Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-138-Caliphate- The State of...

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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-138-Caliphate- The State of al-Qaeda-34

Cees When Zawahiri announced the creation of AQIS he was globally ridiculed and seen as a desperate effort to oppose Daesh. As I warned many times focus on Daesh allows AQ: AQIS to build the two largest training camp ever found in 14 years of Aghan war. We urgently need to stay focused on the larger enemy: AQ as they do have a plan. Bottom line is that this camp was built to be a high end training facility to prepare enemy personnel, for what? And what did we fail to see?

What I think you have to do is challenge your assumptions here,” Campbell explained in his interview with Lamothe. “We struck a major al Qaeda sanctuary in the center of the Taliban’s historic heartland.”

“It’s a place where you would probably think you wouldn’t have AQ. I would agree with that,” Campbell said, according to the Post. “This was really AQIS, and probably the largest training camp-type facility that we have seen in 14 years of war.” Bottom line is that this camp was built to be a high end training facility to prepare enemy personnel. This camp is unique in its level of technical training. The training camp was broken down by basic and advance training areas. Training ranged from physical fitness, weapons training (small arms to advanced explosive training, indirect fire), chemistry to produce advanced explosives, and higher level sniper training

The foreign minister of Tunisia – which has seen thousands of its youth join extremist groups in Syria and elsewhere – said on Friday that unlike the past, modern terrorism has “no boundaries.” “We did not overcome the threat because in the past, we looked at terrorism and tackled it as if it was an isolated phenomenon. But today, it has multiple forms and no boundaries,” Taieb Baccouche said

The Islamic State and its jihadist rival Al Nusrah Front, al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, are training forces to conduct urban warfare at camps inside Syria.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A multi-day operation in southern Afghanistan this month that involved 200 Special Operations forces and scores of American airstrikes targeted what was “probably the largest” al-Qaeda training camp found in the 14-year Afghan war, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan said on Friday. Army Gen. John F. Campbell, the four-star officer in charge of the U.S. war effort, said the camp was used by AQIS, an acronym for al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent. The group’s formation was announced last year by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and is believed to be based in Pakistan and focused on India, Pakistan and other nations in southern Asia.

Al Qaeda’s Kandahar training camp ‘probably the largest’ in Afghan WarBY THOMAS JOSCELYN | October 31st, 2015 | The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe provides new reporting on the two large al Qaeda training facilities raided by US and Afghan forces in the Shorabak District of Kandahar

