Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda

3 The Spreading Threat: Moving Beyond the Core of Al Qaeda

C h a p T e r 3 the spreadinG threat: MovinG Beyond the Core of al Qaeda SITTIng On the inside, these were difficult years, trying to grapple with where this onslaught of violence would end. Years later, looking back, it is easy to see that this adversary could not win. The senseless violence, the nihilistic ideology, the murder of local innocents would almost inevitably turn the tide of Muslim public opinion. These all conspired against al Qaeda, to the point where few pay attention to leadership pronouncements today, in contrast to the global attention to the bin laden and Zawahiri statements featured on al-Jazeera in the first years after 9/11. The seeds of this self-destruction were sown in the rise of violent Islamists during the early and mid-1990s. Today, men seeking to join the jihadist fight travel to South asia—and, until a few years ago, Iraq—from the al Qaeda heartlands of egypt and north africa. a generation earlier, these jihadists’ predecessors traveled from these same areas to fight the Soviet soldiers who had invaded afghanistan. These arab brigades, including those under the al Qaeda banner, did not have a significant role in the brutal battle that bled Soviet forces until they withdrew. But the men who fought gained experience, and their commitment to the fight, to changing the world by overthrowing what they saw as corrupt and un-Islamic regimes in their home countries, led them to organize and mount violent opposition movements during the 1990s, particularly in algeria and egypt. THE SPREADING THREAT 71 In both cases, they were working on fertile ground. algeria had canceled elections in 1992 as Islamists were poised to surge to victory. In the absence of a political outlet for their frustrations, more extreme algerians turned to violence and revolution. as lethal as they were, the government response was brutal, and the terror and counterterror that characterized algeria during those years left, by many estimates, more than 150,000 dead. Some of those at the heart of the revolution were returnees from afghanistan, using their credentials as seasoned commanders and their experience on a battlefield with a conventionally superior foe to organize. They failed, however, murdering so many fellow algerians that they lost credibility. In egypt, too, returnees from the war against the Soviets in afghanistan helped spark an Islamist revolt that left many civilians dead and resulted in an attack in 1997 on tourists in the ancient city of luxor, an event that captured global attention and spurred a security response that eventually devastated the Islamist movement. The violent extremists at the heart of this movement—including ayman al-Zawahiri, who merged his egyptian group with al Qaeda and eventually became Osama bin laden’s number two—had their roots in the Islamists who had been imprisoned and tortured by egyptian security forces after the assassination of president anwar Sadat in 1981. This time around, in the mid-1990s, they made the same mistake as their ideological colleagues in algeria: they killed too many egyptian civilians , and alienated the pool from which they needed support and recruits. These earlier miscalculations of violent extremists presaged what was to happen after the al Qaeda bow wave of 2001, but it didn’t look that way to me in the first years after the 9/11 attacks. Instead, the picture, as I saw it, was a striking and broad spread of revolutionary activity, from north africa and europe through the Middle east and South asia and into Southeast asia and the Philippines—all representing the geographic spread of a national caliphate, the golden age that represented the spread of Islam at its height, centuries ago. It was a past that al Qaeda openly talked about reclaiming. we were gaining against the al Qaeda base in Pakistan and afghanistan, evidenced by the success in ousting the group from afghanistan and taking out leaders from Pakistan. But in parallel to this steady, intense fight that was taking place as al Qaeda’s core membership began to put down roots in the tribal belt along the afghanistan-Pakistan border, terrorist attacks 72 chapter 3 in this other areas, states that are part of the vision of a restored caliphate, gained momentum in the years after 9/11. The pace of attacks by these affiliates in those early years led me to feel, for years, that we were facing a phenomenon that might come from any direction, at any time. attacks and...