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Al Qaeda After The Death Of Bin Laden – The Future Of Jihadist Te...
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Al Qaeda After the Death of Bin Laden The Future of
Jihadist Terrorism
(Thomas Joscelyn, May 25, 2011)
Transcript available below
Watch his speaker playlist[1]
The death of Osama bin Laden will significantly affect
both sides in the war on terror. The most important
questions now are how will al Qaeda and its associated
movements respond to the death of their leader, and is
the United States safer or in more danger today? The
Westminster Institute brings together world-renowned
authorities and national security practitioners for a one-
day special event in Washington, D.C. Together they will
provide answers to these questions and also address the
broader questions of what impact bin Laden s death will
have on non-violent jihadists such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, and what strategies can the U.S. employ to
turn this battlefield win into a definitive victory.
About the speaker
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies[2] and is senior editor of FDD
Long War Journal[3], a widely read publication dealing
with counterterrorism and related issues. Much of his
research focuses on how al-Qaeda and the Islamic State
(or ISIS, ISIL) operate around the globe.
Joscelyn has served as a trainer for the FBI s
Counterterrorism Division. Thomas has testified before
Congress on fourteen occasions, including before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, House Homeland
Security Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee,
House Armed Services Committee, and House Judiciary
Committee. He was the senior counterterrorism adviser to
Mayor Giuliani during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Joscelyn has constructed dossiers for hundreds of
terrorists during the course of his work. The Daily Beast
has described him as one of the most trusted authorities
on the al-Qaeda network because of his encyclopedic
knowledge of terrorist biographies. In 2007, he published
a monograph titled, Iran s Proxy War Against America,
which details Iran s decades-long sponsorship of America
s terrorist enemies. In 2008, he completed an exhaustive
review of the Guantanamo Bay detainee population,
cataloging and analyzing thousands of pages of
declassified documents.
Joscelyn is also a frequent contributor to The Weekly
Standard. His work has been published by a variety of
other publications and cited by The Associated Press,
Reuters, The Washington Post, USA Today, Time, Foreign
Policy, and many others. He makes regular appearances on
television and radio programs.
Transcript
Thomas Joscelyn:
I am supposed to talk a little bit about the death of bin
Laden and sort of the future of jihad and Al Qaeda and
where things are going, and that may seem like a sort of
obvious topic to address, you know, given recent events
here, but I think of that night after Osama bin Laden was
killed, after the news broke that he had been killed in
Abbottabad, Pakistan.
I turned on CNN and I saw one of the guys who was
considered one of the leading thinkers on Al Qaeda, a guy
named Peter Bergen, who is CNN s counterterrorism
analyst. He said that the war was over, that is it,
terrorism is over, we do not have anything to worry about
anymore. That is it and, in fact, it is just that the
Americans need to get beyond the War on Terror. As if it
is something that we came up with, as if it is a
construct in our heads and not something that we are
actually fighting, you know.
So, I guess I would start by saying the war is, in fact,
not over for a lot of reasons. I think that the
ideological conflict has been greatly outlined by the
previous presenters here today and so I am not going to
touch so much on that, but so what I am going to talk
about is much more about the nitty gritty of the fight
and that starts with jihadist-sponsoring states.
Now, that may even seem like an obvious notation for
everybody. I mean, you know, of course there are states
that are involved in sponsoring terrorism and are
involved in terrorism but in fact, much of the analysis
that has proceeded here in the U.S. and in the West
starts with the assumption that states are not in fact
involved in sponsoring terrorism whether that be Al Qaeda
or its like-minded affiliates around the globe.
And since we have a Cold War-minded crowd here today, I
will start with a brief analogy. Back in the Cold War,
back in 1981 in fact, the Reagan Administration decided
it was going to confront Marxist and Leftist terrorism
and Secretary of State Alexander Haig came forward and
said that in fact, much of the terrorism that was on the
planet, Marxist and Leftist terrorism, was sponsored by
the Soviet Union.
