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AnnAls of Terrorism

The mAsTer PlAnFor the new theorists o jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning.

By lAwrence wrighT

One jihadi writes that the next stage will be leaderless resistance, which will prepare the ground or war on open ronts.

Even as members of Al Qaeda watchedin exultation while the Twin Towersfell and the Pentagon burned on Septem-ber 11, 2001, they realized that the pendu-lum of catastrophe was swinging in theirdirection. Osama bin Laden later boastedthat he was the only one in the groupsupper hierarchy who had anticipated themagnitude of the wound that Al Qaedainflicted on America, but he also admit-

ted that he was surprised by the towerscollapse. His goal, for at least five years,had been to goad America into invadingAfghanistan, an ambition that had causedhim to continually raise the stakesthesimultaneous bombing of the UnitedStates Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,in August, 1998, followed by the attackon an American warship in the harbor ofAden, Yemen, in October, 2000. Nietherof those actions had led the United Statesto send troops to Afghanistan. After the

attacks on New York and Washington,however, it was clear that there wouldbe an overwhelming response. Al Qaedamembers began sending their familieshome and preparing for war.

Two months later, the Taliban gov-ernment in Afghanistan, which had givensanctuary to bin Laden, was routed, andthe Al Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora werepummelled. Although bin Laden and hischief lieutenants escaped death or capture,nearly eighty per cent of Al Qaedas mem-

bers in Afghanistan were killed. Worse,Al Qaedas cause was repudiated through-out the world, even in Muslim countries,

where the indiscriminate murder of civil-ians and the use of suicide operatives weredenounced as being contrary to Islam.

The remnants of the organization scat-tered and were on the run. Al Qaeda wasessentially dead.

From hiding places in Iran, Yemen,Iraq, and the tribal areas of western Paki-stan, Al Qaedas survivors lamented theirfailed strategy. Abu al-Walid al-Masri, a

senior leader of Al Qaedas inner council,later wrote that Al Qaedas experience inAfghanistan was a tragic example of anIslamic movement managed in an alarm-ingly meaningless way. He went on, Ev-eryone knew that their leader was leadingthem to the abyss and even leading theentire country to utter destruction, butthey continued to carry out his ordersfaithfully and with bitterness.

In June, 2002, bin Ladens sonHamzah posted a message on an AlQaeda Web site: Oh, Father! Where isthe escape and when will we have a home?Oh, Father! I see spheres of danger every-

where I look. . . . Tell me, Father, some-thing useful about what I see.

Oh, son! bin Laden replied. Sufficeto say that I am full of grief and sighs. . . . Ican only see a very steep path ahead.A decade has gone by in vagrancy andtravel, and here we are in our tragedy. Se-

curity has gone, but danger remains.In the view of Abu Musab al-Suri, a

Syrian who had been a member of Al Qa-edas inner council, and who is a theoristof jihad, the greatest loss was not the de-struction of the terrorist organization butthe downfall of the Taliban, which meantthat Al Qaeda no longer had a place totrain, organize, and recruit. The expulsionfrom Afghanistan, Suri later wrote, wasfollowed by three meager years which wespent as fugitives, dodging the interna-

tional dragnet by moving between safehouses and hideouts. In 2002, he fled toeastern Iran, where bin Ladens son Saadand Al Qaedas security chief, Saif al-Adl,had also taken refuge. There was a five-million-dollar bounty on his head. In thismoment of exile and defeat, he began toconceive the future of jihad.

Suri was born into a middle-class fam-ily in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958, theyear of bin Ladens birth. Red-hairedand sturdily built, he has a black belt in

judo; his real name is Mustafa Setmar-iam Nasar. He became involved in pol-itics at the University of Aleppo, wherehe studied engineering. Later, he movedto Jordan, where he joined the MuslimBrotherhood, an Islamist group that op-posed Syrias dictator, Hafez al-Assad. In1982, Assad decided that the Brother-hood posed a threat to his authority, andhis troops slaughtered as many as thirty

thousand people in the city of Hama, oneof the groups strongholds. The ruthless-ness of Assads response shocked Suri.He renounced the Brotherhood, whichhe held responsible for provoking thedestruction of Hama, and took refugein Europe for several years. In 1985, hemoved to Spain, where he married andbecame a Spanish citizen; two years later,he found his way to Afghanistan, wherehe met Osama bin Laden.

The two men have had a contentious

relationship. Although Suri became amember of Al Qaedas inner council, hegrew disillusioned by the fecklessness andthe disorganization that characterized AlQaedas training camps in Afghanistan.People come to us with empty headsand leave us with empty heads, he wrote.They have done nothing for Islam. Thisis because they have not received any ide-ological or doctrinal training.

In 1992, he moved back to Spain,where he helped to establish a terrorist

cell that played a part in the planning ofSeptember 11th. Two years later, Surimoved to England. He soon became afixture in the Islamist press in London,writing articles for the magazineAl Ansar,which promoted the insurgency in Alge-ria that resulted in more than a hundredthousand deaths. The magazines editorwas Abu Qatada, a Palestinian cleric whohas been characterized as Al Qaedasspiritual guide in Europe.Al Ansarwas,in many ways, the first jihadi think tank;Suri and other strategists suggested tac-


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tics for undermining the despotic re-gimes in the Arab world, and they pro-moted attacks on the West even asAmerican and European intelligenceagencies were largely unaware of thethreat that the Islamist movementposed.

Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journal-

ist who is currently the press aide to theSaudi Ambassador in Washington, PrinceTurki al-Faisal, met Qatada and Suri inthe early nineties. They struck him as farmore radical than Osama bin Laden; atthe time, Al Qaeda was primarily an anti-Communist organization. Osama was inthe moderate camp, Khashoggi recalledrecently. He coined the phrase Salafi ji-hadis to describe men, such as Abu Qa-tada and Suri, who had been influencedby Salafism, the puritanical, fundamen-

talist strain of Islam. Osama was flirtingwith these ideas, Khashoggi said. Hewas not the one who originated the radi-cal thinking that came to characterize AlQaeda. He joined these men, rather thanthe other way around. His organizationbecame the vehicle for their thinking.

Suri later wrote about bin Ladensconversion to his ideas, which took placeafter bin Laden returned to Afghanistan,in 1996. Salafi jihadis spoke with himabout a situation that angered him

deeply: the presence of American troopson the holy soil of the Arabian Peninsula.Corrupt Islamic scholars had lent their

authority to the Saudi royal family, the ji-hadis argued, and the royal family, inturn, had given legitimacy to the Amer-ican incursion. There were two possiblesolutions: either attack the royal familywhich would likely anger the Saudi peo-pleor strike at the American presence.This would force the Saudi family to de-

fend it, thereby losing its own legitimacyin the eyes of Muslims, Suri writes. BinLaden chose the second option.

Suri believed that the jihadi move-ment had nearly been extinguished bythe drying up of financial resources, thekilling or capture of many terrorist lead-ers, the loss of safe havens, and the in-creasing international coperation amongpolice agencies. (The British authoritieswere pursuing him as a suspect in the1995 Paris Mtro bombings.) Accord-

ingly, he saw the Talibans takeover ofAfghanistan, in 1996, as a golden op-portunity, and he went there the follow-ing year. He set up a military camp in Af-ghanistan, and experimented withchemical weapons. He also arranged binLadens first television interview withCNN. The journalist Peter Bergen, whospent several days in Suris companywhile producing the segment, and whorecently published an oral history, TheOsama bin Laden I Know, recalled, He

was tough and really smart. He seemedlike a real intellectual, very conversantwith history, and he had an intense seri-

ousness of purpose. He certainly im-pressed me more than bin Laden.

In 1999, Suri sent bin Laden an e-mail accusing him of endangering the

Taliban regime with his highly theatricalattacks on American targets. And hemocked bin Ladens love of publicity: Ithink our brother has caught the disease

of screens, flashes, fans, and applause. Inhis writings, Suri rarely mentioned thegroup and disavowed any direct connec-tion to it, despite having served on itsinner council. He preferred to speak morebroadly of jihad, which he saw as a socialmovement, encompassing all those whobear weaponsindividuals, groups, andorganizationsand wage jihad on theenemies of Islam. By 2000, he had begunpredicting the end of Al Qaeda, whosepreminence he portrayed as a stage in

the development of the worldwide Is-lamist uprising. Al Qaeda is not an orga-nization, it is not a group, nor do we wantit to be, he wrote. It is a call, a reference,a methodology. Eventually, its leader-ship would be eliminated, he said. (Surihimself was captured in Pakistan in No-

vember, 2005. American intelligencesources confirmed that Suri is in the cus-tody of another country but refused todisclose his exact location.) In the timethat remained to Al Qaeda, he argued, its

main goal should be to stimulate othergroups around the world to join the jihadimovement. His legacy, as he saw it, wasto codify the doctrines that animated Is-lamist jihad, so that Muslim youths of thefuture could discover the cause and begintheir own, spontaneous religious war.

In 2002, Suri, in his hideout in Iran,began writing his defining work, Callfor Worldwide Islamic Resistance,which is sixteen hundred pages long and

was published on the Internet in Decem-ber, 2004. Didactic and repetitive, butalso ruthlessly candid, the book dissectsthe faults of the jihadi movement and laysout a plan for the future of the struggle.The goal, he writes, is to bring about thelargest number of human and materialcasualties possible for America and its al-lies. He specifically targets Jews, West-erners in general, the members of theNATO alliance, Russia, China, atheists,pagans, and hypocrites, as well as anytype of external enemy. (The prolifera-tion of adversaries mirrors Al Qaedashatred of all other ideologies.)Get down to sales and move the goalposts.



