al-qaeda chief ayman al-zawahiri the coordinator 2014 part 31-3-aq- abu musab al-suri

By Capt (Ret) C de Waart, feel free to share: in Confidence

Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2014 Part 31-3-AQ- Abu Musab al-Suri

Re-published Jul 2015.

Defeat or no defeat, on the run or not, hiding in a cave or, ideology or crazed fanatics

While the Islamic caliphate declared early July 2014 has the global attention our real focus needs to remain with Al Qaida, their Intent, Plans, Ideology, Training, Looting military hardware form overrun bases, Strategic thinkers and their publications, the Books published, declarations and words said and written. My series of 2014, part 31.. is an effort to do so. Get the real focus where it needs to be Al Qaida. In this paper we revisit: Abu Musab al-Suri The

Return of Al-Qaeda’s Mastermind1

Abu Musab al-Suri, who also occasionally goes by his birth-name, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, was at one point al-Qaeda’s most able and cold-blooded strategist. He once served as the Qaeda operations chief in Europe, networking throughout the 1990s with jihadis in the Maghreb and the Mashriq, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, South and East Asia. In this dual-capacity—theoretician and organiser—Mr. Suri presided over the planning for the 2005 London bombings, in which four British-born terrorists exploded three bombs on the Underground and another on a bus, claiming the lives of 52 people in all, with another 700 slashed and mangled, their bones snapped like crackling and their blood splashed about the scenes. Such vistas of violence rarely bear themselves to the actual line of sight of Mr. Suri, however; for the man operates in the shadows, directing from afar, often by the light of his laptop screen. His major contribution to the praxis of what we may still think of as ‘the Bin Laden network’ has been his attempt to render the group’s name—al-Qaeda, Arabic for ‘the base’—but a free-floating franchise available to any lone wolf who should wish to shroud himself in it.

Architect of the New Al Qaeda; Al-Qaeda Military Strategist Abu Mus'ab Al-Suri's (born Mustafa bin Abd al-

1 By Francis McLoughlin 14 Aug 2013

Cees: Intel to Rent of 10 15/04/2023


Qadir Setmariam Nasar2 ) Teachings3 on Fourth-Generation Warfare (4GW), Individual Jihad and the Future of Al-Qaeda4

In his efforts to ‘decentralise’ al-Qaeda, Mr. Suri has proven remarkably successful. Mohamed Merah, for example, the 23-year-old sadist who filmed his torture and slaughter of three Jewish children and a rabbi after murdering three French paratroopers in Toulouse last year, was nothing if not an adherent of Mr. Suri’s program. In his journey from the banlieues of his childhood to the Qaeda training camps of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Merah was a perfect illustration of Mr. Suri’s transmutation of the Qaeda threat from that of a handful of hand-lopping tribal-militias dotted around the globe to that of a nebulous, Deleuze-and-Guattari-stylised urban guerrilla warfare, in which ordinary citizens go about their daily business on what amounts to the front line of a world-wide war, and become victims of the fire-shows and sharp metallic-rain which isolated and previously-anonymous jihadi operatives step forward to inflict on their long-time neighbours and co-workers. The Tsarnaev brothers are perhaps the latest instance (at least in the West) of this nefarious doctrine at work.

Now, al-Qaeda’s brain is ‘free’. Mr. Suri was released in December 2011 by President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, to whose regime he had been entrusted by the United States after being apprehended by the CIA in 2005. Within only a few months of his liberation, ‘[h]is videos [were] already being reuploaded… [h]is audios, reposted’, according to Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst and director of West Point’s Centre for Combating Terrorism. The habitual incompetence of the U.S. intelligence community was once again there for all to see in this piece of extreme stupidity; for Mr. Suri, this enemy of civil society, had been allowed to return to the streets as a ‘warning’ to the United States not to mess with the Iranian-backed Alawi elite in Damascus as it fended off the Syrian rebels in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2011. This ‘warning’ would grow into a full-fledged irony for President Assad, given that al-Qaeda—under the rubric of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—currently dominates the armed opposition against his regime. Then again, perhaps the battle-lines in the Islamic world are more opaque than would be suggested by a simple Sunni v. Shia reading of events. Qaeda operatives have long been allowed, by the Mullahs in Tehran, to set up shop in the Islamic Republic of Iran and traverse the country at will since their ejection from Afghanistan in 2001.

