The Financial Times, February 21 2002 17:22GMT
Bin Laden's bid to turn Muslim against Muslim
By FT writers
The tailor's assistant at the Muridke clothes shop had hurriedly hidden the military
jackets in which he had once done a roaring trade with jihadis on their way to fight in
Afghanistan. In their place were women's clothes, which will sell less readily but
certainly will not bring him trouble.
It is risky being a jihadi, or "holy warrior", in Pakistan these days. About 2,000
militants belonging to five different Muslim groups having been arrested since
September 11. Shopkeepers in large cities have been told by police to avoid selling
items - including posters - which "highlight the virtues of jihad".
Far from the snow-capped peaks and desert plains of Afghanistan, new frontlines have
been opened in the war on terrorism within Muslim states from Somalia to Indonesia.
Pakistan is at the centre of the emerging battle.
As with the assistant at Muridke, the shopkeepers in the Markaz-I-Tayyaba (Centre
for the Group of Puritans) religious community 35km outside Lahore are in no doubt
that General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, is determined to crush the
militant Islamist groups which had been their customers.
The Markaz-I-Tayyaba was once a favourite haunt of the Lashkar-I-Tayyaba (Group of
Puritans), one of five Pakistani militant groups to have been banned, and one with
close ties to al-Qaeda. The community has changed its name - to the rather tamer
al-Da'wa (The Call). But with an unknown number of defeated Pakistani and other
militants having fled into Pakistan from the fighting in Afghanistan, the pool of trained
and experienced militants in the country remains substantial.
"The Kashmir jihad may go through a phase where it seems to be getting cold," said
the leader of one Islamic group. "But there's a long legacy of jihad - no matter in which
part of the world - going through hot and cold phases. There's certain to be a hot
phase after the cold one."
It is this kind of conflict - within national borders and largely between Muslims - that is
forming the new front line of the terrorists' struggle. Indeed, some analysts conclude
that fomenting such conflict is a goal of Osama bin Laden.
"Polarising the Islamic world between the umma (Muslim community) and the regimes
allied with the United States would help achieve bin Laden's primary goal: furthering
the cause of Islamic revolution within the Muslim world itself," Michael Scott Doran,
professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton university, wrote recently.
"War with the United States was not a goal in and of itself but rather an instrument
designed to help his brand of extremist Islam survive and flourish among the believers.
Americans, in short, have been drawn into somebody else's civil war," he wrote in
Foreign Affairs last month.
Now, as al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters flee Afghanistan, the scenes of the "frontline"
jihads of the 1990s are being watched closely for renewed activity by governments
from Jakarta to Sarajevo.
Nato officials say they see a continuing threat from terrorists in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
which attracted large numbers of Muslim fighters in the early 1990s. On January 17,
US forces arrested five Algerians and one Yemeni in Bosnia, and in doing so claimed
to have "disrupted" an al-Qaeda network. The six are now detained at Camp X-Ray on
Cuba.
Chechnya has in the past also been a magnet for radicalised Muslims. Although there
are few signs of a build-up of foreign fighters, Chechens may have fled from
Afghanistan since the US bombing begun. According to Russian security sources,
money is still arriving from Gulf Arab donations to Muslim causes, albeit at the rate of
$1m a month compared with $6m a month in 2000.
In south-east Asia several leading activists linked to al-Qaeda evaded a police dragnet
following attempts last December to blow up the US, British, Australian and Israeli
embassies in Singapore. Security forces are still attempting to establish a clear
picture of the militants' network in the region operating under the umbrella of the
Jemaah Islamiah (JI).
Indonesian intelligence officials claim a number of Indonesian radical groups have
been approached by al-Qaeda, though all are now publicly distancing themselves from
Mr bin Laden.
Insecurity and political turmoil have made it difficult for the governmentto contain the
conflict between Muslims and Christians in some areas, such as Sulawesi. This in
turn provided the space needed for the regional Jemaah Islamiah to develop its base
and the network which put together the Singapore plot.
The war against terrorism may only make this turmoil worse. The evidence of JI's
Indonesian explosives expert, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, who was arrested in the
Philippines in January, suggests that US policy may exacerbate the internal conflicts
Mr bin Laden is thought to be seeking.
As part of this war, 660 US troops have been sent to the island of Mindanao to assist
the Philippines' army in fighting the insurrection by the Abu Sayyaf Islamist group,
with which al-Qaeda had brief ties - now severed - in the mid-1990s.
Since his arrest, Mr al-Ghozi has said nothing to suggest Abu Sayyaf has links with
al-Qaeda. Instead, fears abound that the US military presence may worsen the
already considerable resentment and rebelliousness within the Philippines' Muslim
minority.
"The Philippine military has a poor record of distinguishing between rebels and
civilians among the Muslim population, and the joint military exercises may very well
increase civilian casualties," says Julkipli Wadi, a professor of Islamic Studies at the
Philippines state university.
The war against terrorism also threatens Somalia's fragile transitional government.
Allegations of the presence there of Islamists allied to al-Qaeda have been rife.
al-Ittihad al-Islami, a long-established Islamist group which had contacts with
al-Qaeda in the early-1990s and has some sympathisers within the government was
identified as a target.
In reality, al-Qaeda's potential allies in the country are weak, though several Somali
factions opposed to the government have sought to attract US support by portraying
themselves as effective allies against the Islamists.
This has thrown the wisdom of any US action in the country into doubt, particularly as
al-Qaeda's future strategy has yet to emerge visibly from the rubble of Afghanistan.
The fear is that the strategy will be to watch and wait as small, local fires are stoked
into raging infernos, fed by occasional al-Qaeda atrocities.
* Written by Mark Huband. Reporting by Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad, John Burton in
Singapore, Tom McCawley in Jakarta, Roel Landingin in Manila, Andrew Jack in
Moscow, Judy Dempsey in Brussels, Hugh Williamson in Berlin, Mark Turner in
Mogadishu
© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2002.
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