The 9/11 Wars (128 page)

  66
.
Bradley,
Inside Egypt
, p. 40.

  67
.
Michael Slackman, ‘Stifled, Egypt’s young turn to Islamic fervor’,
New York Times
, February 17, 2008. ‘Saving faith: Islam seems to be fading as a revolutionary force’,
The Economist
Special report on Egypt, July 17, 2010, p. 14.

  68
.
At legislatives of December 2005 the Muslim Brotherhood had won 88 seats, or 20 per cent, becoming the most successful opposition bloc despite well-documented fraud and heavy-handed security interference.

  69
.
Pew Research Center,
Declining Support for bin Laden and Suicide Bombing
, September 10, 2009.

  70
.
For a detailed account of post-9/11 militancy in Egypt see Tawil,
The Other Face of al-Qaeda
, pp. 32–6. Author telephone interview with Noman Benotman, March 2011.

  71
.
Author interview, Rabat, March 2007.

  72
.
Author interview, Saleh, March 2007.

  73
.
Roula Khalaf, ‘Forgotten flowering’,
Financial Times
, December 11, 2008.

  74
.
The most common hometowns listed in the Sinjar Records for overseas volunteers arriving to fight in Iraq were Mecca, Saudi Arabia (43), Benghazi, Libya (21), and Casablanca, Morocco (17). Other Libyan coastal towns also supplied a disproportionately high number of volunteers, especially Darnah, a working-class town of 80,000, from where an astonishing 53 fighters listed in the Sinjar records came. CTC (Brian Fishman)
Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleed Outs: Al’Qaeda’s Road in and out of Iraq
, 2008, pp. 38–9. Both Darnah and Benghazi have long been associated with Islamic militancy in Libya, known in particular for a brutally suppressed uprising in the mid 1990s.

  75
.
Alison Pargeter, ‘LIFG Revisions Unlikely to Reduce Jihadist violence’,
CTC Sentinel
, October 2009, vol. 2, no. 10. Paul Cruickshank, ‘LIFG Revisions Posing Critical Challenge to al’Qaida’,
CTC Sentinel
, December 2009, vol. 2, no. 12. Tawil,
Brothers in Arms
, pp. 196-7. Author interview with Noman Benotman, London, 2008.

  76
.
Jason Burke, ‘Westerners flocking to dig into Gaddafi’s deep pockets’,
Observer
, September 2, 2007. Gaddafi had publicly admitted a chemical and nuclear weapons programme six days after Saddam Hussein’s capture in 2003.

  77
.
See Nir Rosen,
Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World
, Nation Books, June 2009, for a fuller account. Bilal y Saab and Magnus Ranstorp, ‘Securing Lebanon from the Threat of Salafist Jihadism’,
Studies in Conflict and Terrorism
, vol. 30, no.10, 2007. Bilal y Saab, ‘The Failure of Salafi-Jihadi Insurgent Movements in the Levant’,
CTC Sentinel
, September 2009, vol. 2, no. 9, p. 15.

  78
.
In Jordan another counter-attack against al-Qaeda’s theological arguments was launched by a senior cleric and former stalwart of armed international Islamic extremism called Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi. See Murad Batal al-Shishani, ‘Jihad Ideologue Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi Challenges Jordan’s Neo-Zarqawists’
, Terrorism Monitor
, vol. 7, no. 20, July 9, 2009. Michael Slackman, ‘Generation faithful: Jordanian students rebel, embracing Conservative Islam’,
New York Times
, December 24, 2008; Lina Sinjab, ‘Syrian Islamic revival has woman’s touch’, BBC News, November 28, 2009.

  79
.
Pew Research Center,
Confidence in Obama
, pp. 83–6.

  80
.
For a good overview see Benedetta Berti, ‘Salafi-Jihadi Activism in Gaza: Mapping the Threat’,
CTC Sentinel
, May 2010, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 5–7.

  81
.
Nidal al-Mughrabi, ‘Pro-Qaeda group declares “Islamic emirate” in Gaza’, Reuters, August 14, 2009. See also on Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell,
Hamas
, Polity Press, 2010. These clashes contributed to the growing sense that the ideological battle between the inheritors of various strands of conservative, revivalist Islamic thought that had preceded the 9/11 Wars by many decades – indeed in some significant ways had provoked the conflict – was resurfacing. See Jean-Pierre Filiu, ‘The Brotherhood vs. Al-Qaeda: A Moment of Truth?’, Hudson Institute, 2009, for a useful discussion.

  82
.
Michael Knights, ‘The Current State of al’Qaida in Saudi Arabia’, CTC
Sentinel
, September 2008, vol. 1, no. 10, p. 7.

  83
.
Ibid.

  84
.
Kenneth Ballen, ‘Bin Laden’s soft support’,
Washington Monthly
, May 2008.

  85
.
Hegghammer,
Jihad in Saudi Arabia
, pp. 19–20, 49.

  86
.
Magdi Abdlehadi, ‘Saudis to retrain 40,000 clerics’, BBC, March 20, 2008.

  87
.
On textbooks see
Update: Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance
, Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom, 2008.

