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Chapter 11 from: Simon Reeve, The New Jackals (Boston: Northeastern University Press.)

 

Militant Islam

 

 

 

Amid the rush to hold all Muslims responsible for the crimes of self-­proclaimed fundamentalists such as Osama bin Laden, it is perhaps worth considering the real scale of the threat Islamic militancy poses to Western democracies and world peace.

 

There are more than one billion followers of the Prophet Mohammad on the planet, and the vast majority want global harmony and reconciliation between different religious groups. A tiny proportion of this number have taken up arms and launched themselves against the West but in waging the holy war these terrorists believe they are reversing a Christian tradition that began with the Crusades.

 

While these militants may view themselves as holy warriors, to the West they are little different from the communists who haunted the free world during the Cold War. The similarities are striking. Islam is the world's only major political religion: it makes no distinction between religion and state, and covers every aspect of life. Communists and Islamic terrorists are both, it seems, highly orga­nized, highly trained, and determined - at any cost - to destroy the Western way of life. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, Western media and politicians have been hunt­ing for a new enemy. Now it is Muslims who are deemed to be the danger.

 

While such stereotyping is deeply insulting to Muslims, it would be foolhardy to deduce that the minority of Muslims who can be broadly identified as 'Islamic fundamentalist' do not pose a serious threat. According to Neil Herman, who spent more than two decades inves­tigating terrorism for the FBI in New York, Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the greatest terrorist threat to the West. Peter Probst, a special­ist on international terrorism with the Pentagon's secretive Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Office, and eight other senior intelligence and terrorism experts from Britain, Germany and the US also agree.

 

Furious at US support for Israel and what they see as double-stan­dards in American treatment of the Palestinians, outraged by the presence of Western troops in Saudi Arabia and the military and economic attacks on Iraq, and brought together by the globalization of militant Islam in recent years, Muslim extremists are growing in numbers. The threat is increasing.

Among those who characterize themselves as Islamic fighters there are three broad strands of militancy.  The first consists of groups traditionally supported by Iran, which nestle under the umbrella of Hezbollah, an international organization with branches, offices and supporters in at least seventeen countries around the world. Hezbollah has had the avowed intention of fighting against Israeli forces since it seized parts of southern Lebanon. The bulk of its support and membership is drawn from Shute Muslims, although within its ranks there are Sunnis and even several hundred Christians who have converted to Islam.

 

The second grouping consists of the Afghan Arabs, the fighters who traveled from across the Islamic world to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet invaders. Osama bin Laden heads al Qaeda, the main Afghan Arab group, but there are at least five others based in Afghanistan and led by Satwat Abdel-Chani, Talaat Yassin Hammam, Muhammad Mekkawi, Talaat Fouad Qassem, and Muhammad Muhieddin, who has created his own little empire inside Afghanistan with the help of several hundred followers and local tribesmen. These leaders swear no allegiance to bin Laden, indeed they are still declar­ing 'fatwas' on each other and fighting their own internecine wars.

 

The third strand of Islamic militancy is the broadest, comprising more than a hundred groups and gangs, many of which have national-specific agendas. These groups have their bases in such countries as Albania, Algeria, Bosnia, Brunei, Chechnya, Dagestan, the Central Asian republics, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and the Philippines.

Despite the widely differing nature of their campaigns, it would be wrong to imagine these groups have no co-ordination. Representatives of Hezbollah meet early each year in Tehran, the

Iranian capital, for a short conference. The different Afghan Arab groups have all sent representatives to meetings in Khartoum, Sudan, organized by Hassan al-Turabi's National Islamic Front and also attended by radicals from Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Even many members of the third strand, the most disparate of all, have met and plotted together at huge conferences held in Dallas, Texas, in 1988 and 1990. The Dallas meetings were the largest of their kind ever held, hosting more of the world's radical Muslims than had ever previously assembled under one roof. The different strands also send representa­tives to meetings of the other strands.

 

The aim of men such as Osama bin Laden is now to harness these disparate groups, with their widely differing aims, into a broad coali­tion with one central objective: to attack the West. In trying to build this coalition bin Laden has been assisted by the communications revolution and globalization, which is not only a powerful force in popular culture and the world economy, but is an important trend in the international Islamist movement. For example, the 18th conven­tion of the Islamic Group of Pakistan (Al-Jama'ah al-Jslamiyyah), held in Islamabad between 23 and 25 October 1998 was attended by dele­gates from more than thirty other militant Islamic organizations. 'All of them spoke about their countries, their movements and the need to unify the message of the Muslims,' according to Ibrahim Ghosheh, the spokesman for Hamas (the Palestinian terrorist group) in Jordan, who was attending the conference for the first time, and wrote a report on it for the December issue of the London-based Filastin al-Mus/imali, Hamas's main publication.

