Also In This Issue No End In Sight: A compilation of deaths, dating from September 12, 2001, attributed to global jihadists Related Resources On NationalJournal.com National Journal Cover Story: "A New And Colder War" (Sept. 22, 2001) · National Journal Cover Story: "The War Within Islam" (May 10, 2003) · National Journal Cover Story: "On Guard, But How Well? (March 6, 2004) · Well-Read Wonk: "The New Crusades: Constructing The Muslim Enemy" (March 11, 2004) · Well-Read Wonk: "After Jihad: America And The Struggle For Islamic Democracy" (Aug. 21, 2004) · Recent Polling On Terrorism Additional Information On The Web Text of Osama bin Laden's 1998 Fatwa against Americans · Changing Patterns of Suicide Terrorism · Compendium of Terrorist Groups by the Council on Foreign Relations · Jihad and Terrorism Studies Project, by the Middle East Media Research Institute · Al Qaeda Attacks Since 1988 · A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam

By Corine Hegland, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, May 7, 2004

Al Qaeda is dead. The organization of men whose deadly choreography of planes in the sky murdered 3,000 people on September 11 has been smashed into oblivion. Its leaders have been killed, imprisoned, or hunted into the barren mountains straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan. Nearly 3,400 of their followers and fighters are either buried, or praying within concrete prisons, and the lands of their training camps have been taken back by provincial warlords. Al Qaeda's funds have been choked and its communication lines tapped.

And yet in just a seven-day period last month, Jordan aired the confessions of soft-spoken men who had prepared to murder 20,000 people by hurling trucks against steel gates, and chemical bombs against concrete and glass. In Thailand, Muslim teenagers with machetes swarmed police stations and army outposts to steal weapons, only to be met with gunfire that killed 112 of their own. Four people died in Damascus after men fired grenades at a former United Nations building and then detonated a car bomb in the street. Anguished parents in Uzbekistan spoke publicly to the Associated Press about their 19-year-old daughter's transformation from police academy trainee to the country's first suicide bomber. On March 29, she killed two police officers and a child, in the first of a wave of suicide bombings in that country that left 47 people dead in just a few days.

On April 21, a car bombing in Saudi Arabia killed seven people. In Madrid, 202 people traveling on commuter trains to work were murdered when cellphones detonated bombs on the morning of March 11. Forty-four Shiites worshiping on the holiest day of their year, March 2, died in Quetta, Pakistan, after grenades and suicide bombs exploded and gunmen opened fire.

Forget, for a moment, the solemn, steady stream of U.S. troops arriving in flag-draped caskets from Iraq. Ignore, for now, the mourning that continues, unabated, as deaths mount among Israelis and Palestinians. And leave out, too, the deaths of Kashmiris in South Asia. In the two and a half years since American troops rooted Al Qaeda out of its Afghan home, more than 1,200 people have died in attacks from Sunni global jihadists outside of those three bloody arenas. That's more than one-third the number of deaths that ignited the "Global War on Terror" on September 11, 2001.

And there's no end in sight.

Spores of Al Qaeda
From the beginning, Al Qaeda more closely resembled a virus than a corporation. In 1988, its founder, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian, chartered Al Qaeda ("The Base") as the vanguard of Islamic zealotry. The goal was inspirational: Al Qaeda wouldn't win the holy war itself, but it would show other Islamists the way. The organization was only the needle for injecting its horrific ideology -- turned first against corrupt Arab governments, later against America -- into other Islamists.

A decade later, Osama bin Laden gave form to that vague intent. He pulled a loose network of militants into a World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, issuing a fatwa declaring that to "kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the Al Aksa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated, and unable to threaten any Muslim."

Then, as American boots hit Afghan sand in October 2001, Al Qaeda pressed the plunger. Up to a thousand men steeped in bin Laden's venomous ideology melted away from the fighting, trekking through the mountains to Pakistan and Iran before dispersing to all points of the globe. Historians might one day trace their many itineraries from intelligence archives; the only public accounting so far states that some of them, carting false identification papers, traveled to the Comoros Islands off Mozambique before scattering.

Qaeda operatives floated like spores, to take hold in militant Islamic groups across the globe. And within months, throughout Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, domestic and sometimes dormant Muslim organizations began to poke their heads into world news. Angry words about repressive national governments changed to impassioned rhetoric about global institutions; local targets gave way to international ones; untrained gunmen became sophisticated bombers; innocent civilians surpassed guilty bureaucrats as the preferred targets; hard-to-get military hardware was abandoned in favor of trucks, cars, fertilizer, and cellphones; and suicide bombers proliferated.

