Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
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 Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 4:57 am Post subject: PBS Frontline: Al Qaeda Today |
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Interesting series being run by PBS "Frontline" exploring the nature of Islamic terrorism. I was unaware of the degree of suggested involvement that Egypt may have in this terrorist evolution nor had I even heard of the concept of "Salafi jihad." I've been, perhaps mistakenly, under the impression that Saudi Arabian "Wahabism" was the progenitor of the radicalization of Islam. Now I'm not so sure. Anyway, an interesting read (nice to have the liberty to focus on things non-Kerry).
Here's the intro + a section dealing with the Egypt factor.
| Quote: | Al Qaeda Today
By Marlena Telvick
PBS - Frontline
Former CIA caseworker Dr. Marc Sageman explains how Al Qaeda has evolved from an operational organization into a larger social movement, and the implications for U.S. counterterror efforts.
Nearly seven years have passed since Al Qaeda issued a fatwa calling on Muslims worldwide to kill Americans and their allies. At the time, Al Qaeda was a hierarchical network with clear lines of authority leading to Osama bin Laden, who in turn provided funding and/or command and control over autonomous groups.
But all of that changed when the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan disrupted Al Qaeda's training camps and lines of communication to its top leadership. These changes largely have been misunderstood, says Dr. Marc Sageman, a former CIA caseworker who left the agency in 1991 and is currently a clinical psychiatrist and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania's Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. He argues that Al Qaeda has been subsumed into the larger Salafi jihad revivalist movement that predates it.
<snip>
+ Egypt's Larger Role
Sageman suggests another part of the terrorists' background is misunderstood: their countries of origin. "It turns out [of those we collected data on] 60 percent are from Egypt," he says, which shows the terrorist social movement is very much an Egyptian story. "The ideology is Egyptian; the leadership is Egyptian. Most people think it's either Saudi or Afghan, but it's very much Egyptian."
In Understanding Terror Networks, Sageman writes that the Egypt connection dates back to the country's humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967. The war, which discredited President Gamal Abdel Nasser's secular socialist policies, fueled the alternative view that "Islam is the solution." Of the many jihadi groups that formed there in the years to follow, it was the Islamic Jihad (EIJ), under the leadership of Al Qaeda's future deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri that took center stage, after the group assassinated Nasser in 1981. Egypt is also the birthplace of the Salafi group the Muslim Brotherhood, responsible for the creation of Hamas and today with branches in some 70 countries.
Over the years, militant Egyptian jihadi groups would produce a raft of notorious extremists including 9/11 highjacker Mohamed Atta, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, "the Blind Sheikh" convicted for a plot to bomb New York City landmarks, and Medhat Muhamad Abdel Rahman, leader of the 1997 attacks which killed 58 foreign tourists in Egypt. Bin Laden, who rose to prominence because of his role in the Afghan fight against the Russians, cemented his hold on the global jihad movement by forming the World Islamic Front (which later became Al Qaeda) with EIJ in 1998.
PBS - cont'd |
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