 

As these militant groups unify, so they pose more of a threat to fragile governments. 'We can see several countries where (Islamists) now threaten to effect a take-over,' said a US intelligence source.  The most serious example is obviously Afghanistan, where the Taliban have nearly strangled the entire country. But Afghanistan is one of the most insular nations on earth. Even if the Taliban took complete control of the country and continued with their repressive policies, the West would feel little of the pain, although heroin from the region kills and hospitalizes thousands of addicts around the globe.  The main victims of the Taliban will be the Afghanis, nearly 19 million souls who have suffered as much in recent decades as any people on earth.

Afghanistan's neighbour, Pakistan, however, is not an insular nation, but a powerful nuclear-armed state courted and cajoled by the West. It is an important Western trading partner with armed forces totaling more than 587,000, and another 513,000 in reserve.8 It is also a nation heading inexorably towards the establishment of a militant Islamic system of government. In March 1999 President Rafiq Tarar, a religious conservative and former judge, was openly urging a speedy change to Islamic government, including the segregation of men and women. According to the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, if Pakistan adopts a hard-line Islamic system of government, the conse­quences for the majority of Pakistanis will be dire.10 'The Western powers think they are the only ones confronting Osama bin Laden and his kind, but it is not just a battle between the Islamists and the West, it's a battle between the majority of Muslims and the Islamists,' she said. 'They want to totally control our way of life, what we wear, what we do, what we think.'

 

The establishment of an Afghan-style government in Pakistan could destabilize the entire region and swiftly lead to conflict with neigh­bouring India. The two countries have fought three wars in the last 50 years, and many analysts and intelligence experts warn that the next conflict between the two states, perhaps over the disputed province of Kashmir, could swiftly escalate into the world's first nuclear war. By late May and June 1999 these fears appeared to have some justifica­tion, as the conflict in Kashmir degenerated into rocket and air-strikes on both sides.

Pakistan's transition to militancy may be unstoppable because it is being encouraged by the alumni of thousands of small madrassas, or religious schools, originally established in the country during the Afghan war by the late Pakistani military dictator General Mohammed Zia-al Haq. Zia rightly supposed the schools could be a useful source of young fodder for the Afghan front, but when the war ended and the Soviets left, the religious schools remained. Pakistan, a country with endemic political corruption, high unemployment, polit­ical apathy and a fragile democracy, already had a void in the educa­tion sector left by the lack of a decent state system: religious schools filled the gap. With obscure sources of funding (often businesses affil­iated to the schools and militant Islamic parties and businessmen), their numbers mushroomed. By 1999 more than 4,000 religious schools were registered with the Pakistani government, teaching more than 540,000 students.

 

Many poor families send their children to the schools because they know they will be fed and looked after. But the children spend their days learning the Koran and praying, and receive little in the way of a formal education. They leave the schools with only a rudimentary knowledge of the world, but a fanatical belief in the supremacy of Islam and their responsibility to fight and ensure its spread. Many retain military connections with their schools.

 

It is a situation that worries Benazir Bhutto. Shortly after the American cruise missile strike on Osama bin Laden's bases, Bhutto was travelling on a plane, sitting next to a senior Pakistani militant. 'So I said to him are there people from the madrassas [religious schools] who are going [to support bin Laden], and he said yes,' said Bhutto.12 'And I said to him how many people do you have in your madrassas, and he said all together the Pakistani madrassas have 325,000 men under arms. So I said how many went into Afghanistan [during the Afghan war], and he said 75,000.' Bhutto claims she has been told that militants in Pakistan eventually want this huge body of 'soldiers' from the madrassas to replace the official army as some sort of revolufionary guard.

 

Many political and moderate religious leaders in Pakistan have expressed concern at the huge number of religious schools and their potential to destabilize Pakistan. Nasrullah Babaar, Pakistan's former Interior Minister and police chief, has said they are 'hotbeds of terror­ism'.13 When she was in office Benazir Bhutto tried to restrict their sources of funding, while the current incumbent, Nawaz Sharif, has tried to impose controls over religious school curriculums. Both Prime Ministers were unsuccessful: there are simply too many schools, with too many powerful supporters, and many are effectively hidden in remote parts of the country.