And so, the Reagan Administration ordered up a National
Intelligence Estimate on Soviet-sponsored terrorism and
they kicked it over to the CIA s analysts and the CIA s
Soviet analysts came back and said, well, no, in fact,
the Soviets are not sponsoring terrorism. It is against
their interests to do so and they would never do this.
They would never be involved in sponsoring terrorism.
Well, the fight that ensued, a bureaucratic fight that
ensued, was quite legendary. In fact, Bob Gates, the
current Secretary of Defense, talks about this in his
book From the Shadows and I recommend anybody go out
there and read it because it is a pretty interesting
characterization, I would say, from Bob Gates, who is
ever the bureaucrat and sides with the bureaucrats to a
certain extent.
I think he still gets the facts right of what happened
and lo and behold, what happened was the Soviet analysts
were wrong and Bill Casey and the CIA leadership and
President Reagan were right. In fact, the Soviets were
deeply involved in sponsoring terrorism. In fact, not
only were the Soviets and their client states deeply
involved in sponsoring terrorism generally and broadly in
terms of training and so forth and ideologically, they
actually were arming and training terrorist groups in
Europe, in the Middle East, and elsewhere to attack us.
In fact, in Lebanon a Soviet-backed terrorist group was
actually tasked by the KGB to go out and kidnap the
deputy head of the CIA in Lebanon in the 1970s.
So I just want you to pause for a second here and think
about this. At the same time the Soviets are actually
sponsoring terrorism against the CIA directly, the CIA s
Soviet analysts are saying that the Soviets are not
sponsoring terrorism at all, okay?
That is the type of ideological, I would say,
intellectual blind-spot you are dealing with when it
comes to the analysis of terrorism. Now, you may be
wondering, what does that have to do with today? What
does that have to do with Al Qaeda and Islamist
terrorism? Well, it turns out that in the 1990s our
analysts, as brilliant as they are, made the same
assumption again. They decided that Islamist terrorism,
jihad, was not state sponsored. And in fact, if you go to
the 9/11 Commission Report, you will see in the 9/11
Commission it specifically describes Al Qaeda as
stateless and as a new terrorism without any state
backers.
Now, if you go through the 9/11 Commission Report
carefully as I have many, many times since 2004 when it
came out, you will realize this is logically incoherent.
When you actually look at the facts of what is reported
in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Now, I will start with a very simple, basic overview of
just safe haven for Al Qaeda. It starts in the early
1990s when bin Laden and Al Qaeda needed a place to live
and they turned to Sudan, which at the time was run by a
guy named Hasan al-Turabi, a leading member of the
international Muslim Brotherhood.
And al-Turabi was a radical ideologue, a real dangerous
thinker, if you actually get into how he thinks and how
he viewed the world, it is really, really troubling. And
al-Turabi did not see the world as, you know, divided
between the Muslim world even, divided between Sunnis and
Shiites. He saw the world as divided between Muslims and
non-Muslims and so what he did with the Sudan is he
turned it basically into this place for cross
fertilization of all of these different terrorist groups
and ideologues that come together and terrorist groups
that come together, including Al Qaeda, and bin Laden.
You know, Osama bin Laden forged a lot of lasting
relationships there in Sudan. So, his safe haven in Sudan
as documented by the 9/11 Commission was a crucially
important part in Al Qaeda s development. Well, wait a
minute, that is one state, right? So we have got one
state where now we have one state that actually plays a
role in sponsoring Al Qaeda.
Well, in the mid-1990s Al Qaeda s safe haven in Sudan
became troubled, I would say, under immense international
pressure. And so, Sudan politely asked bin Laden to
leave, basically, with Al Qaeda and what they did was
they relocated to South Asia.
Now, going to the 9/11 Commission Report, what we find is
the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment had
long had a relationship with bin Laden and Al Qaeda going
back to the 1980s when sort of proto-Al Qaeda was first
getting going. The military-intelligence establishment in
Pakistan likely knew he was coming the 9/11 Commission
found and actually took steps to introduce him to the
Taliban in Afghanistan to make sure he would have a safe
haven in Afghanistan. Well, that is two states now that
are playing a role in sponsoring Al Qaeda because now you
had the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment,
making sure that Al Qaeda s leadership can relocate to
Afghanistan.
