The trajectory is becoming clear: as Al-Qaeda spreads outwards, Arab regimes are increasingly likely to share the brunt of its violence, writes Diaa Rashwan* Producing an accurate description of Al-Qaeda is deceptively easy. Certainly, the information is accessible; since 11 September 2001, thousands of pages of print in hundreds of periodicals have been given over to the task of analyzing the aims, composition, funding, tactics and innumerable other aspects of this organisation. The hard part is sorting out the chaff from the wheat in all this abundant material, a task made all the more difficult because of the tendency of many writers to regurgitate commonly accepted information and perceptions without questioning their sources or double- checking the facts. At least we can take it as given that Al-Qaeda belongs to that stream of international militant Islamist movements that espouse jihad against what they perceive as the external enemies to Islam and the Muslim people. In this it differs from such domestically grown jihadist movements, as the Gama'a Islamiya and Jihad Organisation in Egypt, which targeted the regime within their own country. The focus on the "remote" as opposed to the "near" enemy, as Al-Qaeda members have put it, combines with another fundamental principle to form the effective substance of its battle cry. This principle is expressed in the exhortation to all people of the Islamic world to work together to liberate all parts of Dar Al-Islam from foreign occupation and to support any Muslim people in their wars against foreign aggressors. These two ideas combined in practice for the first time in modern Islamic history during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 when various regional and international powers--the US above all--sought to incite tens of thousands of Muslim youths to go that country to fight the communist invaders. Never before had the call of jihad been used so concertedly to recruit Muslims from around the Islamic world to defend a remote Muslim country against foreign aggression. This applies even to the war against the Zionist occupation of Palestine in 1947 and 1948. In spite of the cherished place of that nation in the Muslim mind, containing as it does the holy Al-Aqsa mosque, volunteers to fight in Palestine came only from the Arab world, even if they did include political Islamists such as members of the Muslim Brotherhood. No non-Arab Islamic nation participated, even though there existed at the time influential Islamist groups in India and Pakistan, such as that led by Abul A'la Al-Mawdudi. In other words, the ideological motivation for volunteering was political (in defense of Arab nationalism) rather than religious as has been the case since the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Jihad can either be defensive, to protect Dar Al-Islam and the Islamic creed from foreign invasion, or offensive, to bring other areas and peoples into Dar Al-Islam. The former is a duty incumbent upon all Muslims, the latter a duty incumbent upon the "Islamic state". Clearly, defensive jihad was the rallying cry behind the volunteer drive to fight in Afghanistan and has remained the guiding philosophy of Al-Qaeda movement and its affiliates. In 1979, the then 22-year-old Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan to join thousands of mujahideen from around the Islamic world in the fight against the Soviet occupation. The following ten years were critically formative in the life of this exceedingly wealthy youth, for whom defensive jihad became synonymous with the entire concept of jihad and the ultimate demonstration of his faith, as he understands it. Only two years after his return to Saudi Arabia 1989, following the Soviet evacuation from Afghanistan, the second Gulf war broke out. To Bin Laden, the US had suddenly become the prime aggressor against Dar Al-Islam, a belief that has guided his actions until today. It can thus be said that Bin Laden was politically and operatively born in the Afghan war and that the second Gulf war confirmed his vision of himself as an international Islamic freedom fighter whose sole mission was to combat those he identified as a threat to Islam and Muslim interests as he perceived them. His jihad was never directed "internally"; that is to say towards overthrowing a specific government and establishing in its place an Islamic regime. The concept of external jihad had also come to dominate the thinking of other militant Islamists who had shared Bin Laden's Afghan experience and who sought to repeat it, this time against the new enemy, the US. Yet there is no evidence of an Al-Qaeda-like organisation coming into being during the period of Bin Laden's stay in Saudi Arabia until his expulsion, nor in Sudan until he was forced to leave that country also in 1995. It was only following the return of the Saudi dissenter -- with the huge personal financial resources at his disposal and in the company of a collection of Islamists from around the world, most of whom were on the run from security authorities in their own countries and a few of whom were looking for a new holy war to fight -- to Afghanistan, which was now almost fully under the control of the Taliban movement, that thoughts turned to giving the dream of international jihad a concrete organisational structure headed by Bin Laden and his companions. It was somewhere between 1996 and 1998 that Bin Laden and his entourage made their first attempt to found this organisation, drawing on their experience and the friendships and connections they had made during the Afghan war. On 12 February 1998, the "International Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders" issued