The lethal spores took their first victim in January 2002. Pakistani militants kidnapped Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and then released a brutal videotape of fellow jihadists slitting his throat. The next five deaths, also in Pakistan, came that March, when militants lobbed grenades into a Protestant church near the American Embassy while the congregation, largely made up of diplomats, worshiped.

Then the tempo quickened and it became clear that something was going horribly wrong in the war on terrorism. In April 2002, in Tunisia, a suicidal driver slammed a truck full of natural gas into a synagogue, killing 21, including 14 Germans and two French people. In May, a car pulled alongside a Pakistani navy shuttle bus filled with French engineers and exploded, killing 14 people in Karachi, Pakistan. The next month, 12 people were murdered by a car bomb in Karachi, on the road between the U.S. Consulate and the Marriott Hotel; in July, a bomb in Algeria killed 38. Two months of relative quiet followed, and then a boat filled with TNT exploded beside a French tanker off the coast of Yemen, killing one person. A week later, some 200 people were murdered in Bali when several bombs exploded near nightclubs frequented by Australian tourists.

And still the virulence spread: 2003 saw more suicide attacks -- 98 -- than any other year in contemporary history, according to Scott Atran, a psychologist and anthro- pologist who runs a project on suicide terrorism for NATO. And 2004 is set to surpass that mark.

"The rise of newly directed and newly enlivened regional terror operations tracks very closely with the wake of those operatives" from Afghanistan, said John Arquilla, co-director of the Center on Terrorism & Irregular Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

The spores of Al Qaeda, in other words, had given rise to new colonies of global terrorists.

"Al Qaeda has accomplished its mission; it is not the main actor today," said Rohan Gunaratna, the Singaporean author of the book Inside Al Qaeda. He suggests that bin Laden perpetrated the September 11 attacks not so much to cripple the American giant as to inspire terrorists worldwide and to show them how to fight. "Today," Gunaratna observed dryly, "what we see is that the groups are sufficiently inspired."

The U.S. government first prominently acknowledged the spread of the terrorist threat in late February 2004 as part of the Central Intelligence Agency's annual worldwide threat assessment. "Al Qaeda has infected others with its ideology, which depicts the United States as Islam's greatest foe," CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Mr. Chairman, what I want to say to you now may be the most important thing I tell you today. The steady growth of Osama bin Laden's anti-U.S. sentiment through the wider Sunni extremist movement, and the broad dissemination of Al Qaeda's destructive expertise, ensure that a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future -- with or without Al Qaeda in the picture."

The Global War on Terror
The Global War on Terror, as the administration calls it, inadvertently galvanized an army of recruits for the jihadists who escaped from Afghanistan. Nine days after the attacks on America, President Bush picked up the gauntlet that Al Qaeda had thrown down. It was a global war that bin Laden sought, and it was a global war that he would have. "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," Bush declared. "Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."

That sweeping declaration was controversial from the start. Psychopathic dictators like Saddam Hussein are one kind of enemy; terrorists are a completely different kind of threat. Terrorists kill in pursuit of political goals, and their organizations have both political and military wings. Al Qaeda's goal is to overthrow infidel governments, starting with America's, and to usher in a new Islamic caliphate. Before September 11, most of the other radical Islamist groups aimed lower, working to topple their own national governments. In some cases, Al Qaeda lent support to local terrorists, but they, for the most part, spurned Al Qaeda's global ambitions as rather irrelevant to their local fight.

Although Bush initially targeted Al Qaeda, governments across the world lost little time in capitalizing on the "Global War on Terror" as an excuse to crack down on their own insurgents. The nonprofit group Human Rights Watch maintains a list called "Opportunism in the Face of Tragedy." In Belarus, an already-repressive regime used the war on terror to enact laws further restricting freedom of the press and granting law enforcement carte blanche. The Muslim separatists of northwestern China, the Uighurs, quickly became "terrorists" in official Chinese pronouncements, and the full weight of Beijing's propaganda machine turned to linking the Uighur fighters to Al Qaeda. In Egypt, the government lashed out at those who criticized its use of torture, secretive military trials, and arrests of dissenters -- declaring that the September 11 attacks proved the virtue of its pre-emptive model. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called Yasir Arafat "our bin Laden." Jordan changed its laws to let the government imprison writers or photographers accused of undermining the king or the royal family. Russia lost no time in transforming all the Chechnyan rebels into "terrorists," while Uzbekistan, whose insurgents had indeed trained with Al Qaeda, justified in the name of terrorism its ongoing crackdown on Muslims who practiced their religion outside of the state's tight restrictions.

