“Al-Qaida fighters and leaders have completely destroyed Amariyah,” said Abu Ahmed, a 40-year-old Sunni father of four who said he joined in the clashes. “No one can venture out, and all the businesses are closed. They kill everyone who criticizes them and is against their acts even if they are Sunnis.”
Over the years now I’ve noticed that where ever Al Qaida shows up soon after the locals start to fight back against them, they do not play well with others. Unless you believe exactly what they do they will kill you.
The radical loser (Long Read)
Der Spiegel ^ | 1/12/05 | Hans Magnus Enzensberger
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1694568/posts
There is also no mistaking other similarities, such as the fixation with written authorities. The place of Marx and Lenin is taken by the Koran, references are made not to Gramsci but to Sayyid Qutb. Instead of the international proletariat, it takes as its revolutionary subject the Umma, and as its avant-garde and self-appointed representative of the masses it takes not The Party but the widely branching conspiratorial network of Islamist fighters. Although the movement can draw on older rhetorical forms which to outsiders may sound high-flown or big-mouthed, it owes many of its idées fixes to its Communist enemy: history obeys rigid laws, victory is inevitable, deviationists and traitors are to be exposed and then, in fine Leninist tradition, bombarded with ritual insults.
The movement’s list of favourite foes is also short on surprises: America, the decadent West, international capital, Zionism. The list is completed by the unbelievers, that is to say the remaining 5.2 billion people on the planet. Not forgetting apostate Muslims who may be found among the Shiites, Ibadhis, Alawites, Zaidites, Ahmadiyyas, Wahhabis, Druze, Sufis, Kharijites, Ishmaelites or other religious communities.
(snip)
Contrary to what the West appears to believe, the destructive energy of Islamist actions is directed mainly against Muslims. This is not a tactical error, not a case of “collateral damage”. In Algeria alone, Islamist terror has cost the lives of at least 50,000 fellow Algerians. Other sources speak of as many as 150,000 murders, although the military and the secret services were also involved. In Iraq and Afghanistan, too, the number of Muslim victims far outstrips the death toll among foreigners. Furthermore, terrorism has been highly detrimental not only to the image of Islam but also to the living conditions of Muslims around the world.
The Islamists are as unconcerned about this as the Nazis were about the downfall of Germany. As the avant-garde of death, they have no regard for the lives of their fellow believers. In the eyes of the Islamists, the fact that most Muslims have no desire to blow themselves and others sky high only goes to show that they deserve no better than to be liquidated themselves. After all, the aim of the radical loser is to make as many other people into losers as possible. As the Islamists see it, the fact that they are in the minority can only be because they are the chosen few.
Like the Thugees and the Assasin and the Mahdi in the Sudan. The only way to victory is to hunt down each and very one we can. They will be dormant for a while, then crawl from under their rocks again.
Originally, terrorism was the instrument of communists, anarchists, and extreme nationalists. The invention of dynamite in the mid-19th century gave the destructive power of artillery to small groups of individuals who before this would have been nothing more than insignificant malecontents. Terrorism would become a tradition of the radical left so that post-revolution communist states continued to sponsor various terrorist groups throughout much of the 20th century. The Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba, North Korea, and other communist governments trained, harbored, and equipped international terrorists, including key members of the PLO, the Baader-Meinhoff group, the Italian Red Brigades, etc. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, terrorism lost its chief benefactor. Since then terrorism of the extreme left has been largely replaced by that of radical Islam.
By 1996 only two communist nations were left that supported terrorism--North Korea and Cuba (lately, neither nation has been particularly active in this kind of activity). At the time the United States government classified five other nations as terrorist sponsors: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Sudan. All five are Muslim nations. One writer associates only two of these states (Iran and Sudan) with radical Islam (Huntington, p. 216). Actually, the term "radical" or "fundamentalist" Islam is little more than a quibble. All of the nations in question are "fundamentalist," i.e., founded upon Islamic law and precepts. As we have seen, nearly every Muslim, at least in principle, accepts Islamic teachings concerning jihad. Certain Western political, academic, and religious leaders are fond of referring to Islam as "the religion of peace" and of the bad guys who engage in terror as "highjacking a great religion." However, a sizable proportion of Muslims, perhaps even the vast majority, do not view the jihadists as the bad guys. They are actually folk heroes throughout the Islamic world, although their image has been somewhat tarnished of late in the Mid-East. This is because the jihadists have now largely targeted fellow Muslims.
