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THE ROVING EYE
Al-Qaeda: Dead or
alive?
By Pepe Escobar
BRUSSELS - Is al-Qaeda really back in business?
The three simultaneous bombings in three housing
compounds for foreigners in Riyadh that left 29 dead,
according to the Saudi Interior Ministry, as well as the
nine suicide bombers, have at least shattered a sort of
consensus that had been emerging among Western
intelligence services.
Until the end of last
week, for instance, France's DGSE verdict was that
"al-Qaeda is finished". According to a top agent, "Big
operations, prepared at least one year in advance, like
September 11, are a thing of the past." Trans-Atlantic
cooperation in the war against terrorism was supposed to
be the key to the victory against al-Qaeda. This is the
official Bush administration position, according to
which half of al-Qaeda's leadership has been apprehended
or killed (four thousand presumed al-Qaeda members have
been arrested since September 11).
At least a
little nuance was injected on May 5 in Paris when the
Interior and Justice ministers of the G8 countries
preferred to state that the menace was still there. It
definitely is - from al-Qaeda's point of view. According
to the site Islammemo.com, the new al-Qaeda "media
coordinator", Thabet ibn Qais, insists "the Americans
are proceeding in the direction that we drew for them
even before September 11". Last week, the Arab magazine
al-Majallah said it had received an email from Thabet
ibn Qais in which he proclaimed "an attack against
America was inevitable".
Since last week, the
Saudi Interior Ministry has also been hunting "Nineteen
terrorists, 17 of them Saudis" who "intended to carry
out acts of terrorism" - after Riyadh police apprehended
lots of explosives, weapons and cash following a
shootout. Some of these may have been among the suicide
bombers who died in the Riyadh bombings.
Thabet
ibn Qais, in his sudden emergence into the world public
arena, was adamant to point out that al-Qaeda "carried
out changes in its leadership and sidelined the
September 11, 2001 team. Future missions have been
entrusted to the new team, which is well protected
against the US intelligence services. The old leadership
does not know the names of any of its members."
Al-Qaeda - and especially bin Laden - are in
fact already getting what they want, irrespective of new
attacks. The US government made it clear on the record
on April 29 what was already no secret, and one of its
key objectives after the removal of Saddam Hussein: the
US is going to end all its military operations in Saudi
Arabia in June, and evacuate what today amounts to
10,000 men and 200 aircraft based in al-Kharj, an
operations center 50 kilometers south of Riyadh. This
happens to be a key, if not the key demand, of bin Laden
since the beginning of the 1990s: US troops out of the
"land of the two mosques".
But the US move also
presents al-Qaeda with a huge problem: it represents the
end of a key argument to legitimize the jihad against
the West. So what is al-Qaeda really up to? And what is
that recently neglected master of the underworld, bin
Laden, doing?
Pakistani and Afghani sources once
again tell Asia Times Online that bin Laden must be in
the proverbial cave in Pashtun territory, which
depending on the source could be anywhere in
southeastern Afghanistan or the North West Frontier
Province of Pakistan. For Western intelligence agencies,
his main priority is now pure survival - not
masterminding operations. He has totally vanished from
al-Jazeera, the Qatari television network to which he
has in the past handed over tapes of his messages.
After painstaking research, Ghislaine Alleaume,
a historian and Arabist at the prestigious CNRS, the
French Center of Scientific Research, is convinced that
bin Laden was killed in December 2001 after the US
bombing of Tora Bora in Afghanistan. She maintains that
the last authentic video of Osama bin Laden was the one
broadcast on December 27, 2001 by al-Jazeera, in which
he appeared tired, thin and with his left arm probably
amputated.
Alleaume also points out that since
January 2002, bin Laden's texts started showing up with
the signature "Osama bin Muhamad bin Laden". Usually he
signed his own name preceded by "brother", "sheik" or
"emir". For Alleaume, "the apparition of Muhamad, the
name of his father, adds an apocalyptic dimension. In
the Holy Koran, it is said that Mahdi, the Messiah of
the last days, will be recognized according to certain
signs, including the fact that he uses the name of the
Holy Prophet".
