Next wave of Al Qaeda leadership

Daily Times [Lahore, Pakistan] ^ | Oct 8, 2004 | unknown

[Mike Fieschko]

* As the group’s Arab core is captured or killed, a new generation of Pakistanis fills the void

Daily Times Monitor

KARACHI: After leaving university, Attaur Rehman traded his jeans and T-shirts for a beard and cap, his civil-service aspirations for a martyr’s spot in heaven. He used to spend his time playing cricket, but he is now in a Pakistani jail facing a death sentence on terrorism charges. Rehman, along with nine other “comrades”, is charged with carrying out a deadly June attack against a senior Pakistani Army general in Karachi. The general escaped narrowly but 10 people, including seven soldiers, were killed.

Rehman’s circle call themselves Jundullah (God’s Army) and have close ties to Al Qaeda. Most are young, educated men, whom Rehman allegedly sent to training camps in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas. Rehman doesn’t fit the mould of the typical Al Qaeda leader. Traditionally, most were Arabs who gained status by resisting the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Younger, educated recruits tapped for suicide missions like 9/11 typically came from Middle Eastern countries with long histories of pan-Islamic resistance. What sets this new breed apart is that they are joining from places like Pakistan, where the focus has been on regional grievances, like independence for the disputed area of Kashmir. But as the Al Qaeda leadership ranks begin to thin, men like Rehman are starting to climb the ladder.

“It is a new generation of Al Qaeda,” Riffat Hussain, a leading defence and security analyst, told Christian Science Monitor (CSM). “These are new converts to Al Qaeda. They may have no links with Al Qaeda in the past, but now they are willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause as they feel Al Qaeda is the name of defiance to the West. They are young and angry, and their number has swelled in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq,” he added.

CSM reported that a voice on an audiotape last weekend, purported to be that of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, called on young Muslims to continue the global fight even if Al Qaeda’s leaders are killed or captured. It is people like Rehman and his colleagues that Zawahiri could have been talking about, CSM suggested. Police suggest that Pakistan’s newly organised jihadis and educated radicals might number in the hundreds. Police say that more than 600 suspected Al Qaeda militants have been rounded up by security forces over the past three years.

Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, the 28-year-old known as Al Qaeda’s computer man, is among them. A middle-class engineering graduate, Khan is believed to have played an important role in planning terrorist attacks in the US and Britain before he was arrested in Lahore on July 13.

Khan visited Afghanistan during his student days and later became a bridge between Al Qaeda leaders and their operatives. He helped Al Qaeda operatives send encrypted messages over the Internet. “His journey to Al Qaeda started from outside a mosque in his Karachi neighbourhood where he met extremists,” his old friend named Khurram told CSM. He watched his friend’s transformation but “never imagined that he would become such a man”.

Under interrogation, Khan exposed part of Al Qaeda’s intricate web of contacts in Pakistan, Britain, and the US. The information led to the July arrest of Tanzanian terror suspect Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and a top Al Qaeda operative, Musa el Hindi, in Britain. “There are two types of recruits,” a senior Pakistani counter-terrorism investigator told CSM. “There are Islamist-educated young men from middle-class and upper-middle-class families whose feelings are ignited in Islamic congregations at private houses, mosques, and madrassas and are subsequently picked up by Al Qaeda men from there,” he said. “Then there are jihadis who were trained by Arabs and Taliban in Afghanistan and have now been approached by Al Qaeda operatives or their trusted extremists.”

Some of the jihadis are drawn from the ranks of local militant organisations, including Al-Badr (backed by the Jamaat-e-Islami), the Kashmiri outfits Harakat-ul Mujahideen and Jaish-e Mohammad, and the Sunni group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Most of these groups have, until recently, focused their energies on Kashmir or sectarian conflicts.

The new independent splinter groups are small, receive funding from Al Qaeda, and attack Western targets using tactics like suicide bombings — once unheard of in Pakistan. Investigators in Karachi told CSM that several such groups of around 10 members each are operating in the city alone..

“They (Al Qaeda) are mostly banking on local jihadis,” said one police investigator. To recruit, Al Qaeda leaders or operatives rely on trusted contacts, preferably people who have fought with Arabs or have been trained by them, said a senior Karachi police investigator. The go-between appoints a group of leaders, who in turn hires the services of members and assigns tasks mostly on the instructions coming from the go-between. For the jihadis, the work can be lucrative — they are paid $170 to $340 a month..