The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.–Winston Churchill

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earlier this month. Lamothe interviewed Gen. John F. Campbell, who oversees the war effort in Afghanistan. And Campbell confirmed that the camps were run by al Qaeda, with one of them being extraordinarily big.“It’s a place where you would probably think you wouldn’t have AQ. I would agree with that,” Campbell said, according to the Post. “This was really AQIS, and probably the largest training camp-type facility that we have seen in 14 years of war.”AQIS stands for Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, the newest regional branch of al Qaeda’s international organization. Ayman al Zawahiri, the emir of al Qaeda, announced the establishment of AQIS in September 2014. AQIS has attempted some pretty daring plots against the Pakistani military, but like al Qaeda arms elsewhere appears to be devoting most of its resources to the jihadists’ insurgencies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries. As we reported on Oct. 13, US military officials said that one of the two al Qaeda camps was nearly 30 square miles in size – an astonishing figure. More than 200 US troops and Afghan commandos, supported by 63 airstrikes, were required to assault the facilities. Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, a US military spokesman, was quoted in a press release as saying that the raids included “one of the largest joint ground-assault operations we have ever conducted in Afghanistan.” Shoffner added, “We struck a major al Qaeda sanctuary in the center of the Taliban’s historic heartland.”Taking out an al Qaeda camp of this size, over several days, likely required extensive planning. And Campbell said as much in his interview with Lamothe. “We looked at it for a while to make sure we reduced the risk to the forces that go in on a target like that,” Campbell said. “It was a very complex target set over several days.” Campbell explained to the Post that the Shorabak camps “were discovered after a raid this summer on another al Qaeda facility in the Barmal district of eastern Afghanistan’s Paktika province.” Interestingly, that is where Abu Khalil al Sudani, one of al Qaeda’s most senior figures, was killed in July. Indeed, intelligence recovered from the facility associated with Sudani may have been used to locate the Shorabak camps. The timing is consistent with reporting by CNN’s Barbara Starr, who cited an email from “coalition forces.” On Oct. 21, Starr reported that the massive camp in Shorabak “had been operating since last November — and the US didn’t learn the full details about the site until July.” That is the same month as the strike against Sudani. According to Starr, the “coalition” explained that “several hundred hours of surveillance” were carried out between July, when the camps were discovered, and Oct. 7, when the joint American-Afghan raids were first launched.The “coalition sources” cited by CNN provided these details on the larger of the two camps: Bottom line is that this camp was built to be a high end training facility to prepare enemy personnel. This camp is unique in its level of technical training. The training camp was broken down by basic and advance training areas. Training ranged from physical fitness, weapons training (small arms to advanced explosive training, indirect fire), chemistry to produce advanced explosives, and higher level sniper training.All of this raises troubling questions. Why weren’t the facilities in Shorabak discovered before July 2015, especially given that one of them was almost 30 square miles in size? US officials have long maintained that al Qaeda has a negligible presence in Afghanistan and was confined to the country’s east. Why didn’t the US know that al Qaeda had major operations ongoing in southern Afghanistan. “What I think you have to do is challenge your assumptions here,” Campbell explained in his interview with Lamothe. “Things change, and what was good here in 2010 or 2011 may not necessarily be good today as far as the enemy. It is true that al Qaeda fighters have streamed into Afghanistan from northern Pakistan. And al Qaeda has relocated its operations not just into Kandahar, but also into Helmand. As we reported on Oct. 24:





Since the beginning of the year, Pakistani authorities have carried out multiple raids against [AQIS]. However, according to Pakistani officials, AQIS has relocated a significant portion of its operations into Helmand. The move by AQIS was made in anticipation of the Pakistani military’s Operation Zarb-e-Azb, an offensive that began in June 2014. The offensive has targeted al Qaeda and affiliated jihadist groups, including several from Central Asia. Some of these same organizations have helped fuel the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan this year.Thus, al Qaeda’s relocation from northern Pakistan to Afghanistan has undoubtedly increased its footprint in the latter country since early 2014. But the reality is that the US intelligence community and military underestimated al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan even prior to that time. An analysis of press releases issued by the now defunct International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from 2007 to 2013 demonstrates that al Qaeda and allied groups maintained significant cadres of jihadists in the country during that span. Declassified files recovered in Osama bin Laden’s compound show that al Qaeda operated in multiple Afghan provinces in the months leading up to the May 2011 Abbottabad raid. So, the US should “challenge” its assumptions as “[t]hings change,” especially because those assumptions were wrong all along.Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for The Long War Journal.

Islamic State? Al-Qaeda! by Derek DavisonA report recently issued by the Wilson Center suggests that the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) is fundamentally incapable of sustaining its early successes. On the other hand, al-Qaeda, which many believe has been eclipsed by IS, may still be the greater long-term terrorist threat to US and Western interests. The report, titled The Islamic State as Icarus: A Critical Assessment of an Untenable Threat and written by National Defense University scholar Thomas F. Lynch III, was released on October 5.Lynch’s argument is rooted in an analysis of the many challenges IS faces. Although its high-profile split with al-Qaeda, its self-designation as a “caliphate,” and its rapid and dramatic successes in Iraq and Syria in 2014 brought IS a considerable amount of attention around the world, 2015 has not been as generous to the organization. In fact, despite isolated successes in Iraq (capturing the city of Ramadi) and Syria (capturing the Tadmur/Palmyra area), overall the group lost almost 10% of the territory previously under its control during the first half of this year.Seven Reasons for SkepticismLynch’s report identifies seven factors that have caused the group’s progress to slow and that should create skepticism about its ability to compete with al-Qaeda over the long term:▪ “Major Pushback from Multiple Foreign Militaries”: IS’s sudden successes may

ultimately prove counterproductive, as the group is now opposed by no fewer than 64 separate nations involved in the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition, plus Iran and now Russia, and that doesn’t include irregular forces arrayed against it, like Kurdish militias in Syria and Shi?a militias in Iraq. As Lynch writes: “No major Salafi-





Jihadist outfit—not AQ and not the Afghan Taliban after the 9/11 terror strikes in the United States—has previously inspired such a comprehensive set of encircling state adversaries in such a short time.”

