Posted on 04/12/2006 8:14:42 PM PDT by callmejoe
Al-Qaida Figure Backs Iraqi Insurgents
Top al-Qaida Figure Ayman Al-Zawahri Urges Support for Iraqi Insurgents in Video
The Associated Press (snipped)
CAIRO, Egypt - No. 2 al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri praised insurgents in Iraq, particularly Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and called on all Muslims to support them in a video posted Thursday on the Internet.
The video was dated with an Islamic month corresponding to November 2005 and al-Zawahri mentions an Oct. 23 earthquake that hit Pakistan and Afghanistan. But it appeared to be the first time the 28-minute video has been made public.
It was not clear why the video was not released soon after the date it was allegedly filmed. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Pinging you here, Selene.
The al Qaeda network run by Zarqawi not only extended throughout Europe, but as news of recent days demonstrates, into Canada and the U.S. As I've mentioned before, Zarqawi ran a global operation before he made his mark in Iraq. They rolled up a large part of the European network right before the Iraq war, but obviously they did not get everyone. It seems they are trying once again to roll up/disrupt the global network over the past 2 weeks. It has been a partial success. Whether it will prove to be total success remains to be seen.
Those who have not yet been snagged will be tempted to act as they may assume that with all the new information that is being uncovered both in North America by seizing the bottom rungs, and in Iraq by seizing and killing the top rungs (i.e. the 17 simultaneous raids in Baghdad), that they are at risk of exposure. So they will "use it or lose it".
http://www.mississauga.com/mi/news/story/3535039p-4084785c.html
THE MISSISSAUGA NEWS
Suspects linked to Baghdad militant
Gerry Timbers
Jun 7, 2006
The arrest of six Mississauga men for allegedly conspiring to blow up the Parliament buildings and the Toronto Stock Exchange is the latest stop on a complex web of terror that connects back to the world's most wanted man, international investigators are saying.
Investigators say the arrests of the Mississauga men are linked to an intricate terror network spreading from the back streets of Baghdad through cells of young Islamic militants living in European capitals.
The arrest of 17 suspects, many of them teenagers, picked up in Mississauga and across the GTA during a counter-terrorism sweep on the weekend, is said to be the latest stage in dismantling a terrorist network that's linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
For nine months, Operation Mazhar's police and intelligence agents in eight countries have monitored emails and intercepted phone calls, leading so far to the arrest of 30 men.
Most of these suspects have never met. They were recruited and schooled making bombs via the Internet, authorities say.
Zarqawi's outfit passes on bomb-making manuals, advice on how to sustain terror cells and even ways to use credit card fraud to hack into vital Internet sites.
A series of raids in recent months in several European capitals and Atlanta in the U.S. have passed virtually unannounced.
One American official told The Wall Street Journal: "We let the operation run as long as we had to make sure we could identify as many would-be terrorist operators as we could and then picked them off one, two, three and finally 17 at a time."
The first arrests came in a Sarajevo apartment in October when Bosnian police picked up 18-year-old Mirsad Bektasevic.
Along with him was a 20-year-old Danish-born man and, police say, explosives and a suicide belt. The suspected target was the British embassy in the Bosnian capital.
Two more men were picked up and all are now going to trial.
Three months ago in Atlanta, FBI agents arrested Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, who had allegedly visited extremists in Canada to discuss possible targets in Washington, including the Capitol building.
The FBI says Ahmed's associate, Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, fled to Bangladesh but has been returned to the U.S. to be tried.
The alleged Mississauga area cell is a collection of high-school students and university graduates, many described by friends and neighbours as models of middle-class respectability.
Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21, of Mississauga is a recent graduate of health sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton.
Saad Khalid, 19, who also lives in Mississauga, is a business student at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.
Like you, I fear that they are now in a "use it or lose it" mode. Especially troubling to me for a personal reason. My son flies to Eastern Europe tomorrow and my husband flies to China on Saturday.
I will be glued to the TV and FR for news. Please ping me to anything I need to know.
You could not get a stronger reaffirmation of the links between AQ and Iraq than this.
>>>>So they will "use it or lose it".
I agree. I heard this morning that another 30+ raids were carried out yesterday. Our troops are working fast.
In other news....New ZAWAHIRI tape coming out today.
He does not mention Zarqawi.
Al Jazeera to air video tape from Zawahri
Fri Jun 9, 2006 7:57am ET
DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Jazeera television said on Friday it would air a new video tape from Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al Zawahri.
Al Jazeera said that in the tape Zawahri speaks about the Palestinian referendum, the Darfur crisis and Egyptian judges.
