Where do we go from here? This is the question that Islamist groups are posing these days in the murky space they inhabit on the margins of reality. It is asked in mosques controlled by radicals, touched upon in articles published by fellow-travelers, and debated in the chat-rooms of websites operated by militant groups.
Leaving aside the usual suggestions to hijack a few more passenger jets or to poison the drinking water of big cities in the West or to blow up this or that monument in Western capitals, the movement appears to have run out of ideas. It may even be passing through its deepest crisis of imagination since the 9/11 attacks against the United States.
There are several reasons for this.
To start with there is the fact that Al-Qaeda which operated as an efficient organ of command and control has been smashed into pieces. Of the top 20 leaders of the network only two, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, are believed to be still alive and free, albeit in hiding. But the two appear to have no regular organizational contact with Islamist cells anywhere in the world. Since December 2001 the two have managed to send a total of six authenticated messages from their hideouts. That the messages reached the outside world is mainly due to the fact that an Arab satellite television channel was prepared to broadcast them virtually unedited. Al-Qaeda, which published a total of 83 books and pamphlets in 2001, has managed to bring out only one book since 9/11, dealing with the war in Iraq.
The difficulty of contacting Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri, generally referred to by the Islamists as “the sheikhs”, was illustrated recently when Abu-Mussab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Al-Qaeda group in Iraq, tried to obtain a fatwa (edict) from them authorizing the mass murder of Iraqi Shiite women and children. It took Al-Zarqawi nearly six weeks to obtain the green light he wanted from Al-Zawahiri.
The disruption of Al-Qaeda’s leadership has had other consequences.
For the past year or so Al-Zawahiri has been urging militants from all over the world, including North America and Europe, to converge on the Middle East for a regional “jihad” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Bin Laden, however, has been preaching a totally different strategy. He wants the jihadists, including “sleepers” in America and Europe, to carry out other “spectacular coups” inside the United States.
So far, however, both strategies have failed.
There is no sign of the new fronts that Al-Zawahiri wanted to open in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. At the same time Bin Laden’s desperate pleas for doing “something big” inside the US have produced no results.
More importantly, the governments of the regional countries targeted have begun to fight back. In Pakistan more than 13,000 schools suspected of propagating extremist ideas have been shut in the past two years. In Yemen, the number of such schools to be shut is around 24,000. There are also signs that Afghan, Pakistani, Saudi, and Iraqi authorities have managed to infiltrate at least some terror groups.
Since 2003 hundreds of terrorists have been picked up in the countries concerned, in most cases thanks to tip-offs from repenting militants. The Islamist websites, and sermons at mosques controlled by Al-Qaeda sympathizers in the West, are these days full of warning against the “munafeqin” (hypocrites) who join the movement to denounce its members, often in the hope of reward. In Pakistan alone the CIA is believed to be spending some $80 million a year on a network of informers that has provided information leading to dozens of arrests by Pakistani authorities.
Earlier this month, the Russians managed to find and kill Aslan Maskhadov, the principal Chechen rebel leader, thanks to a tip-off that cost them $10 million.
Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia have also scored major successes in “turning-around” operations aimed at persuading the militants to repent and return to normal life. More than 1400 former militants have thus been “turned-around” in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, according to official estimates.
While thus hemorrhaging, the Islamist movement is also finding it increasingly difficult to attract recruits, especially within the Muslim world. But even in Western Europe, where Muslim communities still represent fertile ground for recruits, the number of “volunteers”, having reached a peak in the autumn of 2003, has been falling since.
One big problem is that the number of places where Islamists could hide in safety is dwindling. According to regional intelligence sources, the terror networks cannot hide more than a few dozen people in the remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan at any given time. Gone are the days when Bin Laden and his cohorts ruled over mini-emirates of their own in the Hindukush and Waziristan with their several wives, numerous children and extended entourage.
Today, the only place between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean where the FBI is not present is the Islamic Republic of Iran where the trail of Al-Qaeda goes cold. But even then the Islamic Republic can never be regarded as a permanent safe haven for Bin Ladenists whose aims include the killing of as many Shiites as possible.
For the first time in two decades, the Islamist movement is also beginning to face fund-raising difficulties. The generous donations that indirectly came from various regional countries have stopped while scores of bank accounts operated by the militants have been frozen. A total of 103 charities suspected of raising funds for terror have been shut or otherwise neutralized in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait alone. Some businessmen still manage to channel funds to various groups, often through third parties. But these channels are also being detected and shut one by one.
One reason for the growing ties between the Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda and pro-Saddam terror gangs is the fact that the latter still have vast sums of money, mostly stolen from the Iraqi treasury before the fall of he regime, at their disposal.
The Islamist terror movement has suffered another disappointment. Its hopes of an international anti-American front, led by France and Germany, would emerge to isolate the United States and Great Britain have been dashed as President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have balked at the idea of several more years of bad relations with Washington. Even the Spanish government of Prime Minister Zapatero, which owes its election to the Al-Qaeda attack in Madrid last year, has been careful to tone down its anti-American rhetoric.
The biggest setback that the Islamists have suffered, however, is a change of mood in the Islamic heartland. The elections in Afghanistan, West Bank and Gaza, and Iraq, the freedom movement in Lebanon, the beginnings of reform in Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia have helped generate new interest in democratic reform. Also important are the efforts by Mahmoud Abbas to transform Palestine from an emotional cause into an issue of practical politics. Today, even Hamas, the most radical of Palestinian movements, is obliged to end its boycott of normal politics, and is getting ready to fight in the forthcoming parliamentary elections.
While Bin Laden’s message of hatred and terror still resonates in sections of the Muslim communities and the remnants of the left in the West, the picture is different in the Muslim world. There, people are demonstrating for freedom and, in some cases like Egypt a few weeks ago, even for more trade with Israel. This is a new configuration in which Islamist terrorism, although still deadly dangerous, has only a limited future.
