Posted on 07/27/2013 8:47:18 AM PDT by equaviator
Two spectacular al Qaeda prison breaks in Iraq, freeing over 500 of its members in two separate prisons simultaneously this week, demonstrate the group is back with a vengeance. Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch is also the moving force behind the jihadist success in Syria. The resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq has sobering implications for what is likely to follow the drawdown of NATO forces in Afghanistan for the al Qaeda mother ship in Pakistan.
The double jailbreaks at Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons were massive attacks. Suicide bombers, teams of attackers using mortars and small arms, and two dozen car bombs were used. The firefight killed over a hundred Iraqi guards. The attackers also had inside help within the Iraqi security forces. The attacks were the culmination of what al Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership had promised a year ago when it launched the “Breaking the Walls” offensive to free its prisoners from Iraqi jails.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as it is officially named, was created by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A Jordanian, Zarqawi had worked with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan before 9/11 and built many connections in Iraq in the months before the war. Within months of the occupation, his terror gang was killing American troops and Iraqi Shia and taking the country to civil war. Bin Laden publicly anointed him al Qaeda’s amir for the entire region including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and even Turkey.
Zarqawi was hunted down and killed by American forces in a brilliant operation led by Gen. Stanley McChrystal in 2006. His successor was killed a year later. But as McChrystal has said publicly, it was too late. By the time U.S. forces killed Zarqawi, the group had become deeply embedded in Iraqi Sunni Arab society. It was harshly repressed during the American surge, but it was never really defeated. It began to regenerate as soon as American forces left Iraq.
So far this month al Qaeda terrorist attacks have killed over 500 in Iraq. Its leader today, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, promises many more deaths.
At the same time, al Qaeda in Iraq has been the moving force behind the birth and growth of al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria. One of Zarqawi’s protégés, Muhammad al Golani, was sent by al Qaeda in Iraq to set up the al Nusra Front in 2011. By mid-2012 it had become one of the most effective groups in the Syrian opposition movement to Bashar al-Assad’s government. It got considerable support in money, arms, and men from the Iraqi front.
Now al Qaeda in Syria is getting hundreds of volunteer fighters from across the Islamic world, all coming to join the struggle. This week Dutch police arrested a 19-year-old Muslim girl in The Hague who was helping to organize the recruitment and movement of Dutch Muslim citizens to Syria to join the al Nusra Front. Dutch sources say over a hundred have already gone. In Pakistan, the al Qaeda–affiliated Taliban says it is sending fighters to join the battle in Syria and support al Qaeda. Syria has become what Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Iraq were to earlier generations of jihadists: the epicenter of the global jihad. From Western Europe to Southeast Asia, the networks that shipped fighters to Iraq a decade ago are now sending them to Syria.
The al Qaeda group has also begun spreading its influence into Lebanon as well. One well-informed observer reports that “from Tripoli to Akkar, and from Sidon to the heart of Beirut, black Salafi-jihadi flags and banners have been spotted in increasing numbers, a picture unseen before in Lebanon’s history.” The Shia Hezbollah’s support for Assad is creating an all-too-predictable backlash of support for al Qaeda and other extremist Sunni groups inside Lebanon.
Over the objections of al Golani, the Iraqi al Qaeda leadership has insisted it is in charge of the entire al Qaeda movement in the Fertile Crescent states, arguing it has inherited the mandate that bin Laden gave to Zarqawi a decade ago. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman Zawahiri, has sided with al Golani and wants the two groups kept separate, each reporting to him. Al Baghdadi is proving as independent and difficult to manage as Zarqawi was in his heyday, when he too defied Zawahiri’s injunctions to be more restrained in his attacks on Shia targets.
The regeneration of al Qaeda in Iraq and its spread into Syria and Lebanon has important lessons for dealing with al Qaeda in South Asia. In the last five years President Obama has made considerable gains in disrupting and dismantling the al Qaeda core leadership in Pakistan, as he promised he would. Bin Laden’s death, and the death of many of his key lieutenants by drones, has put the mother ship of al Qaeda on the defensive. But it too is not defeated.
Al Qaeda in Pakistan is embedded in a deep network of support groups, including the Taliban and Lashkar e Tayyiba, which help protect it and give it sanctuary, especially in cities like Karachi. It is under virtually no pressure from the Pakistani government. The government’s own secret investigation of how bin Laden lived for almost a decade inside Pakistan before the SEALs delivered justice concludes that the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, is either hopelessly incompetent or complicit in working with al Qaeda.
All of which means that if American pressure on al Qaeda in Pakistan diminishes after the NATO withdrawal of combat forces next year from Afghanistan, we can expect a rapid regeneration of al Qaeda in Pakistan. The drones all fly from bases in Afghanistan, without which there is no pressure on al Qaeda next door in Pakistan. Iraq is a sobering lesson in what happens when a battered al Qaeda movement gets a second chance.
Back? When did they leave?
Oh I forgot BH0 said they were defeated and gone in 2012. My bad.
So is FR’s page glitch.
Obama let the dogs out.
They “left” when Imam Obama proclaimed he rid the world of terrorism and the Global War on Terror is over (forbade the Pentagon to use the term when he was elected).
All the rest of the other freak instances of murders of more than one person are “workplace disasters”, Sporting event mishaps (Boston) and the like.
Meanwhile our nation’s arrayed forces have been engaged in massive covert operations to catch those three old coots up in North Georgia in some “militia terrorist” act other than talking out of their old asses.
A civil war in Iraq is a near certainty — between the Shia government and the Sunnis/AlQ who were ousted by the US and are now coming back to claim ‘their rightful place’. Shades of what happened in Spain in the 1930’s. Like Spain, and unlike Egypt, the government does not have a strong, loyal Army to resist.
Where’s the link?
You nailed it.
A Prison break?
Is it really a break if a guard opened the door?
Let me use a MSM ploy here:
I heard someone say Barack Obama helped them break out of prison.
Oh I forgot BH0 said they were defeated and gone in 2012. My bad.
It was probably just a campaign promise.
What else does BH0 do but campaign, promise, and lie?
Yeah, that is what the Current Occupant of the White Hut told us, in his rush to judgment. That explained who was not supposed to have engineered the attack at Benghazi in September 2012.
Cuffing liars.
But worse, much, MUCH worse, is that the Establishment Republicans have stood back and let Current Occupant get away with that narrative.
Barry Goldwater said in 1963, “None dare call it treason”.
Just to keep perspective, that was fifty years ago. The dry rot has been going on a long time. The face of the enemy has changed, from the Soviets who were ten foot all, to the various faces of the Muslim Brotherhood (and al Qaeda is a franchise of that evil conspiracy), who are also ten foot tall.
We need a new Ronald Reagan to stand up to the Worldwide Caliphate, just as the Evil Empire that was the Soviet Union was faced down in the 1980s.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. That generation has nearly passed.
yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, and yep.
Can’t be.....our admirals and generals told us we won.
New campaign slogan: Detroit is dead and alqaeda is alive!
Don’t have time to read this, but is it relevant? WIll be back...
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