Students leaving these schools are a danger to their own communi­ties, let alone to the country or the wider world. Many of the schools are indoctrinating children with a hatred of America and the West, but they are simultaneously encouraging hatred of other branches of Islam. The streets of Karachi are already riven with factional fighting between rival Sunni and Shute Muslims, and the only night-time sounds in some districts are the wails of private ambulances collecting the dead from yet another shooting. The city is starting to resemble Beirut during its darkest hours.

 

Pakistan stands on the brink of an abyss. Its fragile democracy and the lives of its millions of peaceful hard-working citizens are threat­ened by vociferous militants preaching revolution. Taliban supporters and Islamic militants are gradually infiltrating every stratum of soci­ety, including, most worryingly, the army.

 

According to Benazir Bhutto the Islamists often work through innocuous-looking non-governmental organisations (NGOs).  'They keep making these NGOs because they claim the CIA, during the Afghan war, made NGOs, and the CIA operated through them,' she says. The thinking seems to be that if such subterfuge worked for the CIA it will work for Islamic fundamentalists.

 

'I didn't realize where the Islamists came from in the beginning,' said Bhutto. 'I thought they were the military, or they were the intel­ligence services, but then I realized that these Islamist groups are working to try and influence the placing of people within the military, within the intelligence services, within the election commission, and they are creeping towards power in every sphere [of the country].'

 

This gradual advance of radical Islam ensures another comparison with the Cold War. For decades Western intelligence agencies ran covert operations to prevent communism taking root, like a malignant tumour, in countries such as Italy and France. The same 'domino theory' used during the Cold War to explain the threat of one country, then its neighbours, falling to insidious communism, is now being applied to the spread of militant Islam. If fundamentalists take over in Egypt, so the theory goes, the whole of North Africa and the Middle East will follow. Thus if militants finally complete their take-over of Afghanistan, the Muslim Central Asian states may follow the same path.

 

'The future for Pakistan is very grim,' said Benazir Bhutto. 'I don't think that a take-over by the Islamists in Pakistan is yet imminent, but I think in the last 10 years they have made tremendous inroads, and given another decade, or perhaps just five years, anything could happen.' According to Bhutto, the Islamists are 'playing a long game'.  'They are not looking for an election, they are looking for a revolution. Their idea is "so what if we have to live like [the] Taliban, at least we'll be left with our honour". But what is honour? Is honour starvation for the people?'

 

Among moderate Islamic politicians and Western intelligence experts there is now a general consensus that Islamists have identified several countries to target for conversion to a hard-line system of Islamic government. 'I believe Pakistan is the top target [of the Islamists],' confirms a senior American intelligence source.  Benazir Bhutto agrees, saying she believes the aim of Islamists is for Pakistan to fall first, and Saudi Arabia to fall second. Most Western analysts

seem to believe Egypt is the third target, but Bhutto believes it is actu­ally Turkey.

 

'And there is a "domino effect",' said Bhutto. 'If Pakistan falls then Saudi Arabia will surely be the next one to fall.' Other countries will follow, according to Bhutto: 'After I took over [as Prime Minister for her second term of office in 1993] I had senior Pakistani army and intelligence officers tell me that they wanted a confederation between Pakistan and Afghanistan.' The officers apparently wanted to enter Afghanistan and take the capital Kabul, by force. 'I vetoed it. They had this dream of going upwards into the Central Asian republics, and I told them that Pakistan cannot have such ambitions, and so they were against me.'

According to Bhutto even Nawaz Sharif, the current Prime Minister, is not safe. 'The Islamists backed Sharif because he promised to make General Hamid Gul the Chief of Army Staff, and pass the Islamic Bill. Now that he has had problems delivering on his promises, the Islamists are turning against him.' Bhutto claims that her sources have told her recently that the Islamists in Pakistan have decided they need to create a moral and social vacuum by killing 100,000 people in the country 'to destroy the institutions in Pakistan so that a revolution takes place'. In this scenario Pakistan will turn into another Algeria -a country riven by terrorist massacres. 'They have got a whole agenda,' she said.

 

Bhutto has been given a chilling warning of Pakistan's future. 'One man said to me, "Remember there will only be those who believe and those who will die. There will only be the dead and the believers."