▪ “The Dubious Quality of, and Limited Responses from, Appeals to Potential Affiliates”: One of the areas in which IS has been trying to compete with al-Qaeda is in the recruitment of regional affiliates outside of its core Syria-Iraq zone, similar to the Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda’s affiliate organizations in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra) and Yemen (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). So far, however, IS’s successes in this effort, while impressive numerically, have been limited to isolated groups, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in Central Asia, and to groups that have proven too parochial and/or too brutal even for al-Qaeda, like Nigeria’s infamous Boko Haram. Some of these affiliates have facilitated the flow of new fighters into Iraq and Syria, but there’s little evidence to show that IS has been able to expand its own power into the territories in which its affiliates operate.

▪ “Self-Defeating Foreign Fighter Recruitment Efforts”: IS has been very successful in recruiting foreign fighters to come to Iraq and Syria to join its cause. According to some estimates, 20,000 or more foreign recruits have joined the group since 2013. However, Lynch suggests that this recruitment may begin to backfire on IS. For one thing, there is growing evidence that foreign IS recruits are becoming disillusioned with the organization, either because they’re unhappy with their living conditions or repulsed by IS’s indiscriminate violence directed at other Muslims. As the pool of defectors grows and their stories become public, potential new recruits may begin to think twice about joining IS. For another thing, those foreign fighters have evidently clashed with local Sunni tribes, which (if it becomes a pattern) could make it far more difficult for IS to hang on to the predominantly Sunni areas it now controls.

▪ “Precarious Finances”: This may be the most counter-intuitive point on Lynch’s list, given that the Islamic State is thought to be extremely wealthy. However, IS acquired nearly half of its estimated $2 billion in assets in the capture of Mosul in June 2014 and its subsequent looting of the banks there. It sustains itself by relying on taxing the populations under its control, illicit fossil fuel sales, and kidnapping foreign nationals for ransom, but each of these is vulnerable to degradation. Coalition airstrikes have targeted IS’s energy production infrastructure, coalition member states have agreed to stop paying ransom for their kidnapped nationals, and the organization’s tax revenues are only as substantial as the territory it controls. IS has also been unable to tap into one of the most reliable jihadi funding streams, charitable contributions from wealthy Gulf patrons, due to the next item on Lynch’s list.

▪ “[IS’s status as] a Jihadist Pariah”: The Islamic State’s break with al-Qaeda and its indiscriminate violence has cut it off from much of the rest of the Salafi-Jihadist community, including the wealthy Gulf patrons whose charitable contributions continue to fund al-Qaeda and related groups. Consequently, Gulf charitable funding is being directed toward groups that are explicitly fighting against IS in Syria.

▪ “Risky Social Media Messaging”: IS has made copious use of social media to spread its propaganda, broadcast its successes, recruit new followers, and encourage sympathetic individuals to carry out terrorist attacks. Lynch argues that employing social media to such a degree comes at a cost: it allows intelligence and law enforcement agencies to gain insights into IS’s activities and organization, and it





limits the organization’s appeal by widely broadcasting its brutality to the general public.

▪ “An Ambitious and Unforgiving Territorial Timeline”: As Lynch writes, “by its own logic, the IS caliphate must grow robustly across the Middle East and the wider Islamic world to fulfill its promise. However, it has actually stopped growing in Iraq and Syria, and its claims of group affiliate attacks have yet to produce demonstrable territory gains elsewhere.” If IS can’t start gaining territory again, Lynch writes, its current supporters may well turn against it.

