Jihad and International Security

237 Pages·2006·2.278 MB·English

by  Jalil Roshandel, Sharon Chadha (auth.)

More Praise for Jalil Roshandel and Sharon Chadha’s Jihad and
International Security:
“The authors of this welcome volume ask the hard questions about the
ideology motivating global jihadists; they also provide some balanced
and sensible policy recommendations. Both for its overview and its
practicality, this book will stand apart from others. It deserves a wide
readership, not just in government circles, but with all those concerned
to understand how the war on terror is to be fought and won.”
—Bruce Lawrence, Professor of Islamic Studies, Director, Duke
IslamicStudies Center, Duke University
“Roshandel and Chadha have written a tough, hard nosed primer on al
Qaeda and the global jihad movement. They provide a basic introduction
to the network’s history, actions, tactics, organization, and financing, as
well as the methods that have been used to fight it. They also review al
Qaeda’s statements, ideology, philosophy, and interpretation of Islam.”
—Steven Spiegel, Professor of Political Science, Director, Middle
East Regional Security Program, Burkle Center for International
Relations, University of California, Los Angeles
Jihad and International Security
Jalil Roshandel and Sharon Chadha
JIHADANDINTERNATIONALSECURITY
© Jalil Roshandel and Sharon Chadha,2006
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
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ISBN 978-1-4039-7192-0 ISBN 978-0-312-37613-0 (eBook)
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Contents
Preface ix
1 Where Is Jihad Being Fought? 3
2 What Is The Ideology of Jihad? 39
3 How Is Jihad Being Fought? 69
4 Who Is Fighting Jihad? 99
5 Who Is Really Fighting Jihad? 129
6 How Is Global Jihad Being Countered? 159
Notes 195
Bibliography 223
Index 227
Preface
The purpose of this book is to give the reader a general understanding of
the emergence of al Qaeda and the global jihad movement. To this end,
we have traced the movement’s roots; dissected its most important pub-
lished statements; explored its interpretation and use of Islam; examined its
important ideological sources; reviewed the way in which jihadists conduct
themselves on the battlefield; attempted to understand their self-justification;
reviewed what government analysts and the media have been able to uncover
about its sources of funding and sponsorship; and tried to understand the way
in which the United States and other countries have tried to counter the threat
the movement poses to national and international security.
While we made a concerted effort not to insert our personal views into this
account, we acknowledge that something of our own biases must surely have
seeped into our analysis. We have also refrained from offering any of our own
policy prescriptions and have left that for later discussions or other analysts. We
took this approach because, first, we wanted to provide what we feel is a concise
accounting of the evolution of the global jihad movement that is as free as pos-
sible from political bias. Second, we also discovered, while writing this book
that we, the coauthors, do not necessarily share the same view as to how this
new threat to international security should be countered.
Thus we hope that though we may have not been able to deliver an account-
ing of our personal views we do believe we have provided a correct accounting
of the views and actions of the principal players (and some of the minor ones as
well) that have effected this global phenomenon.
Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others,
Islamo-fascism. Whatever it’s called, this ideology is very different from the
religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, politi-
cal vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a
totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.
President George W. Bush, October 6, 2005
CHAPTER 1
Where Is Jihad Being Fought?
This battle is not between al Qaeda and the U.S. This is a battle of Muslims
against the global crusaders.
Usama bin Laden, in an October 2001 interview with al-Jazeera correspondent,
Tayseer Alouni, who was later sentenced to seven years in prison by a Spanish
court for collaborating with al Qaeda.
When the second airplane hit the World Trade Center on September 11,
2001, a new and disturbing thought quickly spread across America:
the nation was under attack.1September 11, 2001, it would turn out
was not the first day of this new war, or to be precise this jihad—or Islamic holy
war—against America. In fact, though most people had not noticed it, this jihad
had been declared almost four years earlier, in February of 1998.2 It had been
announced in the form of a fatwa—or Islamic religious decree—that was pub-
