Al-Qaeda gears up to exploit Egypt turmoil

YOU would probably have to go back a decade to find a cause with such potential to mobilize militants worldwide in a short space of time.
The ongoing unrest in Egypt gives Al-Qaeda an ideal opportunity to expand a strategy of exploiting instability it has already used in Libya, Syria and Iraq.
Egypt may not become an open front for these militants — the situation there is too unpredictable to say — but the violence has made it more vulnerable to bomb attacks and a rallying cry for those advocating violence.
“If ever there’s a ripe moment 2 (to) support Al-Qaeda, it’s surely now. Raising the flag in Egypt in (is) now a priority, Insha’Allah!” the Kenyan offshoot of Somalia’s Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabaab, said on its Twitter feed.
It is one of numerous posts by Al-Qaeda-linked militant groups calling on Egyptians to abandon democracy as a Western import since an upsurge of violence on Wednesday.
At least 850 people have died since then in the crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood protests against the ouster of President Muhammad Mursi on July 3.
“The mobilization of a jihadi front in Egypt serves Al-Qaeda’s recent agenda of exploiting local conflicts to further their intent for a revolution throughout the region,” the SITE monitoring service said.
Mursi’s overthrow was a propaganda boost for militants like Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahri, an Egyptian who had accused the Brotherhood of treachery by seeking to introduce political Islam through peaceful means rather than resorting to violence.
The worry is that some members of the Brotherhood, whose influence was demonstrated in election victories after Hosni Mubarak fell in 2011, will now be won over to the thinking of Zawahri, who intelligence sources believe is based in Pakistan.
The military, under fire from its ally and main sponsor the United States over the crackdown, says Al-Qaeda already has a role and firm action is the only way to stop it.
The Foreign Ministry distributed photos on Sunday showing what it said were Muslim Brotherhood members carrying clubs and firearms and in one picture a black Al-Qaeda flag. A day earlier, security sources said Al-Zawahri’s brother Mohammed had been detained.
The Brotherhood denies links to the global militant network and analysts doubt hundreds of jihadis will pile into Egypt from outside, although more locals may be driven to violence.
For outsiders looking to fight, Syria is still a more attractive destination with its well-organized operations by Al-Qaeda affiliates Jabhat Al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
“It is more complicated in Egypt, though Egypt has long been important for many militants and the unrest and repression will almost certainly attract attacks or drive some Egyptians toward more organized violence,” said Andrew Lebovich, an academic focusing on Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
Apart from the lure of Syria, Al-Qaeda is no longer the kind of organization in which Al-Zawahri, despite his Egyptian roots, could give top-down orders to go to fight in Egypt.
Since it was founded in the late 1980s by Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda has emerged as the most powerful of the militant groups, bringing in other groups as affiliates.
But it acts more as an essential link in a chain rather than a hierarchy, with different groups focusing on local and regional issues. They cooperate when it suits, are united by a common ideology and some of their leaders have shared experiences of war zones including Afghanistan.
They also have competing demands on their resources, whether it is building a presence in North and West Africa or providing expertise and an ideological core to the Pakistani Taliban waging war against the state.
Since becoming leader of Al-Qaeda in 2011, Al-Zawahri has had to balance his own interest in Egypt with the need to show he is capable of uniting all the different parts of the organization, including its powerful branch in Yemen, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Inside Egypt, some fear the jailing of Brotherhood leaders will make it all the easier for younger members to gravitate toward militant groups, just as happened in earlier crackdowns in the late 20th century — among the recruits then was Al-Zawahri.
Since the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, militants, including those from AQIM, have used Libya either as a base or a source of arms supplies.
Over the past two years, an unknown number of arms have made it into Egypt from Qaddafi’s stockpiles, adding to fears of instability created by the escape of hundreds of prisoners from Egyptian jails during the 2011 revolution which ousted Mubarak.
How quickly any serious violence might surface is open to debate given the speed of the Egyptian crackdown.