Libya definately falls into the category of "fundamentalist Islamic state." The country's ruler, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, is a Muslim religious zealot. He advocates a revolutionary, pan-Saharan socialsm drawn not from the pages of Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, but from the Quran and the Hadith. Like Chairman Mao of Communist China, he has issued his little book of his revolutionary sayings for his followers edification called the Green Book (green being the color of Islam as red is that of Marxism).
Qaddafi's grandiose scheme to create a unified Islamic Saharan empire (with him as its "ceasar," of course) has gone no where. For one thing, his military, which looked strong on paper, proved to be incompetent in battle. His military intervention into Chad in 1982 ended in failure. His army had been badly mauled the year before in a short border war with Egpyt. Deposed Ugandan dictator Idi Amin even referred to Libyan troops unsuccessfully sent by Qaddafi to keep him in power as "a bunch of women" (Lawson, p. 98). Although awash in oil cash, which continues to pile up in Swiss bank accounts, the Libyan people get little but empty promises and anti-American rants (Hamza, p. 312).
Qaddafi was a major player in international terrorism. He provided weapons and training to both leftwing (the Provisional IRA and Red Brigades) and Islamic terror groups (the Moro Abu Sayyif and the PLO). His agents were involved in assassinations and airport bombings. Terror attacks on American and British citizens in Europe and the Middle East led to American bombing raids on Libya in mid-April of 1986. Thereafter, Qaddafi seems to have gotten directly out of the terror business (though, he doubtless is still involved in a smaller, more clandestine way). He continued to develope a nuclear bomb, however. But following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the United States and its allies in March of 2003, Qaddafi thought it prudent to abandon entirely his nation's nuclear weapons program.
Even more so than Libya, the Baathist regimes of Syria and Iraq have been seen as "secular." However, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of the Baathist Party would disagree.
The Baath, or Arab Socialist Resistance Party is like Qaddafism in that its pan-Arab nationalism and socialist agendas are based on an ideological synthesis of Islam and communism. The goal of the Baath Party is the establishment of a single Arab state from the Tigris to the Atlantic and the transformation of this state's society by means of an inkilab ("revolution," or "overturning"). (This sounds suspiciously like the khalifa and jihad of the militant Islamists).
Baathism was first conceived by Michael Aflaq, a Syrian Greek Orthodox school teacher who became a communist while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Aflaq seems to have converted to Islam. He saw no conflict with this religion and with the secular ideology of communism. In 1953 Aflaq and Salah Bitar (a Sunni) joined forces with the organizer of the pro-peasent Arab Socialist Party, Akram Hourani. The Baath Party was the result of this merger.
The merger of communism and Islam greatly appealed to Arabs everywhere, since the sharing of wealth and natural resources seems to fit with the primitive practices of Islam's founder. The Baath Party borrowed from the communists a tight, clandestine organization with seperate units or "cells" whose members are unknown to each other (Spencer, pp. 70, 71). Terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda, have adopted the same kind of cell organization.
In 1963 the Baath Party came to power in Syria. After power struggles between Baathist leaders, General Hafez al-Assad took over the government after a 1970 coup. He was elected president in 1971 in the kind of "election" we have come to expect in totalitarian regimes. His son Bashar became president following the death of General Assad in 2000.
The Assad family are Alawi Shiites. This explains Syria's good relations with the Shiite mullahs who run Iran. Consequently, the Iranian sponsored terror group known as Hizbollah is able to openly operate against Israel from Syrian-occupied Lebanon. Syria also supports Hamas and the Islamic Jihad terrorist groups.
The Baathists came to power in Iraq in 1968. Saddam Hussein became president of the country in 1979 after rising to the top of the Baath Party. Saddam's background would influence the way he would rule the country. He came from a particularly violent part of north-central Iraq beset by crime and intrigue (Hamza, p. 41). So assassination and terrorism would be particularly suited to Saddam the President as instruments of policy.