a declaration decreeing that "waging war against the Americans and their military and civilian allies is a religious duty incumbent upon every Muslim capable of this in any country where this is possible." The declaration was the first official indication of the coalescence of an organisational structure that would later become known as Al-Qaeda. It was signed by Osama Bin Laden, Ayman El-Zawahri, in the name of the Egyptian Jihad Organisation, Rifai Ahmed Taha for the Egyptian Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya (which later withdrew from the front), Mir Hamza for the Ulama Society in Pakistan, leader of the Pakistan- based Ansar Movement, Fadl Al-Rahman and Abdel- Salam Mohammed, leader of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. Nevertheless, it should be noted that of these Bin Laden was the only person who did not sign on behalf of an existing organisation, which suggests that Al-Qaeda had not yet been established. It is impossible to imagine that he would not affix the name of the organisation he founded to a document that declared war against the mightiest power on earth. On 7 August 1998, Bin Laden and his cohorts mounted two massive simultaneous bombing attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania claiming hundreds of dead and wounded. That neither the organisational structure nor the name of their new organisation had yet been finalised is indicated by the fact that responsibility for these bombings was claimed by a new, previously unheard of organization, one never to be heard of again: the "Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Places". The statements issued by this organisation contained several paragraphs that had appeared in the International Islamic Front declaration and suggest that it was one or more of the co- founders of that group that were behind the two bombings. Although the name "Qaeda" appeared in several American reports and press statements at that time, there exists no document, declaration or statement to indicate that the signatories of the International Islamic Front declaration were leaders or members of an organisation bearing that name. Most likely, the appearance of that name in those American sources stems from the fact that Qaeda -- meaning "base" -- was the name assigned to an administrative and financial staging point in Afghanistan for militant Islamists recruited into the war against the Soviet occupation. The term would thus have been used to refer generally to Bin Laden and his associates who operated that staging point rather than to a paramilitary or political organisation that actually existed at the time of the American embassy bombings. One can only suppose that around the turn of the millennium Bin Laden and his associates were still in the process of setting up their new organisation. On 30 October 2000, they launched an attack on the USSS Cole, anchored off of the Yemeni port city, Aden, causing the death and injury of dozens of American marines. Even by this time, neither Bin Laden nor any of his close partners had revealed the name of their new organisation or officially acknowledged their activities, including the bombing of the US warship. The turning point in the concretisation of Al-Qaeda as a jihadist organisational structure seems to have occurred in the course of the following year. In a videotape broadcast on 7 October 2001, which coincided with the beginning of the American-led war against Afghanistan in pursuit of the perpetrators of the hijack bombings against New York and Washington, Bin Laden, the Kuwait dissenter Suleiman Abu Gheith and Ayman El-Zawahri announced that they were, respectively, the leader of Al-Qaeda, its spokesman and the leader of the Egyptian Jihad. By the end of the following month, statements issued by Zawahri, Bin Laden and other associates made it clear they had settled upon the name "The Jihad Qaeda", obviously signaling a merger between the Zawahri-led break-off wing from the Egyptian Jihad organisation and the groups surrounding Bin Laden, which had been referred to collectively as Al-Qaeda in previous years. Hardly had the new Al-Qaeda organisation officially declared itself than it was subject to a severe battering in the course of the American invasion of Afghanistan, waged in the name of the US-led international war on "terrorism". Following the toppling of the Taliban regime, numerous Al-Qaeda leaders were killed, arrested or put to flight. In tandem with these developments, however, there emerged a form of bifurcation in the handling of Al-Qaeda as a concept and organisation. At one level, Al-Qaeda was the actual organisation--"Jihad Qaeda"-- the emergence of which as the apparent successor to the International Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders discussed above. This Al-Qaeda is hierarchically organised with various forms and levels of ideological and operational line-of-command and coordination structures and has clear theoretical and practical perceptions of its aims and strategies. In addition, its membership is geographically identifiable; it can be said to be concentrated in an area extending from Afghanistan and Central Asia, through a part of the Indian subcontinent and down to the Arabian Peninsula and east Africa. The US is hunting down the leaders of this organisation throughout the world, and has succeeded in apprehending a good many of them, such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Bin Al-Shiba, Abu Zubeida, Abdel Rahim Al-Nashiri, Tawfiq Bin Attash, Munir Al-Mutasaddaq and Zakariya El-Mousawi. It has also killed many others, most notably Mohammed