Now, of course, they get to Afghanistan and what happens
is that Al Qaeda forges this lasting relationship with
the Taliban. There is a lot of nonsense out there about
the Taliban can be split from Al Qaeda. I will not get
into that today because that is a whole other session,
but that is just not true. But here you have a third
state, right? You have the Taliban in Afghanistan now,
which is sponsoring or working with Al Qaeda.
So what does the paradigm stateless mean? Well, to me it
is meaningless. It does not mean anything. It basically
is trying to skirt around the fact that you have a number
of bad actors that are really involved in sponsoring,
harboring, training, at a variety of levels of assistance
and support for Al Qaeda and its affiliates.
As you go through that what you realize when you start to
accept the fact that states are involved in this fight,
you start to see things a little differently. And I will
give you a great example. If you look at the fight in
Afghanistan right now, our military leaders and I would
say our political leadership goes to great lengths to
deny the fact that Pakistan and Iran are essentially
waging proxy wars against American troops in Afghanistan.
They occasionally will admit that yes, Iran is doing bad
things and Pakistan is doing bad things, but they do not
really want to get into the real war that is unfolding.
There is a lot that could be said about this, but one of
the interesting sources that has come forward to really
confirm the role of Pakistan and Iran are playing in
Afghanistan, waging war against our troops are all of
these leaked documents from WikiLeaks, including the
Guantanamo Threat Assessments, State Department cables,
and ISAF threat reports. Those are the three categories
of documents that have been released by WikiLeaks.
Now, I guarantee you when Julian Assange set forth to
leak these documents, that he did not think he was going
to be talking about state-sponsored terrorism or he was
going to be documenting what America s enemies are up to,
but that is, in fact, what he has done. And if you go
through these documents in great detail, you find a lot
of troubling revelations.
You find, for example, as I did that back in 2002 that
the Pakistani ISI, the same group that introduced the
Taliban to bin Laden back in the mid-1990s has actually
been working very heavily with all of the different
insurgency groups in Afghanistan, trying to bring them
together and coordinate their attacks against Americans
and even civilians.
In one case (this is really troubling from my
perspective), they actually trained the Taliban to go
after civilian workers in Afghanistan, including Red
Cross workers. And the Pakistani military officers
trained the Taliban to go into Afghanistan, kidnap and
murder Red Cross workers, which they did. And in fact,
they were relaying instructions for once this poor victim
was kidnapped, the Taliban actually got on their phones
and relayed to get instructions from in Pakistan for what
to do with them. The order came from the Pakistani-
supported Taliban leaders in Pakistan to kill him. Well,
that is state sponsorship, is it not? I mean that is a
state directly sponsoring jihadist terrorism.
And it gets worse than that. I think if you go across the
board, you can actually see that Pakistan has basically
become the home for all three of the chief insurgency
groups that we are fighting in Afghanistan today. You
have Gulbuddin Hekmatyar s group, which is known as the
HeI. You have Mullah Omar s Taliban, which, by the way,
is located in Quetta. In fact, his group is called the
Quetta Shura Taliban. Okay, hello, it is named after a
Pakistani city. We all know where he is operating. The
Pakistanis know where he is operating. They are
protecting him.
The Haqqani network, which is the third main insurgency
group, long-time clients of the Pakistani military
intelligence establishment. In fact, the head of the
Pakistani military has repeatedly tried to negotiate a
power-sharing agreement for Siraj Haqqani, the head of
the Haqqani Network in Afghanistan. That is how much they
are under the patronage of the Pakistanis.