Saddam supported terrorism against Israel and the West. The families of Palestinian suicide bombers were paid a reward of $25,000 by the Iraqi government. PLO members and other terrorists were trained by the Estikhabarat (Iraqi Military Intelligence) at the Salmon Pak facility southeast of Baghdad. Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda affiliate, was also established at a training camp in northeastern Iraq. Saddam provided safe houses in Baghdad for some high-profile terrorists. There is more than just a little evidence that his terror reach went far beyond the Middle East.
The average person is convinced Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were solely responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing that took 168 lives on Apr. 19, 1995. However, neither McVeigh nor Nichols between them had the expertise or the technical skill to carry out such and operation. Hidden Middle Eastern hands are all over the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building.
First of all, the ammonium-nitrate bomb used in the OKC bombing is favored by Middle Eastern terrorist groups While the formula is not quite "high tech," it would be a hazardous undertaking for a novice. The amount of munition needed to bring down the Murrah Building had to be carefully calculated. The munition, the trigger mechanism, and other bomb components were just not something that could be slapped together by the average Joe from a do-it-yourself manual, as many assert McVeigh and Nichols were able to do. Bomb experts of the highest repute have disputed that either of them could have done so unassisted (Davis, pp. 267, 268). Incidentally, a Ryder truck using the same homemade explosive was used in the first World Trade Center attack on Feb. 26, 1993, an incident perpetrated by men of Middle-Eastern descent.
Secondly, the Ryder truck containing the explosive was spotted at precisely the right part of the building where it would do the maximum amount of damage. Middle Eastern terrorists have known for years that it is not the blast nor even the flying debris that causes the largest number of deaths in a bomb detonation of this kind, but the collapse of the structure itself. Hence, an examination of photos of terrorist destruction of known Middle Eastern origin will look eerily similar to photos taken of the Murrah Building's destruction.
Thirdly, the Ryder truck had hidden VINs (vehicle identification numbers) removed. This is also part of standard Middle Eastern terrorist operating procedure. A vehicle used in such bombings will often have the VINs removed to prevent authorities from tracing the vehicle back to the perpetrator(s). Whoever altered the truck failed to remove a rear-axle VIN. Whether this was an oversight or done by design to implicate McVeigh and Nichols we cannot say. Nonetheless, it led to McVeigh's capture just two days after the bombing (Apr. 21, 1995). It is very likely the Ryder truck was altered at an auto repair shop near the Murrah Building. This business was owned by another Middle Eastern immigrant (ibid., pp. 198-201).
Fourthly, both McVeigh and Nichols were seen by eyewitnesses with Middle Eastern men prior to the terror strike. Edwin Angeles, cofounder of Abu Sayyif, a Islamic-Philippine terror group, witnessed Nichols meeting with Ramzi Yousef in the Philippine town of Cebu City. Yousef was Osama bin Laden's chief bombmaker until his capture in Pakistan on Feb. 14, 1995. Nichols also frequently called a boarding house in Cebu City that was a known hangout of Islamic militants (ibid. pp. 244, 245). McVeigh was observed by the owner of an Oklahoma City motel in the company of Iraqi "refuges." Among them was a former Iraqi Air Force officer who was seen in the Ryder truck with McVeigh just before the bombing. This man, identified as "John Doe #2," was also seen by eyewitnesses exiting the Ryder truck in the minutes prior to the explosion and leaving the scene in a car driven by McVeigh. All these Iraqis worked for a Palestinian immigrant who was suspected by the FBI of having connections to the PLO (ibid., pp. 1-7).
Saddam Hussein was gradually moving Iraq more and more toward Islamic militancy. In his earlier years he showed not a hint of religiousity. Toward the end of his despotic career he came to embrace the Islamic fundamentalism he once persecuted. He had one of the largest mosques in the Middle East built. He also had a Quran written in his own blood, something only a very dedicated Muslim would do. His ties to jihadist Islam would only have grown tighter were he not removed from power.
