DAMASCUS - On September 26
the long-awaited verdicts on 24 al-Qaeda members
in Spain were announced, sending shockwaves
throughout the Arab world.
Syrian Imad
Yarkas (42) was duly sentenced to 27 years in
prison for providing logistic support to al-Qaeda
and conspiracy to commit murder on September 11,
2001. But very unjustly, according to many
observers, Syrian journalist Tayseer Alouni of the
Doha-based al-Jazeera TV was sentenced to seven
years. He was accused of links to al-Qaeda (but
not of being a member) because he had interviewed
Osama bin Laden weeks after the September 11
attacks on New York City and Washington DC.
There is a general belief in the Arab
world that Alouni's verdict is
wrong, based on
incorrect information and poor evidence on his
ties to al-Qaeda. Al-Jazeera commented: "This is a
black day for the Spanish judiciary. We are
convinced of Tayseer's innocence."
Yarkas, however,
has received an adequate punishment, guilty as
he was of having trained and recruited terrorists
for the September 11 attacks. If anything, the two
verdicts remind the world what Damascus has been
saying for some time - basically, that many
Syrians are involved, in one way or another, in
international terrorism. They threaten world peace
and Syrian security. For years, the world has
accused Syria of being "the boy who cried wolf"
because Damascus always said that it was
threatened by radical Islam.
Many had
doubts, claiming that Syria was fabricating and
magnifying the fundamentalist threat in the
country to eliminate opposition at home and
showing the world that there are only two options
for Syria: either the Islamists or the Ba'athists.
Of course, there is much more to Syria than
political Islam and Ba'athism. This does not mean,
however, that the Islamic threat is fabricated.
Today, the "wolf" is really at the doors of
Damascus. Many people, however, tired of Syria's
rhetoric since the 1980s, do not believe the
Syrians. Yet if the world does not listen, Syria
risks fundamentalists controlling its street.
The Syrian wolf Yarkas, one of
the wolves threatening Syria and the world, was
accused by a Spanish court of having organized a
meeting in Tarragona, Spain, in July 2001,
attended by Mohammad Atta, the man who crashed one
of the airplanes into New York's Twin Towers. Also
at the meeting was Ramzi Binalshibh, another
September 11 suspect who was arrested in Pakistan
and who has been in American jails since September
2002.
Yarkas, a businessman working with
second-hand cars, is a father of six children who
repeatedly said that he had never met bin Laden.
He said in April: "I am not a follower of the
theories of Osama bin Laden. I have never seen him
in my life."
This is hard to believe
because when his home in Madrid was raided after
his arrest in November 2001, police found books
about jihad and newspaper clippings about
al-Qaeda. Yarkas added that to him jihad meant
"defending oneself. Legitimate defense. Nothing
else."
He denied that he had recruited or
even indoctrinated would-be terrorists into
al-Qaeda for terrorist operations in Afghanistan,
saying, "I am not the kind to give classes."
Yarkas added, however, "If I said it was necessary
to [make holy war], I would have been the first
one [to go]." He also denied any connection to
September 11, saying that it was an act "of
terrible savagery".
He was lying and the
Spanish judge did not believe a word he said. It
was revealed that Yarkas had received a telephone
call two weeks before September 11 from an
accomplice called Farid Hilali, telling him in
cryptic language, "We've entered the field of
aviation and we've even cut the throat of the
bird."
German police concluded that this
meant that the final stages of the terrorist
attack were now ready. It was also believed that
Yarkas helped set September 11 as the date for the
attack. Prosecutors wanted to jail him for 25
years for each of the 2,973 victims who died,
meaning, a symbolic 74,325 years behind bars.
Instead, he received 15 years for conspiracy and
12 years for leading a terrorist organization,
a total of 27 years. Under Spanish law, the
maximum time a criminal can spend in jail is 40
years.
The trial and its findings raise
serious alarms in Europe and Syria. It proves that
dormant cells have been operating from various
European countries, with Arab terrorists leading
normal undercover lives as businessmen, like
Yarkas, waiters and petty employees in European
companies.
Since September 11 the names of
several Syrians have appeared in the hunt for
al-Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East. Among the
Syrians accused are Alouni, Yarkas, the
businessman Ma'mun al-Darkazanli and the deadly
Abu Musaab al-Souri, believed to be the man behind
the March 11, 2004 attacks in Madrid and possibly
involved in the brutal July 7 attacks in London.
All of this raises the question: was Syria
bluffing when it loudly repeated after September
11 that it had a common enemy with the US in
international terror? Was that only a plea to the
US to tone down its pressure on Syria, trying to
convince the Americans that Syria could be
supportive in the international "war on terror"?
Syrian authorities have argued that the roots of
Islamic terrorism lie in the Muslim Brotherhood,
which the Ba'ath regime in Syria combated and
crushed in 1982.
Syria has been at war
with Islamic fundamentalism for a long time.
Although exaggerated at times, the threat has
always been there. All regimes prior to the Ba'ath
in 1963 felt uneasy with political Islam, but were
unable to ban Islamic parties because Syria's free
press and parliament would not allow it.
The most any leader could do in the
pre-1963 era was intimidate the Brotherhood during
elections, or arrest members briefly if their
street demonstration became too loud or violent.