It is not implausible that on his
death bed bin Laden himself - surrounded by his closest,
ardent followers - concocted an apotheosis designed to
elevate him directly to Paradise. And indeed, he already
lives on the Internet as one of the key myths of our
time - as a saint, a Messiah, a hidden imam or as a new
Che Guevara. For many, Muslims and Christians alike, he
remains a symbol of anti-imperialism. For a smatter of
Palestinian movements, he will be the true liberator of
Jerusalem (in a manner of which the also disappeared
Saddam Hussein could only dream).
But it's hard
to see this cult following transposed into action. In
the beginning of April, addressing selected Islamist
sites, bin Laden - the real thing or the virtual Messiah
- was inciting suicide bombers to "avenge the murdered
children of Iraq". Yet there were only a few suicide
bombings during the Iraqi war.
A substantial
part of the legions formed in the Afghan training camps
of the 1980s and 1990s has been decimated by the awesome
American military machine, in close cooperation with
virtually all Western security and intelligence
services. Of al-Qaeda's top 20, half have been killed or
captured, including Mohamed Atef, Abu Zubaidah and
Khalid Shaikh Muhamad, the real brain behind September
11.
The "old" team may have been "incapable of
acting", according to French Islamist expert Olivier
Roy, because of extreme American pressure applied
everywhere from Karachi to Riyadh, even during the
buildup to the war against Iraqi. But as much as it's
difficult to assess the real power of this "new team"
announced by Thabet ibn Qais, they may be a completely
different and even harder lot.
What happens to
al-Qaeda will not necessarily be linked to what happens
in Iraq. The jihadis hated the extinct secular Ba'ath
Party as much as they hate the Shi'ites who are now
fighting to grab political power for the first time in
Iraq. This means that for al-Qaeda the American
occupation of Iraq - unlike their presence in Saudi
Arabia - is not a sacrilege. Al-Qaeda is not in the
least touched by the American project to remodel the
Middle East according to its own whims. And this is the
reason why bin Laden - the real thing or the virtual
Messiah - fell on deaf ears when he called for a jihad
in the beginning of April.
Intelligence sources
in the European Union in Brussels confirm there are many
ultra-radical movements, like the Hizb al-Tahrir, based
in London, that preach that the West should be turned
into a Caliphate, and they are now accusing bin Laden of
launching his jihad against the West too early, thereby
exposing all militants to relentless Western repression.
As to radicals in London itself, they have been
practically smashed by Prime Minister Tony Blair's
government. The same intelligence sources confirm that
it took only a couple of high-profile arrests and a
secret non-aggression pact. This explains why even at
the height of the Iraq war, there was not a single
attack or suicide bombing in London.
Diaa
Rachwan, an Egyptian specialist on radical Islamists, is
convinced the answer to the new riddle will be found
exactly in post-war Iraq, which will congregate "a
synthesis of the armed conflicts of the last 20 years":
the international jihad formerly based in Afghanistan,
the suicide bombings of Palestine and the anarchy and
clannish chaos of Somalia. In this nightmarish scenario,
"Americans will be much more vulnerable and hostage to
Islamists".
The question still remains of where
the "new team" of al-Qaeda Arabs has been trained, or
had been training. As the Taliban increasingly develop
their guerrilla war in the Afghan Pashtun belt, the
training could have taken place in key spots in the
North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, but also in
the Caucasus. European intelligence is not making the
mistake of believing that al-Qaeda - with no significant
sleeper cells left and no more fatwas issued in
Europe - is also having trouble with financing. European
intelligence in Brussels is also very worried with the
phenomenon of al-Qaeda "franchising" - from a cluster of
Pakistani-based groups to the Jemaah Islamiya in
Indonesia.
If al-Qaeda is really back, and
planning to strike back with a vengeance, the bombing in
Riyadh is just an appetizer. The main course might well
be the G8 meeting in Evian, France, in the beginning of
June. And this is what is really keeping all Western
intelligence agencies on edge.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
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