At an October 15 Wilson Center event to roll out his report, Lynch suggested that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s decision in summer 2014 to “form and frame an international Islamic caliphate within five years,” a break with al-Qaeda’s vision of a caliphate to be formed at some unspecified future time, may prove to be a mistake. Lynch said, “That is an enormous amount of pressure put on that organization to pull together and show territorial gains” as well create “quality” affiliates, in that five year period. This pressure, according to Lynch’s research, forces IS to claim responsibility for acts to which they are only tenuously connected at best. As more is learned about IS’s actual ability (or lack thereof) to project its authority outside of its Iraq/Syria birthplace, Lynch argues that the group’s “messaging of inexorable gain” will begin to come apart. Lynch later suggested that IS could begin to come apart in “as short a timeline as two and a half to three years” if “the very impatient people that actually populate ISIS” begin to see that the group is not making sustainable gains outside of its core territory.

Limited Appeal In his report, Lynch cites the case of South Asia, where al-Qaeda and IS have been directly competing for dominance in what he calls the “Salafi-Jihadist space.” Al-Qaeda’s decision last September to form its own South Asian affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, was intended to lock IS out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India -Bangladesh-Myanmar region, and for the most part it seems to have succeeded. IS has struggled to gain a foothold there, and its recruitment of fighters from that region has lagged considerably behind its recruitment of fighters from elsewhere, even Europe. The South Asian example may show the limits of IS’s appeal and suggests that al-Qaeda will continue to compete with the younger organization for affiliates and recruits moving forward.Analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told the Wilson Center audience that al-Qaeda remains a greater threat to Western interests than the Islamic State despite the fact that IS has the higher profile at the moment. He pointed out that IS’s brutality, so heavily emphasized in its own public propaganda, drastically limits its pool of potential recruits to people who agree that IS’s most extreme practices, like genocide and sexual slavery, are good things. That, Gartenstein-Ross noted, is “a high bar.” On the other hand, al-Qaeda has quietly been using IS’s extremism to recast itself in a more moderate and potentially more broadly appealing light in places like Syria and Yemen, which earns it more public support and potentially more backing from those wealthy Gulf financiers.Harleen Gambhir, a counterterrorism analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, cautioned that the Islamic State hasn’t stopped trying to expand beyond Iraq/Syria and has in particular established footholds in Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan. It’s using these regional affiliates, which admittedly “are not necessarily the strongest or most powerful groups within each of these areas,” to “help set the conditions for expansion” by increasing “disorder…so that they can set conditions for ISIS’s eventual expansion.” The existence of these affiliates, however dubious their strength or reach, also allows IS to at least claim to be competing with al-Qaeda all around the world.





It’s questionable the extent to which al-Qaeda still poses a major threat to the United States at this point. As Lynch said in his October 15 remarks, losses incurred in the decade between September 11 and the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Special Forces in 2011 have left al-Qaeda “no longer the global catastrophic terror threat that it had been on the precipice of 9/11 or even the several years beyond that.” The group hasn’t successfully carried out a terrorist attack inside the United States since 2001 (though it presumably still wants to do so). In 2013, The Washington Post noted that terrorist attacks overall in the United States had been steadily declining for several decades. But given the alarm that the Islamic State’s quick rise to power generated within the circles of power in Washington, something that actually helps IS by feeding into propaganda about its “inexorable gain,” Lynch’s report represents an important countervailing viewpoint.Image: from a video of the graduation from an Islamic State training camp