The Global War on Terror notched some successes -- many of them, in fact. Diplomats shuttled across the globe lining up support. Papers flew as nations signed on to anti-terrorist conventions and protocols, and dusty communication lines fairly crackled as intelligence and law enforcement agencies learned to work together across national boundaries. One by one, the masterminds and operatives behind Al Qaeda's spectacular attacks -- against the American embassies in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 -- were killed or arrested, along with bin Laden's regional coordinators in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Two-thirds of the men whose names were known are no longer a threat, and intelligence agencies around the world have cooperated on rolling up terror cells.

But thousands of local Islamic radicals whose names were not known remained at large, and they were coming under pressure from their home governments just as Qaeda ideologists and fighters were infiltrating their countries to prepare for the counteroffensive to the Global War on Terror. The Qaeda terrorists, as one observer noted, suddenly found their own "coalitions of the willing" on which to build.

Referring to America's Global War on Terror, Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist groups at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, said, "That stupid policy never defined an enemy. They spoke only about terrorists, without definition, and they put on their list all kinds of Islamists, from sharia organizations to real terrorists."

The targeted local groups, Rashwan asserted, "weren't innocent, but according to our experience with them before September 11, the majority had not this plan to make violence." Afterward, though, these homegrown Islamic militants suddenly realized they were in the crosshairs with Al Qaeda. "They found themselves in a zero-sum game in which there are no compromises," he said.

When the dispersed Qaeda operatives arrived, offering targeted groups a hand in fighting back, the result was, perhaps, predictable: The local groups began to wage their own pre-emptive war against the West.

The New Theaters
Not surprisingly, beleaguered Pakistan, where the more-Islamic-minded members of the government historically have helped local jihadists trying to murder the other, more-secular-minded members, was the first theater to explode. With its entrenched infrastructure of Sunni Islamic militants already fighting in Kashmir, and sometimes against Pakistani Shiites, it was prime breeding ground for the mujahedeen fleeing Afghanistan.

President Pervez Musharraf, a staunch ally of America in the war on terror, moved swiftly and harshly to forestall the threat. His government banned some groups and arrested scores of militants. But terrorism escalated dramatically. Outposts of the Western world came under fire in Pakistan, where suicide bombers struck a bus of French engineers in May of 2002 and tried to hit the U.S. Consulate in June.

First, though, came the January 2002 death of Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped by Pakistani militants and then murdered by foreigners, reportedly including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

Pearl's killing, said Jessica Stern, author of the book Terror in the Name of God, was an indication of just how much had changed. "America went from a rhetorical enemy to a hard enemy for a number of jihadist groups that previously were more focused on regional problems," she said. The men she had interviewed in Pakistan for her book loved to talk about America as the enemy, but practically, they were much more interested in fighting India. Then America came to them.

"When Bush used the term 'crusade' [against terror, on September 16, 2001], it was thrilling to the Pakistani jihadists," Stern said. "They felt that this thing they'd been talking about, the clash of civilizations, was finally becoming real."

With Islamic militants driven now by a common enemy, old boundaries eroded. As in Pearl's murder, individuals from different organizations came together to carry out attacks. "I've seen transcripts of interviews with terrorists there, where they say it doesn't matter which Kashmiri extremist or Pakistani separatist group you join. One is the gateway to the other," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorist expert at the Rand think tank.

In Southeast Asia, a similar transformation is under way. One group, Jemaah Islamiya, has nearly turned into a Qaeda clone, while others, with help from the jihadists who left Afghanistan, are listening to the siren's call.

Jemaah Islamiya, based in Indonesia, nominally sought a single Islamic state stretching through Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and southern Thailand. Many of its leaders and members had trained in Afghanistan, and they returned to take part in Indonesia's bloody religious wars between Muslims and Christians. Some, such as the former Jemaah leader for Malaysia and Singapore, Hambali, maintained close relations with bin Laden's networks. Others, according to the International Crisis Group, regarded their relationship to the World Islamic Front simply as that of a local nonprofit getting help from a larger funding organization.

Until 2002, Jemaah Islamiya largely confined its attacks to churches and priests, in revenge for Christians' massacres of Muslims in the country's sectarian battles. Then Hambali got a call from Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, asking him to take action to draw world attention away from the jihadists who were losing to the Americans in Afghanistan. In October, multiple bombs exploded in the tourist haven of Bali, killing 202 people, most of them Australian. Ten months later, a suicide attack -- believed to be the first in Indonesia -- hit the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, killing 12.

