Declassified Cable From INTELWIRE Expands Wikileaks Revelation Of Iranian Arms Smuggling

One of the State Department cables released by Wikileaks this week claimed that the Iranian government has used the Red Crescent charity to smuggle arms to Hezbollah and the Balkans.

If you were wondering exactly what that means, you'll have to go beyond Wikileaks. A State Department cable obtained by INTELWIRE using the Freedom of Information Act describes an intercepted 1992 arms shipment from Iran to Bosnia in eye-popping detail.

According to the cable, the Croatian government intercepted a plane from Iran which was bound for Bosnia and inspected its contents. Croat President Franjo Tudjman called in his local U.S. consul for advice about what to do. The U.S. eventually advised him to send the flight back to Iran.

The plane was "fully loaded with arms," including a number of barrels believed to contain chemical or biological weapons. It was not the first Iranian shipment of arms to Bosnian Muslims either.

The Iranian and Bosnian governments had previously asked permission from Tudjman to ship arms through Zagreb. The last time, Tudjman had said no, so this time all the supplies in the plane was labeled as humanitarian aid from the Red Crescent.

The 20 to 40 mujahideen fighters on the plane were more difficult to conceal. It's important to note that these were probably not all (or even mostly) Iranians. Iranian nationals in Bosnia functioned more as trainers and intelligence agents, but Iran helped smuggle in fighters from around the Muslim world.

American military veterans were also flying into Bosnia to serve as trainers to the Bosnian mujahideen during the same period. Never-before-reported details of this program will be revealed in my forthcoming book on American jihadists, scheduled for release in spring 2011.

Read the whole cable

For thousands of pages of additional State Department cables, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, click here.

This document was obtained during the course of reporting Sarajevo Ricochet, a documentary about the Bosnia war, including new information about Srebrenica and about the activities of Islamic extremist networks in Bosnia during the war. For an excerpt from the documentary focused on illegal arms shipments from Iran to Bosnia, click here.

Labels: Bosnia, Iran, Red-Screscent, State-Department, Wikileaks

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Previously Classified Documents On Srebrenica Massacre And More

If you support government transparency, but don't support the indiscriminate release of classified information, forget Wikileaks and check out the documents below.

The PDF binder linked below contains 2,000 pages of previously classified State Department documents on the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, considered a turning point in the Bosnian civil war.

The documents include real-time descriptions of the chaos at Srebrenica and U.N. efforts to manage refugees from the town, where Serbian forces killed thousands of Bosnian Muslims. The cables also describe delicate behind-the-scenes diplomacy around the attack and other sensitive issues, including the attitudes of Bosnian government officials, the conduct of U.N. peacekeepers and the alleged killing of a U.N. peacekeeper by a Bosnian soldier around the time of the attack.

All documents were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The PDF is massive. I recommend saving it locally rather than trying to open it in your browser.

INTELWIRE Srebrenica Dossier

These documents were obtained during the course of reporting Sarajevo Ricochet, a documentary about the Bosnia war, including new information about Srebrenica and about the activities of Islamic extremist networks in Bosnia during the war. For an excerpt from the documentary focused on illegal arms shipments from Iran to Bosnia, click here.

INTELWIRE hosts a large collection of declassified State Department cables on a variety of important subjects related to global security and the war on terrorism. INTELWIRE documents include:

Benazir Bhutto assassination

Terrorism financing

Al Qaeda history

The Siege of Mecca

The assassination of Anwar Sadat

General Islamic extremism

Extremism in Egypt

INTELWIRE also features the biggest collection of FBI documents and State Department documents on September 11 available on the Web including documents cited in the end notes of the 9/11 Commission report. September 11 documents can be found here, here, here and here

Labels: Bosnia, Srebrenica, State-Department

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

New Issue of Al Qaeda English-Language Magazine Inspire Focuses On UPS Bomb

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a new issue of its English-language magazine "Inspire" devoted exclusively to the UPS bomb plot.