Although he was not an immediate threat, he represented a permanent and abiding threat to Iraq's religious and ethnic minorities, to the region, and beyond. The mainstream press has beat the "there-were-no-weapons-of-mass-destruction" drum for so long that many people actually take that statement to be somehow etched in stone on the Holy Mount. However, the Saddam Hussein regime was actively acquiring and developing WMDs and other strategic weapons system in violation of the ceasefire that ended the Gulf War in 1991.
Three years after Iraq was supposed to have terminated its nuclear-weapons program, two thousand scientists and engineers and thousands of technicians were working 24 hours every day to develope a nuclear weapon. At least one device was actually assembled. All it required was a complete nuclear core. There was to be no test detonation. With the complete insanity characterizing this man, Saddam planned to drop it unannounced on Israel (Hamza, pp. 333, 334).
Saddam was apparently still actively involved in trying to obtain fissle material right up until just before Gulf War II. Ambassador Joe Wilson denied that the Iraqi dictator was trying to purchase "yellow cake" (i.e., uranium oxide ore) from the African nation of Niger. Yet, the intelligence services of Britain and other nations confirm this. Just days before American tanks rolled across the Iraqi border from Kuwait, Saddam's regime was attempting to acquire forbidden ballistic missles from North Korea. Coalition forces have found chemical weapons caches and mobile labs capable of making anthrax and other biological agents. There are tons of this stuff yet to found in Iraq. That we haven't heard more about this very likely is because coalition officials don't want to alert terrorists to the existence of WMD caches.
America's first modern encounter with jihadist Islam came about as a result of the revolution that brought Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini to power in Iran on Feb. 1, 1977. Khomeini demanded the return of the exiled Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi. When the United States refused, Iranian students entered the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 52 hostages. They were held for 444 days. This incident and President Carter's perceived inability to deal with it undoubtedly led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Under Khomeini and his successors, Iran has become the chief sponsor of international terrorism. In fact, the Iranian Revolution signaled both a new rise in Islamic militancy and a concomitant rise in terrorism. Iran's support of terrorism is both cynical and Machiavellian. Iran supplies weapons to both the Shiite militias in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents, who then use these weapons to kill each other. We will begin to understand the method to this madness in coming paragraphs.
The Sudan at one time provided assistance and sanctuary to the worst of jihadist bad actors, including Osama bin Laden. In a effort to improve its relations with the United States, the Sudanese government even offered to deliver up bin Laden back in 1998. The Clinton administration refused the offer and the rest, as they say, is history. Since then Sudan has seen fit to terrorize only its own citizens in the southern part of the country.
III. Fourth Generation Warfare and Jihadist Islam
"Fourth generation" warfare was envisioned by William S. Lind and other military thinkers as the type of conflict that would charactize the 21st century. The four generations of warfare are as follows:
First Generation Warfare: Napoleonic battle tactics based on massed artillery at a critical point of the enemy's infantry line followed by overwhelming infantry attack en masse. This system was to be supported by the entire nation's economy and citizenry. Clausewitz termed this type of warfare "total war" in contrast to the limited warfare conducted by the European Grand Monarchies in the previous era. These tactics culminated in mass bloodletting and stalemated trench warfare during World War I. The introduction of armored vehicles and combat aircraft introduced mechanized warfare toward the end of the war.
Second Generation Warfare: War of mobility based on the tank, mechanized infantry, and aircraft (especially the dive bomber). These ideas were first advocated by H. Liddell Hart and other British army officers. Guderian and other German generals perfected the technique they termed "blitzkrieg." The English Channel halted the blitzkrieg in the West and in the East the Russian winter and the sheer vastness of the country proved too much for the technique, at least as it was practiced by the Germans.
Third Generation Warfare: Nuclear weapons made the overwhelming conventional forces of the Eastern bloc superfluous. Consequently, the communists began to use guerrilla warfare as a means of grand-strategically out flanking the West. Chinese leader Lin Piao called it "encircling the cities of the world," i.e., using national liberation guerrilla movements to deny the West essential Third World raw materials and the exploited cheap labor upon which these extracted raw materials depend.