And yet, at the same time, he bitterlyblames Al Qaeda for dragging the entire

jihadi movement into an unequal battlethat it is likely to lose. Unlike most jihaditheorists, Suri acknowledges the setbackcaused by September 11th. He lamentsthe demise of the Taliban, which he andother Salafi jihadis considered the mod-

ern worlds only true Islamic government.Americas war on terror, he complains,doesnt discriminate between Al Qaedaadherents and Muslims in general. Manyloyal Muslims, he writes, believe that theSeptember 11th attacks justified theAmerican assault and have given it a le-gitimate rationale for reoccupying the Is-lamic world. But Suri goes on to arguethat Americas plans for internationaldomination were already evident in thelikes of Nixon and Kissinger, and that

this agenda would have been pursuedwithout the provocation of September11th. Moreover, the American attack onAfghanistan was not really aimed at cap-turing or killing bin Laden; its true goal

was to sweep away the Taliban and elim-inate the rule of Islamic law.

In Suris view, the underground terror-ist movementthat is, Al Qaeda and itssleeper cellsis defunct. This approach

was a failure on all fronts, because ofits inability to achieve military victory or

to rally the Muslim people to its cause.He proposes that the next stage of jihad

will be characterized by terrorism cre-ated by individuals or small autonomousgroups (what he terms leaderless resis-tance), which will wear down the enemyand prepare the ground for the far moreambitious aim of waging war on openfrontsan outright struggle for terri-tory. He explains, Without confronta-tion in the field and seizing control of theland, we cannot establish a state, which is

the strategic goal of the resistance.Suri acknowledges that the Jew-

ish enemy, led by America and its non-believing, apostate, hypocritical allies,enjoys overwhelming military superiority,but he argues that the spiritual commit-ment of the jihadis is equally formidable.He questions Al Qaedas opposition todemocracy, which offers radical Islamistsan opportunity to secretly use this com-fortable and relaxed atmosphere to spreadout, reorganize their ranks, and acquirebroader public bases. In many Arabicstates, there is a predictable cycle of officialtolerance and savage repression, which

can work in favor of the Islamists. If theIslamists open the way for political mod-eration, Suri writes, they will stretch outhorizontally along the base and spread.So they once again exterminate and jihadgrows yet again! So then they try to openthings up once again, and Islam stretches

out and expands again!The Bush Administration has de-

clared a war of ideas against Islamism,Suri observes, and has had some success;he cites the modification of textbooks inmany Muslim countries. This effort, hewrites, must be countered by the propa-gation of the jihadi creedand this iswhat his book attempts to do, offering aminutely detailed account of the tenets ofSalafi jihadism. Suri urges his readers toreject their own repressive governments

and to rise up against Western occupa-tion and Zionism. Although the leadersof Al Qaeda have long excused theslaughter of innocents, and many of itsattacks have been directed at other Mus-lims, Suri specifically cautions againstharming other Muslims, women andchildren who may be nonbelievers, andother noncombatants.

Suri addresses the issue of Israel, writ-ing that the Zionist presence in Pales-tine is an insult to Muslims; but he alsoexcoriates the secular Palestinian Na-tional Authority that governs the coun-try. Armed jihad is the only solution, he

advises. Every mujahid must wage jihadagainst all forms of normalizationitsinstitutions, officials, and advocates . . .destroying them and assassinating thosewho rely on them . . . while paying atten-tion not to harm Muslims by mistake.

There are five regions, according to

Suri, where jihadis should focus theirenergies: Afghanistan, Central Asia,Yemen, Morocco, and, especially, Iraq.The American occupation of Iraq, he de-clares, inaugurated a historical new pe-riod that almost single-handedly rescuedthe jihadi movement just when many ofits critics thought it was finished.

The invasion of Iraq posed a dilemmafor Al Qaeda. Iraq is a largely Shiitenation, and Al Qaeda is composed of

Sunnis who believe that the Shia are her-etics. Shortly before the invasion, inMarch, 2003, bin Laden issued his ownlist of targets, which included Jordan,Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Ara-bia, and Yemennot Afghanistan orIraq. Presumably, he regarded thechances of a Taliban resurgence as re-mote; moreover, he was aware that anIraqi insurgency could ignite an Islamiccivil war and lead to ethnic cleansing ofthe Sunni minority.

The American occupation posed amajor opportunity, however, for a mannamed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A for-

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mer prisoner and sex offender, he wasa Bedouin from Jordan. Neither an in-tellectual nor a strategist, Zarqawi actedlargely on brute impulse, but he was areckless warrior who gained the respectof the Arab mujahideen when he ar-rived in Pakistan, in the early nineties. InPeshawar, he met a Palestinian sheikhnamed Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi,

who transformed him from a foot sol-dier in jihad to a leader who, for a time,rivalled bin Laden.

Maqdisi was already one of the mostrenowned ideologues of the radical Is-lamist movement. Incisive, unpredict-able, and sharp-tempered, he has a spir-itual authority and an originality thatmake him stand out among jihadi think-ers. His puritanism has led him to de-nounce many Arab rulers. In The Evi-dent Sacrileges of the Saudi State, his

widely circulated book, Maqdisi declareda fatwa excommunicating the Saudi royalfamilyin essence, a license for anyMuslim to murder them. (The bookinfluenced the men who bombed a SaudiNational Guard training center in Ri-yadh, in 1995, and also those who at-tacked American troops in Khobar thefollowing year.) Maqdisi is the mostinfluential jihadi thinker alive, Will Mc-Cants, a fellow at West Points Combat-ting Terrorism Center, told me.