Mr. Suri was one such Qaeda operative, by chance. (After fleeing U.S. precision strikes in Afghanistan in 2002, he found a safe-haven in the land of men whom Wahhabis regard as heretics ready for the slaughter!). Born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958 to a middle class family, the red-haired adolescent, still going by the name of Mustafa, took a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Aleppo before leaving for Jordan, where he would join the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Returning to his Ba’athist-run homeland, he reportedly took part in the 1982 uprising of Hama, a Brotherhood-stronghold, in which tens of thousands were killed by the Hafez al-Assad regime. After the failure of the small revolution that gave him his first taste of battle, Mr. Suri fled Syria and eventually wound up in Spain, where he lived as an official citizen after taking a Spanish wife. Still radicalised and craving jihad, in 1987 he departed Spain for Peshawar, where he came into contact with Abdullah Azzam, a commander and financier of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion beginning 1979. Mr. Azzam is better known perhaps as Osama bin Laden’s mentor, and so it wasn’t long before Mr. Suri fell in with that crowd. In 1992, he returned to Spain and set up a

2 http://www.lawandsecurity.org/Portals/0/Documents/AbuMusabalSuriArchitectoftheNewAlQaeda.pdf3 Nasar's best known work is the 1600-page book The Global Islamic Resistance Call (Da'wat al-muqawamah al-islamiyyah al-'alamiyyah) which appeared on the Internet in December 2004 or January 2005.4 http://www.memri.org/report/en/print5395.htm



terrorist cell which would play a part in planning 9/11. In 1995, he went to London and established himself as a columnist of renown for Al Ansar magazine, a radical Islamist publication which supported jihad.

Mr. Suri’s subsequent career includes a gig as the spokesman for the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé, and another as the London-based press attaché for Bin Laden himself. At another point he was an adviser to Mullah Omar in Kabul; and from a high-powered thinker for the Taliban, he went to sit on al-Qaeda’s Shura council. By the late 1990s, Bin Laden having ridden out the U.S. airstrikes on the would-be state of Afghanistan, Mr. Suri’s leaderless brand of al-Qaeda came to define the organisation. The spectacular exporting of jihad to American shores in September 2001 made al-Qaeda’s name known to all, along with that of its CEO. But when I say Mr. Suri’s vision for his cause prevailed over predecessors, I should add that it was more the necessity of survival than the sheer sway of its intellectual case which made it so. Mr. Suri even mocked his boss for failing to heed the direction al-Qaeda was headed, jeering that ‘our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause’. Despite his days acting as a go-between for Bin Laden and the press, personality-driven holy war wasn’t Mr. Suri’s style. As I mentioned earlier, al-Qaeda is Arabic for ‘the base’, and that is precisely how one ought to think of it: as a foundation. You can kill as many figureheads as you like, but there will still be jihadis in Nigeria, Mauritania, Libya, Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq—everywhere around the world—who could step forward and replace them. Bin Laden, in Mr. Suri’s eyes, though he deserved some initial acclaim, had become immaterial, eye-candy. It is for this reason, however, from our point-of-view, that drone-strikes are only good for so much. In this perverse game of whack-a-mole—with one jihadi cell rearing its ugly head in Syria today, another in Mali tomorrow—it is foolishness to think that the movement jihad can be wiped out by knocking off one of its heads in Abbottabad, as the Obama administration seemed to think would suffice—until recent events in Benghazi, at least. Counter-insurgency by military means must be a constant feature of the War on Terror if the jihadi network is to be actually defeated and humiliated once and for all. Mr. Suri was delusional if he thought his men could make the U.S. superpower crumble, but still, his ‘leaderless’ tactics for the jihadi cause warded off al-Qaeda’s otherwise guaranteed obliteration. And if Mr. Suri was ingenious in his manoeuvring to spread fear in the hearts of metropolitan infidels, the George W. Bush administration deserves credit for undertaking the right strategy for countering the movement jihad: first, take out its hosts in Afghanistan, who are clearly in league—even operationally—with al-Qaeda; and second, deprive them of the patronage of a shaky dictatorship in rogue-state-Iraq.