"Jemaah Islamiya was a distinct and separate group from Al Qaeda, with very specific aims in its region," Arquilla said. Under pressure from America's war on terrorism, though, the group's parochial identities and targets gave way to the global jihad. "If you look at the things they were saying before 9/11 and what they've said after, particularly after Bali, you see an absolute shift in rhetoric," according to Arquilla.

Al Qaeda's roots in distant Arabia limited its inroads in Southeast Asia. So too did the relatively secular form of Islam that predominates in Asia. But now, those barriers are falling, fast.

Islamic identity is skyrocketing among Southeast Asia's youth, and many young Islamists pledge affinity with the Arabs, the Palestinians, and now the Iraqis. In Indonesia, school children learn Arabic and perform plays glorifying Palestinian suicide bombers. Antipathy toward the West in general, and America in particular, is exploding, helped along by the images coming out of Iraq.

And the allure of the global jihad, which merges the two hated targets, is increasing. "Anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism is emerging as a parallel link between organizations, allowing [the jihadists] to tap into a broader constituency," said David Wright-Neville the director of the Global Terrorism Project at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, and a former intelligence analyst. In southern Thailand, for example, Muslim separatist groups long ago settled for a movement based largely on organized crime. Today, their children are seething with the Islamic sentiments the parents had abandoned: Hundreds of young Muslims attacked Thai police and army outposts last week.

The war in Iraq is "turning Al Qaeda from a very disparate, informal network based on religion into a network based on much more than religion," Wright-Neville said. "It's going through a transformation that will make combating it more difficult."

Similar patterns of increased militant action by some, and militant rhetoric by many, are cropping up all over Central Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Like any effective movement, the global jihad even has its own "consultants" who travel among different groups and help knit them together. Arquilla calls these operatives "boundary spanners," for their ability to crisscross alliances. Among them he cites Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, a terrorist who has been linked to attacks in Iraq, Madrid, and Jordan; "Sammy," the Singaporean who planned attacks there before fleeing to Oman, where he was arrested after establishing another cell; and Imad Mugniyah, a Hezbollah military leader in Lebanon.

"We've basically got a global uprising, or intifada, under way," Arquilla said. "I'm frustrated. We had a chance to stay focused on the networks instead of drifting off into [Iraq], and we could have avoided this metastasizing of the war on terror."

Iraq
The Pew Center for the People and the Press regularly takes opinion surveys to check the political pulse of the world. Respondents from the four Muslim countries -- Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey -- that Pew surveyed in 2004 painted a dark, dark picture of what now confronts the war on terrorism. In nations that were heavily sympathetic to the United States after the 9/11 attacks, the majority of respondents said this year that the war on terrorism is an effort "to control Middle East oil and to dominate the world." Furthermore, two-thirds of Moroccans and Jordanians, and almost half of Pakistanis, said that suicide bombings against the Americans in Iraq were justified. In Turkey, a longtime American ally, one-third said so.

Even before grinning American soldiers posed behind a humiliating tumble of naked Iraqi prisoners, surging hatred of America and its allies showed up anywhere you looked. In Egypt, a political science professor reports that she no longer includes Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French commentator on American democracy, on her exams. "My students laugh," she said. In April, The New York Times reported that militancy was rising among Muslim youth in the United Kingdom, some of whom are calling for a jihad against Prime Minister Tony Blair. And Stern says that even in her classes at Harvard University, Arab students talk angrily about the American military killing Arab children.

Iraq, according to Roger Cressey, former deputy to terrorism czar Richard Clarke, may be the "single biggest recruitment tool that the radical Islamist movement has received since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan." Everywhere, global jihadists -- in tapes from bin Laden, conversations, Internet publications, and online chat rooms, use the occupation of Iraq to declare: America is conducting a war on Islam. If you don't believe me, look at the occupation of Iraq. Their talk of democracy and freedom is a front that they are using as part of their master plan to subjugate the Muslim people.

It's hard to understand, from reading only the English-language news, just how strongly that message resonates among Muslims. But looking at Iraq in Arabic reveals an entirely different country. U.S. and British newspapers use photographs of bodies and caskets sparingly and describe coalition forces as doing their best to narrowly target the radicals, whose numbers include members of Saddam's regime, Qaeda terrorists, and Sunni and Shiite militias who hate democracy.

In Arabic media, the bodies are many -- children, young men, women, and soldiers. In the coverage of the Falluja standoff, English-speakers saw a forceful but necessary response to the gruesome murder of four U.S. contractors by renegade elements of the old regime. Arabic viewers saw an indigenous Iraqi resistance in a city where, a year ago, coalition forces opened fire on a peaceful demonstration, killing 16 innocents.