Maqdisi and Zarqawi formed an im-mediate bond, an alliance of the man ofthought and the man of action. In 1993,

they returned to Jordan to start an Is-lamist group; the following year, bothmen were picked up by Jordanian au-thorities, who seized their weaponsgrenades and a machine gunand im-prisoned them.

Jordanian prisons were full of radicalsand prospective recruits, who were drawnto the cerebral sheikh and his ruthless as-

sistant. Zarqawi soon emerged as theleader of the Islamist group, while Maq-disi continued to be the voice of author-ity. His decisions were often controver-sial; for instance, when Hamas began itssuicide operations against Israel in 1994,Maqdisi denounced the attacks as un-Islamica position that Zarqawi sup-ported at the time.

In March, 1999, Jordans new king,Abdullah II, granted amnesty to politicalprisoners. Zarqawi went to Afghanistan,

but his defiant mentor chose to stay inJordan, where he felt that he was doingproductive work. He was soon back inprison.

Unruly and independent, Zarqawirefused to swear fidelity to bin Laden,and established his own camp in west-ern Afghanistan, populated mainly byJordanians, Syrians, and Palestinians.He was bluntly critical of Al Qaedasdecision to wage war against Americaand the West rather than against cor-rupt Arab dictatorships.

After September 11th, Zarqawi andhis followers were flushed out of Af-

ghanistan by the invasion of the coali-tion forces. He took refuge in Iran and,eventually, in the Kurdish region of Iraq.In April, 2003, after the United Statesinvasion of Iraq, he set up a new terrorgroup, al-Tawid wal Jihad (Monothe-ism and Jihad). Unlike the senior mem-bers of Al Qaeda, Zarqawi was obsessed

with fighting the Shiites, the most evilof mankind, thinking that he wouldunite the much larger Sunni world intoa definitive conquest of what he saw asthe great Islamic heresy. That August,shortly after he began his Iraq campaign,he bombed a Shiite mosque, killing ahundred and twenty-five Muslim wor-shippers, including the most popularShiite politician in the country, Ayatol-lah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who,had he lived, would probably have be-

come Iraqs first freely elected President.In a letter to bin Laden in January,2004, which was intercepted by U.S. in-telligence, Zarqawi explained that if wesucceed in dragging [the Shia] into thearena of sectarian war it will become pos-sible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis asthey feel imminent danger. He said thathe would formally pledge allegiance toAl Qaeda if bin Laden endorsed his bat-tle against the Shiites. Bin Laden toldZarqawi to go ahead and use the Shi-

ite card, perhaps because his son Saadand other Al Qaeda figures were beingheld in Iran, and he hoped that Zarqawiwould persuade the Iranians to handthem over; he hesitated, however, to for-mally ally himself with Zarqawi.

Meanwhile, Zarqawis operatives hadspread into Europe, where they forgeddocuments and smuggled illegal aliensinto the continent while gathering recruitsfor Iraq. One of his lieutenants, Amerel-Azizi, is a suspect in the March 11,

2004, train bombings in Madrid. LikeZarqawis organization, the Spanish cellincluded former prison inmates and op-erated more like a street gang than likethe highly bureaucratic Al Qaeda. Zar-qawi and his men were putting into ac-tion the vision that Abu Musab al-Surihad laid out for them: small, spontaneousgroups carrying out individual acts of ter-ror in Europe, and an open struggle forterritory in Iraq.

Suicide bombings became a trade-mark of Zarqawis operation, despiteMaqdisis condemnation of the practice.And Zarqawi soon improvised a more

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gruesome signature: in May, 2004, hewas filmed decapitating Nicholas Berg, ayoung American contractor. The footagewas posted on the Internet, and it wasfollowed by other beheadings, along withbombings and assassinationshundredsof them.

Within radical Islamist circles, Zar-

qawis gory executions and attacks onMuslims at prayer became a sourceof controversy. From prison, Maq-disi chastised his former protg. Thepure hands of jihad fighters must not bestained by shedding inviolable blood,he wrote in an article that was posted onhis Web site in July, 2004. There is nopoint in vengeful acts that terrify people,provoke the entire world against muja-hideen, and prompt the world to fightthem. Maqdisi also advised jihadis not

to go to Iraq, because it will be an in-ferno for them. This is, by God, the big-gest catastrophe.

Zarqawi angrily refuted Maqdisis re-marks, saying that he took orders onlyfrom God; however, he was beginningto realize that his efforts in Iraq were an-other dead end for jihad. The space ofmovement is starting to get smaller, hehad written to bin Laden in June. Thegrip is starting to be tightened on theholy warriors necks and, with the spread

of soldiers and police, the future is be-coming frightening. Finally, bin Ladenagreed to lend his influence to assist Zar-qawi in drawing recruits to his cause. InOctober, 2004, Zarqawi announced hisnew job title: emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

From that time until he was killed byAmerican bombs, in June, 2006, Zar-qawi led a murderous campaign un-matched in the history of Al Qaeda.Before Zarqawi became a member, AlQaeda had killed some thirty-two hun-

dred people. Zarqawis forces probablykilled twice that number.