The persistence of al-Qaeda, after all, draws sustenance from that dark nexus between the foot-soldiers and canon-fodder of the bigwigs hiding out somewhere in Waziristan, on the one hand, and the rogue-states and Saudi financiers for whom virgin-thirsty Wahhabi warriors are useful clients, on the other. Thus, it stands to reason that contemporary jihad cannot be defeated unless this symbiotic arrangement is disrupted. The Pentagon was quick to realise this, as was the White House. Saddam Hussein had been paying $25,000 to families of suicide-murderers in Palestine and sheltering the Qaeda agent who mixed the chemicals in the bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, founder of the Qaeda branch in Iraq, also thrived under the Ba’athists, who sent him off to fight the Kurds—a people who would otherwise have been low-down on his list of priorities—until the Americans toppled Saddam. If anything, President Bush could have gone further, to wit, he could have targeted Iran and Pakistan, too—but the antiwar muppets would not have approved, and the U.S. military at the time was only designed to fight no more than two wars at once. Nevertheless, the targets were well-advised: Afghanistan was the massive training-



ground for jihad which Syria is becoming today; and Iraq, as Sartre would say, was a menace in- and for-itself.

Of course, that America had to step foot on ‘Muslim land’ to wage its battle against the jihadis to some extent gratified al-Qaeda. The jihadis considered the United States a weak and decadent society which would surely collapse under the strain of the military campaign it sought to wage against them. They were wrong. Mr. Suri was wrong. The Taliban were thrown out of Kabul. Al-Qaeda was battered in Tora Bora, and almost 80% of its men in Afghanistan were killed. Yet after the Taliban were toppled, Mr. Suri would pen his masterwork, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, in a series of safe houses, and disseminate it in December 2004. Al-Qaeda’s ambition was to revive the Caliphate, and by that stage it was hoped that the War on Terror would incite the umma to overcome the national boundaries drawn up by colonial powers after World War II. The idea behind Bin Laden’s plans vis-à-vis the World Trade Centre had been, in short, to lure the ‘Great Satan’ into ‘Muslim land’ and then expose it as a soft and easy target, which the jihadis could happily chip away at, and, before long, send into the history books alongside the Soviet Union. Given that this was the new mission, however, one could ask what real use had the guerrilla cells for some telegenic leader? Bin Laden wouldn’t be able to direct his cadres in other countries on the specifics of every little mission they hoped to undertake against U.S. Marines and their Iraqi supporters. Mr. Suri went even further in this line of thinking by asking, in effect: why should he? Osama bin Who?

I’ll reiterate here a bit of well-known history for the sake of background. The Afghan mujahedin fractured completely after 1989, after the Red Army had withdrawn, and Afghanistan was torn up by warlords—which was insignificant in-itself, as the Afghans had never enjoyed a centralised state. In the midst of the break-up, the Saudi-funded faction of the Islamic militants, led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, planned and advocated attacks on ‘the Far Enemy’. In this vision the ideas of Mr. Suri and another gifted Qaeda strategist who went by the alias ‘Abu Bakr Naji’ superseded those laid out in the older works of Sayyid Qutb and Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj (chief ideologue of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who had planned President Anwar al-Sadat’s assassination). In Mr. Suri’s formulation, jihad was a personal rather than a collective duty, and as such, it did not require the approval of some Islamic authority, whether some registered Imam somewhere or even the chairman of the board of Al-Qaeda Inc. Although this idea that al-Qaeda’s chieftains were irrelevant did not sit well with others on the Shura council, Mr. Suri was retained as a strategist, if only because his zeal in waging the holy battle against ‘the Zionist-Crusader alliance’ was never in any doubt.

