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Al Qaeda Discusses Losing Iraq

Sarge

By Sarge
in The Tailgate

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Sarge

Sarge

Posted
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I thought we had no strategy? That our presense would only cause more people to become terrorists?

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20080527.aspx

May 27, 2008: Al Qaeda web sites are making a lot of noise about "why we lost in Iraq." Western intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in several of these Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was steep and catastrophic. According to their stats, in late 2006, al Qaeda was responsible for 60 percent of the terrorist attacks, and nearly all the ones that involved killing a lot of civilians. The rest of the violence was carried out by Iraqi Sunni Arab groups, who were trying in vain to scare the Americans out of the country.

Today, al Qaeda has been shattered, with most of its leadership and foot soldiers dead, captured or moved from Iraq. As a result, al Qaeda attacks have declined more than 90 percent. Worse, most of their Iraqi Sunni Arab allies have turned on them, or simply quit. This "betrayal" is handled carefully on the terrorist web sites, for it is seen as both shameful, and perhaps recoverable.

This defeat was not as sudden as it appeared to be, and some Islamic terrorist web sites have been discussing the problem for several years. The primary cause has been Moslems killed as a side effect of attacks on infidel troops, Iraqi security forces and non-Sunnis. Al Qaeda plays down the impact of this, calling the Moslem victims "involuntary martyrs." But that's a minority opinion. Most Moslems, and many other Islamic terrorists, see this as a surefire way to turn the Moslem population against the Islamic radicals. That's what happened earlier in Algeria, Afghanistan, Egypt and many other places. It's really got nothing to do with religion. The phenomenon hits non-Islamic terrorists as well (like the Irish IRA and the Basque ETA).

The senior al Qaeda leadership saw the problem, and tried to convince the "Al Qaeda In Iraq" leadership to cool it. That didn't work. As early as 2004, some Sunni Arabs were turning on al Qaeda because of the "involuntary martyrs" problem. The many dead Shia Arab civilians led to a major terror campaign by the Shia majority. They controlled the government, had the Americans covering their backs, and soon half the Sunni Arab population were refugees.

Meanwhile, the "Al Qaeda In Iraq" leadership was out of control. Most of these guys are really out there, at least in terms of fanaticism and extremism. This led to another fatal error. They declared the establishment of the "Islamic State of Iraq" in late 2006. This was an act of bravado, and touted as the first step in the re-establishment of the caliphate (a global Islamic state, ruled over by God's representative on earth, the caliph.) The caliphate has been a fiction for over a thousand years. Early on, the Islamic world was split by ethnic and national differences, and the first caliphate fell apart after a few centuries. Various rulers have claimed the title over the centuries, but since 1924, when the Turks gave it up (after four centuries), no one of any stature has taken it up. So when al Qaeda "elected" a nobody as the emir of the "Islamic State of Iraq", and talked about this being the foundation of the new caliphate, even many pro-al Qaeda Moslems were aghast. When al Qaeda could not, in 2007, exercise any real control over the parts of Iraq they claimed as part of the new Islamic State, it was the last straw. The key supporters, battered by increasingly effective American and Iraqi attacks, dropped their support for al Qaeda, and the terrorist organization got stomped to bits by the "surge offensive" of last year. The final insult was delivered by the former Iraqi Sunni Arab allies, who quickly switched sides, and sometimes even worked with the Americans (more so than the Shia dominated Iraqi security forces) to hunt down and kill al Qaeda operators.

If you can read Arabic, you can easily find these pro-terrorism sites, and see for yourself how al Qaeda is trying to explain its own destruction to its remaining supporters. While it's common to assume the Information War has been going against the West, this was not the case when you checked with what was going on inside the enemy camp.

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Predicto

Predicto

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Interesting read, and hopeful. Thanks for posting it.

Just one question - what do you mean by "our strategy?" Are you saying that it was our strategy to have Al Qaeda maximize civilian deaths so that the Iraqis would get sick of them (because that is what the article says caused the change)? If we really pulled that off, we are really awesome tricksters aren't we. :rolleyes:

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SkinsHokieFan

SkinsHokieFan

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Right because the DOD/DIA/Pentagon report about how we're less safe isn't as credible as strategypage.com that reports on what al Qaeda websites think.

