Courtesy: "Guardian, UK", 3 May 2011
By Jason Burke
....................
Note: The viewpoint expressed in this article is solely that of the writer / news outlet. "FATA Awareness Initiative" Team may not agree with the opinion presented.
....................
We Hope You find the info useful. Keep visiting this blog and remember to leave your feedback / comments / suggestions / requests / corrections.
With Regards,
"FATA Awareness Initiative" Team.
Al-Qaida leadership battle: who can replace Osama bin Laden?
With so many Bin Laden deputies slain in the hunt for the 'the sheikh', al-Qaida's leaderless hardcore is now likely to fracture
By Jason Burke
With so many potential al-Qaida leaders killed or captured over the past 10 years, there is not one standing who has a credible chance of imposing himself as overall leader of the core organisation.
The most obvious candidate to succeed Osama bin Laden is his Egyptian associate, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
But he, like the other potential leadership candidates, has several flaws that only serve to demonstrate how unique "the sheikh" was.
Zawahiri, a 59-year-old former paediatrician, has none of Bin Laden's charisma and little of his talent for propaganda. He is strong on ideology and strategy but his attempts to communicate are often painfully clumsy. Recent videos in which he has removed his thick-lensed spectacles, presumably to make himself look younger or less scholarly, merely reveal how out of touch he is. Even his Egyptian origins are likely to be divisive in an organisation increasingly dominated by Libyans and Saudis and rent by factional tensions.
The second contender might come from among the younger leadership figures, some heavily promoted in a series of propaganda videos as al-Qaida has tried to fight its creeping marginalisation in recent years.
But even the inexperienced Abu Yayha al-Libi, in his mid-40s and credited with a legendary escape from a high-security prison in Afghanistan, can never replace Bin Laden.
The dead leader had a rare combination of talents which held his group together. He may have made grotesque strategic errors – like thinking the US too morally decadent to fight before 9/11 – but he commanded huge loyalty. Without him, the al-Qaida hardcore is now likely to definitively fracture.
The hardcore leadership has always been defined as Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and a few score associates with them in Pakistan. According to recent intelligence reports, largely based on the interviews of detainees, these are less numerous than often thought. Degraded by recent drone strikes, there are maybe only 80 or 100 senior al-Qaida militants still operative in Pakistan.
Certainly, many potential leadership candidates have been killed over the last 10 years. One of the first to die was Mohammed Atef, the former military commander killed in November 2001. One of the latest, Abu Mustafa al-Yazidi, a polylingual veteran who played linkman between al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban, died in 2009. A whole bench of potential leaders has been wiped out.
Many others have been captured. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, was picked up in Rawalpindi in 2003. Never a formal member of al-Qaida, he was unlikely to make the top ranks. Both Abu Farraj al-Libi, picked up by the Pakistanis in 2005, and Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, detained on the Iraqi border, were capable and committed operators but neither was charismatic enough to lead.
Alongside Yayha al-Libi and his peers there is an even younger generation, but they are unknown and untried.
Decentralisation was always an integral part of Bin Laden's strategy, with al-Qaida conceived as an umbrella group, channelling and focusing the diverse energies of the various groups active across the Islamist world in the 1990s, but it is hard to see how one of the affiliate groups or the "network of networks" could provide a leader now.
Each group has remained largely independent of the main al-Qaida leadership, and there is the problem of the fundamental parochialism of al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsular (largely Yemen), in the Maghreb (largely Algeria), and in Iraq. Each is rooted in specific local factors and history. Faced with significant challenges in reconciling global agendas with local realities, they are more likely to go their own way than try to pursue the chimerical dream of a united international jihad that Bin Laden dedicated much of his life to.
One exception might be the freelance US-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, currently in Yemen where he grew up. Through internet sermons and his slick magazine Inspire, 40-year-old Awlaki has the reach and has shown the ambition to, if not lead al-Qaida, then to fill the space Bin Laden has left. He is young, eloquent, speaks English and Arabic and can reach out to many different audiences. Awlaki's profile and success is a reminder of how al-Qaida was always only one of scores of radical groups that together constituted the dynamic, varied and evolving phenomenon of Sunni Muslim violent extremism.