Although at times he appeared to be more interested in guerrilla tactics than the Islamic scriptures, Mr. Suri was too talented a tactician to be dismissed by the more Puritan fanatics of the jihadi house-of-cards (as Mr. Suri himself would have thought of the command-structure of al-Qaeda Central). Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to take another case of a jihadi leader who may not have been an exactly exemplary member of the cult, was self-evidently a gang-leader if not a clinical-psychopath. And yet, despite his obvious unsuitability as a candidate for a Qaeda figurehead, the man was so brutal and fearsome a leader of his self-titled ‘al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia’ that the nominal heads of the Bin Laden network had little choice but to recognise his lumpen-militias as the real-deal, to wit, the Iraqi manifestation of the greater Qaeda crusade for a global-caliphate. Mr. Suri, for his part, was a more cynical denizen of the Qaeda core, and thus distasteful as a colleague to those of a more theological bent. Still, his value lay in his influence among the more gung-ho milieu behind Bin Laden, which didn’t



recoil at the magnitude of the retaliation which al-Qaeda had to expect for carrying out the attacks of September 2001.

It should always be remembered that there was a time, after 9/11, when some in al-Qaeda lost their nerve. Abu al-Walid al-Masri, for instance, another board member of the gang’s Shura council, wrote that his experience in Afghanistan was ‘a tragic example of an Islamic movement managed in an alarmingly meaningless way’, such that ‘[e]veryone knew that their leader was leading them to the abyss and even leading the entire country to utter destruction, but they continued to carry out his orders faithfully and with bitterness’. Mr. Suri, as we have seen, was far more enthusiastic about the prospects of the ‘Great Satan’ coming to his home-turf. He was as dismayed as the next jihadi at the fall of the Taliban, and it was amongst the ruins of that regime that he wrote his magnum opus, as has been alluded to. In 2002, he fled to eastern Iran, where he joined his boss’s son Saad and the Qaeda security chief Saif al-Adl. (The question cannot be asked enough: Why was al-Qaeda, then as now, allowed to operate so freely under the regime of the Shi’ite Mullahs in Tehran?) The Americans, realising his importance (The Global Islamic Resistance Call is studied at West Point), put a five-million-dollar bounty on his head. In exile, Mr. Suri furthered his meditation on the future of the jihadi cause. Mr. Suri was finally captured in Quetta by Pakistani intelligence agents in October 2005 and handed over to the CIA which, under an ill-begotten rendition program, gave him up to the anti-American dictatorship of Syria in 2006. As we know, he has since been set free by Assad himself, and his whereabouts are now unknown though his influence on global jihad has resurged palpably among his militant brethren. In this age of Google and decentralised resistance to the secular world of capital and free speech—think: Occupy Wall Street and the op-ed section of Al Jazeera—Abu Musab al-Suri is an especially effective spokesman and theoretician of ‘leaderless’ jihad: al-Qaeda writ large. In the aftermath of the Tsarnaev brothers’ bombings and the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Mr. Suri is perhaps a more authoritative figure in al-Qaeda than Mr. Zawahiri himself, who can organise the old Qaeda vanguard-militias from the tribal regions of Yemen to the impoverished north of Nigeria, but whose attempts to shake-up the West on the scale of 9/11 have taken a backseat to the more amateur assaults on civil society mounted by scattered jihadi cells and lone wolves. The two faces of al-Qaeda today are Mr. Zawahiri and Mr. Suri, but one should not make the mistake of thinking that they represent antagonistic rather than supplementary forces in their clash with civilisation. If Syria becomes the new pre-2001 Afghanistan, a transition materialising before our very eyes, I daresay the Zawahiris of the world will once again have the breathing-space to pull of something a little more formidable in its blood-shedding capacity than a couple of pressure-cookers in Boston. Will they be able to get it? That is the question.