lished in a London-based Arabic newspaper.3Its author, Usama bin Laden, was
a rich Saudi exile then living in Afghanistan. Though the fatwa urged Muslims
to attack American civilians anywhere on the planet, it received almost no atten-
tion until the next summer, when bin Laden launched his first mass-casualty
attack: the simultaneous suicide bombing of two American embassies in east
Africa. But even this act of war would largely go unnoticed, as most of the casu-
alties were African.
The U.S. government paid such little attention to the threat coming from bin
Laden, that even on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the lead pilot of
the North American Aerospace Defense Command was called into action, his first
thought was that the United States had just been attacked by the Russians—as he
recalled, “I’m thinking cruise missile threat from the sea. You know you look
down and see the Pentagon burning and I thought the bastards snuck one by us.”4
When it finally did emerge that bin Laden was behind the attacks, most
Americans could only register a sense of confusion. Why was bin Laden urging
Muslims to wage holy war against Americans? Or, as President Bush put it:
“Why do they hate us?”5
4 ● Jihad and International Security
The answer would not be obvious given the amount of blood and treasure
Americans had committed over the past several decades defending Muslims.
Americans had sent billions of dollars of aid and Stinger missiles to help
Muslims drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan during the 1980s. In 1983, 241
Marines gave up their lives trying to establish peace between Muslims and
Christians during Lebanon’s civil war. Then in 1991, the United States spent
tens of billions of dollars and 147 lives to liberate Kuwaiti Muslims from Iraqi
Muslims. In 1993, another eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed trying to deliver
famine relief to Muslims in Somalia. Then in 1995 Americans defied the inter-
national community to intervene on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia and again in
Kosovo in 1999. Not to mention the billions of dollars American taxpayers sent
every year to benefit Muslims in Egypt and Jordan. When most Americans read
this history they were only more perplexed: Why was bin Laden telling his
coreligionists they had a religious duty to attack Americans? Shouldn’t he be
ordering them instead to thank the Americans for their sacrifice? Even more
astonishing was the fact that other Muslims were apparently taking him
seriously. What was the real story here?
According to bin Laden, the case against America was threefold: the
American military presence in Saudi Arabia; the fact the United States was a
loyal ally to Israel; and the crippling sanctions that the United Nations had
imposed on Iraq. According to bin Laden, as he wrote in his fatwa, these three
“crimes and sins” were the reasons that Muslims ought to, “kill the Americans
and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can.”6
In fact, bin Laden had been urging Muslims to attack American forces in
Saudi Arabia as early as 1996 even though the only reason the United States
forces were in the Arabian Peninsula in the first place was because they had been
invited there at the behest of the Saudi king, who first asked them to protect the
kingdom’s oil fields from the designs of Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the
Gulf War and who then continued to request their presence there ever since. But
as far as bin Laden was concerned, the presence of the American forces was
objectionable because given the fact they were non-Muslims, they were prohib-
ited from being permanently stationed in the holy lands of Islam.
In his fatwa, an astute reader would have noticed, bin Laden referred to
Americans as “Crusaders,”7in the manner Muslims sometimes pejoratively refer
to Western Christian civilization. By calling Americans “Crusaders,” bin Laden
was reminding his coreligionists that the modern-day Americans were only the
descendants of the Christian armies of the Middle Ages, the armies who had
sought but failed to reclaim the birthplace of their religion from the Muslims,
who had conquered these same lands during the eighth century. By using such a
pejorative, bin Laden was essentially telegraphing his fellow Muslims that once
again the Muslim armies would prevail, even if these modern “Crusaders” were
no longer fighting under the banner of Christianity but under the star-spangled
banner of the American flag.
In the fatwa, bin Laden would also remind Muslims that they had a religious
duty to reclaim Jerusalem from the Jews. But what was curious about bin
Laden’s statement was that he did not specify that Muslims should target