An important question is what effect the leader's death will have on the ideological impact of al-Qaida. "My life or death does not matter. The awakening has started," Bin Laden boasted in late 2001. But it is not clear whether he will prove correct.
Bin Laden's greatest success was to make his particular interpretation of radical Islamism globally known. There were other strands of militant thinking and strategy around in the late 1990s but 20 years of "propaganda by deed" made Bin Laden's the dominant one. A thriving jihadi subculture has emerged. Al-Qaida has become, in many ways, a social movement. Bin Laden's death means the removal of the iconic figure at the centre of this construct.
Also, many of the myriad factors that have fed radical militancy in recent decades – some of which stretch back decades or even centuries in the Islamic world or in the Islamic world's relationship with the west – are still has potent as ever. We are living in a new era of polarisation, conspiracy theory and religious identity. The strategic impact of Bin Laden's actions depended in part on the reaction of his enemies, particularly the United States. The consequences of his death do so, too.
That said, in recent years the increasing marginalisation of al-Qaida – culturally, socially and geographically – has been very clear. The Arab Spring demonstrated how Bin Laden's message had been rejected by those hundreds of millions he once sought to radicalise and mobilise. Al-Qaida had orchestrated no major successful attack for more than five years. The recruits were coming to the makeshift Pakistani camps but only in enough numbers to assure the core group's survival, not its success, at least not in the short-term.
One of the most important figures in Islamist militancy's recent history was Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian as his nom de guerre or kunya suggests, who formulated a complex theory of "leaderless jihad". This, he imagined, would see militants all over the Islamic world and beyond acting independently according to a blueprint uploaded to the internet (and written) by Suri himself . At one moment, in around 2004 or 2005, it looked like his vision was becoming a reality. Suri certainly thought so, boasting that the London 7/7 bombings showed the beginnings of a "global intifada". He was wrong and was detained in Pakistan shortly after the London attacks and is now, almost certainly, in a Syrian jail.
The most probable scenario in the future is continuing, low-level violence and threat shifting around the periphery of the Islamist world, depending on local circumstances and the emergence of new leaders able to galvanise fresh networks. But there is unlikely to be a genuine successor to Bin Laden, either as head of al-Qaida, or as pre-eminent global icon of jihad.
The most obvious candidate to succeed Osama bin Laden is his Egyptian associate, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
But he, like the other potential leadership candidates, has several flaws that only serve to demonstrate how unique "the sheikh" was.
Zawahiri, a 59-year-old former paediatrician, has none of Bin Laden's charisma and little of his talent for propaganda. He is strong on ideology and strategy but his attempts to communicate are often painfully clumsy. Recent videos in which he has removed his thick-lensed spectacles, presumably to make himself look younger or less scholarly, merely reveal how out of touch he is. Even his Egyptian origins are likely to be divisive in an organisation increasingly dominated by Libyans and Saudis and rent by factional tensions.
The second contender might come from among the younger leadership figures, some heavily promoted in a series of propaganda videos as al-Qaida has tried to fight its creeping marginalisation in recent years.
But even the inexperienced Abu Yayha al-Libi, in his mid-40s and credited with a legendary escape from a high-security prison in Afghanistan, can never replace Bin Laden.
The dead leader had a rare combination of talents which held his group together. He may have made grotesque strategic errors – like thinking the US too morally decadent to fight before 9/11 – but he commanded huge loyalty. Without him, the al-Qaida hardcore is now likely to definitively fracture.
The hardcore leadership has always been defined as Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and a few score associates with them in Pakistan. According to recent intelligence reports, largely based on the interviews of detainees, these are less numerous than often thought. Degraded by recent drone strikes, there are maybe only 80 or 100 senior al-Qaida militants still operative in Pakistan.
Certainly, many potential leadership candidates have been killed over the last 10 years. One of the first to die was Mohammed Atef, the former military commander killed in November 2001. One of the latest, Abu Mustafa al-Yazidi, a polylingual veteran who played linkman between al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban, died in 2009. A whole bench of potential leaders has been wiped out.