It is indisputable that these three groups are all
originally Pakistani proxies. It is indisputable that
they all receive support from Pakistan to this day. In
fact, I could list hundreds of examples of how that is
true. But there is something else that you should know
about all three of them, which is that they are all
deeply allied with Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda is not just this group that is stateless as the
9/11 Commission found, but actually has both direct state-
backers but also indirect state backing through the
groups it has allied itself with, which are in turn state-
backed. And so I come back to what Peter Bergen said
about the War on Terror is over and you are going to see
a lot of people thinking along those lines, but I come
back to where Osama bin Laden was killed, which is
basically right near Pakistan s version of West Point in
Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Now, if you think that nobody in the Pakistan military
intelligence establishment knew that he was there, I
would say I could take you up to New York and there is a
bridge I would like to sell you, you know, because it is
just not true. I mean, obviously, you know, in fact, the
Obama administration went to great lengths to keep the
operation from the Pakistani military intelligence
establishment because it was so worried about this
information leaking and the raid being stopped [before it
could begin].
It turns out, again turning back to 9/11 Commission, that
is not new. In fact, when the Clinton administration
tried to kill Bin Laden back in 1998, they decided
against it. Why? Because they would have to tell the
Pakistanis that they were coming, and they knew the
Pakistanis would tip him off, right? Well, is that not
state sponsorship, you know? So, where are we when we
talk about stateless, I have no idea at this point. I
mean I look at what has been said about Al Qaeda and its
affiliates being stateless, and just the basic facts of
how it operates, where it receives safe haven undermine
that whole mantra.
But I would like to turn now to Iran a little bit, and
this is a topic which I was actually at AIPAC on Monday,
discussing, and I was supposed to have a debate, but my
debate partner dropped out, unfortunately, that would
have been fun. But Iran has been one of the more
misunderstood parties in all this, and the big
misunderstanding from Iran s perspective, from the
perspective of people who study Iran is that somehow
because it is Shiite that it cannot possibly work with
Sunnis, okay, and that the Iranians could not possibly
work with Sunnis because of these ideological and
theological differences preclude them from working
together.
Well, [there are] a lot of things I can say about that,
but I will start with the 9/11 Commission Report. okay?
And I would encourage you to go home and if you have a
copy of the 9/11 Commission Report, then you can, if you
want to, take down these page number so you can check me,
okay? It is pages 61, 68, 128, 240, and 241, and after
reading those pages I want to ask you a question, Does
Iran sponsor Al-Qaeda or not? Because I think the answer
is unequivocally, yes, it does, and it does in very
important and very troubling ways. But so how could that
be right? I mean you know Iran is Shiite, and Al-Qaeda is
Sunni, and they have all these supposed differences.
Well, the bottom line is that a lot of times tactical
necessity trumps those ideological or theological
concerns.
And you know, I think it was Steve in here earlier had a
picture of Sayyid Qutb throughout his presentation a
number of times. And Sayyid Qutb is in fact the big
Muslim Brotherhood ideologue who influenced and really
was the forefather of Al-Qaeda, really got Al Qaeda s
thinking, put a place for it in the world. Well,
Ayatollah Khomeini, who leads the current Iranian
revolution actually, this is Khamenei now, not Khomeini.
Khamenei, who is the current spiritual leader of Iran,
actually translated Qutb s words from the Arabic into
Persian, okay? He sat down and did it, multiple volumes
of it, so here is the intellectual forefather of al-
Qaeda, and the current head of Iran actually took the
time to translate his words into Persian from the Arabic
in order to spread his word throughout Iran. In fact, it
is still some of the most widely read volumes in the
clerical establishment in Iran today.
So, this idea that Sunnis and Shiites cannot cooperate
really is, I would say, a pseudo intellectual
understanding of the world. It is sort of this veneer
people like to pretend they actually understand the
Middle East when that is really just not an understanding
at all, and you know, again, even if you look at Israel
and Israel s enemies today, Hamas has the same
ideological roots as Al Qaeda does. Well, it is radical
Sunni. Who is its chief state backer? Iran.
Okay, now why is it so important?
