public relations strategy were laid to rest the following day, when the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan issued an open letter to the Shanghai Cooperation Conference, reiterating verbatim the “neighborly” sentiments from Mullah Omar’s ‘Eid message.  The SCO, it should be pointed out, includes China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, all countries that are directly targeted by al-Qa’ida-allied groups based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

All of this has sparked a great deal of heated argument and anxious hand-wringing on several jihadi forums, but for reasons of space I’ll just single out one thread from the al-Hisbah forum. On October 14, “al-Najjar,” in a post entitled “Mullah Omar and Zawahiri Diametrically Opposed: A plan, a problem, or…?!,” contrasts the neighborly outreach of Mullah Omar’s ‘Eid message with the aforementioned statements about the “laws of Satan” in Zawahiri’s Baitullah eulogy, and ends by asking Zawihiri, “Oh our Shaykh, how is it that these are ‘Satanic laws’ when they are essentially the same as what has been mentioned by Mullah Omar, the Commander of the Faithful, to whom the mujahidin in Afghanistan and Pakistan have pledged their allegiance?”  A later poster, “Abu Azzam 1,” adds that Mullah Omar’s messages imply some level of recognition of the United Nations, an organization which al-Qa’ida has unequivocally labelled as “infidel,” and that these opposing moves seem to him to signal “the beginning of the end of relations between al-Qa’ida and the Taliban.”  Another forum participant, “Abu Salam,” agrees, writing yesterday that “this is a clear indication that al-Qa’ida and the Taliban movement are not of one mind, and that al-Qa’ida may turn on the Taliban in the near future.”  We shall see.  But one thing is clear: the recent shift in the Quetta Shura’s strategic communications is not to al-Qa’ida’s liking, and it is raising serious concerns among the broader Salafi jihadi movement about the religio-political legitimacy of the Afghan Taliban’s leadership.

Al-Qa’ida Publicy Cements Ties to the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan

Vahid Brown October 14, 2009

The official al-Qa’ida media outlet al-Sahab has released a flurry of videos in the past two weeks featuring leaders of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), both living and dead, in what amounts to a media campaign announcing their open alliance with Pakistan’s deadliest militant network.  On September 28, Zawahiri’s video eulogy for the slain TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud – the “role model of the youth” (ritha’ qudwat al-shabab) – was posted to the forums, followed two days later by a similar video message on the “martyrdom” of Baitullah starring Mustafa Abu’l-Yazid.  On October 2, al-Fajr Media distributed a third al-Sahab video eulogy for Baitullah, but this time featuring Wali ur-Rahman, the new TTP commander for the Mehsud tribal areas (an English transcript of which can be downloaded from here; links to all three videos can be found here).  

This series of al-Sahab celebrations of Baitullah, released two days apart over the course of a week, is itself a rather unusual concentration of al-Qa’ida media attention on a single non-al-Qa’ida member, and is totally unprecedented in terms of the al-Sahab air time devoted to the TTP.  Prior to these developments, the closest that al-Qa’ida came to officially signaling its ties to the TTP was in the release of an al-Sahab interview with Mullah Nazir shortly after he and Gul Bahadur joined Baitullah Mehsud to form the Shura Ittihad ul-Mujahidin this February.  Aside from the brief mention of Baitullah in that video, these recent releases are to my knowledge the first official al-Qa’ida communiqués to give any significant attention to the TTP and its leadership.

But that’s not all, folks. Yesterday, an Urdu newspaper reported that Aqil, alias Dr. Uthman, the sole surviving attacker in this weekend’s dramatic assault on the Pakistani Army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi , is the subject of an al-Sahab video released to a private television station in Pakistan, in which Aqil is shown receiving training in Waziristan and casing targets in Rawalpindi (Khabrain, 13 October 2009, pp. 6 and 8; article unavailable online, but there is an OSC translation).  And today, Pakistan’s ARY TV aired an al-Sahab video that they’d received, featuring TTP amir Hakimullah Mehsud, appearing alongside Wali ur-Rahman, in which both of them deliver statements to the people of Pakistan regarding their jihad against the state. (Ironically, both TTP leaders emphasize in the video that the TTP is not a servant of foreign masters, and that the TTP are “sons of Pakistan”).

While the close relationship between al-Qa’ida and the Pakistani Taliban has long been known, this release of multiple joint AQ-TTP messages from the al-Sahab production outlet is nonetheless extremely significant.  First of all, these developments indicate that al-Qa’ida has successfully seized the moment in the wake of the death of Baitullah to dramatically increase its influence over the TTP.  But this series of videos is perhaps also evidence of a decreasing willingness on al-Qa’ida’s part to remain in the shadows of its Pakistani partners as they unleash yet another bloody campaign of violence in Pakistan’s cities.  If so, this would represent a very important strategic shift in the thinking of al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders, who have thus far been content to provide largely anonymous guidance, training and force-multiplication assistance to their Pakistani jihadi allies.