The only exception was the union years with Egypt
(1958-1961) when president Gamal Abd Nasser
ruthlessly crushed the Syrian and Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood. The Ba'ath responded with great force
to the Islamic threat twice in 1964 and 1982. This
succeeded in temporarily rooting out political
Islam from Syria. It took fanatics 20 years to
reemerge, not as members of the Brotherhood, but
as a more radical third-generation of terrorists
in organizations such as al-Qaeda, using Islam as
a cover, abusing and distorting it to accommodate
their political beliefs.
Probably the most
famous terrorist among the third generation of
Syrian fanatics who is now a member of al-Qaeda is
Abu Musaab Souri, who, to the horror of many
Syrians, was reportedly the man behind the terror
attacks in Madrid. A hi-tech terrorist, he teaches
radical Islam over the Internet and offers online
training courses to terrorists, in addition to
hands-on practice in chemical weapons and
explosives.
One year younger than bin
Laden, Abu Musaab was born in 1958 in Aleppo,
Syria's second-largest city, where he studied
mechanical engineering and joined al-Talia
al-Muqatila (The Fighting Vanguards), a military
Islamist group led by the famous Brotherhood chief
Marwan Hadid.
After the war between
Syria's late president Hafez Assad and the
Brotherhood in 1982, the Muslim group was crushed
and forced to leave Syria. A defeated Abu Musaab
turned his back on the Brotherhood. He claimed
that it had allied itself with secular movements
and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
He went
to Afghanistan and reportedly was recruited into
al-Qaeda by Abdullah Azzam, a terror leader who
was killed by the US Army in Baghdad last week.
Azzam, known as "the godfather of jihad" and said
by the US to be the number two al-Qaeda man in
Iraq behind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, brought Abu
Musaab into the inner circles of al-Qaeda and made
him an official member in 1992.
Abu Musaab
went to Spain then Great Britain, returning to
Afghanistan in 1998, where he became an ally of
Taliban leader Mullah Omar. He also worked in the
Arabic section of Kabul Radio during Mullah Omar's
dictatorship.
Abu Musaab administered
jihadi military camps in Kabul and Jalalabad,
training recruits and helping with their
indoctrination. After the US invasion in 2001, the
US government claimed that he had been involved in
September 11, putting a US$5 million reward on his
head.
He wrote a long reply denying
involvement, claiming that he heard about the
attacks on television like everybody else. He
voiced strong support for them, however, adding
that he also was unconnected in any manner with
the attacks in Madrid, paying tribute to the
innocent people who had been killed on that
dreadful day.
He also said that he did not
know Zarqawi. Such an acquaintance, he added,
would be an honor. In his reply Abu Musaab urged
European countries to stay away from US policies
in the Middle East to avoid attacks on their
territories. He added that as long as these
countries did not help the US, they were not
targets of al-Qaeda. The only exception was Great
Britain, which he said was an inseparable member
of the US-Israeli alliance that troubled Arabs.
The first generation of radical Islamic
politicians in Syria included Marwan Hadid and
other Muslim commanders who led combat against the
Syrian regime in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This
generation was influenced by the veteran Muslim
leaders of Syria who operated in the 1940s, mainly
the Brotherhood founder in Syria, Mustapha
al-Sibaii. Unlike the newer generation of
radicals, however, Sibaii was a gentleman
politician and a democrat.
The second
generation included Abu Musaab al-Souri and Imad
Yarkas. This generation was influenced by men like
Hadid.
The third generation is that of
young people, in their 20s and 30s, who were
indoctrinated by the older men who carried out
attacks in the post-September 11 order, such as
those in Bali in 2002, Istanbul in 2003, Madrid in
2004 and London in July. Their inspiration would
be Jordanian Zarqawi, who turns 40 in 2006.
These are the wolves lurking in Syrian
society. Inspired by the occupation of Iraq and
the ongoing insurgency, these people will take to
arms to unleash their frustration. To date, those
using Islam as a tool to wage war and rise to fame
have not failed, to the horror of the Americans.
To say the least, the insurgency is not
losing in Iraq. This gives the new generation of
Syrian jihadis a boost of confidence. To control
them, Syria has no choice but to give them
alternatives to radical political Islam - a
regime-friendly Islamic party, maybe, or a
non-friendly one that nevertheless does not have a
military agenda. By refusing to acknowledge their
political existence altogether, the state is
making them more secluded, and more dangerous.
The Algerian model should be a good
reminder to the Syrians of how chaotic the street
can become if angry Islamists are on the loose. In
the 1990s, Algeria was plunged into civil war
after the military prevented an Islamist political
party, the Islamic Salvation Front, from taking
power following the country's first multiparty
elections. More than 100,000 people were killed,
many civilians in grotesque massacres.
No
one wants that to happen in Syria. Yet inside
Syria secret radical members of Islamic groups
appear as normal citizens leading normal lives,
just like Imad Yarkas did in Spain.
They
can be the grocer near one's house, the waiter at
a restaurant, the taxi driver or the office boy in
one's own bureau. When conditions are ripe, these
people can explode, spreading a fundamentalist
wave throughout Syria that would be very difficult
to contain.
Naturally, they would receive
assistance from the first, second and third
generation of fanatics in Europe and the Middle
East; men like bin Laden and Abu Musaab al-Souri.
They are the wolves Syria has to combat.
Now, when Syria cries wolf, the world
should listen.
Sami Moubayed is
a Syrian political analyst.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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