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THE
ROVING EYE
War comes to the heart of
Europe
By Pepe Escobar
BRUSSELS - The battle over the future of
global Islam will be fought and decided in Europe.
Whether or not it is responsible for the
attacks on London, the al-Qaeda nebula is now
configured as a relentless jihadi recruitment
mechanism, profiting from the fact that the
American invasion and occupation of Iraq has been
added to its original mix of extreme Wahhabism and
Silicon Valley (which al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, visited in the early 1990s).
"Al-Qaeda" is a mutating virus,
proliferating secretly in unexpected places. It
used to thrive on subterfuge, evasion and
deception. Now, the virus is attacking on three
fronts. The Internet spreads the lethal, remixed
Koran of jihad's aims and ideology; Iraq has
become the university for a new, deadly generation
of internationalist jihadis; and Europe is the
latest battleground where the new generation is
bound to strike. The Euro-jihadi is here to stay.
"Al-Qaeda" is now a metaphor for global,
deterritorialized jihad - indeed a "database" (as
its original name implies) that strives to
represent the microcosm of the whole Islamic
umma (community). This is a political war
conducted by a revolutionary vanguard. It is also
a social war. It is definitely not a religious
war. Whether religious war may succeed it depends
to a large extent on the Muslim population of
Europe, and whether it can isolate the
Euro-jihadis.
No one is innocent
The killing of innocents, or massacre of
infidels - as in London's attacks - is not
considered terrorism by either Osama bin Laden or
Zawahiri: as bin Laden himself has made clear, it
is seriously regarded as only a minor reparation
for all the crimes committed against Islam since
the end of the 600-year-long Ottoman Empire in
1923.
Al-Qaeda may be a revolutionary
vanguard, but it is always careful to cloak its
war as a war against unbelievers. In December
2002, Zawahiri published a crucial pamphlet in the
London daily, al-Quds al-Arabi, widely reproduced
on the jihadi Internet. He quoted a Koranic verse
to justify the accidental killing of Muslims in
attacks against unbelievers: the Muslims should
not be there in the first place. Because it is
ostensibly a war against unbelievers, al-Qaeda
cannot but stress that if Muslims are associated
with unbelievers, Islam itself is in danger.
Many clerics used this scholarly doctrine
- al-wala wal-bara ("loyalty and
separation", in Arabic) to explain why Baghdad
fell to the Mongols in the 13th century, as well
as the Spanish Reconquista of Andalusia. Zawahiri
used it to legitimize any "collateral damage" by
jihad. The measure of Zawahiri's influence is
offered by the new, lethal and even more
nihilistic generation of jihadis operating in
Iraq: they have no problems justifying the killing
of fellow Muslims and innocent Iraqi civilians,
because for them these people are "associating
with unbelievers". Zawahiri made it clear in 2002
that any Muslim ally of America was by definition
an apostate: "Jihad against Americans, Jews and
their allies among the hypocrites and apostates is
mandatory on all Muslims."
The
Euro-jihadis
The London investigation
followed three leads: the attackers might have
come from the Middle East, from Northern Africa,
or they could have been British. Now Scotland Yard
has established they were four men aged 18 to 30,
"cleanskins" - with no criminal record - and
British-born, of Pakistani origin. In short: the
new, lethal, generation of suicide-bombing
Euro-jihadis.
Most EU counter-terrorism
analysts in Brussels - indeed, all over Western
Europe - are stunned. This is what many had feared
for a long time. As for rumors that London was
part of a plan hatched by former Iraqi Mukhabarat
agents to use British jihadis and thus retaliate
inside British territory, EU analysts say they
have no evidence - at least not yet - that
Ba'athists were involved. But the jihadi component
of the Iraqi resistance may well be. EU analysts
tell Asia Times Online, "At the moment we have no
evidence that former Iraq intelligence was
involved, but we are studying the possibility of
Zarqawi agents being infiltrated in Britain, or
having come to Britain to conduct an operation."
If "al-Qaeda", the virus, really did
perpetrate the London bombings, it won't be
confronted with the huge public relations problem
posed by the Casablanca attack in Morocco. Then,
al-Qaeda's ideology - disseminated by Salafist
sheikhs - had contaminated a group of lumpen
proletariat Moroccans, who decided to turn their
impotence into terrorism. The problem is that only
fellow Moroccan Muslims were killed. The attacks
on Madrid in March last year - perpetrated by
Casablanca-linked Moroccans - was a different
story: the victims were scores of "infidel"
Europeans. These jihadis were trained by al-Qaeda.
The same pattern, according to EU
counter-terrorism analysts, may have played itself
out in London.
Just as in Madrid, the
attack was claimed by the Abu Hafs al-Masri
Brigades (which honor the Egyptian Abu Hafs, a
former security chief for bin Laden and trainer of
Arab Afghans, killed by American bombs in Kandahar
in November 2001). Then a communique was sent to
the London daily al-Quds al-Arabi. Now a
communique has appeared on an Islamist website
from Dubai.