Friday, 30 October 2015 The foreign minister of Tunisia – which has seen thousands of its youth join extremist groups in Syria and elsewhere – said on Friday that unlike the past, modern terrorism has “no boundaries.” “We did not overcome the threat because in the past, we looked at terrorism and tackled it as if it was an isolated phenomenon. But today, it has multiple forms and no boundaries,” Taieb Baccouche said at an opening session of the Manana Dialogue in Bahrain, held by the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank. As of the end of 2014, some 3,000 Tunisians have flocked to Syria to fight against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, with many joining the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). According to estimates, Tunisia is the largest exporter of ISIS fighters in the region. In the same panel discussion, Gulf Cooperation Council Secretary General Abdullatif al-Zayani said that the current definitions of terrorism were in need of change. We need stop having these discussions about how we the definitions of terrorism are. The Houthis’ coup in Yemen is terrorism. In Syria and Iraq, terrorism. And Palestine with the Israeli occupiers as well,” Zayani said. “It’s high time we start talking about containment of all this violence,” he added.No positive interventions Meanwhile, Yemeni foreign minister Riyadh Yaseen said the only way to address the chaos in the region is to convince Iran to “stop interfering in the internal affairs of others.” Since late March, a Saudi-led coalition has bombed Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen, in a bid to put the internationally-recognized government back in power. “In Yemen’s history, there were no positive interventions from Iran in terms of education, infrastructure or development. The bulk of those came from the Gulf, the U.N., but not Iran. They have only ever exported to us arms and brainwashing of our youth,” he said. For her part, the U.N.’s Development Programme administrator Helen Clark said that without sustainable development focusing on the young generation, there could be no peace in the region. The focus of her observations centered on the “21st century high-tech phenomenon” surrounding ISIS’ capabilities in reaching the Arab’s world young men and women. “When you look at the weeks and months they take to groom people online and tracking the foreign jihadists’ movements, these are very sophisticated measures,” Clark said. “And I raise the question whether we are taking sophisticated set of techniques ourselves in countering it? But we are where we are and we can’t rewind the clock backwards,” she added. The panel discussion was followed by an official opening night dinner attended by delegates, which had Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi as the keynote speaker.

Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the wider fallout from the Iraq invasionDAVID MORRISON 28 October 2015





Tony Blair was warned by his intelligence chiefs that invading Iraq would increase the terror threat facing Britain. If MPs had known this, would they have voted for war?

Flickr/theglobalpanorama, CC BY-SA 2.0Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller was the director general of MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, from October 2002 until April 2007, that is, for a few months before the US/UK invasion of Iraq and for four years afterwards, while the US and the UK were occupying Iraq. She gave evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on 20 July 2010.Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller’s evidence to Chilcot One of the four members of the inquiry committee, Sir Roderic Lyne, asked her, “to what extent did the conflict in Iraq exacerbate the overall threat that your service and your fellow services were having to deal with from international terrorism?”She replied: “Substantially” (p24-5).She said there was hard evidence of this, for instance “numerical evidence of the number of plots, the number of leads, the number of people identified, and the correlation of that to Iraq and statements of people as to why they were involved, the discussions between them as to what they were doing” (p34).She added: “The fact is that the threat increased, was exacerbated by Iraq, and caused not only my service but many other services round the world to have to have a major increase in resources to deal with it. In 2003, having had an upgrade in resources after 9/11, which my predecessor agreed, and … another one … in 2002, by 2003 I found it necessary to ask the prime minister for a doubling of our budget. This is unheard of, it's certainly unheard of today, but he and the Treasury and the chancellor accepted that because I was able to demonstrate the scale of the problem that we were confronted by.” (p26-7)Sir Roderic Lyne asked “how significant … a factor was Iraq compared with other situations that were used by extremists, terrorists, to justify their actions”. She replied: “I think it is highly significant … By 2003/2004 we were receiving an increasing number of leads to terrorist activity from within the UK.” (p18)There had been, she said, “an increasing number of British-born individuals living and brought up in this country, some of them third generation, who were attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the west's activities in Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their fellow religionists and the Muslim world” (p19).As a consequence, the fact that the London bombings in July 2005 were carried out by British citizens didn’t come as a surprise to MI5.

Al-Qaeda activity increased “substantially” because of Iraq So, there is no doubt whatsoever that al-Qaeda related activity in Britain increased “substantially” because of Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. This activity included the London bombings of 7 July 2005, in which 52 people were killed and more than 700 were injured. If Britain had not participated in the invasion of Iraq, it is very unlikely that such an upsurge in al-Qaeda related activity in Britain, including the London bombings, would have occurred. Stating that is not a justification for the London bombings or other al-Qaeda attacks. It is simply a statement of fact.