Well, if you go and you check those pages from the 9/11
Commission Report, you will find some troubling things,
and one of things you will find is that in the 1990s when
bin Laden was in the Sudan, he was really struggling to
get Al Qaeda going. He wanted to show how Al Qaeda could
be, you know, some of this international vanguard for
jihadists around the globe. He wanted to really inspire
them to action, and so they needed a spectacular event.
They needed something that would show, you know, just how
powerful Al Qaeda had become.
And Bin Laden got the idea, this is going back to the
early 1990s now, that in fact he should reach out to Iran
and its chief terrorist proxy Hezbollah, for training.
And he said, You know, one of the things that Iran did
back in the early 1980s, in 1983 in Lebanon, was
basically forced the American withdrawal from Lebanon
with an attack on the Marine barracks there. It killed
241 Marines. And Bin Laden looked at that and said, ah,
well, America is a paper tiger, they will retreat if we
hit them, and the way I can show people that we can do
this is if we learn how to do this and Al Qaeda does this
to the Americans again.
So, he reaches out to Iran and Hezbollah, and he says
show me how to do this, show my organization how to do
this. Now, this, again, is all according the 9/11
Commission Report on the pages I cited for you, okay?
Iran and Hezbollah agreed, okay, and they took the
military committee members of Al-Qaeda, they took a
number of different tactical experts from Al-Qaeda into
Lebanon and Iran, and showed them how to do it. They
showed them how to attack embassies, how to build suicide
truck bombs, how to do that type of thing.
Well, the result was the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya
and Tanzania, okay? As you go through that operation [you
find that] that was a mirror image of what Hezbollah and
Iran did in the early 1980s in Lebanon. They attacked
diplomatic facilities with suicide truck bombs, there
were simultaneous attacks that they were coordinating
even though there were hundreds of miles away, the way
the truck bombs were designed, the whole nine yards.
So, you go forward to 1998, and after the embassies are
bombed, the Clinton administration sits down and says,
well, now we have to really get tough with Al-Qaeda, and
we are going to issue an indictment, so that is basically
what they did, they issued an indictment. And you look at
the indictment of Al-Qaeda, and interestingly enough, in
the indictment of Al-Qaeda they recognize state
sponsorship. They say that Al Qaeda has forged these
relationships with the Sudan, that is where they were
headquartered in the early 1990s, but also with Iran and
Hezbollah to act against their common enemies.
And then you flashforward to October of 2000 when a key
Osama bin Laden lieutenant decides to agree to a plea
deal in a US Court, actually, in the Southern District of
Manhattan. His name is Zawi Muhammad. In his plea deal he
agreed. He says, yes, I was the one was personally
responsible for setting up the meetings between Hezbollah
and Iran on the one hand, and Al Qaeda and Osama bin
Laden on the other. He agrees to this.
And then, in early 2001, there is a trial, and at that
trial several witnesses come forward that are all relied
upon by the Clinton administration and prosecutors, and
they all say, up and down, that Iran and Hezbollah
trained Al-Qaeda to do this. And that is how Al Qaeda
acquired what the 9/11 Commission later deemed the quote-
unquote, tactical expertise to do the embassy bombings.
Now, think about it for a second. This is Al Qaeda s most
spectacular attack prior to 9/11. This is the thing that
brings them into the fore. Most people had not even heard
of Al-Qaeda before the August 1998 Embassy Bombings. The
whole point of them was that you would hear about them so
you know who they were, that they could kill on a mass
scale, and yet the 9/11 Commission, Clinton
administration prosecutors, you know, court documents,
the terrorists themselves, a number of different parties
would come forward and tell you that Iran and Hezbollah
actually showed Al Qaeda how to do this.
Well, how can the 9/11 Commission in the same document
that says that Al Qaeda is stateless include this
information on the pages I gave you? It just does not
make any sense, right? It is just logically incoherent.
Well, now, the last two page numbers I came to are 240,
241 I gave you. I suggest you read those very carefully.
I have many times because it is actually very
interesting. You will see that these are two pages that
were basically written to track the movements of the
hijackers for 9/11, and they are tracking their travels,
and you will see seven instances in those two pages where
senior Hezbollah operatives and officials are cited,
seven on two pages, okay?
