ji·had·ica

Blog Recommendation

There is a new blog in town: On War and Words. It is produced by military historian Mark Stout, who is probably best known to our readers as the lead author of the Terrorism Perspectives Project (the most comprehensive treatment available of the genre “jihadi strategic studies”). I am very excited that he has decided to blog. Do not be fooled by his understated autobiography – this man really knows a lot about jihadism and an insane number of other subjects.

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Thomas Hegghammer January 7, 2010

Article on Ideological Hybridization

I feel bad posting so many secondary sources and even worse plugging my own stuff, but I hope you will agree that this article is quite relevant to the issues Jihadica was set up to cover.

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Thomas Hegghammer November 18, 2009

Abu’l-Walid is Back… with the Taliban (and not al-Qaida)

(Editor’s note: I am delighted to introduce our next guest blogger, Vahid Brown from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Vahid is a linguist and historian with deep knowledge of the history of al-Qaida and the jihadi movement. He is the author of Cracks in the Foundation and the co-author of several well-known CTC reports. Vahid and I share many research interests, so I am thrilled that he will be with us for the next month or so.) Mustafa Hamid Abu’l-Walid al-Masri, once a senior member of al-Qa’ida, has re-emerged lately after several years of relative silence and is once again chronicling, critiquing and offering strategic guidance to the jihadi movement.  He began posting new “editions” of his voluminous early writings to a blog in 2007 and ‘08, and this July he began to add newly-written articles on the Afghan insurgency, one of which has already been covered by

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Vahid Brown October 9, 2009

Al-Qaida and the German Elections

Usama Bin Ladin has just released a new audio statement to the European peoples.  It is relatively short (under 5 minutes) and basically tells the Europeans to get out of Afghanistan.  The statement is subtitled in German and is clearly timed to coincide with the German elections this coming Sunday. Bin Ladin’s statement comes in addition to a series of three statements from Bekkai Harrach threatening Germany. I have not seen this kind of jihadi media offensive in connection with any other non-US election. Of course, I, like everyone else, can’t help thinking of the Spanish elections in 2004. Peter Neumann at FREEradicals has a good analysis where he reveals that German intelligence are very nervous. Should they be? Personally I think al-Qaida would not issue all these messages if something really big was in the making in the next few days, precisely because media offensives put intelligence services on

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Thomas Hegghammer September 25, 2009

Calendars

So we all managed to survive a new celebration of 9/11. But why should Al-Qaida commemorate 9/11 in the first place? I am not referring to the heavy debates that raged among its leadership about the strategic relevance of striking US territory and that Vahid Brown documented in his landmark study Cracks in the foundation. I am talking about the very un-Islamic way Bin Laden’s network focuses on the number 11 and sticks to the Gregorian calendar. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon opened a series of Al-Qaida suicide bombings on the eleventh day of a Christian month: in April 2002, against the Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba; five years later, in April 2007, against the government palace and two security stations in Algiers; in December 2007, again in Algiers, this time against the Constitutional court and the UN headquarters. And Fernando Reinares

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Jean-Pierre Filiu September 12, 2009

Visions of Afghan and Somali Emirates

On 25 August 2009, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) published a plea by Dr. John Boutros for Muslims to aid the jihadi cause. He stated, “Do not mourn because the Islamic Caliphate is imminent… Trust me, the US is one or two thrusts” away from crumpling. However, in order to make this happen Muslims must give aid to the jihadis. Boutros claimed that the United States is weak due to the financial crisis, which is allegedly causing the rich states to consider separating from the Union. He stated that militarily the United States is vulnerable because it has so many soldiers in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in the suburbs of Baghdad, who are easy targets. In regards to the United States homeland he continued, “Hundreds of thousand of soldiers stationed in the streets of Washington and Los Angeles wait for a martyr to cross the continents

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Scott Sanford August 27, 2009

Hijazi Comments on New AFPAK Strategy

On 28 July 2009 the popular jihadi blogger Akram Hijazi initiated a series of articles under the title, “The Power of God in the Great Empires.” He titled the first installment “The American Strategy in Afghanistan,” the second “Dismembering the Strategy,” the third “Strategic Crisis and NATO’s Humiliations,” and the fourth, which is the last and not yet published, “The Realities of the Taliban’s War.” In the first article, Hijazi questions if there ever really was an American strategy in Afghanistan and he asserts that observers will have to wait and see how the new strategy will play out given Afghanistan’s history as the “Graveyard of Empires.” However, his tone is not optimistic. He then continues to describe the evolution of the US Afghanistan strategy by quoting from US public officials and Western media. The strategy he describes is basic counterinsurgency, increased troop levels, and eliminating safe havens in Pakistan.

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Scott Sanford August 16, 2009

The Non-Strategic “Special Strategic Study”

The “Falluja Think Tank” recently published the “Special Strategic Study of the Global Battle and the Jihadi Movement’s Place in It.” Like Thomas, I had high expectations, but was disappointed in the end because the study amounted to little more than general summaries of U.S. and jihadi history. However, the author did state that divine providence allowed 9/11 to happen, which caused the U.S. to abandon its principles of democracy and human rights. The author started by establishing that the battle between the United States and the jihadis is religious in nature rather than geopolitical or for acquiring resources. He commented that today’s “crusaders” are not only supported by their governments, but also by the “dogmatists” like the Knights Templar and the Knights of Malta, who, he claimed, “resemble the mujahedeen because they fight for faith.” He went on to chart America’s “path” to global dominance and then gave a

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Scott Sanford July 22, 2009

The Posts That Never Were

Apologies for the slow publication pace here at Jihadica, but deadlines and an upcoming house move mean I can only dream about serious blogging these days. This does not mean forums are quiet. Every morning this past week I found things on the forums that deserved commentary. In a dream world, here’s what I would have written about had I had the time: –    France is taking heat. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb published a statement declaring “France the mother of all evils”, and other posts fumed over the recent French plans to ban the niqab or the burka. I suspect the Americans and the Brits (who of course have long argued that France is the mother of all evils)  are happy to share the burden of jihadi attention. Unfortunately for the Anglo-Saxons, however, I don’t think the veil weighs nearly as heavy in the jihadi basket of grievances as

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Thomas Hegghammer July 13, 2009

Obama is more Dangerous than Bush

This is the title of the main story in the July issue of al-Sumud, the Arabic-language magazine of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The 56-page magazine has several articles devoted to Obama and the Cairo speech, and the front page features a particularly unflattering picture of the US president. But it is the lead article which I find the most interesting, because it confirms that jihadis feel threatened by Obama in their fight for Muslim hearts and minds. The two-page article (pp-18-19) is written by the Saudi sheikh Abd al-Aziz al-Julayyil and is actually taken from the latter’s website, which says the text was written on 17 May 2009. Al-Julayyil starts off by saying he was motivated to write this article after observing a lot of optimism among Muslims over the arrival of the new US administration. He says he realises  many will react to the headline, for how can

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Thomas Hegghammer June 29, 2009
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