Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS AL QAEDA’S ENEMY WITHIN TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Frank Gardner Producer: Innes Bowen Editor: Hugh Levinson BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 07.08.08 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 10.08.08 2130-2200 CD Number: Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Nu’man bin Othman Stephen Ulph Senior Fellow, Jamestown Foundation, Washington Dr Kemal Helbawi, former spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe Nigel Inkster Director Transnational Threats, the International Institute for Strategic Studies Hanif Qadir Founder of Active Change Foundation, London Ahmed Rashid Journalist and author of Descent into Chaos: How the war against Islamic extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. BIN OTHMAN: (Reading letter in Arabic) GARDNER: Wounding words from a former comrade-in-arms of Osama Bin Laden, now turned one of his most vocal critics. Nu’man bin Othman, a former Libyan jihadist, reading me the text of a bold and critical letter he sent to Al Qaeda’s number two last year. Now what’s so extraordinary about this is that here is a man who fought the Communists in Afghanistan alongside Osama Bin Laden. As recently as the summer of 2000, he attended Bin Laden’s summit of jihadist leaders in Kandahar. Now, with thousands of Muslim lives since lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, Nu’man bin Othman has written to Al-Qaeda strategist, Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, to tell him he’s making terrible mistakes. BIN OTHMAN: I said to him, “We would like to give you what you need, not what you want” because he said, “We need this. We want all the people to come with us.” I told him, I said to him, “No, you need something more important than what you want. You need someone to advise you. You need to re-examine your ideology.” GARDNER: Well they must see you as a traitor? BIN OTHMAN: I don’t care. GARDNER: Have they threatened you? BIN OTHMAN: No, nobody can threaten me. I don’t care about these things. Maybe it works with other people, but not with me. GARDNER: bin Othman deeply disapproves of Western policies. But, like many former Al-Qaeda sympathisers, he’s now telling its leaders that their strategy of apparent indiscriminate killing is wrong. It’s the latest in a string of rebukes from those within the ranks of the jihadi network. Others who have turned on Al-Qaeda include the highly influential Egyptian idealogue, Dr Fadl, and the respected Saudi scholar, Sheikh Salman Al-Oudah. . In his letter, Nu’man bin Othman criticises Al-Qaeda’s failure to recognise that these days it’s more likely to be imperfect nation states that provide Muslims with security than a violent insurgency to establish a Caliphate. According to him, that vision is unrealistic, the tactics a failure and - most damningly - the methods un- Islamic. He even questions Al-Qaeda’s very claim to speak for Muslims. BIN OTHMAN: He declared war. He didn’t ask you, huh, you don’t know about it, and after that he would like you to support him. And if you don’t, he says, “Oh you let me down. You failed me and you failed Islam.” Why should I believe I have a duty or obligation towards Al- Qaeda? You need to convince me and the other Muslims how you established your authority. I’m talking about Islamically. SEGUE: ULPH: Well the end of Al-Qaeda is certainly not going to come from the removal of heads because again and again the counter-terrorism officials are saying that you know they seem to pop up again like Space Invaders - remove one line, there’s another line there. So where’s that coming from? Well the obvious conclusion is that’s coming from an ideological factory. GARDNER: Stephen Ulph, Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, working on the ideology of jihadism. ULPH: Ideological justification is a crucial element. This is something which has surprised a lot of analysts in the West. A good example of this occurred recently in Algeria with the merging of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat with Al-Qaeda which was not universally accepted entirely due to issues of doctrinal propriety, and one of the particular sore matters was suicide bombings. There was a very interesting comment from an Algerian writer in April and he mentioned - and I’ll quote - “A large number of the terrorist network leaders have decided to suspend their activities and wait for guidance or fatwas. Members have demanded that the leader justify his suicide attack strategy with religious arguments.” It’s important enough for them, so it should be important enough for us to study this. We’re beginning now to twig this is important to us as much as it is to them. GARDNER: It’s true that Western analysts are only now becoming fully aware of the divisions within the global jihadi movement. People can often make the mistake of treating the Islamist creed as some sort of immovable monolith, but in fact lively debate has always gone on beneath the surface. VIDEO CLIP: DR KHALID FIKRI (ph) GARDNER: So this is the gentleman here? HELBAWI: This man is Dr Khalid Fikri and we have other two gentlemen, Abu Baseer and Abu Ethar. GARDNER: Dr Kemal Helbawi is showing me a grainy video of a debate he took part in, in 1998. He was representing the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which by then had given up on seizing state power by violent means and had embraced democracy instead. Ranged against him were leading Syrian, Egyptian and Algerian jihadi scholars - people who are not exactly household names in the West but still hugely important to those trying to justify violence through religion. Amazingly, this London debate took place in a church! (to Helbawi) Isn’t that a bit of ironic - a group of jihadists meeting in a church? HELBAWI: If it is fulfilling their purpose, everything could be accepted. GARDNER: That veiled dig at his opponents is perhaps a touch unfair. Unknown to most people in the West, Arab Islamist thought