And this information actually did not come to the 9/11
Commission until one week before the final report was
due, and what happens is the commissioners and all their
staffers come forward and they say, wow, you know, this
is really troubling, look at this, you know. They found a
box of evidence from the NSA, including intercepts and
other information that showed that Hezbollah officials
were tied to all the hijackers.
And the staffers, to their credit, said we have to put
something in the commission s report for this, and they
said we have to have to do this really quick because, you
know, we cannot go to press and publish this report and
not explicitly raise the troubling questions about Iran
and Hezbollah s role in all this. And so, they did, so
240 and 241 are the pages where they put it in. And you
will see at the end of page 241 when they get to the end
of the section that it says we believe the U.S.
government should investigate this further. That is what
it says.
Well, I am here to tell you that investigation never
happened, okay?
So, years ago people made this assumption that Al Qaeda
was stateless, okay? There is ample evidence that it is
not stateless, that in fact, state backers work with it
and use it for [their] own purposes, right? And yet,
there is no will to actually investigate the state
backers of Al Qaeda even after the 911 Commission, the
official body that is commissioned to look at this, [the]
greatest attack, comes forward and says we should look
it, they still do not do it.
Well, last week there was a lawsuit in New York. The
Commission staffer s name is Janice Kephart, who actually
investigated the hijackers travels, that is what she was
tasked with. She filed an affidavit and she said you
should have been looking at this all along, and she put
in an affidavit and a lawsuit against Iran, saying that,
in fact, Iran at least provided material support by
providing safe haven and safe transit to the hijackers.
Okay, that is the minimum of what we know. Now, on that
lawsuit I think there is some good information and some
bad information, but I think her affidavit stands out as
something really important.
Well, now, wait a minute, you know, I keep harping on
this, but just think about this for a second, you know. I
will tell you right now, I have a lot of conversations
with people at DNI, DHS, CIA, DIA, three-letter acronyms,
any one you can pick, basically, I talk to people there,
okay, and they have this whole idea that Al Qaeda is
stateless and does not get any state support, and you
hear voluminous amounts of information that says
otherwise. Well, I want return to Afghanistan a little
bit because here is another great example of where state
sponsorship matters.
Prior to 9/11, Taliban and Iran were at each other s
throats. There is no doubt about that. In fact, in 1998,
1999 they were on the verge of war, and that is because
the Taliban executed a number of Shiite diplomats in
Mazar-e Sharif, which is in the northern part of
Afghanistan, and also had a brutal assault on hundreds of
other Shiites there. And the Iranians moved a bunch of
troops to the border, and Mullah Omar had a bunch of anti-
Iranian rhetoric, and the Iranians went back at Mullah
Omar, and just you know about verbal fighting, rhetorical
fighting. And they were on the verge of real fighting.
Well, after 9/11, something interesting happened, which
is the Iranians said they do not dislike the Taliban that
much anymore because we are there, we are in Afghanistan.
And so, there is a guy down in Guantanamo. One of the
things I study intently are the Guantanamo detainees and
sort of the profiles of who they are. This guy still down
there named Khairullah Khairkhah. He was the governor of
the Herat province for the Taliban, which is the
westernmost province, bordering on Iran. And he has
admitted that what he did after 9/11 was he setup the
meetings between the Taliban and Iran so that Iran could
give support to the Taliban in their war against the
U.S., and Iran pledged its assistance to the Taliban in
its war against the U.S.
What does that tell you about state sponsorship or state
backing, you know? It tells you that Iran is willing to
work with anybody against us because after all we are the
Big Satan and the Little Satan is Israel. This is what I
always tell people, you know. And Iran is basically
willing to work with anybody along those lines. And so
what you find in the documents down at Guantanamo and all
these other leaked documents that I talked about, the ISF
threat reports, and the ISF State Department cables, all
these leaked documents is that, in fact, Iran has
sponsored the Taliban all the years since then from late
2001 through and current.