Central Asia, extending from the Caspian Sea through western China, has long been a strategic focus of al-Qaeda. The writings of top al-Qaeda strategists, most notably Abu Musab al-Suri (AKA Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmarian Nassar) and Ayman al-Zawahiri, advocate for the establishment of a jihadist front throughout Central Asia to serve as a stepping stone towards the creation of an al-Qaeda stronghold, extending from the Caucuses across the Caspian Sea and into Pakistan.



An Al Qaeda Strategist’s Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, Lessons for the U.S. in SyriaBrian Fishman May 16, 2014 · in (W)ARCHIVES

With the rebellion against Assad in tatters, one of its chief strategists looked back on the movement’s failures. His findings were both profound and timeworn from similarly doomed uprisings around the globe. Among them: the rebels did not have a comprehensive plan or strategy; they were divided by ideology and especially the role of Islam; rebel leaders outside the country were disconnected from events on the ground and therefore unhelpful; rebels inside Syria were too dependent on neighboring states with divergent agendas for training, strategy, and support; the rebellion focused on growing numerically rather than building a core cadre of capable fighters; and the rebels failed to unite Arabs and Kurds in common cause.But these reflections – “Lessons Learned about the Armed Jihad Ordeal in Syria” – are not about the current civil war. They were written some 30 years earlier by the jihadi strategist Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, who played a key role in the so-called Fighting Vanguard, the leading jihadi group in the uprising against Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad. The document was captured in Afghanistan by U.S. forces shortly after the initial invasion in 2001.Al-Suri’s look back accomplishes three basic tasks: assessing the failings of the rebellion as a whole, examining the weaknesses of the Fighting Vanguard as a subset of the rebellion, and drawing basic lessons for future jihadis. But for this edition of (W)Archives, rather than leave


http://warontherocks.com/category/warchives/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/023170030X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=023170030X&linkCode=as2&tag=httpwaronthec-20&linkId=VUSGPQ2WPYUS55RH

https://www.ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Lessons-Learned-from-the-Jihad-Ordeal-in-Syria-Translation.pdf

http://warontherocks.com/category/warchives/

http://warontherocks.com/author/brian-fishman/

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those lessons for the jihadis alone, we will mine al-Suri’s document for lessons that can guide U.S. policy toward Syria.Lesson One: Quality Over Quantity; Al-Suri laments that after the Fighting Vanguard suffered initial defeats at the hands of Assad’s forces in 1979, the “leadership [opened] the doors to any one (sic) who was willing to join.” That ecumenical approach, which was echoed twenty-five years later by al-Qaeda in Iraq, meant that recruits were not well schooled in military tactics or, more importantly, in a common ideology and culture. For al-Suri, this lack of “Islamic commitment and perseverance” meant that fighters would often slip away after initial failure rather than commit to rebellion for the long-term.While al-Suri’s definition of “Islamic commitment” should not be on the U.S.’ list of criteria for allies to support in Syria, his basic admonition that small and elite is a better way to get things done in Syria is a good one for Washington policymakers—and for many of the same reasons that Suri describes. Coalitions in Syria are inherently fragile, and incompetence is at least as dangerous as ill-intent. The United States needs allies it can support on the ground in Syria, but they should be a small number of well-trained and very well-vetted fighters. A, broad rebel coalition reliable enough to be supported financially and with military hardware remains an intellectual unicorn, not worth chasing.Lesson Two: Beware the Expatriates; Al-Suri expounds at length on the problems of expatriate Syrians who claimed to support the rebellion but, in practice, wound up contributing minimal value. This was, in large measure, because they did not understand developments on the ground and could not deliver resources the way states could. In his words,Any revolution that claims jihad and chooses a confrontational military path with a despot regime like the one in Syria, yet limits its preparations to political programming printed on high gloss paper and occasional communiqués addressed to the Arab summits, Moslem (sic), and international institutions, will lose effectiveness over time and evolves into a group of political refugees waging useless public relations campaigns none of which reaches the concerned masses on the inside.As the United States has learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, relying on expats for managing the political machinations of a complex insurgency is deeply problematic. The United States needs to engage militants in Syria directly. This will require certain risks that the United States is loath to accept in a post-Benghazi world, but leadership on the ground will make the most important decisions, for better or worse, and the U.S. needs to be at the table.Lesson Three: Do Not Rely On Arab States (or their efforts to control their proxies)Al-Suri laments rebel dependence on various Arab states because “neighboring regimes were temporary allies with their own interests and agendas, they dealt with us and treated us accordingly; these regimes feared Islam and imprisoned its faithful members.” This is not particularly surprising to any student of Machiavelli (which al-Suri certainly is), but it illustrates the danger of outsourcing foreign policy hopes and goals, even to friends with aligned interests.The United States needs to continue reminding Arab states of the inevitable backlash from the Syrian jihad. Jihadis have certainly learned the lesson not to trust Arab states, but that has not stopped them from working together over the past three years. Qatar in particular has sponsored a range of militant groups, including Ahrar al-Sham, which hosted Ayman al-Zawahiri’s designated representative in Syria until he was assassinated earlier this year. The United States cannot depend on Arab states any more than al-Suri did. In fact, it should be preparing for those alliances to crumble (even more than they have) and for today’s jihadis to lash out at their would-be supporters.Lesson Four: Beware External Attacks; Al-Suri wishes that the Syrian rebels in the early 1980s had been more effective striking targets outside of Syria, which is worrisome because it