"What we see from the television, and pictures, shows us that those people are really young people, Iraqis -- which means they are not remnants of the former Baathist regime, and they are not [foreign] terrorists," Rashwan said. "They are new people in search of independence, in search of their future, who are hating the occupation."

The U.S. helicopter gunship bombardment that initiated the siege in Falluja killed a number of civilians, including children. Images of their small, bloodied bodies never made it to America, but the Al Jazeera exclusives were shots seen round the world.

The jihadist movement, said Paul Eedle, a prominent British reporter on militant Islam, "has been talking of nothing but Falluja since the thing exploded. A lot of people expressing these sentiments are sitting cozily in Saudi Arabia, but they get just as worked up about Falluja as they do about Palestine."

The Virtual Jihad
It took decades for Muslims in Africa and Asia to get upset about the plight of the Arab Palestinians. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Islamic warriors from around the world traveled there to fight, but, for most Muslims, the war was far away. Islamists reacted to Iraq in real time, however, and homegrown outlets were ready to channel their rage.

The World Wide Web has changed the Islamic world just as much as it has changed the West. In 2002, after the United States forced Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, the global jihad exploded on the Internet. Angry Muslims across the world freely communicate through Web sites, chat rooms, e-mail groups, and online forums. "The Internet is an open university," said Reuven Paz, director of the Project for the Research of Islamist Movements in Herzliya, Israel.

Islamists cannot publish newspapers, run radio stations, or even publish books anymore in most countries, but the Web evades censorship. Online books circulate within seconds, and supporters around the globe argue strategy. Every other week, Saudi Islamists publish online magazines on the struggle, and they encouraged readers going on pilgrimage to Mecca this year to print and distribute copies. Before the March 11 train bombing in Madrid and the bloody, videotaped murder of an Italian bodyguard held hostage in Iraq, there appeared a sophisticated, Web-published analysis of an Islamist strategy to isolate the British by forcing a change in the Spanish parliamentary elections and then peeling off the Italians and other European forces in Iraq.

"Islamists view themselves as fighting a global war to create or restore the big Islamic nation without borders or nationalism," Paz said, "and the Internet is the best tool for building their virtual umma," or community of believers.

The new communities are not just virtual, either. Individuals from different organizations, of different nationalities, and with different skills are coming together in small cells to carry out attacks, and then melting away again. "The biggest change that's taken place is that the boundaries that used to differentiate groups are breaking down," Hoffman said. Cooperation among terrorist groups -- on weapons, training, and funding -- is old. Now, though, the "groups are much more permeable than they've ever been."

And while Al Qaeda is still around to help, the global jihad is rolling along quite nicely on its own. Captured terrorists, asked whether they belong to Al Qaeda, often answer, "I don't know," according to Atran. "They're not lying or being evasive," he said. "Jihadists understand the general mission and message of Al Qaeda -- to expel nonbelievers from Muslim lands and politically unite Muslims under religious authority," he said. "But they are far less likely than their interrogators to think of Al Qaeda as an organized body."

A decade ago, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington predicted a "clash of civilizations." The wars of kings, nations, and ideologies were finished, he said. Blood would now be shed along the fault lines of civilizations, and the deep and ancient line between Islam and the West was likely to produce the first quake. The "centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent," he wrote. "On both sides, the interaction between Islam and the West is seen as a clash of civilizations."

Al Qaeda has done its best to convince Muslims that the clash is real. "I sometimes get the impression that bin Laden studied Samuel Huntington's book the way Mao studied Marx," Atran said. Five times a day, the clatter and clutter of modern life in Islamic nations are stilled by a haunting, aching, and ancient call to praise the greatness of God. Atran suggests that bin Laden has taken that "transnational emotion that binds all Muslims" and effectively harnessed it to his political agenda. He has, at the moment, no credible competition. Moderate Islam is on the retreat, and Western democracy has little traction among the corrupt and repressive governments of Islamic countries.

Take a look at some headlines from the past week:

"Bloodshed in Thailand's Muslim South Risks Reigniting Insurgency"

"Pope Urges Restoration of Order in Indonesia After Christian-Muslim Clashes"

"Police Fire to Disperse Anti-Election Protesters in Jammu-Kashmir"

"Damascus Attackers Had Gone to Iraq to Fight Americans"

"Several People, Including Westerners, Killed in Rampage in Saudi City"

"Court Accuses 15-Year-Old of Recruiting, Training Young Palestinian Bombers"

These incidents fall all along Huntington's -- and bin Laden's -- fault lines.

Al Qaeda is dead, yet a thousand new graves have been dug by the global jihad. Long lives Al Qaeda.

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