In July, 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri,Al Qaedas chief ideologue and second-in-command, attempted to steer the ni-hilistic Zarqawi closer to the foundersoriginal course. In a letter, he outlinedthe next steps for the Iraqi jihad: Thefirst stage: Expel the Americans fromIraq. The second stage: Establish anIslamic authority or emirate, then de-velop it and support it until it achievesthe level of a caliphate. . . . The thirdstage: Extend the jihad wave to the sec-ular countries neighboring Iraq. The

fourth stage: It may coincide with whatcame beforethe clash with Israel, be-cause Israel was established only to chal-lenge any new Islamic entity.

Zawahiri advised Zarqawi to moder-ate his attacks on Iraqi Shiites and to stopbeheading hostages. We are in a bat-tle, Zawahiri reminded him. And more

than half of this battle is taking place inthe battlefield of the media.Zarqawi did not heed Al Qaedas re-

quests. As the Iraqi jihad fell into bar-barism, Al Qaedas leaders began ad-vising their followers to go to Sudanor Kashmir, where the chances of vic-tory seemed more promising. Al Qaeda,meanwhile, was confronting a newproblem, which one of its prime think-ers, Abu Bakr Naji, had already antic-ipated, in an Internet document titled

The Management of Savagery.

Najis identity is unknown. OtherIslamist writers have said that hewas Tunisian, but a Saudi newspaperidentified him as Jordanian. Will Mc-Cants, the West Point scholar, has trans-

lated Najis work. He said that AbuBakr Naji might be a collective pseud-onym for various theorists of jihad. But,he added, Najis work has appearedon Sawt al-Jihad, the authoritative AlQaeda Internet magazine, meaning thatit reflects the prevailing views of the or-ganization. Other analysts are cautious

about giving too much weight to Na-jis words. Speaking at a conference ear-lier this year, David Kilcullen, the chiefcounterterrorism strategist at the U.S.State Department, highlighted the ten-dency of extremist movements to frag-ment into splinter groups based on ide-ological differences. Its important torealize that there are numerous com-peting points of view within the move-ment, he said. Not everything pub-lished in jihadist forums has the approval

of the senior leadership.Najis document, which appeared inthe spring of 2004, addresses the crisisand the opportunity posed by the tumultin the Arab world. During our longjourney, through victories and defeats,through the blood, severed limbs and


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How slowly should I do this to make you the most upset?

skulls, some of the movements have dis-appeared and some have remained, hewrites. If we meditate on the factorcommon to the movements which haveremained, we find that there is politicalaction in addition to military action.Many Islamist groups have disparagedthe notion of politics, considering it a

filthy activity of Satan, but understand-ing the politics of the enemy, Naji sug-gests, is a necessary evil. We urge thatthe leaders work to master political sci-ence just as they would work to mastermilitary science.

Naji argues that Al Qaedas publicimage has suffered among Muslims be-cause the organization has failed to carrythe battle to the media. The first stepin putting our plan in place should beto focus on justifying the action ratio-

nally and through the Sharia, he says.Second, we must communicate thisjustification clearly to the people and themasses such that any means or attemptto distort our action through the mediais cut off.

The media is especially important inthe chaotic period that the jihadi move-ment has entered, when people are un-derstandably offended by the carnage. Ifwe succeed in the management of thissavagery, that stageby the permission

of Godwill be a bridge to the Islamicstate which has been awaited since thefall of the caliphate, he proclaims. If wefailwe seek refuge with God from

thatit does not mean an end of thematter. Rather, this failure will lead to anincrease in savagery.

Naji writes in the dry, oddly tem-perate style that characterizes many AlQaeda strategy studies. And, like all ji-hadi theorists, he embeds his analysisin the tradition of Ibn Taymiyya, the

thirteenth-century Arab theologianwhose ideas undergird the Salafi, orWahhabi, tradition; bin Laden fre-quently refers to Ibn Taymiyya in hisspeeches. The remarks of bin Laden andZawahiri play only a modest part in Na-jis work. Indeed, Naji is a more atten-tive reader of Western thinkers: the the-sis of The Management of Savagery isdrawn from the observation of the Yalehistorian Paul Kennedy, in his bookRise and Fall of the Great Powers

(1987), that imperial overreach leads tothe downfall of empires.Naji began writing his study in 1998,

when the jihad movements most promis-ing targets appeared to be Jordan, thecountries of North Africa, Nigeria, SaudiArabia, and Yemenroughly the samecountries that bin Laden later named.Naji recommended that jihadis continu-ally attack the vital economic centers ofthese countries, such as tourist sites andoil refineries, in order to make the regimes

concentrate their forces, leaving their pe-ripheries unprotected. Sensing weakness,Naji predicts, the people will loseconfidence in their governments, which

will respond with increasingly ineffectiveacts of repression. Eventually, the govern-ments will lose control. Savagery will nat-urally follow, offering Islamists the oppor-tunity to capture the allegiance of apopulation that is desperate for order.(Naji cites Afghanistan before the Talibanas an example.) Even though the jihadis

will have caused the chaos, that fact willbe forgotten as the fighters impose secu-rity, provide food and medical treatment,and establish Islamic courts of justice.