:doh:

Well the facts on the ground agree with this

Here is another story talking about the "involuntary martyrs" impact in places like Pakistan and across the Middle East

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/fareed_zakaria/2008/05/the_only_thing_we_have_to_fear.html

The Only Thing We Have to Fear ...

You know that we are living in scary times. Terrorist groups are metastasizing all over the globe. Al Qaeda has re-established its bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hizbullah, Hamas and other radical Islamic groups are gaining strength. You hear this stuff all the time, on television and on the campaign trail. Amid the din, it's hard to figure out the facts. Well, finally we have a well-researched, independent analysis of the data relating to terrorism, released last week by Canada's Simon Fraser University. Its findings will surprise you.

It explains that there is a reason you're scared. The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups-and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START-it was almost never described as such." To take just two examples, Mack pointed out that in 2004, the Janjaweed militia killed at least 723 civilians in Sudan (as documented by independent studies). The MIPT recorded zero deaths in Sudan from terrorism that year; START counted only 17. In Congo in 1999, independent studies identified hundreds killed by militia actions. The MIPT notes zero deaths that year from terrorism; and START, seven.

Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islam-ist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Bena-zir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."

The University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management (I wish academic centers would come up with shorter names!) has released another revealing study, documenting a 54 percent decline in the number of organizations using violence across the Middle East and North Africa between 1985 and 2004. The real rise, it points out, is in the number of groups employing nonviolent means of protest, which increased threefold during the same period.

Why have you not heard about studies like this or the one from Simon Fraser, which was done by highly regarded scholars, released at the United Nations and widely discussed in many countries around the world-from Canada to Australia? Because it does not fit into the narrative of fear that we have all accepted far too easily.

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SkinsHokieFan

SkinsHokieFan

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Good news.

But do you think their message boards are full of posters flaming each other about such defeatist talk only enabling the evil crusader American empire? :silly:

:laugh:

The talk in the streets in Pakistan (by the more fanatical people) was a fear the Americans are coming after them next (them being these *******s who bomb people)

But these people also don't see a difference between the Pakistani gov't and the Americans

One of the best examples of this happened in Pakistan last year with the Red Mosque incident in Islamabad. The populace was furious that Musharaf did not go in and just completely crush those jerks. However, that doesn't sell a story to the west, because after all, Pakistan is completely backwards and full of radicals

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SkinsHokieFan

SkinsHokieFan

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Yea, its statistics. You know what they say. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I'll give you some personal stories from Pakistan and talking to family.

Or you could read the literally dozens of blog posts/articles I have posted over the last 6 months about this. And you clearly have not read the article I posted because you would see its not exactly a "rah rah Bush rules" article.

In fact its the opposite

Your choice :)

Or you can just admit, that you got nothing :laugh:

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SkinsHokieFan

SkinsHokieFan

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SHF, it is time for Pakistan to open the borders so we can finish the job. 2 cents.

:laugh:

If I wasn't going to a movie in 7 minutes I'd go into far more detail about it, and I have in a few posts over the past 5 months. It may be one of the most complex and ignorant regions in the world. On top of that, no part in thanks to our role, our biggest ally in Pakistan (Musharaf) is essentially nutered

The Pakistani gov't hasn't had control there since 1948

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DarrellsMyHero28

DarrellsMyHero28

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Well the facts on the ground agree with this

Here is another story talking about the "involuntary martyrs" impact in places like Pakistan and across the Middle East

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/fareed_zakaria/2008/05/the_only_thing_we_have_to_fear.html

Its definitely good news, but we still have to realize that the fact is the United States is less safe from terrorist attacks at home and abroad since we went into Iraq. This may be an area of improvement but overall we're worse off.

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Sarge

Sarge

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Its definitely good news, but we still have to realize that the fact is the United States is less safe from terrorist attacks at home and abroad since we went into Iraq. This may be an area of improvement but overall we're worse off.

Yeah, because there have been so many domestic terrorist attacks since 9/11 :rolleyes:

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