ji·had·ica

Guest Post: The Story of Eric Breininger

[Editor’s note: This post was written by Christopher Radler and Behnam Said, who are intelligence analysts based in Hamburg, Germany. For links to the original document, see the comments to the preview post.] On 3 May a message announcing the death of Eric Breininger (b. 3 August 1987) and three of his fellow combatants was posted on several German jihadist websites. Breininger, who travelled to the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the winter 2007, was one of the most infamous German jihadists. From Waziristan Breininger, a.k.a. “Abdul Ghaffar al-Almani”, sent several videotaped messages to the jihadist community in Germany, asking them to join the jihad or at least to support it financially. Since September 2008 the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) searched for Breininger, based on his assumed affiliation with a foreign terrorist organization. A day after the announcement of his death, Breininger’s alleged autobiography, entitled Mein

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Thomas Hegghammer May 11, 2010

Homegrown Literature

Since the topic of homegrown militancy is very much in focus these days, I wanted to flag a very interesting series of reports on radicalization in various European countries produced by the Centre for Studies of Islamism and Radicalisation at Aarhus University in Denmark. The Centre’s mission is to bridge the gap between the fields of terrorism studies and Islamism studies, and their reports do that quite nicely.

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Thomas Hegghammer May 10, 2010

Good Insights

The latest issue of the journal Arab Insight has two particularly interesting articles: one on al-Qaida in Yemen by Abdul Elah Shayea (the guy who interviews AQAP people) and another on the decline of the global jihad by Murad al-Shishani. Those of you who don’t know the journal should check out past issues; there are lots of very interesting pieces.

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Thomas Hegghammer May 7, 2010

Preview: Autobiography of a German Jihadist

The memoirs of Erik Breininger, the German jihadist who was allegedly recently killed in Waziristan, have reportedly appeared online. I haven’t seen them myself yet, but if their authenticity can be established, we are dealing with an extremely valuable document. Jihadica will bring you more details soon.

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Thomas Hegghammer May 5, 2010

What’s the Minbar doing in Moscow? (Part 1)

Although I’m awfully late in paying attention to it, there is an interesting dimension to the Moscow metro attacks that occurred just over a month ago that is relevant for jihad watchers but has not been dealt with in the media or blogs as far as I know. While attention has obviously focused on the attacks themselves and on the video claim of responsibility by the leader of the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus, Dokku ‘Umarov, I have not seen any references to a written statement by the same man posted on the online jihadi library Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad (the Pulpit of the Unity of God and Jihad). This statement – and particularly the fact that it was posted on the Minbar, the largest jihadi online library – is interesting. It indicates a development of potentially great significance to the future of jihadi ideological production. This post is the first

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Joas Wagemakers May 4, 2010

New Report Profiling the Taliban

Anne Stenersen has written a new FFI report on the organizational structure and ideology of the Taliban. The report is based on field research, analysis of online Taliban propaganda and a thorough review of the secondary literature. This is essential reading for anyone working Afghanistan. One of her conclusions caught my eye: “For the time being, it looks like any attempt to negotiate with the Taliban leadership directly would serve to strengthen the insurgent movement, rather than weakening it. A more realistic approach is probably to try to weaken the Taliban’s coherence through negotiating with, and offering incentives to, low-level commanders and tribal leaders inside Afghanistan.”

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Thomas Hegghammer April 23, 2010

A Jihadi-Salafi Case against Hamas

In the past few years, an increasing number of news items have focused on the clashes between Hamas in the Gaza Strip and more radical Jihadi-Salafi groups. (For a recent example, see here.) Analyses of these groups have mostly concentrated on their alleged ties with al-Qa‘ida and their criticism of Hamas as being soft (see here, for example) but little is known about their actual ideology. Last year, however, a book giving a detailed ideological critique of Hamas (Al-Qawl al-Asas fi Hukumat Hamas) was released by a Jihadi-Salafi from Gaza called Abu ‘Abdallah al-Maqdisi, not to be confused with Abu l-Nur al-Maqdisi, the leader of Jund Ansar Allah, whose death at the hands of Hamas last year caused a widespread uproar among Jihadi-Salafis. It is not clear how representative this book is of Hamas’ radical opponents’ ideology in Gaza but the arguments are typically Jihadi-Salafi ones and are therefore likely

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Joas Wagemakers March 23, 2010

Did the Quetta Shura Break With al-Qaida?

Mustafa Hamid, aka Abu’l-Walid al-Masri, published a blog piece a little while ago which discussed the arrest of Mullah Baradir. It’s fascinating reading, especially the first part which deals with the historical role of Mullah Baradir in the Taliban insurgency. It’s already been covered in part by Leah Farrall. I thought I’d add some comment about the opening lines of the article, in which Mustafa Hamid says that the Taliban’s high council made three important decisions after 2001, one of which was to “break the ties between the Taliban and al-Qaida.” Mustafa Hamid has previously said that al-Qaida and the Taliban have moved further apart after 2001, although I don’t think he’s ever been this specific. We have heard similar things in the media, but the reports are hard to confirm. Was there actually a decision in the Quetta shura, led by Mullah Baradir at the time, to break ties

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Anne Stenersen March 22, 2010

Spy Forums

In a remarkable story, the Washington Post reported today that Saudi intelligence and the CIA operated a honeypot jihadi forum for years until it was shut down by the US military in 2008. The news here is obviously not that intelligence services run jihadi forums, but that US agencies wage cyberwarfare on each other. Since I don’t know what is technologically possible and what is not, I don’t have an opinion on the issue of forum takedowns, but I find the lack of interagency coordination appalling. Bureaucratic politics aside, which forum was it? The Post article does not say. There are several candidates, since many forums went down in 2008, foremost of which Ekhlaas (September) and Hesbah (November). I initially suspected the latter, but I was a little confused by the article mentioning events in “early 2008”. So I asked my forum-watching colleagues Evan Kohlmann and Reuven Paz, and they

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Thomas Hegghammer March 19, 2010

New Reports

My brilliant friend and countryman Jacob Høigilt has just written an absolutely fascinating report on Islamism and Education in the Palestinian Territories. It’s fieldwork-based, rich  and nuanced, and it undermines widespread assumptions about the link between Islamic education and militancy. While I am at it, I might as well mention my own completely unrelated CTC paper on the Failure of Jihad in Saudi Arabia.

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Thomas Hegghammer March 4, 2010
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