Now, of course, the Pakistani ISI does as well in
Afghanistan, but here is the Taliban, which is our prime
enemy in Afghanistan in terms of what is launching
attacks against the civilian population, against American
forces, and it has got two very powerful state backers.
So, you know, here is the bottom line: if you are an
American soldier or American commander or a General on
the ground in Afghanistan, who is it you are fighting,
you know? Are you fighting these stateless actors who are
just coming your way or waging jihad against you or are
you fighting proxies of states who are killing American
soldiers? I will tell you that the evidence is just
overwhelming that, in fact, these are proxies of states,
they work with states.
Now, that does not mean necessarily that Al Qaeda or its
affiliates were wholly owned by states, that is not the
truth, okay, and it is not that they were totally under
direct control of states, that is not the truth either,
but states have worked with them to amplify their
capabilities and have worked with them to achieve common
objectives. That is the truth of the matter and there are
a lot of different states along those lines.
I will give you another quick example outside of South
Asia. If you go to Yemen, [there is] Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). We all know Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula is now, according to the Obama
administration, the greatest threat to us in terms of
terrorism, okay, in terms of Al Qaeda affiliates and Al
Qaeda itself because it is the one that is actually
taking the lead in launching attacks against us.
Well, again, here is a piece of information that comes
out from all the leaked documents. The number two player
in Yemen is a guy named General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar. He
is a guy who brought President Saleh to power in 1978,
part of a tripartite agreement between, basically, Saleh
s backers, the Islamists, and the military. Now, Ali
Mohsen al-Ahmar is, in fact, according to State
Department cables and according to leaked intelligence
documents, a longtime supporter of jihadism and
terrorism, and, in fact, he is a longtime supporter of
Osama bin Laden.
This is the number two guy in the military or number one
guy in the military, but number two guy in all of Yemen,
who is a prime Al Qaeda backer. If you think about that
for a second, here is another state that, in fact or
elements there of that are sponsoring Al Qaeda, and, in
fact, General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar actually founded or
helped found the original Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen,
which was called the Islamic Army of Aden, which grew
into Al Qaeda s formal affiliate and helped launch the
USS Cole bombing among other things.
Oh, well, the USS Cole Bombing, the guy who executed that
is down at Guantanamo. Leaked documents on him show that,
in fact, he had a great relationship with the Yemeni
political security organization in the government of
Yemen, and worked closely with them, a guy named Nashiri,
and he had state backers there to help him do that.
Wait a minute now, now, we have tied another government,
another jihadist-sponsoring state to Al-Qaeda and an Al
Qaeda attack, so what is the common theme of all this? If
you had not guessed, it is that the stateless paradigm
does not make any sense and that we really needed a
different way of viewing these things and a different way
of talking about them, in order to try to understand the
enemy we fight. And that the war, as Peter Bergen said,
is not over, it is just beginning, I would say, in some
ways because these states have been basically held
unaccountable for all this stuff for all these years.
And so, all of the ideological problems that were talked
about earlier today I think are all hold, and I think it
was brilliantly outlined for you by the other presenters.
I would say the other half of that are the jihadist
states actually sponsored that ideology in various ways,
and they use it for their own gain. They manipulate those
who adhere to it, and they, basically, as far as our own
government is concerned, are not even in that game.
Thanks.
References
1. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ2EfBuSgD7CkdTgIL6Y8SiIVuHE92Dq4 (l…
2. https://www.fdd.org/ (link)
3. https://www.longwarjournal.org/ (link)
Date Published: 2023-01-03 14:41:55
Identifier: al-qaeda-after-the-death-of-bin-laden-the-future-of-jihadi…
Item Size: 210670844
Language: eng
Media Type: movies
# Topics
Westminster Institute
Thomas Joscelyn
Al Qaeda
Bin Laden
Afghanistan
Yemen
Terrorism
AQAP
Taliban
Iran
Pakistan
Sudan
Haqqani
CIA
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
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