After coalition forces overran Al Qaedacompounds in Afghanistan in late 2001,they seized thousands of pages of internalmemoranda, records of strategy sessionsand ethical debates, and military manuals,but not a single page devoted to the poli-tics of Al Qaeda. Alone among Al Qaedatheorists, Naji briefly addresses whether

jihadis are prepared to run a state shouldthey succeed in toppling one. He quotesa colleague who posed the question As-suming that we get rid of the apostate re-gimes today, who will take over the minis-try of agriculture, trade, economics, etc.?Beyond the simplistic notion of impos-ing a caliphate and establishing the ruleof Islamic law, the leaders of the organi-zation appear never to have thought aboutthe most basic facts of government. Whatkind of economic model would they fol-

low? How would they cope with unem-ployment, so rampant in the Muslim

world? Where do they stand on the en-vironment? Health care? The truth, asNaji essentially concedes, is that the rad-ical Islamists have no interest in govern-ment; they are interested only in jihad. Inhis book, Naji breezily answers his friendas follows: It is not a prerequisite that themujahid movement has to be prepared es-pecially for agriculture, trade, and indus-try. . . . As for the one who manages the

techniques in each ministry, he can be apaid employee who has no interest in pol-icy and is not a member of the movementor the party. There are many examples ofthat and a proper explanation would takea long time.

Fouad Hussein is a radical Jordanianjournalist who met Zarqawi andMaqdisi in 1996, when, he writes, a ca-reer of trouble led me to SuwaqahPrison. He had published a series of ar-ticles criticizing the Jordanian govern-ment, and, in response, the authoritieslocked him up for a month. Since Zar-



qawi and Maqdisi were being held at the

same jail, Hussein sought out interviewswith them; eventually, Zarqawi servedhim tea while Maqdisi talked politics.Zarqawi mentioned that he had been insolitary confinement for more than eightmonths and had lost his toenails as a re-sult of being tortured. The next week,Zarqawi was sent to solitary again, andhis followers staged a riot. Hussein be-came the negotiator between the prison-ers and the warden, who relentedanepisode that cemented Husseins stand-

ing among the radical Islamists.In 2005, Hussein produced what is

perhaps the most definitive outline of AlQaedas master plan: a book titled Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of AlQaeda. Although it is largely a favor-able biography of Zarqawi and his move-ment, Hussein incorporates the insightsof other Al Qaeda membersnotably,Saif al-Adl, the security chief.

It is chilling to read this work and re-alize how closely recent events seem tobe hewing to Al Qaedas forecasts. Basedon interviews with Zarqawi and Adl,Hussein claims that dragging Iran into

conflict with the United States is key to

Al Qaedas strategy. Expanding the areaof conflict in the Middle East will causethe U.S. to overextend its forces. Accord-ing to Hussein, Al Qaeda believes thatIran expects to be attacked by the U.S.,because of its interest in building a nu-clear weapon. Accordingly, Iran is pre-paring to retaliate for or abort this strikeby means of using powerful cards in itshand, he writes. These tactics includetargeting oil installations in the PersianGulf, which could cut off sixty per cent

of the worlds oil supplies, destabilizingWestern economies.

In an ominous passage, Hussein notesthat for fifteen yearsor since the endof the first Gulf WarIran has beenbusy building a secret global army ofhighly trained personnel and the neces-sary financial and technological capabili-ties to carry out any kind of mission. Heis clearly referring to Hezbollah, whichhas so far focussed its attention on Is-rael. According to Hussein, Iran hasidentified American and Jewish targetsaround the world. This secret army is ledby two professional Lebanese men who

have pledged full allegiance to Iran andwho hold enough of a grudge againstthe Americans to qualify them to inflictdamage on Jewish and American inter-ests around the world.

Iran, he continues, has been cultivat-ing good relations with other Palestin-ian resistance groups, including Hamas.

Iran views these parties as its entrenchedwings in occupied Palestine, Husseinwrites, asserting that the peace talks be-tween Israelis and Palestinians at theEgyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikhin February, 2005, were secretly aimed atcountering Iranian influence on the Pal-estinian resistance. Al Qaeda interpretedthis as the first step toward launching anattack on Iran, Hussein claims. Both theU.S. and Israel view Hezbollah, the Is-lamist group in Lebanon, as a creature of

the Iranian state, and are intent on elimi-nating it. The military campaign againstIran will begin when the United Statesand Israel succeed in disarming Hezbol-lah, Hussein predicts.