Zawahiri's jihad masterplan,
elaborated in 2001, was to conduct selected,
spectacular strikes whose powerful reverberation
on global TV and the Internet would mobilize the
Muslim masses. But Gilles Kepel, professor of
Middle East Studies at the Institute of Political
Studies in Paris, warns that "apart from some
narrow and unlikely alliances with intellectuals
or black sheep, a few random Islamic bankers, and
young, dispossessed bombers, bin Laden has been
unable to unify poor urban youth, the Muslim
middle classes, and the Islamist intelligentsia
into a coalition capable of repeating the only
triumphant Islamic revolution the world has ever
seen: the one that took place in Iran in 1979".
After London, this situation may be about
to change. Kepel already talks of "the fight for
Europe".
Over 10 million immigrants from
Muslim countries now live in Western Europe. Their
children were born in Europe, speak one or more
European languages, carry EU passports, are well
educated and technology-savvy, and are familiar
with the maze of European institutions.
Internationalist jihadis are fighting to capture
the hearts and minds of these 10 million.
EU analysts, among the doom and gloom,
agree that tensions between Muslims and
non-Muslims are bound to peak, especially in
Britain and France. Some parts of Brussels, the
capital of Europe, feel like Morocco. Belgium, as
well as Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and
Scandinavia have all tried very hard to carefully
calibrate their policies in terms of keeping
potential jihadis under a close watch while at the
same time integrating their Muslim populations.
France has been too harsh; Britain had thought it
kept everything under control by monitoring
"Londonistan". Now the battle for Europe has come
- a matter of fitna - sedition,
disagreement, war in the heart of Islam.
Fitna is Islam's enemy within - and it's
the jihadis new thrust that is provoking the
turmoil.
The question facing the jihadis
is whether to force the destabilization of
national governments - like those of Saudi Arabia,
Egypt and Pakistan - or to go deeper into
internationalist jihad. In these terms,
"al-Qaeda", the virus, is not different from any
revolutionary vanguard: one is reminded that
Stalinists wanted to consolidate the revolution in
the USSR, while Trotskyites wanted a permanent,
world revolution. Until now, London was a Salafi,
and Salafi-jihadi, sanctuary. Now there's bound to
be major repression - and dispersal. "Invisible"
Euro-jihadis may be holed up anywhere. The point
is not that "al-Qaeda" wants to impose Islam in
Europe: what it wants is to impose Wahhabi values
in the Arab-Muslim world, and extirpate the West
from Muslim lands.
Retaliation
Salafis - closely
linked to House of Saud-approved sheikhs - will
keep discouraging jihad with a vengeance. They
prefer discreet integration. As an example: in
France, they did not even protest the law that
forbids veiled girls in schools. Sheikh Yousef
al-Qardawi - immensely popular because of his
al-Jazeera talk show - is against suicide bombing
as in September 11 or London, but he approves of
jihad in Palestine.
The reverberations of
London's attacks, on the other hand, may embolden
more Salafi jihadis in west Yorkshire, Hamburg,
Paris or Madrid. Some of these jihadis have been
to Bosnia, Pakistan, Chechnya or Iraq and are more
than ready to strike in western Europe. Not to
mention the new jihadis born in Europe, with clean
records, apparently well-socialized, and aged
between 18 and 30.
When Zawahiri launched
his jihad, one of his basic aims was to punish the
West, specifically the Anglo-American sphere. He
didn't foresee that the massive response would
include death and destruction in the Middle East,
as in Iraq. According to some Middle Eastern media
reports, more than 128,000 Iraqis have been killed
by the invasion and occupation since March 2003;
55% are believed to be women and children under
the age 12. This figure is said to be based on
information gathered in Iraqi hospitals and from
the families of victims. This is how the Middle
East evaluates the occupation. And this is one of
the major factors giving jihadis what they see as
justification for no-holds-barred retaliation
against the West.
This new generation of
Euro-jihadis is now turning it all upside down,
profiting from widespread revulsion against the
Anglo-Americans takeover of Iraq to retaliate as
well as advance a Salafi worldview. This could all
have been prevented by a very simple move: a real
democratic project for the Middle East - before
indiscriminate support for every one of Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's excesses; before
Guantanamo; before Abu Ghraib; before the leveling
of Fallujah.
Instead, thanks to Pentagon
propaganda regurgitated by corporate media, we now
have a cipher, a man nobody is sure even exists -
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - elevated to supernatural
status. EU analysts despair: we may be entering
the age of one thousand Zarqawis coming from the
shadows to haunt not the US, but western Europe.
It's as much a war at the heart of Europe as a war
at the heart of Islam.
(Copyright 2005
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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