Entries Tagged 'Western books' ↓

What’s the point of editing a blog if you can’t use it for shameless self promotion?

My book Jihad in Saudi Arabia is finally out in the US. I am marking the occasion with a book launch at George Washington University today at 4pm, so if you are in the DC area, please come along.

Despite the Istanbul attacks in 2003, the Turkish fight against terrorism has remained largely synonymous with the fight against Kurdish separatists. To my knowledge, there are few if any in-depth academic studies of Turkish jihadism. Not even the 2003 Istanbul attacks have been closely examined by scholars, despite a wealth of available Turkish sources. At most, there are studies of how the Turkish media covered these events, and the emphasis is on the narrative being used by non-jihadists to describe the phenomenon (see e.g. Gökhan Gökulu’s 2005 M.A. thesis “Terör Eylemlerinin Medyaya Yansıması”). With the exception of Mehmet Faraç’s book İkiz Kulelerden Galata’ya: El Kaide Turka and the reporting of a few other journalists, Turkish writers and intellectuals seem surprisingly uninterested in the phenomenon itself. Although it has been thought that the secular Turks were almost immune to militant Islamism, the Turkish jihadist community appears to be growing.

The first Turks entered the jihadi scene in the late 1980s. Ferzende Kaya has interviewed a few of the surviving Turkish fighters from the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s. The first Turkish jihadists went to Afghanistan as early as May 1980. According to Kaya, most of the veterans of the war either died in combat or retired from jihadism as they returned home.

Brian Glyn Williams offers a rare account of how a new generation of Turkish jihadists were recruited and trained in the 1990s. He puts its genesis down to the influx of Turkish Islamists who entered Islamist universities in Pakistan after 1994. The students, argues Williams, frequently crossed to border into Afghanistan to get what he calls “hands-on education”. Very little is known about this period, and I am uncertain what source material Williams bases these claims on.

Whether or not they arrived there by way of Pakistani universities, Turks arrived in Afghanistian in large enough numbers to keep a Turkish-language jihadi training programme running. By 2001 a Turkish group had coalesced around a Turkish Emir called Habib Akdaş. They were based in the Khalden camp in Eastern Afghanistan. Sometime between 9/11 and the American-led attack about a month later, the group left for Turkey. Two years later the group carried out the attacks against the British Consulate, two synagogues and an HSBC branch in Istanbul. According to his own account, the al-Qaida Iraq leader abu Musab Zarqawi’s right hand man, Louai al-Sakka, was the master mind behind the attack and the link between the Akdaş group and the al-Qaida leadership. Al-Sakka is now in prison for both the 2003 attacks and for attempting to bomb an Israeli cruise ship in 2005. The cruise ship plot was foiled when the chemicals al-Sakka was to use exploded in his rented apartment. Akdaş died fighting in Iraq.

In April this year, there appears to have been a spate of arrests in South-Eastern Turkey, and one of the arrestees is an Uzbek. The Turkish press described the arrested men as al-Qaida members. The Turkish (or rather Kurdish) Hizbullah (not to be confused with its Shia namesake in Lebanon) is located in this area, which also seems to provide many of the Turkish recruits for the Islamic Jihad Union. Although little is certain, there may be a link between IJU and Hizballah.

Arrests of alleged al-Qaida members are nothing new in Turkey. There have been raids many times before. One such wave of raids happened in April last year. If one is to believe the Islamic Jihad Union member Ebu Yasir el-Turki, as many as 2000 Turks have arrived in Afghanistan since 2001. He claims that most of them have gone back to Turkey where they try to create groups and recruit people for the Jihad in Afghanistan. As many as 5000 Turkish militants may have joined the insurgency in Iraq. If this continues, Turkey may have an important role to play in the global Jihad. Maybe it will not be a combatant or front, but Turkey is already a conduit, recruitment base and maybe also training ground for jihadists going to the hot fronts.

At the risk of seeming omphaloskeptic, I will add a few more observations about jihadists citing western scholars, because this phenomenon taking larger proportions than I expected.

Since my last post on the subject, both the Militant Ideology Atlas and the RAND study mentioned by al-Maqdisi have been posted on al-Maqdisi’s own website, Minbar al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad (MTJ). Maqdisi’s readers can now enjoy the original version, the original executive summary as well as an Arabic summary of both reports. As many of you know, MTJ is the largest online library of jihadi literature, so this means that the CTC and RAND are now part of the official jihadi literary canon.

It also means we now know which RAND study al-Maqdisi was referring to in last week’s statement:  Building Moderate Muslim Networks by Angel Rabasa, Cheryl Benard, Lowell Schwartz and Peter Sickle.