In April, Zawahri said hundreds of suicide bombers had "broken America's back" in three years of war in Iraq.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-06-09T115735Z_01_L09700329_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-ZAWAHRI.xml&archived=False
Bump.
I am always amazed at how small the world is, the Canada groups are showing links to so many countries.
Thanks for the alert, not a surprise, they will need to show how strong and in control they are.
One has to wonder how long ago this tape was recorded? Do they have a collection at al-jazeera, for any coming incident..........?
Good thinking, Joe.
Sorry that I have not kept up, got behind on my pings and see that I have missed a lot of important information.
My thanks to both of you for the pings, even if I did miss seeing them.
Your 6 dates were impressive, do you recall that in the past, several years ago, they would let us find a date and then make the attack 2 to 4 days later...
It could be that the attack/killing of Zarqawi, threw a change to their plans.
Will they wait for a new leader? or go with the old plans?
"Please ping me to anything I need to know."
will do
"You could not get a stronger reaffirmation of the links between AQ and Iraq than this."
True . . . unless some of the Baathist bureaucrats were stupid enough to document Iraqi-Iranian cooperation in "creating" al Qaeda (recruiting and training) in the early 90s . . . and someone finds it in the recovered archives. Iraq is "old news" (though people are dying every day). People are set in their views and it is hard to change minds. People need to be looking for evidence on what Iran has done. And how its new leader was hip deep in it.
"Our troops are working fast. In other news....New ZAWAHIRI tape coming out today."
I still have a very bad feeling about all this the past two months. These are not "fireside chats" to comment on news, and they are not "proof of life" to show they are alive (or we would have seen weekly videos after Tora Bora), and they are not to demonstrate relevance (they do that with attacks, not tapes).
If we had this deluge of communications from UBL and Zawahiri 2-3 years ago, we would have gone to orange and there would be lines at the grocery store for canned goods and bottled water. (And FR would melt down with so many posts that Ian would have to start a new thread every few days.)
After 5 yrs, as far as the public is concerned, it is either collective yawns, glazed-eyed stares, or baffled shrugs of the shoulders.
We are about to be hit hard. I'll bet that everything the past two weeks (UK, Canada, U.S. and now Iraq) is about disrupting it. I hope that it does.
"I am always amazed at how small the world is, the Canada groups are showing links to so many countries."
Exactly.
This relates to the reason I no longer post on TM. It is not moderated (Ian has a full-time job and is doing a huge favor just to keep putting new ones up)and some of the more active posters (not the past few weeks but for a long time before that) go onto illegal immigration rants. No one pulls those posts, and I get tired of looking at them. So I now scan the thread from the bottom up so I can skip certain names because I know what they'll be posting (illegal immigration, not security-related issues).
The most indisputable reason why those posts do not belong on TM is that "security" is the fig leaf that is used to legitimize the issue as being threat-related. If it truly were a border security issue, then I'd expect at least as many posts on the threat coming from the Canadian border - - it is longer, more permeable, and more networked with global commerce, travel, and migration. Canada has far more jihadis than Mexico and has diverse communities of immigrants where jihadis lurk. Canada is a far greater threat than Mexico. Yet I doubt of the hundreds of thousands of posts there are more than a dozen or so on the dangers of the exposed Canadian border. But there are thousands of posts on the Mexican border. It is complete nonsense, and life is too short.
The southern border security issue is indeed a grave concern. But the northern border is a far graver threat than the Mexican border, as are the air and sea ports (for instance, even small nukes are very heavy . . . if you want to get one here you are going to have to slip it in large amounts of unchecked cargo, not backpack it across hundreds of miles of open desert where you'd need to shield an already heavy device with even more heavy lead)
You are right that Canada is incredibly connected to the world. But it also shows why those who devote 90+% of their time to ranting about Mexico might help us all if they spent part of that energy holding Congress' feet to the fire on securing the seaports, air cargo, coastal defenses (stand-off attacks from barges offshore) and the northern border.
All of these are far more dangerous threats than the Mexican border (and should be discussed far more on a threat called "threat matrix"). We are busy rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic because we have lost our collective minds in placing one issue above all others and at their expense when it is not the gravest threat - - not even close.
Border security means 360 degrees and 3 dimensional defense of our periphery (air, land and sea in all directions). Not this unhealthy obsession with only one dimension of the threat that is the predominant opinion of most of those who are inclined to post on FR.
The threats rank:
number 1: SEA
number 2: air
number 3: land
And then even once you get to land, if you have to pick which border you secure first - - it is the northern border hands down. The Mexican border is at the top of the list today. It shows how backward and irrational our political debates have become.
