Al-Qaeda's new talent in
Afghanistan By Michael Scheuer
Al-Qaeda's late-May naming of Mustafa
Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid as the "general
leader" of the group's activities in Afghanistan
shows that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri
believe that helping the Taliban win the Afghan
war is a top priority.
It also suggests
that the al-Qaeda chieftains think the path to
victory in Afghanistan is set solidly enough that
Abu al-Yazid can manage the organization's Afghan
affairs while the group turns to
other
aspects of the jihad outside Afghanistan.
Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid
was born in Egypt's al-Sharqiyah governorate in
the Nile Delta on December 17, 1955, and in his
youth he became a member of the country's radical
Islamist movement. Abu al-Yazid was somehow
involved in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian
president Anwar Sadat, he spent three years in
prison after being convicted, and at some point he
became a member of Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic
Jihad.
He has been convicted in absentia
in several trials in Egypt, and has been sentenced
to both life imprisonment and the death penalty.
According to Interpol, his pseudonyms include
Sheikh Sa'id al-Misri, Mustafa Abu Yazid, Sa'ad
Abu Shayama, Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad, and Said
Uthman. He appears to be best known in al-Qaeda
circles as Sheikh Said.
Abu al-Yazid left
Egypt for Afghanistan in 1988, and he is reported
to have been a founding member of al-Qaeda in the
same year. He accompanied bin Laden from
Afghanistan to Sudan in 1991, and while there he
served as the accountant for bin Laden's
Sudan-based businesses - including his flagship
company Wadi al-Aqiq.
He also may have
arranged the funding for the failed June 1995
assassination attempt by Egypt's Islamic Group
against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis
Ababa.
Abu al-Yazid apparently returned to
Afghanistan with bin Laden in 1996. By that time,
he was a confidant of bin Laden, a senior al-Qaeda
leader, a member of its Shura Council, and a
continual key manager of the organization's
finances.
Abu al-Yazid is reported to have
supplied the requisite funding for Muhammad Atta -
the leader of the September 11, 2001, attackers -
and to have received from Atta the return of
surplus funds just before the attacks occurred. In
2002, the US government placed Abu al-Yazid's name
on the list of terrorists and organizations
subject to having their financial accounts frozen.
Despite his having been involved in
jihadist activity for nearly a quarter-century,
few personal facts about Abu al-Yazid are known;
indeed, his first media appearance occurred in May
in a 45-minute interview produced by al-Qaeda's
Al-Sahab media group after he was named the
"official in general charge of the al-Qaeda
organization in Afghanistan".
Based on his
financial duties for al-Qaeda, it is fair to
speculate that he may have had schooling in
economics or business management, and several
reports claim that he received military training
in Afghanistan but has never had responsibilities
as an al-Qaeda military leader.
The Lahore
Daily Times reported in December 2004 that Abu
al-Yazid had some unspecified duties in
maintaining the relationship between al-Qaeda and
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Abu al-Yazid
also appears to have some talent for clandestine
international travel. He is reported to have
arranged the financing for the September 11
attacks from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar,
and veteran Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir
recently said Abu al-Yazid had just returned to
Afghanistan from a two-year "jihadi mission" in
Iraq.
Given Abu al-Yazid's skill set, he
probably assisted al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the
nascent Islamic government of which it is a part,
in strengthening their logistical, financial,
media and administrative systems.
Abu
al-Yazid is reported to be a man of "noble
character" who is trusted by al-Qaeda's different
national and ethnic groups, as well as a person
who is trustworthy, displays fine manners and is
amiable at all times. He is said to have a large
family consisting of "two wives, sons and
daughters" and is one of the few senior al-Qaeda
lieutenants who has lived along both the
Pakistan-Afghanistan and Iran-Afghanistan borders.
One of his daughters married the son of
the incarcerated Egyptian Islamic Group spiritual
leader, Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman. The daughter
and her husband, Muhammad Abd al-Rahman, were
captured by US forces in Afghanistan in early
2003.
Significance of Abu al-Yazid's
appointment The appointment of Abu al-Yazid
underscores the importance to al-Qaeda of
re-establishing a Taliban government in
Afghanistan. As an al-Qaeda founder and a member
of its Shura Council, Abu al-Yazid brings great
prestige to the group's support for the Taliban,
and - like bin Laden and Zawahiri before him - he
pledged personal allegiance to Taliban leader
Mullah Omar as the "Commander of the Faithful" in
his first Al-Sahab interview.
Abu
al-Yazid's stature in al-Qaeda also will cause his
appointment to be viewed among Islamists as a
complement to the Taliban and Mullah Omar. This is
a direct effort to ensure that the insurgency is
seen by the traditionally insular Afghans as being
led by Afghan mujahideen and not by "foreign
Arabs". In essence, it is the same kind of
keep-the-locals-in-the-lead effort that al-Qaeda
undertook after the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
who had broken with al-Qaeda's locals-first
doctrine by behaving as the foreign leader of
Iraq's Sunni insurgents.
The installation
of a financial and logistics manager like Abu
al-Yazid clearly suggests that Mullah Omar, bin
Laden and al-Zawahiri believe that the mujahideen
are well on the way toward defeating the US-led
coalition.
In his Al-Sahab interview, Abu
al-Yazid made clear that his job would be to help
manage the overall war effort. He said that
rank-and-file manpower was not a problem for the
mujahideen - there being plenty of Afghan and Arab
fighters - but that they needed more money for
insurgent attacks and suicide bombings.
"So funding is the mainstay of jihad," Abu
al-Yazid said, and indicated that much of his time
would be spent in fundraising, which, as noted
above, has long been his forte. [1] He also said
he would seek to acquire Arab specialists to
assist the Afghan insurgency "in all spheres:
military, scientific, informational, and
otherwise" - a goal that is reminiscent of bin
Laden's successful effort to bring Arab economic,
agricultural and managerial specialists to assist
the Taliban in governing the country in the late
1990s.
From al-Qaeda's perspective, the
assignment of Abu al-Yazid must be seen as a move
that keeps a strong, talented and respected hand
managing the organization's activities in
Afghanistan and one that simultaneously allows bin
Laden, Zawahiri and other senior leaders to devote
more thought and time to projects elsewhere in the
world. With their Afghan program in a
steady-as-she-goes mode, bin Laden and his
associates will turn to the more direct management
of al-Qaeda's already expanding reach from Iraq
into the Levant, Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula
as well as preparations for the group's next
attack inside the United States.
Note 1. Public statements
by al-Qaeda leaders that stress shortages of money
should always be taken by Western analysts with a
large grain of salt. Al-Qaeda's chiefs are
completely familiar with the US and Western
fixation on "terrorist finances" and the Western
assessment that Islamic militancy and violence can
be suppressed by governmental actions that prevent
the flow of money to the mujahideen. Indeed, Abu
al-Yazid is intimately familiar with this Western
strategy as he himself is on one of the US
government's lists of terrorist financiers. In the
current case, the immense oil profits currently
accruing to the mujahideen's traditional donors
and the accelerating pace of the Afghan and Iraqi
insurgencies - in each of which al-Qaeda is a full
participant - tend to make Abu al-Yazid's claim of
a funding shortfall look more than a bit like
disinformation.
Michael Scheuer
served as the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at
the US Central Intelligence Agency's
Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is
now a senior fellow at The Jamestown
Foundation.
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