Qaeda On The Run
Syria Slay is Latest Setback
Amir Taheri
http://www.nypost.com/seven/10082007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/qaeda_on_the_run.htm?page=0

Unknown gunmen murdered Muhammad Gul Aghasi - one of the key "theologians" of al Qaeda - at a mosque in northern Syria last month. Candidates for the fiery preacher's killing include rivals within his own radical group, agents of the Americans - and his Syrian hosts. Whatever the truth, this is bad news for the already ailing al Qaeda.

Born in 1973, Aghasi, who was of mixed Kurdish-Turkmen ethnic stock, studied Islamic theology in Damascus in the 1990s before traveling to Pakistan, where he established contact with the Taliban and al Qaeda. In 2004, having returned to his Syrian hometown, he created the Ghuraba al-Shaam (Aliens of the Levant), with the declared aim of recruiting, training and arming jihadists to fight against the new Iraqi government and the U.S.-led Coalition forces.

By 2006, Aghasi - using the nom de guerre Abu Qaaqaa (Father of the Hissing Sound of Swords) - claimed that his group had dispatched more than 2,000 jihadists from half-a-dozen Arab countries to Iraq. The group also boasted of providing jihadists in Iraq with safe havens inside Syria where they could rest, get medical care (even dental work!), retrain and even get married before returning to the battlefield.

Wearing Afghan-style clothes and the mandatory flowing beard, Aghasi was especially proud of the role his jihadists had played in fighting the Americans in Fallujah for more than a year. He claimed that his bulletproof, German-made limousine had been a gift from an Arab businessman for his role in the Fallujah battle. He had created an outfit called Office of Services for the Mujahedin in Iraq, handling millions of dollars collected from unknown benefactors.

The Syrian authorities, not normally known for their tenderness toward anyone operating outside lines fixed by the government, allowed Aghasi to do as he pleased. Damascus dismissed demands by Iraq and a number of other Arab countries (whose citizens Aghasi recruited) to curb the activities of the "Aliens" and insisted that Aghasi was only "a man of faith preaching his version of Islam."

Members of Aghasi's family claim that he had all along worked alongside the "legitimate authorities of the country" to further the interests of "Syria and Islam."

The Syrian authorities claim he was killed by two former jihadists from Iraq who had defected to the U.S. forces there. But it is rumored in pro-jihadist circles that Aghasi had worked for both the Syrians and the Americans. In this theory, the self-styled Sword of the Faith had started working for Syrian intelligence before getting a better offer from the Americans; when he switched sides, the Syrians decided to put him on the fast track to martyrdom.

Some experts have long maintained that al Qaeda no longer exists as a single organization and should be seen as a system of franchise used by a variety of groups, including many copycat outfits, across the Muslim world and beyond. Aghasi's story suggests an even more complex picture, since it shows that any individual or group could take the name of al Qaeda without referring to any central authority that issues the franchise. Al Qaeda's original leaders, including Osama bin Laden, assuming he is still alive, are only too happy to let others fight their fight while they huddle in their hideouts.

These are not happy days for the worldwide al Qaeda brand. Having focused most of its energies on fighting in Iraq, the movement has all but disappeared from the scene in other parts of the global jihad, notably the Caucasus, southern Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Kashmir and the Arabian Peninsula.

The dream of defeating the American "Great Satan" in Iraq has also forced al Qaeda affiliated groups and individuals to cooperate with regimes that they had hitherto regarded as ideological enemies - including the Islamic Republic in Tehran and the Ba'athist establishment in Damascus. Two of Bin Laden's sons, Saad and Seif al-Adl, have been in Iran since 2002, along with at least six other al Qaeda leaders. The Iranians say all are under arrest and will be tried on unspecified charges. Aghasi's story, meanwhile, shows that al Qaeda couldn't have maintained its presence in Iraq without the tacit consent of the Syrian intelligence - a consent that may be withdrawn at any time when and if Damascus decides to repair its ties with Baghdad and Washington.

Al Qaeda had hoped that the U.S. Congress would hand it a victory in Iraq by forcing the Bush administration to withdraw American forces before the Iraqis were ready to defend themselves. But that hope vanished last month when it became clear that the United States will retain its military presence in Iraq for at least another year.

Al Qaeda took another hit last week when Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheikh, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti and the most prestigious cleric in the kingdom, issued a fatwa against "traveling abroad for the purpose of jihad." Hours after the fatwa was issued, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hailed it as a "major step toward defeating al Qaeda in Iraq."