/end rant
Border security means 360 degrees and 3 dimensional defense of our periphery (air, land and sea in all directions). Not this unhealthy obsession with only one dimension of the threat that is the predominant opinion of most of those who are inclined to post on FR.
The threats rank:
number 1: SEA
number 2: air
number 3: land
We are about to be hit hard. I'll bet that everything the past two weeks (UK, Canada, U.S. and now Iraq) is about disrupting it. I hope that it does.<<<<
You are correct.
From my worldwide reading, I get the impression that the cells and groups, are now independant and will work without the leaders of al-qaeda.
al-qaeda is no longer the main threat, it is all of them, the gangs, the prison muslims, the communinst anarchy groups and now even school groups.
The attacks are of course well planned by al-qaeda ove the years, but I think we have enough cells to hit here and there and to 'get even' with the U.S., to make us think it is all al-qaeda.
If you want a good taste of what is out there to attack us, go to: kgo.com and listen to tonights "John Rothman" program, he is a left, but has a brain and at times will take on the left, if they are wrong.
This is one of his better programs, he had for the first half hour, Melanie Phelps? the author of the new book, something like "Londonstan".
She sounds right to me. and John is defending her.
The left, man on the street and the democrat leaders, are saying that we murdered zarqawi, etc, it is all Bush's fault, etc, some of them are very ugly.
I am seeing an increase in plane accidents, more school threats and more arson.
Pipe bomb threats, are now turning out to be real bombs.
And we had an American, building nail bombs, with a small jar that is said to contain Ricin....so the fake threats are now real threats.
"I do hope you will join us."
Thanks. Ping me when you set up the next thread. I only post on FR in fits and starts nowadays (not daily), so I mostly read instead of post. But I appreciate you pinging me to the North Korean posts. I always go read each one.
I will ping you to the new thread.
You have a valuable brain and I am always interested in what you have to say.
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
This article is good as far as it goes, but has five glaring omissions:
1) Zarqawi was *not* building a global network. He ran a global network long before the Iraq war and the insurgency began. They tried dismantling it in 2003 before the Iraq war and it has popped back up like weeds. It will likely do so again because the roots run deep.
2) It mentions many European nations and Canada but says virtually nothing about the U.S. I'd bet money the network here is extensive. When UBL last year authorized Zarqawi to begin preparation for operations inside the United States, it was likely not an empty boast.
3) Zarqawi oversaw WMD projects for the global al Qaeda network long before Iraq. That expertise came into play with his failed plan to launch a chemical weapons attack in Amman a couple years ago. WMD was his expertise, not beheadings.
4) In recent months, the Zarqawi network has had impressive success in expanding the fight to the Palestinian territories. There are now cells in Sinai, Gaza, and the West Bank. Al Qaeda/Palestine is building operational capabilities in these areas.
5) The short-term danger is underestimated in this article. This is not a matter of one key leader or one part of the organization being dismantled, but substantial portions of the overall organization are being shut down and compromised. They are all now uncertain whether they will be exposed given the extent of the dismantling and must either flee Iraq to safe havens in Iran or Syria, or more likely, they must act before they are caught (use it or lose it).
If Zarqawi had obtained a trump card from his WMD connections with the previous regime, it *will* be used. The chances of a WMD attack are greater for another reason besides the "use it or lose it" scenario. On a much smaller scale, the issues presented by the collapse of the Zarqawi WMD-organization are similar in nature to the issues presented by the collapse of a WMD-state (command and control issues).
The WMD threat presented by this collapsing network covers the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel (everywhere there is a network presence), but the threat is most severe inside Iraq.
If I were in Iraq, I'd be checking the filters on my gas mask. In any of these other places, I'd think about updating response plans and heightening awareness of the threat.
from the June 12, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0612/p01s02-woiq.html
Next target: Zarqawi's global web
The slain leader was developing a wider terror network, particularly in Europe.
By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BAGHDAD - American investigators are exploiting the intelligence bonanza found in the rural safe house north of Baghdad where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed last Wednesday.
Analysts say that the memory sticks, hard drives, and documents found there and at some 56 other sites raided after the Jordanian militant's death are likely to damage Mr. Zarqawi's networks. The US military describes the finds as a "treasure trove."
The new intelligence leads could uncover terrorist operations far afield from Iraq - particularly in Europe - as Zarqawi had begun to piece together a much wider network of militants, experts say.
"The US government will have a firm understanding of Zarqawi's network, not only in Iraq, but Zarqawi's global network," says Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore. "Zarqawi had penetrated at least 20 European countries, Canada, ... and even established cells in Southeast Asia."
