Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

A new report written by Thomas Hegghammer of Norway titled, “Terrorist Recruitment and Radicalization In Saudi Arabia”, gives as its premise the claim by Hegghammer that the al Qai’da terrorist organization has not recruited Saudi militants through mosques, but through “social networks” and “friends”. This new report will be strongly welcomed by Caliphate proponents throughout Europe and the United States because the logic of the report separates the mosque archipelago from the foundation of terrorism and the creation of Jihadist terrorist cells based upon non-ideological factors.

We know this isn’t true and a peer review is in order.

The terrorists that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, were determined through the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be overwhelmingly Saudi in personnel structure. While this is explored by Hegghammer as a factoid to support his thesis, he does not explain why Usama Bin Ladin and Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri coordinated with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to bring Saudi terrorist personnel into the United States disguised as students. Even with relaxed immigration standards and a student visa program that wasn’t monitoring entrants once they arrived to college in America, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed knew that putting together enough al Qai’da terrorist cells in order to successfully launch attacks on September 11, 2001, would require secrecy, funding, training, communications, material support and a security focus to guard against leaks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the world’s top domestic intelligence agency, and the slightest clue that terrorists were planning to attack the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House, would have sent the FBI into a full mobilization to dismantle such a plot. Small details were uncovered about the pending terrorist operation prior to September 11, 2001, but the CIA charter only allowed the agency to operate overseas, not on domestic American soil. This prevented a sharing of information between agencies of government which more than likely would have allowed the CIA and the FBI to piece together the plot and stop it before it was initiated by al Qai’da. In other words, US intelligence was working as it was designed to on September 10, 2001.

The hurdles that needed to be overcome by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in building the al Qai’da terrorist cells inside the United States were enormous. Mohammed needed to gather together four to five terrorist teams of at least five members each. That means that Mohammed would initially plan for an estimated twenty-five terrorists that he would be responsible for and he established an information security policy with the selected leaders of the terrorist teams with instructions that they were not to inform the other terrorist cell members of the true plans of September 11, 2001. This means that the terrorist cell members with the exception of those leading the cells did not know the full details of the terrorist operation that they would be involved in. The September 11^th hijackers perhaps believed they were merely hijacking the aircraft to fly them to another airport—possibly to Cuba or elsewhere within reach. As long as the terrorist cell leaders on each team didn’t talk about the operation in detail, information security was greatly enhanced. Caliphate Jihadist terrorist cells are disciplined in that way and they are very effective in regards to information and personnel security policy.

The next major hurdle that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed faced involved decisions about the recruitment of the actual terrorist personnel involved in the operation. From where would the terrorist cell members originate—what country? How would that make sense not only to al Qai’da, but to American authorities? The answer came in the American student visa program. Thousands of Saudi students attend US universities every year and major in every field of study from chemical engineering to medicine. The student visa program was problematic because once foreign students arrived at the American universities they were accepted to attend from overseas locations, little follow-up was done to ensure that those students were accounted for through their participation at the university. For example, an overseas student could show up for one semester and then drop off the radar and there was really no mechanism or resources to track those students down.

Once inside the United States with a student visa in hand, the terrorist cell members were now inside a democracy that they could live and travel where they wished without further permissions. But Khalid Shaikh Mohammed also selected individuals for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack that had family members living in the United States. This fact further entrenched the terrorist operatives from scrutiny prior to the operation, but it also allowed the FBI to quickly determine who many of the hijackers were and where the terrorists received their flight training from because some of the hijackers broke from information security protocols and left messages with family members just prior to the initiation of the attacks. When the terrorist attacks were initiated, the family members that were left with the notes by some of the hijackers contacted the FBI, and within hours the FBI was able to trace the activities of the hijackers through credit card receipts and other sources and methods to their residences and flight schools across the country.

The important point to remember here is that none of the hijackers were “friends” with Usama Bin Ladin or Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, and were recruited through mechanisms entwined with the mosque archipelago. Some witnesses on the terrorist flights that day communicated that the terrorists were wearing red bandanas, the fundamental symbol of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Hegghammer doesn’t mention this in his report, but it must be asked, why would Saudi terrorists wear symbols of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization? The CIA and Egyptian intelligence dismantled the Egyptian Islamic Jihad years before this terrorist attack took place.

The answer to that question rests in the truth of what Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri was trying to accomplish in the unification of Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. As early as 1992 when the Soviet presence in Afghanistan had all but completely been removed and the Taliban had begun to seize control over the country from the Northern Alliance, Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri began to realize that a foothold for the creation of a terrorist nation-state was in play. By reaching out to all of the organized terrorist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere, Zawahiri was attempting to create a transnational terrorist army from which al Qai’da and the Taliban could use as a means to project power internationally. Zawahiri would certainly use such a force to go after the Mubarak government in Egypt should it materialize, since President Mubarak was the critical personality that allowed the final deterioration and interdiction of Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group that Dr. Zawahiri himself founded with great effort.