Since the last post I have also learned that Joas Wagemakers has been cited before; In fact, both Muhammad al-Mas’ari and Abu Humam al-Athari have mentioned him in the past. The latter notes on p. 94 of his book The Exalted Declaration that “A Christian from one of the European countries has written a PhD thesis on al-Maqdisi in which he speaks about our sheikh al-Maqdisi and the sayings of his opponents and supporters. Curiously, this Christian has read all the books of our sheikh al-Maqdisi and he has an article in which he responds to the claim that al-Maqdisi has revoked his positions.”

At FFI we have been watching all these references to colleagues in the field with a mixture of jealousy and relief. We seemed to have escaped the scrutiny of the jihadists. Or so we thought.

A few days ago a scanned PDF version of Brynjar Lia’s book Architect of Global Jihad turned up on the al-Faloja forum as well as on Archive.org . It soon also appeared on Thabaat where it was applauded as “objective” (hat tip: Adam R.)

But the icing on the cake was the appearance, on Minbar al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad, of an Arabic translation of my colleague Hanna Rogan’s FFI report on Jihadism Online. The translation is the work of the MTJ itself and is accompanied by an introduction to the report, to FFI and to Hanna’s bio. The fact that al-Maqdisi’s assistants took the time to translate Hanna’s 38-page report into Arabic is quite extraordinary. I have not seen this honour bestowed on any other recent academic publication.

What’s next, the Infidel Scholar Atlas?

Document (Arabic): 04-29-09-minbar-new-articles-inventory
Document (Arabic): 04-29-09-minbar-atlas-summary
Document (Arabic): 04-29-09-minbar-rand-summary
Document (Arabic): minbar-translation-of-hanna-rogan-ffi-report
Document: 04-27-09-faloja-architect-of-global-jihad

Update (30 April): Jihadica’s reporting inspired a frontpage story in the New York Times today.

Yaman Mukhaddab, a Jihadi pundit who’s appeared on this blog several times, has translated the summary of the new RAND study, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa’ida. It’s a fast turnaround for a translation, given that the existence of the study was first reported in Western media on July 28 and Yaman finished his work on July 30.

Yaman says he has rushed to translate the document for two reasons. First, he believes that it is dangerous. RAND, he says, has finally understood that the reason al-Qaeda attacks the U.S. is to provoke it into a direct military conflict in the Middle East, which will strengthen and consolidate the mujahids and bring about greater losses for the U.S. and its allies.

Second, RAND is the go-to contractor in the U.S. for crafting the government’s response to al-Qaeda. Past RAND studies have had a huge influence in this regard and most of their recommendations have been implemented.

Yaman further argues that the next administartion will follow the plan outlined in this study. Both Republicans and Democrats want to end direct engagement with mujahids in the Middle East and use proxies and clandestine operations instead.

Since RAND’s recommendations for correcting the U.S. response to al-Qaeda derive from a scientific study of past terrorist groups, the mujahids would do well to read them so as to not fall into the enemy’s new traps. Moreover, RAND studies are public and provide an early warning of what the U.S. will do next, so the mujahids would be foolish to ignore them.

After posting his translation of the summary, Yaman offers five thoughts:

1. The enemy has finally begun to understand.
2. There is much in this study that torpedoes the propaganda of the enemy, which will help the mujahids.
3. How can the enemy’s new strategy be thwarted?
4. The RAND study is not an exercise in disinformation. But it still has some major holes that its authors haven’t perceived.
5. The study will be implemented. Indeed, there are signs of this happening already.

In the coming weeks or months, Yaman plans to flesh out the five points above. He also intends to translate the fifth section in the complete study called “Military Force and al-Qa’ida in Iraq” since it contains much of benefit to the mujahids. Finally, Yaman hopes to translate the entire 225 page document. I’ll keep you posted.

7-30-08-yaman-mukhaddabe28099s-commentary-on-rand-study-how-terror-groups-end

Ekhlaas member Rahib Irhab (”Terrible Terrorism”) posted some excerpts from Omar Nasiri’s book, Inside the Jihad.  (The excerpts are originally from al-Hayat, who got them from the Arabic version of the book.)  Nasiri (a pseudonym) is a Moroccan-born spy who penetrated al-Qaida’s organization in the ’90s at the behest of the French.  Rahib Irhab suggests that forum members should read the book in order to understand how militant groups are penetrated, presumably to prevent the same techniques from being used again.

Document: excerpts-from-omar-nasiri-inside-the-jihad

On May 10, 2008 Ekhlaas member mohanad57 posted a link to Encyclopedia of Modern U.S. Military Weapons in pdf format. Like most illicit material shared by Jihadis, the link takes you to an independent file sharing site (in this case, rapidshare.com). This keeps the forum managers from getting in trouble, reduces bandwidth consumption, ensures that files can be shared rapidly, and makes the links temporary. For all you jihadologists out there: If there is a download you want on a Jihadi forum, get it immediately–the link will stop working in a few days.