Some say the scale of Zarqawi's operations - bolstered by recruits inspired by his battlefield exploits in Iraq - may have begun to rival the less visible Osama bin Laden.
"Zarqawi was building a global terror network parallel to Al Qaeda of bin Laden," says Mr. Gunaratna, who is also author of "Inside Al Qaeda." "The killing of Zarqawi is a huge victory - not so much against the Iraqi insurgency, because the insurgency will continue, [but] internationally.... And this network will suffer."
Zarqawi's followers vowed to fight back Sunday with "major attacks" in Iraq, and to renew their "allegiance" to Al Qaeda chief, Mr. bin Laden. An Internet statement said the leadership of Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq met after his death, and promised to "prepare major attacks that will shake the enemy like an earthquake."
The group - posting its message on a site used by the umbrella Mujahideen Shura Council - did not name a successor to Zarqawi.
Depending on what media survived the bombs and the caliber of the more than two-dozen suspects detained in the raids, the information could potentially be in league with that gleaned from the fall of Kabul in 2001 or the capture of Al Qaeda operational mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan in 2003, experts say.
"There is a pattern of senior associates of Al Qaeda, that they keep so much information, so much data - they like to have everything close to their chest, and have it with them," says Michael Radu, the co-chair of the Center on Terrorism at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
Zarqawi's network, especially in Europe, "is much more extensive than that of bin Laden or [Al Qaeda No. 2, Ayman] al-Zawahiri," says Mr. Radu. "I wouldn't be surprised if we see another wave of arrests in Europe. Then we will know if what was captured [in Iraq] and after was indeed important for [Zarqawi's] network."
Jordanian security officials estimate that Zarqawi recruited, trained, and sent back 300 militants, who are now awaiting orders in their home countries to strike, according to a report in Sunday's edition of The New York Times.
The US military in Baghdad is not further describing the contents or value of the Zarqawi material, says spokesman Maj. Douglas Powell, because "the intelligence is still being developed and we're not ready to address anything specific." Maj. Gen. William Caldwell says he is pushing to have some information quickly declassified.
US forces have "had a steady drum beat of operations against the Al Qaeda network here in Iraq since the Zarqawi operation," Gen. George Casey, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, told Fox News on Sunday. "We will continue to go after [Zarqawi's] network and disrupt it in what we feel is a very vulnerable period. And so we hope to take advantage of that."
Zarqawi's top followers will assume that US forces are exploiting the new leads, says Gunaratna. "Some key operatives will change their venue and their methods," he says. "They will know that Zarqawi's material has been compromised."
The ultimate value of the intelligence from "such a big event" as last week's raids "depends on how [Zarqawi's network is] organized. The goal is always to cut off the head," says a US official in Baghdad familiar with terrorism investigations.
"Think about it like a corporation. The little guy is going to have information about his boss, who will know about the subdivision - the best thing is to get them all," says the official. "But not everybody is organized that way; it is not necessarily a hierarchy."
Indeed, Zarqawi's network appeared to operate alongside - not necessarily over - a broader Iraqi insurgency. Last January Zarqawi helped form the Mujahideen Shura Council, bringing together several Sunni insurgent groups that share Al Qaeda's ideology of turning Iraq into an Islamic state.
"His Shura Council is 80 percent Iraqi, so [US and Iraqi forces] will continue to hunt those people," says Gunaratna. "But Zarqawi has made this group very Iraqi. He has seeded his ideas and values to those Iraqis."
Indeed, Zarqawi's adherents seem to be working on revenge. A string of attacks have continued unabated in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, killing an average 19 people a day over the past three days.
Also Saturday, a more prescient clue: a gruesome video on the Internet of the beheading of three uniformed Shiites, that were claimed in the video to be members of a death squad - a tactic often used by Zarqawi himself against Western hostages.
"Iraq is the front defense line for Islam and Muslims, so don't fail to follow the path of the mujahideen [holy warriors], the caravan of martyrs and the faithful," said Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi leader of Council.
"As for you, the slaves of the cross [Christian coalition forces], the grandsons of Ibn al-Alqami [Shiites], and every infidel of the Sunnis, we can't wait to sever your necks with our swords," warned Mr. Baghdadi, according to an Associated Press translation of the Internet statement.
But the ability of Zarqawi's acolytes to produce and disseminate such videos also may prove to undermine such technically savvy groups.
"They have to keep track of all these little cells they have, and contacts. And the fact that so many have computer training is a temptation to put everything on a hard drive, because who can memorize all those individuals and aliases?" says Radu, of FPRI, about Al Qaeda leaders. "The electronic age is a double-edged sword for them, because it makes them vulnerable if those things are captured."
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