Sir David Ormand’s evidence to Chilcot In advance of the invasion of Iraq, the The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

–Winston ChurchillCdW Intelligence to Rent of 12 03/05/2023



UK intelligence services warned that the threat to Britain from al-Qaeda was likely to be heightened as a result of British participation in the invasion of Iraq.Sir David Omand held the post of Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office from June 2003 until April 2005. He gave evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on 20 January 2010. Asked by Sir Lawrence Freedman for the inquiry what intelligence assessments were made before the invasion about the potential impact on al-Qaeda, he replied: “… in August 2002, the JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) judged that the build-up of forces in the Gulf, in the region, prior to an attack on Iraq, would increase public hostility to the west and western interests.“By 10 October the JIC is warning that AQ (al-Qaeda) and other Islamist extremists may initiate attacks in response to coalition military action. We [the intelligence services] pointed out that AQ would use an attack on Iraq as justification … for terrorist attacks on western or Israeli targets. We pointed out that AQ was already in their propaganda portraying US-led operations as being a war on Islam and that, indeed, this view was attracting widespread support across the Muslim community.“Coalition attacks would, we said, radicalise increasing numbers. On 16 October 2002, we reaffirmed that the United Kingdom was a priority target for AQ. On 13 December 2002, we warned that US-led action could draw large numbers to the Islamist extremist ideology over the following five years, and again, on 10 February, that the threat from AQ would increase at the onset of any attack on Iraq and that we should all be prepared for a higher threat level to be announced and for more terrorist activity in the event of war.” (p38/9)

Baroness Manningham-Buller confirms that increased threat was predictedBaroness Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Chilcot inquiry that the government was warned in advance that there was likely to be a heightened threat from al-Qaeda as a result of British participation in the invasion of Iraq. She agreed that her judgment prior to the invasion was that “a war in Iraq would aggravate the [terrorist] threat from whatever source to the United Kingdom” (p31) and that “there wasn't any particular controversy amongst the intelligence agencies about that judgment” (p32).This was communicated to the government through Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) assessments and, in her case, directly to the home secretary (David Blunkett at the time) to whom the head of MI5 reports. If ministers read JIC assessments she said “they can have had no doubt” that, in the opinion of the intelligence services, the projected invasion of Iraq would increase the threat to Britain from al-Qaeda.

Government stayed silent about heightened threat prediction The government was very keen to bring intelligence assessments of the threat from Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” to public attention, but it kept silent about the pre-war intelligence assessments that the al-Qaeda threat to Britain would be heightened by British participation in military action against Iraq.The reason for this is obvious: the government was in the business of making a case for war against Iraq, so intelligence assessments that suggested that this would increase the likelihood of bombs on British streets were kept from parliament and the public. Had MPs been aware of these assessments on 18 March 2003, they might not have given a green light to military action.On that day, Tony Blair did not tell them that al-Qaeda activity in Britain would likely increase with murderous effect if they voted for war. On the contrary, he told them that a vote for war was a vote to combat al-Qaeda; that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would prevent a future alliance between him and al-Qaeda, as a consequence of which al-Qaeda would be armed with “weapons of mass destruction”.





This is a variant of the story told by the Bush administration at the time to bolster popular support for attacking Iraq, namely, that such an alliance already existed and Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. This is not supported by any intelligence. Nevertheless, a Harris poll in July 2006 suggested that 2 out of 3 Americans still believed it to be true (see here). And, according to a Zogby poll in February 2006, 85% of the US troops serving in Iraq believed that their mission was mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks” (ibid).

