The Eminence Gris
Western Intelligence was of the opinion even before the death of Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad, Pakistan compound by the action of U.S. Navy SEALS, that al-Qaeda was a spent force. That although the name of Osama bin Laden was a venerated one among jihadists, the movement itself had petered out. Not that, by any means, fanatical Islamist ideology itself had dissipated into history, only that it had taken on different forms.It had, in fact, become the near-defunct head office, with its branch plants scattered throughout the geography of the Middle East and North Africa like franchises taking up the cudgel against the sinful, undeserving West, along with any heretical Islamic sects. The power of hatred and divine blessing for the work of martyrdom-obsessed jihadists was not abated, merely webbed elsewhere, and the threat to world stability remained.
It cannot have been lost on Osama bin Laden that he was side-lined from his glory days in the mountain hideouts of the inhospitably beautiful North West Frontier provinces, to the calmly pleasant but boring confines of the Abbottabad compound where he was secure from detection from prying eyes for too many years. And from where he sent out directives and suggestions via his trusted courier.
His second-in-command was the active one, Ayman al Zawahiri, inheriting the role of speaker-of-jihad-authority through the dissemination of videotapes exhorting terrorist activities of a smaller and more imaginative scale. And then the advent of the Arab Spring suddenly erupted from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya to Syria, stalling in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
But presenting an opportunity to al-Qaeda, through its own inventive auspices and through affiliation with other fanatical Islamist movements. Al-Qaeda waited with bated breath for the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve its successes; bin Laden believing "there is a sizable direction within the Brotherhood that holds the Salafi doctrine, so the return of the Brotherhood and those like them to the true Islam is a matter of time."
Well, wasn't he prophetic? In no time at all, in fact, in Egypt and in Libya and in Syria, Salafists, Brotherhood and al-Qaeda militias brought up the rear and became ascendant. And they ever so accommodatingly released from long-term incarceration prisoners of the ilk of the brother of al-Qaeda's now-leading figure, Ayman al Zawahiri, an Egyptian.
Brother Mohammed al Zawahiri now heads the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
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Egyptian Islamist Mohammed al-Zawahiri told Egypt’s
state-run newspaper Al-Ahram that media outlets who reported the news
did not evaluate it “intellectually.” (Photo courtesy of nation.com.pk)
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Which has staked out its territory, mostly in the Sinai, which Egypt has decided not to defend, and to leave to the Bedouin, the Salafists, the Islamic Jihad which mounts attacks across the border into Israel, finding common cause with Hamas, since both are of Egyptian origin, both more or less sanctioned by the Muslim Brotherhood.
American intelligence officials feel that Mohammed al Zawahiri and his EIJ group have resumed terror activities under the al-Qaeda banner, branching into Libya, complicit with other al-Qaeda affiliated groups in setting up terrorist training camps and mounting attacks, such as the one on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi where U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
Mohammed al Zawahiri was implicated in the anti-American protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, helping to raise the al-Qaeda flag over the embassy, replacing the stars and stripes while protesters chanted "Obama, Obama! We are all Osama!"
Arab Spring -- call it Islamist Springboard...
Labels: Crisis Politics, Egypt, Islamism, Libya, Revolution, Syria, Terrorism, Tunisia
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, January 12, 2013
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