http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/05/world/meast/syria-civil-war/

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/01/statement_from_zawah.php

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/01/statement_from_zawah.php


is likely that today’s most virulent jihadi groups in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusrah and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, are both capable of such strikes. Will they make a similar calculation? Al-Suri argues that various Arab states did not support the rebellion because Assad offered stability—and he would have liked to shake Arab consciousness using directed military attacks. Or as he put it, “In short the lack of military operations on the outside prevented us from deterring the enemy and his friends and supporters.”Al-Suri’s rationale here is pretty thin; it is not at all clear that terrorist attacks outside Syria would have had the effect he desired. Indeed, terrorist attacks today are just as likely to create a backlash against the rebellion as bend popular support to its will …and yet, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Saudi Arabia and other Arab states have at times enabled migration of jihadis to Syria in part out of a desire to avoid internal upheaval. But whereas al-Suri fantasized about attacks abroad, such a strike today would likely be counterproductive, at least in the medium-term, by creating a very strong backlash by security services. An exception in this regard is Jordan, which, despite having a strong intelligence and security apparatus, faces enormous pressure from the inflow of refugees. A massive reaction from security forces against a threat might actually incite broader violence.Lesson Five:International Coordination is Key to Limiting International TerrorismOne major reason al-Suri was unable to build militant organizations for external attacks was the collaboration of “security services between Jordan, Iraq, Syria and other Moslem countries was evident, and by studying our organizations they were able to wage effective campaigns against similar Islamic organizations in the neighboring countries.”While contemporary militant groups in Syria have their secrets, the current rebellion is the most transparent in history, both because militants have turned to the Internet and social media to recruit and solicit funds and because those militants are working with foreign states. Maintaining international collaboration and information sharing about the external spread of Syria’s militants is absolutely critical.Lesson Six: A Divided Rebellion in Syria Will Fail; Al-Suri’s primary complaint regarded the divisions between militant groups operating in Syria. For him,the true mujahideen were spread among numerous bickering organizations, and thus lost their effectiveness in leading the faithful into one direction; it even went farther than that, friction, hatred and partisan bickering lead (sic) to conflict between the faithful youth –who had the same goals– all because the various leaders had differing and contradictory objectives.This lament has now been echoed countless times on web forums, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts by various supporters of contemporary Syrian rebels, ranging from secular champions to jihadis. And that chatter is nothing compared to the open warfare between ISIS and other militants inside Syria. But the point is no less salient because it is ubiquitous: the rebels in Syria will not win unless they work together.The urge to unite jihadi factions must of course be balanced against the danger posed by certain factions, especially JaN and ISIS. Even al-Suri, while arguing for cooperation across different militant networks, reminds of the jihadi tendency toward absolutism, saying, “Loyalty to truth and justice is the first duty to be observed if we were to establish an exemplary jihad path,” which is of course the ideological caveat that ISIS has used to justify mass murder.The most important lesson from al-Suri’s recollection of the first rebellion against an Assad dictator in Syria is that what is contemporary is rarely new. The complexity and variation of the current fight in Syria, including the growth of new and dangerous jihadi groups, is undoubtedly disturbing, but it is hardly unprecedented. Sort of like a rebellion that is its own worst nightmare.