The magazine features a photograph of the device prior to its being mailed. According to the magazine, the book "Great Expectations" was included to reflect AQAP's high hopes for the plot.



Inspire claims the plot was an "operation of leverage" designed to cost the U.S. money through increased security precautions.

"Our objective is not maximum kill but to cause a hemorrhage in the aviation industry," wrote Yahya Ibrahim, who in the previous issue of Inspire proposed that would-be mujahideen weld lawnmower blades to trucks and drive into crowds of people.

In another article, an AQAP "explosives department" member named "Ikrimah Al Muhajir" says that the organization has developed five detonators which do not use any metal components, in order to evade security measures such as metal detectors.

"Inspire" No. 3 is notably lacking in any content from Anwar Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who is believed to oversee the magazine. An Awlaki video was released earlier this month without the distinctive logo of AQAP's media division. While I would hesitate to draw a conclusion based on two pieces of data, these are both curious omissions and worth keeping an eye on.

In the "Contact Us" section of the magazine, a message states: "Due to technical difficulties, we have been unable to check our e-mails for some time."

The PDF of Inspire was rendered on Nov. 16, 2010, and released today, indicating a four-day lag time between the completion of the magazine and its availablity to the public.

The issue comes more than 20 days after the actual UPS bomb plot, in which explosives devices were shipped from Yemen and addressed to Chicago synagogues. The devices were detected, intercepted and disarmed before reaching U.S. soil.

Follow INTELWIRE on Twitter for instant analysis of breaking news related to the War on Terror. INTELWIRE coverage of this release began at 7:44 p.m. Eastern and included the first reported images and details of the magazine's content.

Labels: Al-Qaeda-In-The-Arabian-Peninsula, Anwar-Awlaki, AQAP, Inspire-Magazine, Samir-Khan, Yahya-Ibrahim, Yemen

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

More Ruminations about Al Qaeda's War on Scholarship

Aaron Zelin has an interesting and informative post over at al-Wasat that provides some very useful context to my recent post about the newest messages from Anwar Awlaki and Adam Gadahn.

My post analyzed a recent move by Al Qaeda's American shills to throw out any Islamic scholarship that potentially refutes Al Qaeda's positions on jihad in favor of truthiness -- following a gut feeling that military jihad in the form of killing Americans is simply right, or as Awlaki put it "obvious."

Awlaki openly argues that no scholarship is necessary to justify this conclusion; Gadahn argues that Al Qaeda has its own scholarship which supports jihad, but like McCarthy's oft-cited list of Communists in the State Department, you'll just have to take his word for it.

Aaron shows that there is a lot of historical context behind this move and that jihadists have historically thrown out scholarship that they don't agree with. I would tentatively argue that what's new(ish) here is an attack on the actual process of scholarship.

Of the examples Aaron cites, Hassan Al-Banna, Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Muhammad Al Maqdisi all dispute the scholars who disagree with them, arguing that they are corrupt or simply wrong. That's a little different from what Awlaki is saying in his latest message, which is that scholarship is itself unnecessary -- a radical shift from a cleric who has in the past tried very hard to justify his own scholarly prowess.

Compare this to Abdullah Azzam, the father of the modern jihadist movement, who believed the conclusions of scholarship fully justified his position on jihad and bemoaned the lack of Islamic scholarship and education among the soldiers who came to Afghanistan. In "Join the Caravan," he wrote:

As for the juristic details of jihad, such as distribution of booty and treatment of prisoners of war, these matters have arisen in many regiments. Due to ignorance about them, however, they were forced to pass them on to an area in which there was a scholar or scholars who could give their decisions according to the Islamic law. You will become aware, on account of the profound signs left by the Arab youths of modest education (possibly not even surpassing secondary school), of the severe need for propagators, Imams, reciters of the Qur'an and religious scholars.