 

If fundamentalism does spread from Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Central Asian states, it will be a process that takes several more years. Central Asia has felt the influence of Islam for more than a thousand years, but it has usually cohabited with local cultural practices and customs: the first sense of identity possessed by people in the region is usually loyalty to their tribe or region. Within the new republics of the former Soviet Union, fundamentalism, indeed Islam as a whole, has made little headway.

 

A greater threat to global security, perhaps, is posed by the possible resurgence of fundamentalism in powerful, strategically important countries such as Egypt, or oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia.

 

Hosni Mubarak, the current Egyptian President, has no natural successor, and when he retires or dies there appears to be no one capa­ble of taking his place and leading the country as a secular society. 'Egypt will fall soon enough,' said a veteran American intelligence official.23 'Everything [President] Mubarak does [to stop the Islamists] is just delaying the inevitable.' The American source believes the world could soon witness a new Cold War, but this time one pitting secular democracies against autocratic Islamic nations. 'We [the US] were victorious against communism, but this will be the struggle for liberty that dominates world politics well into the next century, and I think we've lost the fight already,' said the man wearily 'It's just a matter of time.'

 

Some experts believe that such warnings are melodramatic, given the ferocity with which the Egyptian government has attempted to crush the Islamist movement. Since 1991 more than 100,000 Islamists have been detained without trial in Egypt and squashed into the coun­try's crowded jails. By the beginning of June 1999 officials were quietly voicing the belief that Mubarak had won the battle with the Islamists. The conviction and sentencing to death, in absentia, of nine prominent fundamentalists, coupled with the trial in April 1999 of 107 more, seemed to convince Mubarak he was in control. He even released 1,300 low-level suspected fundamentalists from jail.

 

Mubarak's complacency is dangerous, because the Islamists will never give up their struggle to convert Egypt into an Islamic state. The permanent nature of their global fight was set out as far back as 1968: 'Jihad will never end. It will last until the Day of Judgement,' accord­ing to the eminent Sheikh Muhammad Abu-Zahra.

 

There can be no doubt that an Islamist take-over in Egypt would have far-reaching consequences. Many intelligence experts predict it could have a greater impact on global politics than the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution. Iran is dominated by Shiite Muslims, the minority sect in the Islamic world, while Egypt, by contrast, has the largest population of any Arab state, and is the world's leading centre of Sunni Muslim learning - its Al-Azhar University is the oldest and most prestigious Islamic university on earth. So a take-over in Egypt by fundamentalists, even if it was by democratic vote, would shatter other Islamic governments around the world.

 

Saudi Arabia is another leading target for the Islamists. Osama bin Laden, who considers the Saudi rulers to be corrupt Western stooges, has focused on the country for years, and there are now signs the Saudi lead­ership's power and influence is starting to wane. The Saudi monarchy

has specifically tried to draw legitimacy from fundamentalist Islam ever smce 3,500 Islamists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Mullahs on the government payroll denounce the West, the mutuwaeen (the reli­gious police) harass members of the public who fail to stop working or shopping at prayer time, and the government has erected road signs with religious exhortations such as 'God is great'.

 

However King Fahd is ailing, and many doubt that his likely successor (and the current de facto ruler), Crown Prince Abdullah, can prevent the winds of change blowing through the kingdom. GDP per head in Saudi Arabia is rumoured to have fallen from $15,000 per year a decade ago to as low as $4,000 in 1998; unemployment and discon­tent is growing among the population, and the regime shows signs of weakness. Vast petroleum revenues that used to earn the nation more than $140 billion a year during the 1980s have now dwindled to just $20 billion a year, according to Western intelligence reports.24 Saudis who used to travel to smaller Gulf states to party and shop are now being forced into taking employment there, while some are even taking jobs as menial workers - almost unheard of for Saudi citizens. The Saudi government has been forced to announce that at least 80 per cent of every company workforce must be Saudi citizens in a desper­ate bid to increase employment among its supporters inside the king­dom. The militants smell blood.

 

Osama bin Laden has not been slow to identify falling oil revenues as a rallying cause. 'Muslims are starving to death and the United States is stealing their oil,' he says. 'Since 1973, the price of petrol has increased only eight dollars per barrel while the prices of other items have gone up three times. The oil prices should also have gone up three times but this did not happen.' According to bin Laden the price of American wheat has increased threefold but the price of Arab oil has increased by no more than a few dollars over a period of 24 years -'because the United States is dictating to the Arabs at gunpoint'. Bin Laden claims that over the last 13 years the United States has caused Arab nations a loss of more than $1,100 billion. 'We must get this money back from the United States,' he said.

