Special Analysis: Al-Qaeda Reorganizing

2003 has not been a good year so far by al-Qaeda. In the course of less than six months, key members of their military committee have been captured or killed as a result of the US-led campaign against terrorism. Their two biggest losses so far this year include that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the head of their military committee, and Hanbali, the operations chief of Jemaah Islamiyyah. The network's terror theoretician, Yusuf al-Ayyeri, was killed in a gunfight in Saudi authorities. Ali Abd al-Ghamdi has been captured and over 600 members of the Salafi Jihad have been arrested in Morocco. In addition, any number of senior commanders and mid-level leaders have been arrested worldwide since the beginning of the year, many of them since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq.

The capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed likely served as the catalyst to spur this reorganization of the terror network....

As any number of news articles have noted since his capture, Mohammed was with the organization since the very beginning and was the mastermind responsible for both Oplan Bojinka in 1994 and the 9/11 attacks. His capture forced the network to reorganize itself and likely thwarted any planned terrorist offensive that was intended to coincide with the war in Iraq.

The Summit

According to the September 8 of Newsweek, bin Laden held a "terrorist summit" in April 2003 shortly after the fall of Baghdad:

In April, shortly after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, the Qaeda leader convened the biggest terror summit since September 11 at a mountain stronghold in Afghanistan. The participants included three top-ranking representatives from the Taliban, several senior Qaeda operatives and leaders from radical Islamic groups in Chechnya and Uzbekistan, according to a former Taliban deputy foreign minister. He got the details from a Taliban colleague who was there. Bin Laden, in a fiery mood, appointed one of his most trusted lieutenants, Saif al-Adil, to be Al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Iraq. The leader handed the Egyptian-born al-Adel a letter of introduction, asking all religious leaders, businessmen and mujahedin to give him any support possible. Al-Adel left Afghanistan immediately. A few weeks later he was reported to be in neighboring Iran, where he is said to be under house arrest. The Taliban official nevertheless insists, contrary to American intelligence assessments, that al-Adel made it to Iraq and is organizing anti-U.S. operations.

At the same meeting bin Laden said he was working on “serious projects,” another ranking Taliban source tells NEWSWEEK. “His priority is to use biological weapons,” says the source, who claims that Al Qaeda already has such weapons. The question is only how to transport and launch them, he asserts. The source insists he doesn’t know any further details but brags: “Osama’s next step will be unbelievable.” The plan was reportedly delayed and revised after the March capture of Al Qaeda’s operations chief, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. U.S. intelligence officials say no one disputes bin Laden’s interest in germ warfare. Nevertheless, they argue, his main priority is to kill Americans by any means readily at hand—and most bioweapons are harder to get and use than many of the alternatives.

Now the source behind this information is former Taliban officials and local tribesmen who could easily be lying, nevertheless if one takes it as face value it explains a number of things, especially when read in conjunction with this article from the Washington Post that documents the role that current al-Qaeda military commander Saif al-Adel played in ordering Abu Musab Zarqawi to establish a front in Iraq.

One further note to be made about the events of the summit are that the Taliban boast about al-Qaeda wielding chemical or biological weapons isn't half as far-fetched as it might sound. Especially if someone was helping them out in this regard.

The New Breed

In any case, as we entered into May 2003, the Saudi magazine al-Majallah was contacted by a man named Thabet bin Qais who claimed to be al-Qaeda's new spokesman. According to bin Qais, al-Qaeda has "sidelined" the September 11 team, not all that surprising a move given what happened to them.

The nom de guerre of the new spokesman, Thabet bin Qais, also reflects a definite shift within the organization. In Islamic tradition, bin Qais was one of the companions of the Prophet Mohammed and frequently served as his spokesman. Over the course of the last year, a series of audio and written sermons have appeared on a number of websites and internet forums sympathetic to al-Qaeda's cause, allegedly from bin Laden. These have not received widespread notice from the media because they were not intended for general distribution but rather as messages to members or supporters of the organization to reinforce the goals and direction of their global war against the West.

The topics of these sermons range from the need for global war against the West and revolution throughout the Arab world to the meaning of jihad, despite the fact that bin Laden is has no recognized religious authority with which to make such claims.

The climax of these sermons occurred at the beginning of July 2003, when a bin Laden audiotape declared the terrorist leader as the new Prophet of Islam and announced the creation of five new pillars of the faith. These statements, which are extremely heretical from an Islamic perspective, also illustrates the degree to which bin Laden's meglomania has come since September 11. This is an important thing to be aware of because it illustrates that this is no longer a clash between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb for bin Laden and his followers: this is now a battle between the rest of the world and the new Prophet of God.

In any case, Thabet bin Qais was hardly the only al-Qaeda leader to step into the spotlight during this time period. Al-Majallah also received E-Mails from Abu Mohammed al-Ablaj, whose rants are wonderfully chronicled over at Alphabet City. Al-Ablaj, who made cryptic references to the Riyadh bombings before they occurred, discussed everything from al-Qaeda's alliance with Saddam Hussein to the organization's position on the American withdrawl from Saudi Arabia. While bin Qais and al-Ablaj were hardly the newest al-Qaeda leaders to be announced since the overthrow of the Taliban (others include Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Hazim, Abdel Azeem al-Muhajir, and Abu Leith al-Libi).