The final example Aaron cites is a particularly interesting one, from "The Neglected Duty" by Muhammad Faraj, which corresponds pretty closely to the position Awlaki just staked out:

So he who says that knowledge is Jihad must realize that what is fard [obligatory] is fighting … If a person wants to increase his knowledge … he could do so, because there are no restrictions on knowledge, which is available for everybody. But to delay Jihad because of seeking knowledge is an evidence of the one who has no evidence … However, we do not underestimate knowledge and scholars, rather we call for that. But we do not use it as evidence to abandon the obligations that Allah ordained.

While Faraj goes out of his way to say he's not underestimating scholarship, he's saying that thinking shouldn't get in the way of killing. Or, in American idiom, shoot first and ask questions later.

Rather than competing in the battlefield of ideas, Awlaki walks his readers through an argument that dismisses the entire debate and says that it is incumbent on individuals to accept the common-sense argument for jihad without regard for scholarship as a process, or finding consensus, another key process in Islam.

Fighting Satan does not require a jurisprudence. It does not require consulting. It does not need a prayer for the cause.

Gadahn says almost exactly the same thing in his recent message, emphasizing the supremacy of "common sense" over scholarship and learning:

I shall mention briefly here a number of obvious facts which young men recognize before old men and laymen recognize before Ulama [scholars]. [...] This is why anyone who wants to debate the legal basis for the contemporary Jihad must refute all those fatwas and reject all those proven consensus and not just make do with relying to one fatwa or Alim [scholar].

Gadahn, however, hedges his bets by explaining that the mujahideen have their own scholarly books of jurisprudence, which he may or may not disclose at a later date, assuming someone gets around to writing them.

In sum, I am reading these latest communiques as an attack on the process of scholarship itself, rather than on specific types of scholars, i.e., corrupt vs. pure, or modern vs. historical.

Will this initiative against scholarship per se (as opposed to fighting individual opinions) will take hold in Al Qaeda? We'll see. Back in the 1980s, I think you could get away with this, because there was much less emphasis on self-education about Islam. There was no Internet. Would-be jihadists were shaped by those who they met and learned from.

Today, the online pool of potential jihadists loves to endlessly dissect Islamic scholarship and pose as educated people themselves. You can find interminable, tedious arguments about fiqh, madhabs and precedents on almost every jihadist message board. This process helps harden extremist views for many of the participants. The lesson here? A little knowledge is a lot more dangerous than no knowledge.

On the other hand, the core argument used by Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups is more political than religious and is predicated on the assumption that Muslims are being victimized all over the world. This is the primary driver of jihadist recruitment; the religious arguments are a form of secondary reinforcement.

The approach Al Qaeda is beta-testing with these releases may attract more unstable people in the short term (a speciality of Awlaki's), but it's only going to accelerate the transformation of Al Qaeda's membership from soldiers to thugs, a shift that has been sapping the organization's effectiveness for some years now.

Labels: Abdullah-Azzam, Adam-Gadahn, Al-Qaeda, American-Al-Qaeda, Anwar-Awlaki, Ayman-Al-Zawahiri, Muhammad-Al-Maqdisi, Muhammad-Faraj, Osama-Bin-Laden

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Awlaki, Gadahn, Truthiness And Al Qaeda's War On Scholarship

Anwar Awlaki's new video reinforces a message recently sent out by Al Qaeda Central by his fellow American, Adam Gadahn. When Islamic scholarship does not support jihad, the scholars must go.

According to a translation of Awlaki's message from Flashpoint Partners:

[T]he role of fatwas is to protect Islam and not the Americans. The role of the fatwa is to protect the Sharia principles and not the governmental principles. And the person of jurisprudence, his role is to speak the truth, and not patch for the rulers and search for them for an exit every time they fall in a ditch. So if the jurist cannot speak the truth due to being forced, then we call upon the Muslims to follow behind the Ulama who do not fear in Allah the accusation of the accusers. But those who agree with the rulers on everything and are disagreeing with the Mujahideen in everything, then those are the apostate Ulama, and be aware of them.