UPDATE, 10/22/09: The video mentioned here as being aired in part by ARY TV on 14 October was distributed on the forums today by al-Sahab.  It is a little over thirty minutes long and, after opening invocations in Arabic, features Hakimullah and Wali ur-Rahman speaking in Urdu. There is no subtitling.

Abu’l-Walid is Back… with the Taliban (and not al-Qaida)

Vahid Brown October 9, 2009

(Editor’s note: I am delighted to introduce our next guest blogger, Vahid Brown from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Vahid is a linguist and historian with deep knowledge of the history of al-Qaida and the jihadi movement. He is the author of Cracks in the Foundation and the co-author of several well-known CTC reports. Vahid and I share many research interests, so I am thrilled that he will be with us for the next month or so.)

Mustafa Hamid Abu’l-Walid al-Masri, once a senior member of al-Qa’ida, has re-emerged lately after several years of relative silence and is once again chronicling, critiquing and offering strategic guidance to the jihadi movement.  He began posting new “editions” of his voluminous early writings to a blog in 2007 and ‘08, and this July he began to add newly-written articles on the Afghan insurgency, one of which has already been covered by Leah Farrall on her blog and in the Australian.

The October issue of the Taliban monthly al-Sumud reveals that Abu’l-Walid, author of at least two of the articles in the latest issue, has taken up one of his old jihadi jobs: official Taliban propagandist and media strategist.  His recent output also leaves little doubt that Abu’l-Walid is still at odds with the al-Qa’ida senior leadership over a wide range of ideological and strategic issues, and that he has every intention of continuing to publicly air al-Qa’ida’s dirty laundry.

All of which makes the timing of Abu’l-Walid’s appearance in al-Sumud very interesting, and for two reasons. First of all, the writings that Abu’l-Walid has posted to his blog are among the most damning criticisms of al-Qa’ida in existence, and his newer articles continue to ridicule Bin Ladin; in this one from September, for instance, UBL is singled out as the spokesman of the Salafi jihadi movement, which Abu’l-Walid slams for its do-it-yourself approach to Islamic jurisprudence. That such a vociferous critic of al-Qa’ida has been given an official platform by the Taliban, in their flagship Arabic magazine, clearly sends an important signal.

Second, as documented by Farrall, Abu’l-Walid broke his operational silence, so to speak, in July, by publishing an essay giving strategic advice to the Taliban – advocating a concerted campaign to kidnap American soldiers.  Aside from a lot of rather predictable anti-ISAF propaganda, the only piece of strategic guidance in Abu’l-Walid’s two al-Sumud articles appears in the one titled “They are Killing NATO Soldiers… Are They Not?,” (al-Sumud vol. 40, pp. 40-3), where he writes, “I say again that the mujahidin need direct guidance from their political leadership to the effect that taking prisoners is of far greater importance than capturing weapons or war booty.” That Abu’l-Walid’s guidance on this issue has moved from a blog to an official Taliban organ is obviously an important – and disturbing – development.

Also interesting is that on October 2, the same day that the latest issue of al-Sumud was released online, “Hawadit,” the pseudonymous administrator of Abu’l-Walid’s blog, posted there two letters written that day to the editors of al-Jazeera and to al-Quds al-‘Arabi, respectively, taking both papers to task for relying on Leah Farrall’s aforementioned piece in the Australian in their reports on Abu’l-Walid’s pro-kidnapping essay.  Why cite a counter-terrorism security official, writing in a “Zionist” newspaper, when they could have referenced the available writings of Abu’l-Walid himself – “one of your own former correspondents,” al-Jazeera is asked.  Most interesting, though, is the one and only detail that “Hawadit” takes issue with Farrall about: her description of Abu’l-Walid as a “senior al-Qa’ida figure.”  Both letters are emphatic on this point: Abu’l-Walid is most certainly not a member of al-Qa’ida at this time.

(For background on Abu’l-Walid, see the brief biographical profile I wrote for the CTC a couple of years ago; Muhammad al-Shafi’i’s excellent series of articles on Abu’l-Walid in al-Sharq al-Awsat, including this one in English; and Sally Neighbour’s Mother of Mohammed (Melbourne University Press, 2009, and forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press), which tells the story of Rabiah Hutchinson, an Australian woman who married Abu’l-Walid in Afghanistan in 2000.)

UPDATE: Leah Farrall has provided some excellent additional analysis to this issue, here, here and here.

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