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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Blowback from Bush and Blair's incompetently pursued war on terror has hit London. When will the U.S. figure out how to fight smart?
Jul 8, 2005 | Credit for the horrific bombings of the London Underground and a double-decker bus on Thursday morning was immediately taken on a radical Muslim Web site by a "secret group" of Qaida al-Jihad in Europe. By Thursday afternoon, as the casualty toll rose above 40 dead and 700 wounded, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was saying, "It has the hallmarks of an al-Qaida-related attack." Although U.S. President George W. Bush maintains that al-Qaida strikes out at the industrialized democracies because of hatred for Western values, the statement said nothing of the sort. The attack, the terrorists proclaimed, was an act of sacred revenge for British "massacres" in "Afghanistan and Iraq," and a punishment of the United Kingdom for its "Zionism" (i.e., support of Israel). If they really are responsible, who is this group and what do they want?
The phrase "Qaida al-Jihad" refers to the 2001 decision made by Ayman al-Zawahiri, a leader of the Egyptian terrorist group al-Jihad al-Islami, to merge his organization into bin Laden's al-Qaida ("the Base"). The joint organization was thus renamed Qaida al-Jihad, the "Base for Holy War." (Zawahiri and bin Laden had allied in 1998.) The group claiming responsibility for the London bombings represents itself as a secret, organized grouping or cell of "Qaida al-Jihad in Europe." It is significant that they identify themselves as "in Europe," suggesting that they are based on the continent and have struck from there into London. This conclusion is bolstered by their description of the attack as a "blessed raid." One raids a neighboring territory, not one's own. Whether this group carried out the attack or not, the sentiments they express do exist among the radical fringe and form a continued danger. Jihadi internet bulletin boards expressed skepticism about the group, and pointed to an inaccuracy in the quotation from the Quran. But al-Qaida wannabes are often engineers without good Arabic or Islamics training.
Most probably, then, this group consists of a small (and previously obscure) expatriate Muslim network somewhere in continental Europe, which has decided to announce its allegiance to Qaida al-Jihad. It is highly unlikely that al-Qaida itself retains enough command and control to plan or order such operations. They could have found many cues in al-Qaida literature, however, that London should be attacked.
The United Kingdom had not been a target for al-Qaida in the late 1990s. But in October 2001, bin Laden threatened the United Kingdom with suicide aircraft attacks if it joined in the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. In November of 2002, bin Laden said in an audiotape, "What do your governments want from their alliance with America in attacking us in Afghanistan? I mention in particular Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia." In February of 2003, as Bush and Blair marched to war in Iraq, bin Laden warned that the U.K. as well as the U.S. would be made to pay. In October of 2003, bin Laden said of the Iraq war, "Let it be known to you that this war is a new campaign against the Muslim world," and named Britain as a target for reprisals. A month later, an al-Qaida-linked group detonated bombs in Istanbul, targeting British sites and killing the British vice-consul. Although bin Laden offered several European countries, including Britain, a truce in April of 2004 if they would withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, the deadline for the end of the truce ended in mid-July of that year.
Ayman al-Zawahiri recently issued a videotape, excerpts of which appeared on al-Jazeera on June 17, which stressed the need for violent action as opposed to participation in political reform. True reform, he said, must be based on three premises: The rule of Islamic law, liberating the lands of Islam from the Occupier, and the freedom of the Islamic community in managing its own affairs. He thundered that "expelling the marauder Crusader and Jewish forces cannot be done through demonstrations and hoarse voices." Al-Zawahiri's videotapes have often been issued just before major terrorist actions, and some analysts believe that they are intended as cues for when they should be undertaken. Abdel Bari Atwan, the London editor of the Arab newspaper al-Quds, warned that the appearance of the tape signaled an imminent attack.
The communiqué on the London bombing is unusual in appealing both to the Muslim community and to the "community of Arabism." "Urubah," or Arabism, is a secular nationalist ideal. The diction suggests that the bombers are from a younger generation of activists who have not lived in non-Arab Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and think of Arabism and Islam as overlapping rather than alternatives to one another. The text makes relatively few references to religion, reading more as a statement of Muslim nationalism than of piety.
In accordance with al-Zawahiri's focus on violence as the answer to the "marauding" of occupying non-Muslim armies in Muslim lands, the statement condemns what it calls "massacres" by "Zionist" British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of them Muslim lands under Western military occupation (and, it is implied, similar in this regard to Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli control). These bombings, it says, are a form of revenge for these alleged predations. The language of revenge recalls tribal feuds rather than Islamic values.