Fourth Generation Warfare: Also known as "asymmetrical" or "low-intensity" warfare. This kind of warfare is characterized by terrorism and the response of civilized nations to it. It has become the favored weapon of Islamic jihadists everywhere. As an instrument terrorism has really become an end in itself. Terrorism creates social and political chaos. Areas of instability then become safe havens for jihadist groups. These "jihadistans" can then be turned into staging areas for further terrorist operations. We will explain this more fully in a moment. In this type of warfare the line between criminal and political activity has become almost completely erased, since jihadists often finance their terror operations by narcotics trafficking, smuggling, piracy, extortion, etc. Terrorist groups also frequently make ad hoc alliances with criminal syndicates or even hire them out to do some of their dirty work. We could say fourth generation warfare is fedayeen activity of a far more dangerous nature that has gone global.
The last sentence in the previous paragraph is exemplified in Mustafa Nasar's book The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance, a 1600-page pseudo-academic jihadist tome. The dispersion and autonomy of terrorist cells Nasar's book advocates has already inspired bombings in Madrid, London, and Bombay (Cozzen, May 2, 2006). However, it is hard to see how terrorist activity absent even a loose command structure reaching back to a bin Laden or Zarqawi could be fit into an effective overall strategic plan.
Militant Islamic terror groups turn Marx-Leninist guerrilla warfare theory on its head. The communist guerrilla/national liberation movements of the later half of the 20th cen. would always first create a civilian council composed of loyal members of the communist party or the liberation movement. This group would seek safe haven in another Communist country or in one sympathetic to their cause. They would then recruit idealistic college students and others to train as guerrillas, under experienced mentors who were either veterans of other such wars of liberation, or who were graduates of communist schools of political warfare.
Eventually these cadre would infiltrate into the target country and go through further training in a remote area. They would establish ties to student and other front groups in the capital and other major cities. These groups would raise money, collect necessary equipment, disseminate propaganda, act as spies and couriers, organize demonstrations, and eventually engage in assassination and acts of terror.
When the guerrilla movement was properly trained and equipped in-country and ties to the aforementioned groups established, low-level military operations would begin. These operations would be conducted, at first, by squad and platoon-sized units. Eventually, as sympathy for the movement grew and more recruits began to pour in, larger units would be created and the local people in the countryside would be formed into part-time militia units. The goal was the establishment of a regular army and the creation of a "parallel hierarchy" (i.e., a rival government).
Unlike the jihadists, any terrorism conducted in the above scenario would have a specific purpose, i.e., to eliminate agents or supporters of the central government or to intimidate and strike fear in anyone who might contemplate betraying the movement. These jihadists seem to lack any "party" discipline in their use of terror. It looks more and more like an indiscriminate exercise of violence. In this sense, jihadist terror hasn't even reached any stage described in the literature dealing with guerrilla warfare.
Thus, jihadists operate more like disjointed criminal gangs whose only hope is to create complete chaos so that faith in an established government is completely eroded. They may ensconce themselves in tribal areas where the writ of the established government is already weak. They may make alliances with the local tribes with bribes of money and promises of protection against government agents or rivals. Rival thugocratic jihadistans will be set up in various parts of the country where all governmental authority has broken down. These jihadist gangs may cooperate to bring down the established government. If these rival gangs cannot unify to form a radical Islamic government, they will fight it out until one is top dog.
This seems like an "anti" strategy rather than a legitimate one. However, it has a mad kind of logic to it. It worked to bring in the Taliban regime in Afghanistan from 1995 until it was toppled by a coalition of Western powers and the Northern Alliance in 2001. It also seems to be working for the present in Somalia, where a Taliban-like government with ties to Al Qaeda was installed in the city of Mogadishu. It also had some success in Lebanon. After years of civil war Hizbollah was given autonomy within the country so that a jihadistan can operate openly almost as a state-within-a-state. The jihadists have high hopes terror will be the weapon that will bring Iraq into their tyrannical orbit.
Conclusion
We ought not to despair about radical Islam and its use of terror. Undoubtedly, there will be horrific terror incidents in coming years, perhaps even with weapons of mass destruction. It must also be noted that each of the strategic revolutions just discussed was introduced by a totalitarian and aggressive regime. We can take some comfort in the realization that Bonapartism, Communism, and Fascism were defeated in spite of the strategic vision of these ideologies. There is no reason to believe Jihadism will fare any better in the end, the terror weapon they wield so effectively notwithstanding.