Brian Fishman is a War on the Rocks Contributor and a Fellow at the New America Foundation. Brian, Abu Musa’b as-Suri didn’t write his book some 3o years ago (he is not that old). He did so after the loss of Afghanistan by the Taliban and al-Qa’eda. His view of the history of the jihadi movement goes some 30 years back, this is true. But not his writing it.

Additionally: Remember what Abu-Mus‘ab al-Suri, ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Hakim had to say regarding the importance of “There are (5) important naval straits in the globe … .in his Dec 2004 published manifesto…..The Call for Global Islamic Resistance. Al-Suri started writing "The Call for Global Islamic Resistance" in 1997 in Kabul, and finalized its current version in 2004. Abu Musab al-Suri's 1,600 page manifesto, "The Call for Global Islamic Resistance," constitutes an important window into contemporary jihadist thought and the historical evolution of jihadi movements. The book was published in December 2004 online and is still available on a few Jihadist Websites for download.

Page 1384] Third: naval straits and main water crossings:There are (5) important naval straits in the globe, four of which are located in Arab and Muslim land and the fifth in America which is the Panama Canal. These straits are:1. The strait of Hormuz, the oil gate of Arabian Gulf – Persian2. The Suez Canal in Egypt3. Bab al-Mandeb between Yemen and the horn of Africa4. Gibraltar Straits in al-Maghrib al-Aqsa [TC: Morocco]The majority of the Western World economy, its commerce and oil pass through these water crossings. The Military Fleets, air carriers, the missiles of death, they all pass through these crossing and they are targeting our children and women. We have to shut down these crossings so that these campaigns would leave. This could be achieved by targeting American ships and ships of their allied countries. They could be closed through mining and sinking ships, or by threatening naval passage through martyrdom operations, hijacking and by force if possible.[Page 1018] One of the things the Ottomans were proud of is that they used to prevent Christian ships from crossing the Bab el-Mandib strait from Yemen to the Gulf of Suez because they would be passing near by the sea of Jedda, which is one of the holy areas. They considered the entire Red Sea as holy and forbidden to Christians! The Ottoman ships would take the goods from the Christian traders at Yemen and transport it for them to theGulf of Suez and give it to them at the Mediterranean.[Page 100] Robbing the Muslims' Treasury and their Foundational Wealth; If we were to add the fact that the Islamic world extending east from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Philippines, to the coasts of the Atlantic ocean and west to the Morocco coasts, Mauritania, and Senegal, and from central Asia, the Caucuses, the Balkans, North Africa to South Asia, the Indonesian islands, and south to the center of sub-Saharan Africa; if we were to know that this Islamic world owns a tremendous strategic reserve of mineral resources, since a number of its governments are considered among the top exporters of important industrial metals; and if we add to that the agricultural and zoological fortunes abundant to these regions, in addition to what it provides from land, sea, and air transportation resources as well as the transit rights for the area, which contains four of the five most important international naval straits and passageways, the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandab, Suez canal, and Gibraltar, and its skies are transportation nodes between the four geographical directions in the world; if we considered all of this, we would be amazed at how this region contains countries which top the lists of poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy in the world!