Atef (Abu Hifs Al-Masri), military commander of the organisation. These coups combined with the ongoing campaign against them have undoubtedly weakened the ability of the Jihad Qaeda to mount major operations outside Afghanistan, its primary base, the headquarters of its top leaders (such as Bin Laden and El-Zawahri), and the most important arena in their battle against American forces and the US's local allies. At a second level, however, "Al-Qaeda" became that vast amorphous "network" of organisations, groups and individuals attributed to the jihadist movement in particular, and radical Islamist movements in general. Ever since the US declared its ambiguously defined "war on terrorism", Islamists of even the most moderate hue have become subject to daily threats and harassment. Not surprisingly, this approach has enraged Islamist groups around the world and provoked the more radical among them to use whatever means at their disposal to damage American interests abroad. Although there is no concrete evidence of any connection between these groups and the Jihad Qaeda -- apart, that is, from a shared hostility to the US and an espousal of violence -- every operation they mount against US, Israeli or Western targets in general serves the Jihad Qaeda campaign against the US. This organisation, therefore, hastens to capitalise on this by issuing vaguely worded statements that give the impression that it was responsible for some of these operations, which, in turn, has led the US to expand its definition of Al- Qaeda to include individuals and groups who, in fact, have nothing to do with it. To further confuse matters, the US occupation of Iraq has engendered an environment conducive to the spread of Islamist extremism and militant groups throughout the Arab and Islamic world, although with greater intensity in the Middle East and the Gulf region in particular. Developments inside occupied Iraq combined with the intensity of the global war against terrorism, its deliberate distortions and misinformation, reproduce the ideas and strategies that led to the creation of the Jihad Qaeda on an unprecedented scale. As a result, the Arab and Islamic world is now teeming with what we might term Al-Qaeda clones. One might compare Al-Qaeda to a transnational company that allows others to use its "trademark" as long as those others first subscribe to its ideas and quality standards and second, affix the Al-Qaeda logo to their product. It is in this sense, if any, that Al-Qaeda "branches" have sprung up in many countries of the Arab and Islamic world, pursuing the same objectives as the "mother company" and emulating its modus operandi but without there being an actual direct organisational link with it. The Internet has been highly instrumental in the spread of this phenomenon. Fatwas (religious rulings) and paramilitary expertise and know-how are readily available to aspiring Al- Qaeda clones via hundreds of sites. Undoubtedly, too, the high- profile operations the original Al-Qaeda has undertaken in various parts of the world against overwhelming security odds have encouraged fledgling radicals and extremist groups to similarly establish their jihadist credentials and qualify for membership in the vast amorphous Al-Qaeda "network". That Bin Laden and Zawahri are still at large and continue to make occasional videotaped proclamations has also been a source of inspiration to those groups while simultaneously contributing to the perpetuity of the Al-Qaeda organisation itself. Add to the foregoing an international environment increasingly charged over the past two years with military conflict, political disputes and ideological clashes and the consequent augmenting sense of worldwide instability and chaos. This sense is particularly acute in the Middle East because of the Iraq situation and the ongoing plight of Palestinians and because of the many severe domestic problems that are coming to a head in the course of profound changes that are affecting political and economic ways of life and modes of cultural, religious and ethnic expression. The growth of violence and terrorism is a manifestation--though by all means not the only one -- of this political and psychological unrest. The mounting anger and despair felt by many youths combined with the spread of extremist interpretations of Islamic scriptures have driven thousands into the embrace of militant organisations with many deployed on major suicide attacks against, primarily, American and Western targets, as we have seen recently in Riyadh, Casablanca and various parts of Iraq. The blend of desperation and religious fanaticism was also behind the recent spate of kidnappings and brutal slaughtering of foreigners in complete defiance of the spirit of Islam and explicit strictures pertaining to the treatment of prisoners of war. Moreover, these same feelings appear to be propelling small extremist groups further down the dark and endless tunnel of fanatical violence. We have recently begun to see an incipient resurgence in the targeting of Arab and Muslim regimes, in the course of which the perpetrators no longer discriminate between Muslim and non-Muslim victims. This trend has received encouragement by a new development in the jihadist rhetoric of Jihad Qaeda leaders, which now links the war against the external enemy (the US) with the war against the internal one (Arab regimes); or as they put it in their exhortations to their followers, the "remote enemy" and the "near enemy" must be fought at the same time. * The writer is managing editor of the annual The State of Religion in Egypt Report , issued by Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