Back in the Saddle Again

Both Thabet bin Qais and al-Ablaj remain at large to date, but shortly after their E-Mailed statements to al-Majallah, al-Qaeda and affiliate organizations carried out a series of mass casualty terrorist attacks in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Chechnya that put the rest of the world on notice that al-Qaeda was once again a global force to be reckoned with. Similar major attacks during the summer reached Algeria, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Russia, even attacking the United Nations building in Baghdad. The ratio of attacks and attempted attacks inside of Iraq should serve as an indication that the organization now regards the battle against coalition forces in the country to be a holy war of liberation on par with the group's efforts in Chechnya and the surrounding Russian republics. According to Amir Taheri, the late Yusuf al-Ayyeri saw Iraq as the penultimate battlefield within which the organization can defeat the concept of Western democracy much the same way that the Afghan mujahideen (from al-Ayyeri's point of view) defeated the concept of communism.

This new strategy appears to have been accepted by the al-Qaeda leadership and may account for two recent changes to the organization's behavior. The first occurred on September 25, when a communique from al-Qaeda stated that it was open to accepting the offer of negotiations with the government of Yemen and even going as far as to praise the Yemeni dictator, declaring that he was the only Arab leader who wasn't an agent of the West. These developments come after an al-Qaeda operative bearing the nom de guerre of Al-Mutaz Biulah al-Qandahari was designated the new al-Qaeda leader in Yemen.

Then on October 3, ICT reported that four additional affiliate organizations (the Yemeni Islamic Jihad, the GSPC, and the previously unknown Ahfad al-Sahaba) had formally merged with al-Qaeda much the same way that Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad did in 2001.

While this merger is interesting for a number of reasons if for no other reason that much larger affiliate groups like Jemaah Islamiyyah or the LeT were not included in favor of the smaller Yemeni ones, this is likely an attempt by al-Qaeda to shore up its center by drawing fighters away from what had previously been local struggles in order to serve as a force multiplier for the group in its battle against the US in Iraq.

This formal announcement of the terror network's reorganization comes at a time when it appears that it has decentralized to the point where it now operates four separate military committees, all of which appear to be in contact with one another with at least some degree of coordination as far as the direction of the global jihad is concerned.

• One committee in northern Pakistan, specifically the Northwest Frontier Province, Baluchistan, and Azad Kashmir that coordinates both the Taliban/Hezb-e-Islami insurgency in Afghanistan and terrorist activities across the Indian subcontinent. If bin Laden is alive, this is where he is likely to be. The loss of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Tawfiq Attash Khallad, and Ammar al-Baluchi has likely heavily diminished this committee's capabilities.

• One committee located at an IRGC military base in the Kerman province of Iran, allegedly "under arrest." As this committee appears to be the one that is coordinating the insurgency in Iraq, I would take Iranian claims that the al-Qaeda leaders are in custody and unable to communicate with their followers with a whole shaker of salt.

• One committee located in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge and in Chechnya whose members include Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, Abu Walid (a relative of three of the 9/11 hijackers), Abu Iyad, and Abu Khabab, the head of al-Qaeda's WMD department. This committee is heavily involved with their counterparts in Iran and has a number of additional members according to Collin Powell's presentation to the UN who were complicit in the attempted plots to use chemical weapons in Europe in late 2002 and early 2003.

• There appears to be at least one more committee located somewhere in Africa (Sudan, Somalia, or Niger would be my best bet) that consists of a number of dangerous individuals that include Hassan Hattab, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, Abderazak al-Para, and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. Of all the al-Qaeda leaders, these are probably the ones that we know the least about.

Implications

What can the US expect as a result of this reorganization as far as the future of the war on terror goes?

1. Africa is going to take on an increased role in terms of the war on terrorism. Both Burkina Faso and the former government of Charles Taylor in Liberia had documented ties to al-Qaeda that remained strong even after September 11. Al-Qaeda operatives began arriving in Somalia almost as soon as the Taliban fell in Afghanistan and the organization reputedly established bases in Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Nigeria in June 2002. Additional strongholds were said to have been established or expanded in Sudan, Kenya, and Bangladesh at some point prior to the Riyadh bombings. These bases are going to take on more and more importance for the organization as battle continues.

2. Because of the increasingly decentralized nature of the leadership and the lack of easy communication, coordinating mass casualty attacks on the scale of September 11 are going to be increasingly difficult to coordinate, especially if they are intended to be launched against Western nations. However, the organization has ongoing research in the area of non-conventional weaponry and a crude chemical or biological weapons attack should not be ruled out as a possibility.

3. The current fighting in Iraq is now the central pivot of al-Qaeda's global war against the West. Increasing amounts of resources and operatives are going to be diverted away from regional campaigns in order to fight against coalition forces in Iraq. This turns the fighting in Iraq into a contest of collective wills between the coalition and the terrorists as far as who backs down first. If they succeed in Iraq and force the US to withdraw with its mission unfullfilled, using Iraq as a base from which to destabilize other Middle East states will be child's play by comparison.

4. Tracking down and eliminating each of these leadership committees should take on a top priority as a means of both ending the foreign insurgency in Iraq as well as serving as the ultimate means with which to splinter the terrorist network. That al-Qaeda is now forced to incorporate what had previously been affiliates into the center is ultimately a sign of weakness and a testimony to the success thus far of US-led anti-terrorism efforts. By destroying the entire leadership of the terrorist network, al-Qaeda's remnants and affiliates will splinter apart, enabling each of them to be dealt with in turn. The loss of the leadership, combined with the destruction of any bases that have been established over the last year and the disruption of the financial channels, will be the three blows that nail shut al-Qaeda's coffin once and for all.