British version of the US propaganda line Alastair Campbell’s diary entry for 27 February 2003 (published in book three of his diary extracts) explains why the British version of the US propaganda line was adopted:“TB felt we had to be pushing two main arguments – the moral case and the reason why the threat was real and current, not because he could whack missiles off at London but because he could tie up with terrorists and others with a vested interest in damaging our interests. But we should understate rather than overstate … The Americans saying there was a direct link [between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein] was counterproductive. Far better to be saying there was a possibility and one that we were determined to ensure never came about.”How a non-existent alliance could pose a threat that is “real and current” is a mystery.And this propaganda line (including the assertion that Britain was under threat from a non-existent alliance) appeared in Tony Blair’s speech on 18 March 2003 when he persuaded the House of Commons to endorse military action:“The key today is stability and order. The threat is chaos and disorder — and there are two begetters of chaos: tyrannical regimes with weapons of mass destruction and extreme terrorist groups who profess a perverted and false view of Islam …“Those two threats have, of course, different motives and different origins, but they share one basic common view: they detest the freedom, democracy and tolerance that are the hallmarks of our way of life. At the moment, I accept fully that the association between the two is loose — but it is hardening. The possibility of the two coming together — of terrorist groups in possession of weapons of mass destruction or even of a so-called dirty radiological bomb — is now, in my judgment, a real and present danger to Britain and its national security.”(Dare we suggest that recent experience has demonstrated that it is the overthrow of tyrannical regimes that produces “chaos and disorder”?)Tony Blair didn’t mention to the House of Commons that he had received an intelligence assessment a month earlier, which(1) said there was no evidence that Iraq had provided chemical or biological materials to al-Qaeda, and(2) judged that any collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of al-Qaeda and associated groups(See paragraph 126 of House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report, Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction – Intelligence and Assessments, published in September 2003). Nor did he mention to the House of Commons that, in the opinion of the intelligence services, the invasion of Iraq which he was asking them to endorse would increase the threat to Britain from al-Qaeda.The sensible thing to do Saddam Hussein was ideologically opposed to al-Qaeda and didn’t allow it to operate in the part of Iraq under his control (though an al-Qaeda related group, Ansar al-Islam, operated in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq). The notion of an alliance between him and al-Qaeda was a fantasy invented to provide some sort of an





answer to the question: why are you invading Iraq, when you say that the greatest threat to the west is al-Qaeda?The sensible thing for the US to do after 9/11 was to make peace with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a secular Arab state opposed to al-Qaeda and with Iran, a Shia state opposed to al-Qaeda, and do what was necessary to force Saudi Arabia and its Gulf state allies to cease providing inspiration and financing to al-Qaeda.But, instead, Iran was included in the “axis of evil” and shunned and Iraq was invaded and occupied, falsely justified in part on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11. In the process, Iraq was transformed from an al-Qaeda-free zone into an area where al-Qaeda flourished, so much so that the president later described it as “the main battleground in the war against terror”. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has continued to inspire and finance al-Qaeda and its offshoots – and continued to be the US’s best friend in the middle east, apart from Israel.This disastrous policy, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, was compounded in the following decade by the overthrow of another secular Arab regime in Libya in 2011, followed by a 4-year long attempt to overthrow another in Syria. Three secular Arab states that were potential allies against al-Qaeda have been destroyed or badly damaged by the US and its allies, enthusiastically supported by Britain, and as a result the al-Qaeda offshoot, ISIS, has established a “caliphate” in parts of Iraq and Syria and has associated organisations in many parts of the Muslim world, from Nigeria to Libya to Yemen and Afghanistan.

Jihadists in Syria train for urban warfareBY BILL ROGGIO AND CALEB WEISS | October 29, 2015 The Islamic State and its jihadist rival Al Nusrah Front, al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, are training forces to conduct urban warfare at camps inside Syria.Both jihadist groups have released propaganda on social media sites over the past several days that show their personnel drilling in urban warfare tactics. The Islamic State is training its forces inside a city under its control, while Al Nusrah is instructing fighters near the contested city of Aleppo.The Islamic State showcased jihadists training inside the ancient city of Palmyra (or Tadmur in Arabic) in the Homs desert. The fighters can be seen infiltrating a segment of the city before they practice how to effectively navigate the streets in combat. The trainees use light-machine guns, technicals, and rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s) as cover fire for during these exercisesAl Nusrah released a video from its Sayfullah Shishani Battalion that shows its fighters training for urban warfare inside buildings in Aleppo Province. The Sayfullah Shishani Battalion includes a large number of fighters from the Caucasus as well as other Russian-speaking militants, and it is named after Sayfullah Shishani, a Chechen military commander within Al Nusrah who was killed fighting in Aleppo with the Battalion early last year. The footage shows the group’s new leader, an ethnic Uzbek, speaking to trainees before they learn how to clear buildings. The Arabic and Russian language video also highlights the use of a US-made M240 light machine gun, which was likely obtained by Al Nusrah from fighting with US-backed rebel groups in the area.Jihadist groups in Syria have showcased urban warfare training prior to these two propaganda releases. Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar and Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad have both released material showing this type of instruction in Aleppo before their merger into Al Nusrah. The Islamic State’s Sabiri’s Jamaat, a group comprised of Dagestanis and Uzbeks, also released a video showing urban warfare training also in Aleppo early last





year.

Jihadist training camps in Iraq and SyriaSince the beginning of 2012, a total of 139 camps have been identified as being operational inside Iraq and Syria at one point in time. Of those, 102 have been found in Syria, and 37 in Iraq; 17 are used to indoctrinate and train children.Some of the jihadist training facilities may no longer be in operation due to changes in fortunes on the battlefield (lost territory, airstrikes, etc.). At least 16 are thought to be closed and 15 to 22 have been hit in Coalition airstrikes. It is unclear if these camps have been destroyed or if they reopened in the same location or elsewhere. It is also very likely that there are training sites that have not been advertised. Since June 21, The Long War Journal has identified 22 new training camps. Of these, 17 are located in Syria while the other 5 are in Iraq. Ten of these camps were identified as being run by the Islamic State, with an additional camp operated by the pro-Islamic State Liwa Shuhada al Yarmouk group in southern Syria. Three were identified as Al Nusrah

Front facilities, including one camp for children run by the Saudi al Qaeda cleric Abdullah al Muhaysini. Four camps are managed by Ahrar al Sham, while the Turkistan Islamic Party and Harakat Fajr al Sham al Islamiyya each operate one. Two camps that were run by Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad and the Crimean Jamaat have statuses that are unclear, as both of these organizations have since joined Al Nusrah.The Islamic State has operated 68 camps in the region (35 in Iraq, 33 in Syria). The Al Nusrah Front has operated 26 camps inside Syria. Allied jihadist groups have run 45 other camps (43 in Syria and two in Iraq); 12 of those camps are managed by jihadist groups from the Caucasus, five by Uzbek jihadist groups, three by ethnic Uighurs, and jihadists from Gaza, Morocco, and Kazakhstan each run one camp.In the past, al Qaeda has used its network of training facilities to instruct fighters to battle in local insurgencies, identify potential recruits for attacks against the West, and support a host of allied jihadist groups. The threat of urban warfare training was illustrated by the Charlie Hebdo attacks earlier this year in Paris. The two gunmen, who were later discovered to have ties to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, displayed professional training during the attack.





Jihadis Shift To Using Secure Communication App Telegram's Channels ServiceBy: M. Khayat*The following report is a complimentary offering from MEMRI's Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM). For JTTM subscription information, click here.IntroductionIn the last few weeks, a number of jihadis and terrorist organizations have announced that they are opening their own channels on the Berlin-based secure messaging app Telegram. Telegram's Channels Service, launched in late September 2015, allows individual message content to be transmitted to an unlimited number of subscribed users. Terrorist organizations like the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have already created several channels on Telegram for sharing their content with thousands of followers. Telegram was founded by Pavel Durov, known as "Russia's Mark Zuckerberg." Durov also created Vkontakte (VK), a popular Russian social network website. Jihadis' use of Telegram and other secure messaging apps has gained momentum in the last year, for purposes such as communications, propaganda, and recruitment.[1] The new service offered by Telegram constitutes a step up from the standard one-on-one messaging function, and there seems to be no way to censor it. One of the main strategies in combating jihadi content online has been identifying, reporting, and removing it. Currently, Telegram's channels offer no way in to monitor them, and thus are expected to pose an obstacle to this with regard to them. Also, based on the rate at which new jihadi channels are emerging, and on the large number of members they are attracting, these channels can be expected to become a fertile and secure arena for jihad-related activities. Content shared on Telegram channels goes beyond the mere reposting of jihadi groups' propaganda, and includes tutorials on manufacturing weapons and launching cyberattacks, calls for targeted killing and lone-wolf attacks, and more. Some channels, such as those belonging to ISIS, show various levels of coordination among them, even using bots to aid their efforts.




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