went through something of a transformation in the late 1990s. After the Luxor massacre in 1997 when dozens of tourists were killed, Egypt’s Islamists largely renounced violence. Incredibly, some even came to think of the late President Sadat no longer as a traitor for making peace with Israel, but as a martyr. Yet with so many thousands of Islamists locked up in Egyptian jails, I asked Dr Helbawi whether those who renounced violence were not perhaps doing it primarily for reasons of self- preservation. HELBAWI: I’ll tell you, Frank, it’s not prison that changed them, but they knew that this way is not leading to paradise and they don’t like to displease God. This is the main factor. They are not afraid of terrorism laws or security forces or prison, not at all. They are afraid to go to hell. GARDNER: Today there is a new and highly significant repudiation of jihadist violence by another jailed Egyptian idealogue - and this time it’s really hurting Al-Qaeda.. Said Imam, also known as Dr Fadl, is seen as the Godfather of jihadi thought. Al-Qaeda’s leadership drew on his edicts for years. But last November, he published a devastating treatise that drew on Islamic law and jurisprudence to argue that resorting to violence is banned and so was rebelling against a Muslim ruler. He writes to young Muslims, urging them to turn away from Al-Qaeda’s recruiters. ACTOR READING EXTRACT FROM DR FADL’S TEXT: Do not be deceived by the heroes of the Internet, the leaders of the microphones who are launching statements inciting the youth while living under the protection of a tribe or in a distant cave or under political asylum in an infidel country. Those who have triggered clashes and pressed their brothers into unequal military confrontations are specialists neither in fatwas nor in military affairs. GARDNER: This 180 degree about turn by Dr Fadl follows the publication a month earlier of an open letter by Sheikh Salman Al- Oudah, the Saudi scholar whom Bin Laden once called an inspiration. Now Al-Oudah has openly condemned him, reading out a message on Saudi television which asked Bin Laden how much blood has been spilt, how many innocents amongst children, elderly, the weak and women have been killed and made homeless, all in the name of Al-Qaeda?. These questions are especially relevant to Al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq, the country both President Bush and Osama Bin Laden have called “their central battlefield.” Dr Helbawi adds his voice to the critics. HELBAWI: Every Muslim who understands Islam will tell you that you can defend your country against occupation troops. If they are doing, that’s okay, but they are not. They are committing many crimes: Sunni killed the Shia and Shia killed the Sunni, kidnapping people, taking ladies, raping ladies. This is not jihad. SEGUE: INKSTER: Al-Qaeda in Iraq overplayed their hand; behaved in an arrogant, brutal fashion which alienated their potential allies, which I think is an important vulnerability. GARDNER: Nigel Inkster, the Director of Transnational Threats at the International Institute of Strategic Studies and, until recently, a senior government official in Whitehall. He thinks Al-Qaeda’s second-in- command and chief spokesman, Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, is uncomfortably aware of just how unpopular the group’s tactics have become with most Muslims. Last December, he took the unprecedented step of initiating a public debate, inviting questions via email. As Nigel Inkster says, many were from disapproving Muslims. INKSTER: One of the questions that was most asked and which clearly caused him a lot of difficulty was the issue of why so many Muslims had been killed by Al-Qaeda and related groups. Zawahiri didn’t I think come up with a very convincing answer on this, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of debate going on in jihadist circles. GARDNER: Do these vulnerabilities present opportunities, do you think, for Western intelligence agencies and are they being taken advantage of? INKSTER: Well I think the answer to the first question is yes they obviously do. To the second, I think the answer is probably not sufficiently. If we had known in 1998, 1999 what we know now about what had been happening in Afghanistan, the relationships between the jihadi groups and the relationship between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, I’m sure that it would have been possible to do more to foment dissent between them. And governments are now I think starting to focus on some of the inherent contradictions in the single narrative, you know the jihadi message, but this is going to be slow progress and it requires levels of expertise which are not readily available to governments, at least not Western governments. GARDNER: Government involvement in matters like these carries the risk of backfiring because nobody likes to feel that they’re being manipulated. But even without it, some of the opposition to Al-Qaeda from the jihadi elite is filtering through to Western based Muslims. CLIP FROM ONLINE LECTURE GARDNER: I’m listening here to an online lecture. It’s in Arabic, but with simultaneous translation and it’s given by Abu Baseer al Tartusi. He’s a cleric in the global jihadi network who debated with Dr Kemal Helbawi over ten years ago. He’s still living in London and, judging by this recent recording, British Muslims are now seeking out his advice. He’s disagreed with Al-Qaeda by condemning the 7/7 London bombings; in fact condemning all suicide attacks as being un-Islamic. But listening to the recording, you get the impression that that’s not what some British jihadi sympathisers want to hear. CLIP FROM ONLINE LECTURE GARDNER: Abu Baseer has just given a lecture there on the duty of Muslims living in Britain not to carry out attacks here. A man with a British accent asks if it would make any difference if someone were to leave this country and then return to attack it? Answer: no, not unless you tell the authorities you’re giving up your British citizenship. Another man