  88
.
‘Reform in Saudi Arabia: At a snail’s pace’,
The Economist
, October 2, 2010.

  89
.
Two Guantanamo returnees who had been through the deradicalization programme but had nonetheless resumed violent activism surfaced in the Yemen in January 2009.

  90
.
Author interview, March 2009.

  91
.
Ibid. The exact number at the time was 4,238 American servicemen killed.

  92
.
The militia is estimated to have lost up to a 1,000 fighters in the battles.

  93
.
Sabrina Tavernise, ‘A Shiite militia in Baghdad sees its power wane’,
New York Times
, July 27, 2008.

  94
.
Interview, November 2010.

  95
.
Author telephone interview, August 2008.

  96
.
Afif Sarhan and Jason Burke, ‘How Islamist gangs use internet to track, torture and kill Iraqi gays’,
Observer
, September 13, 2009.

  97
.
Martin Chulov, ‘They turned the tide for America. Now, as withdrawal nears, sons of Iraq pay the price’,
Guardian
, May 14, 2010.

  98
.
Compared to 1,287 regular police. Iraq Body Count, ‘Post-Surge violence, its extent and nature’, December 28, 2008.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/surge-2008/
.

  99
.
Rosen,
Aftermath
, p. 542.

100
.
Interview, Baghdad, November 2010.

101
.
‘At least 27 die in Iraq as bombs, shootings shatter lull’, AFP, February 11, 2009.

102
.
AQIP had theoretically ceased to exist in 2006. The very declaration of the ISI had angered many of the more nationalist fighters, who carried out the vast proportion of attacks on government and American forces, presuming as it did overall command of ‘resistance efforts’ and the right to decide the future of the country. See Mohammed M. Hafez, ‘Al-Qa’ida Losing Ground in Iraq’,
CTC Sentinel
, December 2007, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 7.

103
.
A significant predictor of involvement in radical ‘jihadi’ militancy in Iraq in 2009, according to network analysis carried out by American intelligence specialists, was the previous or current involvement of a family member. Many of the female suicide bombers were widows of dead militants. A dozen bombers came from a single village in Diyala province, one of the few remaining strongholds of the extremists. See Martin Chulov, ‘Innocent grandmother – or suicide bombing mastermind?’,
Guardian
, June 11, 2009. Another predictor was a recent jail sentence. With the state’s prison system now in Iraqi hands, many of the hardened al-Qaeda militant leaders held by the Americans had been released, often quickly returning to violence, recruiting family members and friends to fight alongside them.

104
.
Nineveh was heavily affected by Saddam’s Arabization strategy, which had seen hundreds of thousands of local Kurds driven from their homes, which were then given to Arabs from the south, particularly military families loyal to Saddam. These latter clearly stood to lose much if sufficient calm returned for either the Kurds to make claims to land beyond the current limits of the three provinces they controlled or the central Baghdad government to decide to implement laws that called for measures to reverse Arabization.

105
.
In Anbar a few years earlier the attempts by radical Islamists from outside the province or indeed the country to seize control of lucrative local trafficking networks had been one of the key drivers behind the turning of the local sheikhs towards the Americans. Andrea Plebani, ‘Ninawa Province: Al’Qaida’s Remaining Stronghold’,
CTC Sentinel
, vol. 1, no. 1, January 2010, p. 20.

106
.
Ibid., p. 21.

107
.
In Najaf and Karbala the ISCI score was 14.8 per cent and 6.4 per cent, down from 45 per cent and 35 per cent in 2005. See Joost Hilterman, ‘Iraq on the edge’,
New York Review of Books
, November 19, 2009, for a useful analysis.

108
.
Afif Sarham, ‘Hitmen charge $100 a victim as Basra honour killings rise’,
Observer
, November 30, 2008.

109
.
Baghdad received power only for twelve to fourteen hours. NYT, Op-Chart, June 18, 2009. ‘Iraq: key figures since the war began’, Associated Press, January 2, 2009. Oxfam International,
In Her Own Words: Iraqi Women Talk about Their Greatest Challenges
, March 2009, p. 5.

110
.
In comparison with pre-war Iraq this was an improvement. Before the war, 12.9 million people had potable water and 6.2 million had sanitation. On October 2, 2008, 20.9 million people had potable water and 11.3 million people had sanitation. ‘Iraq: key figures since the war began’, Associated Press. Martin Chulov, ‘Iraq withdrawal: Amid heat and broken promises, only the ice man cometh’,
Guardian
, August 30, 2010.

111
.
Oxfam International,
In Her Own Words
, p. 10.

112
.
As ever, compared to what had gone before there was improvement. But though many lauded the fact that ‘only’ twenty-five civilians a day were dying on average through 2008 in Iraq, fewer pointed out that the rate had been roughly equivalent to that of the first twenty months of post-invasion Iraq from May 2003 to December 2004. Iraq Body Count, ‘Post-Surge violence: its extent and nature’, December 28, 2008.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/surge-2008/
.

113
.
Ibid.

114
.
In all in 2009 there were 706 explosions causing 2,972 deaths. Iraq Body Count, ‘Civilian deaths from violence in 2009’, December 31, 2009.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2009/
.