Inside Iraq itself, a new force of more than 30,000 volunteers is getting ready to battle al Qaeda in the two predominantly Arab Sunni provinces of Anbar and Ninveh. Many of the volunteers are young men who had previously fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq. They decided to switch sides when Arab Sunni religious and tribal leaders realized that al Qaeda was merely using Iraq as a battlefield in its own war against the United States.

Even before Aghasi was gunned down, the flow of jihadists going to Iraq via Syria had slowed down. According to Iraqi official estimates, the number of foreign jihadists entering between January and July was down by almost 50 percent compared to the same period in 2006. This is, perhaps, one reason why the al Qaeda cyberspace is now full of desperate calls for more jihadists for Iraq. Despite the setbacks it has suffered, al Qaeda still sees Iraq as a make-or-break moment for its dream of world conquest.

Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri is based in Europe.


Al-Qaeda in Iraq on the Run
By Cliff May
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/CliffMay/2007/10/18/al-qaeda_in_iraq_on_the_run

Al-Qaeda is on the horns of a dilemma. Last month, some 30 of its senior leaders in Iraq were killed or captured. Now, Osama bin Laden faces a tough decision: Send reinforcements to Iraq in an attempt to regain the initiative? That risks losing those combatants, too – and that could seriously diminish his global organization. But the alternative is equally unappealing: accept defeat in Iraq, the battlefield bin Laden has called central to the struggle al-Qaeda is waging against America and its allies.

Hard times for al-Qaeda should be good news for America but you wouldn’t know it from the reaction of the anti-war movement and their sympathizers in Congress and the elite media. Many have been unwilling even to acknowledge that U.S. forces are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. They claim we are merely refereeing a civil war and/or combating Iraqi “resistance” to American “occupation.”

CNN this week ran a special called “Meeting Resistance,” a documentary about what it called “ordinary Iraqis …taking up arms and fighting the Americans.” Earlier this month Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-VA) lamented that Congress had been unable to pass legislation to “change the mission away from deep involvement in Iraq’s civil war and toward a more narrow focus on fighting al-Qaeda.”

How startled CNN producers and the Senator must have been to see the front-page story this week in the Washington Post reporting that American troops have dealt “devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq.” If our forces have achieved this without it being their mission, and despite the “resistance” of “ordinary Iraqis,” they must be warriors unlike any the world has seen since Thermopylae.

Is it ignorance or partisanship that makes so many politicians and media moguls blind to what has been happening in Iraq over recent months? Do they really not understand the dramatic change in strategy implemented by Gen. David Petraeus, the new American commander in Iraq?

That key to that strategy, known as the “surge,” is not the number of troops deployed – though a minimum force size is necessary -- but rather how they are utilized. Col. Wayne W. Grigsby, Jr., who commands a “surge” brigade based in a mixed Sunni and Shia area near Baghdad, made it simple for me in a phone conversation this week: “We do not commute to work,” he said. “We live in the towns with the people we are here to help.”

That means providing them with security – gathering intelligence from them about where the terrorists are hiding, and then eliminating them, their safe havens, their bomb factories and their weapons caches. Do that and the bloodshed begins to subside.

“The Iraqi people are fed up with the violence and with the extremists, both Sunni and Shia,” Grigsby said. Far from “resisting” the American troops in their communities, “they want to join the fight and protect their neighborhoods. They are coming to us and saying, ‘How can we help? We don’t want to live like this.’”

Volunteers do not form sectarian militias. On the contrary, Grigbsy said, “they want to be recognized as legitimate members of the Iraqi security forces.”

American troops also facilitate economic and political development – something, they say, ordinary Iraqis sincerely desire. What about reconciliation? “I see signs of Sunni and Shia getting along,” the colonel answered. And there is, increasingly, “grass-roots governance. People aren’t waiting for the central government to act.”

Despite the fact that many more American troops are now deployed “outside the wire,” the number of soldiers killed in action is down 64 percent from May, the month before the “surge in numbers” reached full strength and the “surge of operations” began against al-Qaeda cells, Iranian-backed militias and other enemies of America and Iraq.

And now bin Laden has to choose: send his most capable lieutenants to try to reheat the insurgency in Iraq; or cede the battlefield to the Americans and the majority of Iraqis who have no interest either in blowing people up or embracing the al-Qaeda way of life.

The first course risks losing combatants who could otherwise be promoting al-Qaeda’s agenda in Hamburg or New Jersey. As for the second course, bin Laden has said that the “world war” raging in Iraq will end in “either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.”

At this moment, al-Qaeda in Iraq seems likely to suffer the latter. Confronted by America’s adaptable, agile and courageous military forces, its only hope is divine intervention – and maybe the U.S. Congress.

Clifford D. May is the President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.