Hussein claims, without offering evi-dence, that Iran already has thirty thou-sand intelligence agents in Iraq. Sincethe Americans have not succeeded ineliminating the Sunni resistance, how canthey deal with the situation if the Shiites

join the resistance? Iran plans to incite its

proponents in Iraq to join the anti-U.S.resistance in the event that the UnitedStates or Israel launches an attack on Iran.Iran plans to open its border to the resis-tance and provide it with what it needs toachieve a swift and major victory againstthe Americans. Al Qaeda, he writes, alsoexpects the Americans to go after Iransprincipal ally in the region, Syria. The re-moval of the Assad regimea longtimegoal of jihadiswill allow the country tobe infiltrated by Al Qaeda, putting the

terrorists within reach, at last, of Israel.Hussein observes that Al Qaedas

ideologues have studied the failure of Is-lamist movements in the past and con-cluded that they lacked concrete, realisticgoals. Therefore, he writes, Al Qaedadrew up a feasible plan within a well-defined time frame. The plan was basedon improving the Islamic jihadist actionin quality and quantity and expanding itto include the entire world.

Al Qaedas twenty-year plan beganon September 11th, with a stage thatHussein calls The Awakening. Theideologues within Al Qaeda believed

The JoKe

One afternoon you skipped schoolto go for a swim in the river.There were a few older boys theresplashing around naked,

their clothes in neat piles on the bank.That time someone hid yours as a joke.You squatted in shallow waterpleading, while they took their timecombing their hair, getting dressed,running off without a glance back.

Little by little it got dark and cold.The lights went on in the city.Still, you were going to wait a bit longerbefore stepping out of the river

to make a search among the rocks

or, if no luck, scale the embankment,dash bare-assed over the railroad tracks,slip mothlike past the first lamppost,let shadows lying in wait take you homeon small streets lined with trees.

Charles Simic


11/1358 The new yorKer, sePTemBer 11, 2006

that the Islamic nation was in a state ofhibernation, because of repeated catas-trophes inflicted upon Muslims by theWest. By striking Americathe headof the serpentAl Qaeda caused theUnited States to lose consciousnessand act chaotically against those who

attacked it. This entitled the party thathit the serpent to lead the Islamic na-tion. This first stage, says Hussein,ended in 2003, when American troopsentered Baghdad.

The second, Eye-Opening stagewill last until the end of 2006, Husseinwrites. Iraq will become the recruit-ing ground for young men eager to at-tack America. In this phase, he argues,perhaps wishfully, Al Qaeda will movefrom being an organization to a mush-

rooming invincible and popular trend.The electronic jihad on the Internet willpropagate Al Qaedas ideas, and Mus-lims will be pressed to donate fundsto make up for the seizure of terror-ist assets by the West. The third stage,Arising and Standing Up, will lastfrom 2007 to 2010. Al Qaedas focuswill be on Syria and Turkey, but it willalso begin to directly confront Israel, inorder to gain more credibility amongthe Muslim population.

In the fourth stage, lasting until 2013,Al Qaeda will bring about the demiseof Arab governments. The creeping

loss of the regimes power will lead toa steady growth in strength within AlQaeda, Hussein predicts. Meanwhile,attacks against the Middle East petro-leum industry will continue, and Amer-icas power will deteriorate through theconstant expansion of the circle of con-

frontation. By then, Al Qaeda will havecompleted its electronic capabilities, andit will be time to use them to launch elec-tronic attacks to undermine the U.S.economy. Islamists will promote theidea of using gold as the internationalmedium of exchange, leading to the col-lapse of the dollar.

Then an Islamic caliphate can be de-clared, inaugurating the fifth stage ofAl Qaedas grand plan, which will lastuntil 2016. At this stage, the West-

ern fist in the Arab region will loosen,and Israel will not be able to carry outpremptive or precautionary strikes,Hussein writes. The international bal-ance will change. Al Qaeda and the Is-lamist movement will attract powerfulnew economic allies, such as China, andEurope will fall into disunity.

The sixth phase will be a period oftotal confrontation. The now estab-lished caliphate will form an IslamicArmy and will instigate a worldwide fightbetween the believers and the non-be-lievers. Hussein proclaims, The worldwill realize the meaning of real terror-

ism. By 2020, definitive victory willhave been achieved. Victory, accordingto the Al Qaeda ideologues, means thatfalsehood will come to an end. . . . TheIslamic state will lead the human raceonce again to the shore of safety and theoasis of happiness.

A l Qaedas version of utopia hasdrawn the allegiance of a new gen-eration of Arabs, who have been tu-tored on the Internet by ideologues suchas Suri and Naji. This third generationof mujahideen, as Suri calls them, havebeen radicalized by September 11th, theoccupation of Iraq, and the Palestinianintifada. (Suri wrote this before the cur-rent struggle in Lebanon.) Those jihadisfighting in the conflict in Iraq have beentrained in vicious urban warfare against

the most formidable army in history.They will return to their home countriesand add their expertise to the new cellsspringing up in the Middle East, CentralAsia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malay-sia, and many European nations.

With a few troublesome exceptions,America has been free of the kind of in-digenous Islamist terrorism that has re-cently visited Britain. It is a tribute to theAmerican Muslim community, whichis more integrated into American soci-

ety than its counterparts in Europe. Rel-atively few Muslims in the U.S. havebeen imprisoned, and the typical Mus-lim household earns more than the na-tional average. The situation in Europeis starkly different, which means that itwill be an ongoing source of trouble, andmay continue to be a launching pad forthe kind of attacks against America rep-resented by the alleged plot to blow up asmany as ten airliners over the Atlantic.