This parallels a message from Adam Gadahn last month:

[T]he Mujahideen who have gone out to defend their religion, brothers and countries against the campaign and its agents, haven't relied on one fatwa from one Alim (learned man), but rather, have depended on numerous fatwas, and moreover, on numerous proven consensuses about the obligatory nature of Jihad on individual Muslims in a number of scenarios most or all of which have occurred not just in our day, but starting from a number of decades ago at the very least.

This is why anyone who wants to debate the legal basis for the contemporary Jihad must refute all those fatwas and reject all those proven consensus and not just make do with relying to one fatwa or Alim.

Both Gadahn and Awlaki are keenly focused here on discrediting Muslim voices who use religious scholarship to oppose Al Qaeda's brand of military jihad. If you count Awlaki's article on the Mardin Declaration in the most recent issue of AQAP's magazine, that's three messages in two months on this subject.

In addition to the similar messaging, both Gadahn and Awlaki released their messages in Arabic rather than English, despite the fact that both are famous mostly for their English-language content speaking to American Muslims.

Although they may be trying to expand their respective followings in the Arabic-jihadi world, I would suggest this tactic is probably an effort to make them look more credible as they go after credible scholars.

Gadahn's video also featured clips of Awlaki, although Gadahn did not refer to him by name.

So what does it all mean? Here are the possibilities:

1) Awlaki and Gadahn are reacting to the same public events (the Mardin declaration) and not coordinating their messages.

2) Awlaki and Gadahn are echoing each other's messages after seeing them posted to the Web.

3) Awlaki and Gadahn are coordinating their messaging, most likely through a third party.

Obviously, options 1 and 2 are the stronger possibilities. But as I noted previously, the insertion of Awlaki clips into Gadahn's last video was a development which could point to option 3. In this context, it's worth noting that information embedded in the video file suggests Awlaki's latest message may have been recorded as early as July.

Either way, as a journalist I know that three of anything is a trend. Al Qaeda, which once tried to market itself as a home to scholars, is now running away from scholarship in a uniquely American fashion.

There is a longstanding tradition in American politics of rejecting intellectualism, scholarship and even scientific fact in favor of gut-feelings and "truthiness." So it's also fascinating that Al Qaeda's most prominent Americans are leading the charge to dumb down jihad. Who better?

FOLLOW-UP: More Ruminations on Al Qaeda's War Against Scholarship

Labels: Adam-Gadahn, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda-In-The-Arabian-Peninsula, American-Al-Qaeda, American-Jihadists, American-Terrorists, Anwar-Aulaqi, Anwar-Awlaki, AQAP, Azzam-the-American

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

New Awlaki Video Released, But Not By Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

Updated 11/9/2010

Anwar Awlaki has released the full version of a video that was previewed online last week. The new release raises a number of questions with no immediately obvious answers.

The new video is entirely in Arabic, without English subtitles, and was not released by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Everything we've heard from Awlaki over the last couple of months has come from AQAP, so this is a very curious development, the meaning of which is not yet clear.

Despite the lack of official branding, the video received massive play on the Al Shamikh forum -- with a bigger banner ad than Osama bin Laden's recent audio release. Al Shamikh is an Arabic forum.

The video is a wide-ranging assault on the political and religious establishments of the Muslim world in general and Yemen in particular, according to a translation by Flashpoint Partners. In addition to the usual calls to kill Americans, Awlaki makes a particularly pointed attack on Islamic scholars who support the status quo or offer any kind of ideological cover to those who would ally with the West against the mujahideen.

Until recently, there was little evidence to suggest that Awlaki had made much of an impression on the Arabic-speaking jihadist community. It's possible that this means he has finally broken through. However, it's also worth noting that bin Laden's release came with several different sizes and shapes of banner ad, while Awlaki's patron on Al Shamikh submitted only one massive banner. So while this might just be a case of smart marketing, I suspect it represents a real breakthrough.

