:: IslamistBlog ::

:: Monday, April 28, 2003 ::

Islamists in Retreat

The Anglo-American invasion and conquering of Iraq is both a tremendous setback and a brazen challenge to the Islamist mujahideen, exactly as the Bush adminstration meant it to be. Did anyone really believe the invasion of Iraq was purely because they might have had some nerve and biological agents? A lot of backstage comments from the State department leading up to this conflict suggested the real reason was to project US power directly into the Middle East, and no doubt, to try to establish a form of government not as overtly hostile to the West as all the other Arab governments in the region.

The result is that Islamist organizations have at least temporarily lost their balance. They are in retreat and probably scrambling for cover (as if they weren't already). Afghanistan is no longer a place where they can operate freely, and the long terror corridor Teheran-Baghdad-Damascus has collapsed. This doesn't mean that Islamists have been defeated, certainly not in Afghanistan, where with the spring melt it seems that coordinated activity is beginning to emerge.

Here is a sample of the Islamist reaction to the collapse of the NeoFachist regime run by Saddam Hussein in Iraq :
WorldNetDaily: Jihadist hope turns to Pakistan
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and
WorldNetDaily: Is al-Qaida finished?
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Yet Islamist elements are making guerrilla attacks in Afghanistan; they have succeeded in killing a US soldier and wounding 5, and killing some Afghan security forces as well:
Asia Times: Afghanistan, once more the melting pot
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Despite that setback to anti-Islamist operations, it appears that levels of Islamist terrorism have lowered from 2001 to 2002, both in number of attacks and in the number of people killed by Islamist terror. If the decrease is due to the US-led counter offensive against the Islamist crusade, then it came at pretty high cost in dollars and in lives:
CNN: Terror report: Attacks down overall
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In other big news several Islamist operatives were bagged in Pakistan, and one in Iraq:
CNN:Bush hails capture of top al Qaeda operative
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and:
CNN:Al Qaeda-tied terrorist nabbed in Iraq
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In the US the FBI is getting ready to communicate warnings to nuclear facilities, presumeably because of cryptanalysis of Islamist communications, or perhaps unencrypted intercepts:
TIME:The FBI Plans to Warn Nuclear Facilities
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On the one hand, an anti-Islamist has to be pleased with most of these developments -- even the warnings to the nuke plants can be viewed as positive in that it shows that we have some knowledge of the activities of Islamist opertatives in the US. On the other, there's much that is happening that plays into the hands of the Islamist propagandists. The shootings in Fallujah are a plain example.


Islamist Methods I

I have a friend who is a reporter, he said that the one of the big things he learned over 15 years on the crime beat is this: If you don't see an act of violence, you can never be sure what really happened. Every side has a different story. The Sunni Iraqis say one thing, the US conquerors say another. I think if the soldiers fired then they were either shot at or thought they were shot at. But you don't know. Maybe they just got fed up with an aggressive crowd. Maybe one of them hates Arabs and took a pot shot. On the Iraqi side, it would be no surprise if Islamists or similar fired from within the crowd (the print version of the New York Times indicated this was a strong possibility on the following day). As far as the Islamists were concerned, not nearly enough Iraqi civilians were killed to make really good Islamist propaganda (in Afghanistan the Islamists multiplied civilian deaths by close to 10,000 to arrive at their own figures, as shown on the azzam.com websites).

But Islamists believe that it is okay if innocent Muslims are killed when fighting the disbelievers(1). In Mogadishu the mujahideen fighters used women "volunteers" as shields. Islamist warriors used them as rifle stands, firing from behind them as they advanced on US soldiers, sometimes resting their assault rifles on the women's shoulders as they walked toward certain death. It surely could have happened in this case too, with Islamsts taking advantage of a largely innocent crowd of protesters, and firing from within the crowd. They did fire from the buildings across the street. But ... if you're not there ... you just don't know.

Mullah Mills

1). From Faraj: Jihad, The Absent Obligation, p 69-70: "Such Muslims, if they are killed, will be martyrs but obligatory Jihad must not be abandoned because of the one who will be killed as a shaheed (witness to God). This is because when the Muslims fight against the disbelievers, the one who is killed by them will be a martyr, and so will be the one who is killed for the benefit of Islam, although he does not deserve to be killed as far as his intention is concerned."
:: Mullah 7:50 PM [+] ::
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