 

The threat from Islamic militants stems not only from their future establishment in countries such as Saudi Arabia, but also from exist­ing regimes. Sudan still sponsors and trains a small number of terror­ists, according to Western investigators, although this has dramati­cally decreased since the days when Osama bin Laden was resident in Khartoum.

 

Iranian-sponsored terrorism also remains a significant problem, despite the presence of reformist and moderate politicians in Tehran. Hard-liners still dominate the intelligence services and remain committed to funding terrorism, particularly on Israel's northern border. Iran has been linked to several terrorist attacks in the 1990s, including the killing of three leaders of the Iranian Democratic Party of Kurdistan and their translator in an attack on a Berlin restaurant in 1992, the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in March of the same year, an assassination attempt on Jaques Kimche, a promi­nent Jewish leader, in Istanbul in June 1993, and the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in July 1994, which killed 96 people and wounded more than 200.

 

Investigations into the Berlin restaurant killings, which were conducted in a brazen fashion reminiscent of a gangland 'hit', revealed the full extent of the Iranian terror operation in Europe. According to investigations by the German Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (Bfv), the internal intelligence service, the Iranians established a special operations centre in 1986 to co-ordinate terrorism in Europe from the sixth floor of their Bonn embassy, run by a perma­nent staff of 20 elite 'Revolutionary Guards'.

 

However, the signs emerging from Tehran since the landslide victory of Mohammad Khatami, a Shiite Muslim theologian and scholar of Western philosophy, in the 1997 presidential elections, have been over­whelmingly positive. 'The world is tired of seeing the perpetuation of violence and terrorism,' said President Khatami during a landmark visit to Italy in March 1999, the first state visit by an Iranian leader to a Western nation since the Islamic revolution in 1979.28 'The world, now more than at any other time, needs peace and concord.' American politi­cians may be wary of embracing a country they have spent two decades turning into a pariah nation, but US analysts remain more confident: 'there are signs Iran is scaling-back its covert operations,' says a senior American analyst and terrorism expert grudgingly.

 

However the backing Iran gives to many terrorist groups, such as the Lebanon-based Hezbollah (amounting financially to perhaps $7-b million every month), continues. Hezbollah has been linked to the bombing of a US Marine barracks in 1983, bombings of two American embassy buildings and kidnappings of more than fifty foreigners. By the late 1990s it had moderated its position slightly, and thus become a stronger political force, but it remains a serious threat to peace in southern Lebanon.

 

While established groups launch and fund attacks around the world, other groups are now successfully infiltrating a country some analysts see as one of the world's future religious battlegrounds: the United States. Until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing the FBI saw little threat to domestic American security from Muslim extremists. But even after the New York attack the intelligence services have been unable to prevent militant groups establishing themselves in the US. According to Oliver 'Buck' Revell, former Associate Deputy Director of the FBI, 'the United States is the most preferred and easiest place in the world for radical Islamic groups to set up their headquarters to wage war in their homelands, destabilize and attack American allies . . . “

   

Groups now known to have established themselves in the US include: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Hizba-Tahrir (the Islamic Liberation Party), the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group, En-Nahda of Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Ga'mat Islamiya, Abu Sayyaf Group, followers of Osama bin Laden, the Afghan Taliban and Jamat Muslimeen (from Pakistan and Bangladesh).

 

Hamas has a particularly strong presence in the US, and is believed to have developed the largest network of all militant Islamic organi­zations in the country. 'Its origins go back to 1981 when it started in Plainfield, Indiana,' according to Steven Emerson, one of the foremost experts on terrorism in the US.31 Today, Hamas has offices, branch chapters or a major presence in more than twenty American towns and cities.

 

Islamic militants pose a serious challenge to the intelligence services. 'What makes these groups so troublesome is that they hide under a religion, do not have a traditional linear hierarchy, speak a foreign language and generally go about as far as they can in pushing the limits of the law without our being able to track them when and if they go over the line,' said Oliver Revell.  Revell understands the threat better than most, but he has a more worrying thesis: the agenda of Muslim terrorist groups in the United States, he says, 'is to not only build their infrastructure and raise funds but also to be in position to ultimately move against the United States.'

 

 

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