In 2002, the Dutch government com-

missioned a study of the recruits to theIslamist movement. The report, titledRecruitment for the Jihad in the Neth-erlands, divides the jihadis into threegroups. First are young men of Dutchdescent who have converted to Islamaphenomenon, noticed elsewhere in Eu-rope, in which traditional forms of wor-ship have lost their allure and radicalIslam functions as an all-encompassingidentity and as a form of protest. Manyof these conversions take place in prison.The second category is composed mainlyof illegal Arab immigrants who have lit-tle knowledge of the culture and lan-


12/13

guage of their host country. The thirdand largest category is made up of thesons and grandsons of predominatelyMoroccan immigrants, native speakersof Dutch who speak little or no Arabic.This group, caught between cultures,identifies most profoundly with radicalIslam.

After the murder of the filmmakerTheo van Gogh, in Amsterdam in 2004,the government published another study,From Dawa to Jihad, detailing thethreats from radical Islam. This studynotes a sharp difference between tradi-tional radical political Islam and whatthe authors term radical-Islamic puritan-ism, which characterizes the new genera-tion. Traditional radical Islam was homo-geneous and organized; it had a detailedideology with a specific vision of a non-

Western alternative society. There was,in theory, a peaceful path to this idealizedvision, but the traditional radical thinkersbelieved that this path had been cut off bythe West, making jihadwhich they sawas a political struggle carried out on thebattlefieldthe only alternative. The ide-ology of the new generation, comprisinga mixture of ethnic identities, is alarm-ingly vague. Their only political goal isa return to the ideals of the seventh-cen-tury Prophet and his early successors; they

spout messianic slogans about the caliph-ate and imposing Sharia, without a clearidea of what those goals entail. They cat-egorically reject the possibility of a peace-ful path. They believe that the world isdivided between sons of light and sonsof darkness, and that a fight to the end isthe will of God.

Al Qaedas apocalyptic agenda is notshared by all Islamists. Althoughmost jihadi groups approve of Al Qa-

edas attacks on America and Europe,their own goals are often more paro-chial, having to do with purifying Islamand toppling regimes in their own coun-tries which they see as heretical. Many ofthese groups would be happy to see AlQaeda disappear, so that their campaignscan be understood as nationalist guerrillastruggles with specific political goals.

This rupture has grown increasinglyapparent in the past five years. SheikhMuhammad Hussein Fadlallah, Hezbol-lahs spiritual leader, publicly denouncedthe September 11th attacks and con-demned Al Qaedas use of suicide bomb-

ers, even though the tactic was employedin the 1983 attacks on the U.S. Embassyin Beirut and the barracks of Americanand French troops in Lebanon, both of

which are believed to have been carriedout by Hezbollah. After September 11th,leaders of the Egyptian Islamist organiza-tion, Gamaa Islamiya, which has worked

closely with Al Qaeda in the past, pub-licly condemned Al Qaedas tactics andits goals of worldwide jihad. Even some ofZawahiris former colleagues in the Egyp-tian terror group he formed, Al Jihad,argue that Al Qaeda has undermined thecause of Islam by instigating anti-Muslimsentiment in the U.S. and the West.

It is notable how seldom these ideo-logues refer to the words of bin Ladenor Zawahiri, the nominal leaders of themovement, perhaps because the decla-

rations of Al Qaedas leadership are di-rected more at Americans and Euro-peans than at the jihadis.Beware thescripted enemy, who plays to a global au-dience, David Kilcullen, the counterter-rorism strategist at the State Department,

wrote in a paper now being used by theU.S. military in Iraq as a handbook fordealing with the insurgency. Al Qaeda,he wrote, propagates a single narrativeaimed at influencing the West; but eachfaction within the jihadi movement has

its own version of this narrative, oftensharply different from the message being

put forward by bin Laden and Zawahiri.Although American and European

intelligence communities are aware of thejihadi texts, the work of these ideologuesoften reads like a playbook that U.S. pol-icymakers have been slavishly, if inad-vertently, following. The data dont getto the top, because the decision-makers

are not looking for that kind of informa-tion, a policy analyst who works closelywith the C.I.A., told me. They thinkthey know better.

As the writings of Abu Musab al-Suri, Abu Bakr Naji, Fouad Hussein,and others make clear, the tradition ofSalafi jihad existed before bin Laden andAl Qaeda and will likely survive them;yet, from the beginning of the war onterror, the strategy of the Administra-tion has been to decapitate Al Qaedas

leadership. Bruce Hoffman, who is theauthor of Inside Terrorism and a pro-fessor at Georgetown Universitys Schoolof Foreign Service, told me, One of theproblems with the kill-or-capture met-ric is that it has often been to the exclu-sion of having a deeper, richer under-standing of the movement, its origins,and our adversaries mindset. The nu-ances are absolutely critical. Our adver-saries are wedded to the ideology thatinforms and fuels their struggle, and, by

not paying attention, we risk not know-ing our enemy.

I had a bit o a quiet day, so I sculpted you in butter.


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