Many others have been captured. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, was picked up in Rawalpindi in 2003. Never a formal member of al-Qaida, he was unlikely to make the top ranks. Both Abu Farraj al-Libi, picked up by the Pakistanis in 2005, and Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, detained on the Iraqi border, were capable and committed operators but neither was charismatic enough to lead.
Alongside Yayha al-Libi and his peers there is an even younger generation, but they are unknown and untried.
Decentralisation was always an integral part of Bin Laden's strategy, with al-Qaida conceived as an umbrella group, channelling and focusing the diverse energies of the various groups active across the Islamist world in the 1990s, but it is hard to see how one of the affiliate groups or the "network of networks" could provide a leader now.
Each group has remained largely independent of the main al-Qaida leadership, and there is the problem of the fundamental parochialism of al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsular (largely Yemen), in the Maghreb (largely Algeria), and in Iraq. Each is rooted in specific local factors and history. Faced with significant challenges in reconciling global agendas with local realities, they are more likely to go their own way than try to pursue the chimerical dream of a united international jihad that Bin Laden dedicated much of his life to.
One exception might be the freelance US-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, currently in Yemen where he grew up. Through internet sermons and his slick magazine Inspire, 40-year-old Awlaki has the reach and has shown the ambition to, if not lead al-Qaida, then to fill the space Bin Laden has left. He is young, eloquent, speaks English and Arabic and can reach out to many different audiences. Awlaki's profile and success is a reminder of how al-Qaida was always only one of scores of radical groups that together constituted the dynamic, varied and evolving phenomenon of Sunni Muslim violent extremism.
An important question is what effect the leader's death will have on the ideological impact of al-Qaida. "My life or death does not matter. The awakening has started," Bin Laden boasted in late 2001. But it is not clear whether he will prove correct.
Bin Laden's greatest success was to make his particular interpretation of radical Islamism globally known. There were other strands of militant thinking and strategy around in the late 1990s but 20 years of "propaganda by deed" made Bin Laden's the dominant one. A thriving jihadi subculture has emerged. Al-Qaida has become, in many ways, a social movement. Bin Laden's death means the removal of the iconic figure at the centre of this construct.
Also, many of the myriad factors that have fed radical militancy in recent decades – some of which stretch back decades or even centuries in the Islamic world or in the Islamic world's relationship with the west – are still has potent as ever. We are living in a new era of polarisation, conspiracy theory and religious identity. The strategic impact of Bin Laden's actions depended in part on the reaction of his enemies, particularly the United States. The consequences of his death do so, too.
That said, in recent years the increasing marginalisation of al-Qaida – culturally, socially and geographically – has been very clear. The Arab Spring demonstrated how Bin Laden's message had been rejected by those hundreds of millions he once sought to radicalise and mobilise. Al-Qaida had orchestrated no major successful attack for more than five years. The recruits were coming to the makeshift Pakistani camps but only in enough numbers to assure the core group's survival, not its success, at least not in the short-term.
One of the most important figures in Islamist militancy's recent history was Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian as his nom de guerre or kunya suggests, who formulated a complex theory of "leaderless jihad". This, he imagined, would see militants all over the Islamic world and beyond acting independently according to a blueprint uploaded to the internet (and written) by Suri himself . At one moment, in around 2004 or 2005, it looked like his vision was becoming a reality. Suri certainly thought so, boasting that the London 7/7 bombings showed the beginnings of a "global intifada". He was wrong and was detained in Pakistan shortly after the London attacks and is now, almost certainly, in a Syrian jail.
The most probable scenario in the future is continuing, low-level violence and threat shifting around the periphery of the Islamist world, depending on local circumstances and the emergence of new leaders able to galvanise fresh networks. But there is unlikely to be a genuine successor to Bin Laden, either as head of al-Qaida, or as pre-eminent global icon of jihad.
....................
Note: The viewpoint expressed in this article is solely that of the writer / news outlet. "FATA Awareness Initiative" Team may not agree with the opinion presented.
....................
We Hope You find the info useful. Keep visiting this blog and remember to leave your feedback / comments / suggestions / requests / corrections.
With Regards,
"FATA Awareness Initiative" Team.
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