Other notes:

* The video is already available on YouTube. So much for that crackdown.

* The person who posted the video to jihadist forums, "Terrorist 093," asked jihadist forum members to voluntarily translate the video into English and post their results. This is also unusual, since Awlaki could have easily translated it himself or tasked the job to one of his lackeys at "Inspire," AQAP's English-language magazine.

* Aaron Zelin at Jihadology has some interesting notes on the title of the video, "To make it known and clear to mankind, and not to hide it," a quote from the Quran.

* The video was released in as a regular file but also in a massive 1.6 gig HQ version, which is also odd because the video is not in the standard 16x9 aspect ration used for HD. What I suspect this means is that no one from AQAP worked on it. I've speculated in the past that American Al Qaeda Samir Khan has been producing AQAP's videos, and Khan is closely aligned to Awlaki, so add that to the list of questions. (I'm stringing together a lot of guesses here, so caveat emptor.)

Labels: Al-Qaeda-In-The-Arabian-Peninsula, American-Al-Qaeda, American-Jihadists, American-Terrorists, Anwar-Aulaqi, Anwar-Awlaki, AQAP, Yemen

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

YouTube's War on Awlaki: So Far, So-So

One day after YouTube said it would ban videos by Anwar Awlaki that incite violence, a search of the site in Arabic showed dozens of videos still available.

A search of the Arabic version of YouTube for the name "Awlaki" yielded 429 hits. Two of the top three results were official media releases from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which were posted along with links to top jihadist forums.



A number of Awlaki audio lectures which do not directly advocate violence remain on both English and Arabic versions of YouTube.

Most of these audio recordings -- such as "The Journey of the Soul" -- were originally published commercially and may be covered by valid copyrights, despite their wide availability in pirated form online.

Others, which do not primarily relate to violent topics, nevertheless discuss and justify violence and violent conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims. For instance, in a series on "The Hereafter" which is still available on the English version of YouTube, Awlaki says:

The only justified war is jihad. Because that is the only fight that is happening for the sake of Allah Subhan Allah. Everything else is happening for the sake of dunya. [Non-Muslims] attack jihad in Islam, as if their wars are justified. What are they fighting for? Sometimes they would cover it. They would mask it with the goal of human rights. We’re fighting for human rights.

Hundreds of other radical videos remain on YouTube as well. A search for videos under the keyword "mujahideen" yielded 5,000 hits in Arabic and another 5,000 in English. Videos included propaganda from the late leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, known for his ultraviolence.

Footage also included Abu Mansour Al Amriki, aka Omar Hammami, an American citizen who has joined the Al Qaeda-linked Al Shabab insurgency in Somalia. In the video featured, Hammami directly encourages Muslims to join the fighting in Somalia.

A search under mujahideen also yields footage of overtly terrorist groups and activities in Algeria, Palestine and Chechnya, and footage of the war in Bosnia. Searching for "jihad" in Arabic produced videos of lectures by Osama bin Laden, London radical preacher Abu Hamza Al Masri, virulently anti-Semitic preacher Muhammad Hussein Yaqub and jihadist fighters in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman Al Zawahiri was represented by more than 2,600 videos on the Arabic version of YouTube, including a substantial number of official Al Qaeda releases which should, in theory, be easily identified as objectionable material.

It's not clear what strategy YouTube is using to eliminate problematic videos, or whether they have a subject-matter expert working on the problem. While some content will certainly fall into a gray area, it doesn't look like they have eliminated the low-hanging fruit yet.

Searches were conducted Nov. 3-4, 2010.

Labels: Abu-Mansour-Al-Amriki, Al-Qaeda-In-The-Arabian-Peninsula, Anwar-Awlaki, Ayman-Al-Zawahiri, Omar-Hammami

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink