On July 14, 2022, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor to the head of al-Qaeda, will broadcast his final speech from the Kabul hideout. The theme is not original. It involves specifying the theoretical aspects underlying the practice of jihad on a global scale, under an equally traditional title: ‘The Question of the Century, or the Crusaders Through the Ages’. According to his usual ideas, “the aggression of the crusaders” against Islam continues to have the same character today and their response is based on monotheism (tawhid) and should consist of jihad until the triumph of the true faith. .
That must be the fundamental content of preaching (dawa) aimed at achieving the unity of believers in the struggle against their enemies: “national governments, international legality, atheism, secularism, oppression and injustice, military occupation and Christianity. Without forget “the establishment of Israel at the heart of the Islamic nation” and the occupation by Spain of Ceuta and Melilla.
Until those last words, al-Zawahiri remains true to the legacy of the radicalization of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had advocated Islamization of society in Egypt by combining preaching and violence. One of his intellectuals, Sayyid Qutb, broke the balance in favor of violent action against an apostate (false Muslim) power. The perfect social system, based on the sovereignty of Allah, would be imposed by jihad on the ignorance (yahiliyya) of the disbelievers of the time, heirs of the “pagans”, enemies of Muhammad in the seventh century.
The story dissolves into an eternal return of the struggle for the true faith against its adversaries. The Muslim Brotherhood organization forgot about this absolute priority and so al-Zawahiri, in the wake of Sayyid Qutb, declared it “suicidal and criminal”.
The assassination of Anuar al-Sadat in 1981, whose plot he was involved in, marked the beginning of the era of jihad that al-Zawahiri led after he was released from prison in 1984. It was the spark that ignited the Islamic revolution: “The bloody chapters of this revolution are unfolding day after day.
The foundations were laid for the future confluence of the reactive fundamentalism of Sayyid Qutb of Egypt with the resurrection of another fundamentalism, the extreme of Abdul Wahhab in Saudi Arabia. This terrorism will not be the result of misery, but of the discontent of an elite who find themselves at the crossroads of an archaic mentality and a world ruled by foreign and infidel powers.
The war in Afghanistan served as a meeting place for both movements. With an ostensible welfare goal, bin Laden founded the al-Qaeda organization “to help, both militarily and financially, oppressed Muslims around the world.” The victory over the Russians served as a model: «If Russia could be destroyed» [vencida]America can be beheaded,” bin Laden said before the 2001 attacks.
Abdel Bari Atwan, reflects the intersection of influences between bin Laden and al-Zawahiri: “The increase in audacity and violence of al-Qaeda’s actions, along with the manipulation of the media – the entry on the scene of cyber terrorism – and the development of the psychological strategy, the contributions of al-Zawahiri, in addition to the priority of international action. Al-Zawahiri Criticized Bin Laden’s Statement [en 1998] of jihad to the United States. He allegedly told bin Laden that the United States would never take him seriously as long as his complaints were reasonable. Faced with this, al-Zawahiri pleaded for resorting to means of instigating terror taken from the life of the prophet, especially in the attacks on his Jewish opponents. Killing them was secondary; he talked about the horror that such actions would sow in America.
Al-Zawahiri in London published his justification for the 9/11 attacks: Knights under the banner of the Prophet. He advocated the creation of a unitary power, a caliphate, tasked with expelling the infidel invaders – Israel and the United States – from dar al-Islam. Since this was unattainable in the short term, it was time to strike, to harass the enemy with all kinds of weapons, to carry out suicide operations. He expects ‘a long road of jihad and sacrifice’.
In 2004-2005, the attacks in Madrid and London seemed to usher in a new, asymmetrical form of world war. The US military’s conquest of Afghanistan robbed al-Qaeda of its main operational platform, its control systems improved, and despite the rise of cyberterrorism, via the Internet, the tide was somewhat controlled.
Mobile terrorism gave way to the development of a decentralized Al-Qaeda, with each territorial section provided with an intelligence division. That’s where the Islamic State begins. “Without digital technology,” Bari Atwan wrote, “it is highly unlikely that the Islamic State could even have arisen, let alone survive and expand.”
Bush came to the aid of the jihadists with his frenzied invasion of Iraq. The vacuum thus created was covered by the initiative of Jordanian Musab al-Zarqawi, who arrived months before the war and was willing to join al-Qaeda, but from the even more radical tenets of Takfirism; he hated the Shiites, the majority of Islamic heretics in the country, “a sect of polytheism and apostasy.”
Moreover, the exemplary nature of terror will go well beyond the al-Zawahiri attacks, opening with the beheading of an American businessman in March 2004, and an attack on the major Shia festival of Ashura, which left 185 dead.
Al-Zawahiri had to respond, in a letter dated October 11, 2005. He accepts the establishment of a caliphate, with the idea of supranational expansion, but believes that the war against odious Shiism breaks the unity of Muslims against America, the true enemy. Nor does he accept the slaughter of hostages and the display of executions, “one of the things the Muslim people will never find palatable.” The opposition remained until the defeat of the Islamic State in 2019.
The existence of al-Qaeda seemed secondary to the fame its competitor had gained. Fernando Reinares has proven this to be a false impression: “When President Biden says Al Qaeda has been downgraded or reduced [crea] a mistake that confuses public opinion, because today the branches of Al Qaeda are active in North, East and West Africa, as well as in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula or in South Asia…». While it continues to operate on a global scale, the physical disappearance of the Islamic State has returned primacy to Al-Qaeda.
There were two ways to cause death, as evidenced by the 2015 Paris attacks: revenge in the wake of the prophet, from al-Qaeda against Charlie Hebdo, and massive takfirist terrorism, from the Islamic State in the Bataclan room. .
The war action that led to the death of bin Laden on May 2, 2011, bringing al-Zawahiri under the leadership of al-Qaeda, which he had previously exercised. Action open to discussion and recalling the importance of leaving Afghanistan in 2021, by regaining its role as a haven for Islamic terrorism.
Source: La Verdad
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