The Saudi terrorist displaying of the banner of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad red bandanas on September 11, 2001, was a symbol of al Qai’da as a transnational terrorist organization, and a message from the terrorists to Dr. Zawahiri of their loyalty to him and the terrorist group. It means that the al Qai’da leadership cell had thought proactively about the Saudi terrorist cell members and their national identity, and al Qai’da wanted a transnational footprint in the attacks in regards to nationality of the terrorist members. By wearing the Egyptian Islamic Jihad colors, the Saudi terrorists were giving their loyalty to Zawahiri, an Egyptian national.

This means that al Qai’da became a separate entity outside of Saudi nationalism, although it started with roots in Saudi Wahabbism. Al Qai’da is now a revolutionary terrorist organization that had control of a nation-state for a brief period of time, and wishes to do so again.

Blurring these truths is a fixation in western security thinking that is attempting to unify a consensus opinion in matters relating to terrorism and the national security of the western nation-state. The foundation of this consensus thinking that is emerging in academia is derived from an agenda to prevent the identification of the mosque archipelago as having an association to terrorism, while continuing to push for dialogue with Caliphate Jihadism in order to identify and reach an agreement on a redress of grievances. Academia fears a Caliphate Jihadist blowback should the United States withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and since western academia does not know how to define terrorism or doesn’t understand what terrorism even is, it is being suggested then that the west must admit in some way how it is at fault with Islamic Identity because the reason terrorism exists must be due to some activity caused by the west.

The mosque archipelago is the cornerstone to the resocialization of the Islamic male against the west. Islamic nation-states have used the mosque archipelago as centers of gravity for the dissemination of anti-western and anti-Jewish propaganda for decades and longer. Where else do circles of “friends” and “social networks” in Islamic countries “meet”? The Islamic call to prayer that occurs five times per day forces the Islamic male into the mosque archipelago system in the Islamic world. It is within the mosque archipelago that the activities, whereabouts, status, and every other form of human identity, can be measured by the internal security apparatus of the Islamic “state”. The Islamic male is gathered into the mosque archipelago and readily submits to resocialization that occurs within them because that is where the Islamic male finds his cultural bond with society. These radicalized individuals are not meeting in garages, shopping malls, bowling alleys, movie theatres and clubs. They are gathering in respect to their deity and they are highly-motivated populations. Once inside the mosque archipelago, the “social networks” that Hegghammer refers to are well-greased with the latest anti-western propaganda and other “enemy of the state” focus. Islamic governments have used this tactic for many years because concentrating their disgruntled young male populations into mosques and preaching to them in a cult setting about “outside enemies” draws their attention and energies away from the “host government” itself. When the energies of the young Islamic male become too much for the host government to control, recruitment for jihad takes place in the mosque archipelago, idle Islamic males are conscripted and then sent to some foreign battlefield at government expense in the hopes that they will be liquidated.

The transnational presence of Caliphate Jihadists in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and other locations throughout the world confirms this. Claiming there is no mosque function in transnational Caliphate Jihadism is like saying the Third Reich had no connection to a Thousand Year Reich plan.

The mosque is the Islamic state, and the Islamic state is the mosque. The two go hand in hand together.

Western academia needs to drop its fascination with running resistance to the critiquing of Caliphate Jihadism and instead focus all of its energies on getting the United Nations to agree to a very basic definition of terrorism. If the United Nations can’t come to an agreement about what terrorism is, the academic tendency to defend terrorists won’t save the west from terrorism, as Chamberlain was not able to save Europe from Hitler.

A good start to defining terrorism is that terrorism is any act that creates terror. The next step is to admit that Caliphate Jihadism is entwined with the mosque archipelago internationally and that Islamic nation-states use the mosque archipelago as a mechanism for socializing young Islamic male populations into militancy against the west and the State of Israel.

As for the structuring of al Qai’da, the terrorist organization is now attempting to recruit battle-hardened insurgency groups in Iraq such as Ansar al Sunnah, The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), Jaish, and others.

Any claim that these groups which al Qai’da is attempting to absorb has no connection to the mosque archipelago and Islamic Identity resocialization is absolutely ludicrous.

The al Qai’da/Saudi connection only matters because Usama Bin Ladin is a Saudi. If Bin Ladin were Sudanese, or if he were Somali, or Egyptian, it would immediately restate the current academic push that is arguing that terrorists are nothing more than “friends” recruiting other friends in “social circles”. Al Qai’da is transnational and has been since 1992.

The primary Caliphate Islamist “social circle” is the mosque archipelago, the Islamic “state” within a state. That is the primary vehicle for the current phase of Caliphate Jihadist terrorist recruitment and western academics need to learn about it. Al Qai’da wants to emerge as a nation-state because it believes that it is ideologically superior to the Islamic nation-states in the international community and the constructs that form those states.

Al Qai’da wants another country as its base and to Dr. Zawahiri and Mullah Omar, it doesn’t matter what state the group absorbs. These plans are being levied against the west by Dr. Zawahiri even now as he lives and receives protection from the mosque archipelago. In Saudi Arabia, 172 militants were recently apprehended by the Saudi government in a plot to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and destroy critical Saudi energy infrastructure.

Academic claims that al Qai’da does not have the resources to move against Saudi Arabia are also ludicrous.

Christopher Farmer

MS, National Security

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