Amjad Farooqi, a top militant reportedly killed by security forces, was a main recruiter. A veteran of the Afghan resistance in the early 1990s, Farooqi linked up with Al Qaeda operatives following September 11, 2001. Security forces arrested some 10 suspected Al Qaeda-linked Pakistani militants following the interrogation of two arrested accomplices of Farooqi.

The rise of splinter groups has made the task of investigators much more difficult. The police recently recovered a booklet of instructions from a jihadi in the wake of ongoing crackdown.

“Don’t roam around with beard and Islamic dress in fashionable neighbourhoods,” stated the instructions. “Always take out the chip of the mobile phone while sleeping to avoid being caught. Use the mobile phone from a crowded place so police don’t locate the positioning. Don’t write the original numbers of mujahids in a notebook, try to memorise the last three digits.”

To bolster secrecy, group members do not know the real names of their comrades, and only group leaders know the whereabouts of other members, said a police official. Suicide bombers are mostly young and usually live and operate separately, he added.

The growing influence of militant groups within the law enforcement agencies has also alarmed authorities. Three policemen acted as suicide bombers in the Shiite mosques in Karachi and Quetta. Several low-ranking personnel from the armed forces were arrested for their alleged involvement in the foiled assassination attempts against President General Pervez Musharraf.

“It is difficult to monitor the profiles of these new recruits and the new groups,” Karachi police chief Tariq Jameel told CSM. “If we want to defeat them then there is a need of collective effort from the entire society to eliminate terrorism and extremism. They are chasing us and we are chasing them. The battle is on,” he added.

[MplsSteve]

Good article...but not surprising.

I always believed that when we eliminated the first couple of layers of Al Qaeda that there's be more fanatics waiting in the wings.

That's what American needs to realize. The War On Terror won't end with OBL's capture or verification of death. It's bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran.

[SlowBoat407]

Their ranks would be swelling even if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq. They are opportuning the event just as Abu Musab, the son of sixty dogs, has opportuned it as he hacks off the heads of innocent people who are trying to make life better for Iraqis.

The young jihadis are angry, burning scum who want nothing more than to give action to their hatred. It's turning into a target rich environment.

[bert]

It is my view that Pakistanis play at history but are actually ineffective at getting anything done. They do very well mimicking the British military on the parade ground but just don't have the wherewithal to ever get into battle.

Pomp and circumstance, masterful bureaucrats, ineffective planners, blow and bluster,dismal accomplishment.

[Fishrrman]

MplsSteve writes:
Good article...but not surprising.
I always believed that when we eliminated the first couple of layers of Al Qaeda that there's be more fanatics waiting in the wings.
That's what American needs to realize. The War On Terror won't end with OBL's capture or verification of death. It's bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran.

After the World Trade Center attacks, I was out working in my yard, under my apple trees, and came to this analogy:

Each season, as long as I've lived here, I have to go down to the backyard, and clean up the apples from my two apple trees. The apples that fall from them aren't really edible, and need to be cleaned up and disposed of.

I can clean up the apples this year, but come _next year_, I will have to clean them up once again.

Question #1: if I want to solve my "apple problem" once and for all, so that I am never again plagued by the problem of "bad apples", what must I do?

Osama bin Laden, and _all_ the others, are merely this seasons bad apples. We can clean them up, get rid of them, kill them. But before long, the "tree" from which they grow will spawn an entirely _new_ crop of jihadis to deal with, to dispose of, once more.

Question #2: if we want to cleanse the Earth from the threat of Islamic jihadism once and for all, what must we do? To ensure that there are no _future crops_ of "bad apples"?

Confront these questions, and accept the answers in your heart, and you will know what needs to be done...

Cheers!
- John

[theDentist]

Most are young, educated men

Educated? In actual colleges or in their version of schooling? Doesn't take much of an education to pull a trigger or set a mine.

[conservativewasp]

OK, so we'll kill them too.

[LibSnubber]

"That's what American needs to realize. The War On Terror won't end with OBL's capture or verification of death. It's bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran."

Right you are. Our children are going to have to fight this cancer called islam, and probably our grandchildren too.

[Donna Lee Nardo]

ping FYI

[marshmallow]

“There are Islamist-educated young men from middle-class and upper-middle-class families whose feelings are ignited in Islamic congregations at private houses, mosques, and madrassas and are subsequently picked up by Al Qaeda men from there,” he said.

Some things never change. These are the modern day equivalent of the '60s and '70s rich-kid rebels.

The SLA, the Jane Fondas, the Patty Hearsts, etc. They know something is not right with the world but their misplaced idealism and activism leads them to advocate solutions which lead to only more violence and misery.

[beaelysium]