asks: what about Muslims who are born here? Surely they never agreed to the covenant between citizen and state? So should they be bound by it? The answer, he’s told, is yes they should. By living here and interacting with the society, you’re effectively agreeing to be bound by the laws. CLIP FROM ONLINE LECTURE GARDNER: So does all this mean that Al-Qaeda is finished? Can the West finally start to breathe easy? Well that depends in part on whether these condemnations we’ve heard are reaching the potential recruits. To try to find out, we visited the Active Change Foundation in East London. It’s a movement set up to try and steer impressionable young men away from violent jihad. It was set up by Hanif Qadir, himself a former jihadi who turned back six years ago on the brink of going to fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan. I asked him if all this ideological debate on jihadism is making any real difference at street level. QADIR: The number of young people getting involved in violent extremism and who are prepared to go to Afghanistan or Iraq to fight the jihad is growing. GARDNER: So these articles that appeared in papers by people saying it’s the beginning of the end for Al-Qaeda, etcetera, I see you frowning, you would say that that’s a lot of pie in the sky? QADIR: It is a lot of pie in the sky. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite. From what we see on the ground, we’ve got a lot of people more sympathetic to Al-Qaeda in their mentality. Sadly to say, but it’s a fact. GARDNER: What is it that is driving the sort of young men that you meet and try to de-radicalise towards Al-Qaeda’s mindset? QADIR: First and foremost, it’s the foreign policy of the West. So these issues are creating a huge impact on the ground. GARDNER: If a negative perception of Western foreign policy is indeed one of the key drivers towards extremism, then the key country here is Pakistan. Young men radicalised here in Britain and seeking terrorist training nearly always head for Pakistan’s tribal territories. Nearly every single recent terrorist plot in this country can be traced back to this rugged borderland next to Afghanistan. So how do things look on the ground over there? RASHID: What we’ve seen since 9/11 has been a huge expansion of Al- Qaeda. GARDNER: The influential journalist Ahmed Rashid. In his latest book, Descent Into Chaos, he argues that in his native Pakistan and Central Asia things are going Al-Qaeda’s way. It’s time, he says, for a reality check. RASHID: First of all, we’ve seen the growth of the Pakistani Taliban, which has come directly under Al-Qaeda. That is Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen living along the border with Afghanistan who have given shelter to Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban when they escaped from Afghanistan after the war ended in 2001. Now these Pakistani tribesmen were able to form their own militias and then they became very ideologised and they began to develop their own agenda, which was to Talibanise North West Pakistan, which is what they’re doing now. So we see this expanding movement, which of course is being enormously encouraged by Al-Qaeda because the Pakistani Taliban, by expanding the territory under their control, also are able to offer Al-Qaeda much greater protection and security for people like Bin Laden who are possibly living on the Pakistan side of the border. GARDNER: Here in London, Hanif Qadir of the Active Change Foundation is in touch with so-called ‘mujahideen veterans’, men who’ve been recently fighting in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan. I asked him what sort of messages they were bringing back. QADIR: A lot of them were sympathetic towards the Al-Qaeda jihad, and when they realised that in actual fact their methods are totally against any Islamic justification they come back and they say they were misguided totally. A lot of them are really frustrated and angry at the way they were led into this you know jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq. GARDNER: So there is something of a backlash here? QADIR: There is absolutely. There is a degree of backlash, but we’ve also got a lot of people who are more sympathetic as well. Because of things like what happened a couple of weeks ago when you know forty- seven civilians got killed … GARDNER: In Afghanistan? QADIR: … in Afghanistan, it’s creating more anger in young Muslims. But these mistakes that are happening almost on a daily basis now, it’s actually adding to the problem and the growth of violent extremism in the UK and around the world. GARDNER: It strikes me that what we’re seeing here is almost as if there were two separate tectonic plates, grinding against each other in opposite directions. Because at one level you’ve got the intellectual debate, the Arab thinkers within the jihadi movement - these are the people who are standing back and questioning whether Al-Qaeda’s extreme methods aren’t actually doing more harm than good to Muslims. But then, down at the grassroots level, things are moving the other way because you’ve still got growing numbers of potential recruits to violent jihad, including here in Britain. Often these recruits have only a shallow knowledge of Islam. They’re far less impressed by theological debate than they are by more day-to-day, down-to-earth factors like TV reports of air strikes on civilians or the presence of US and British troops in Iraq. Here’s Nigel Inkster again. INKSTER: If you look at opinion polls in the Islamic world, you find that the reason why most Muslims express support for Al-Qaeda is nothing to do with creating a Caliphate, is nothing to do with the religious dimension. It’s about resistance to the United States. A few weeks [ago], there was a major poll - I think in the United States. You know 33% of Muslims expressed approval for Al-Qaeda because of this. There was a similar poll in Pakistan recently, which came up with actually an identical percentage. 33% expressed support for Al-Qaeda because they were standing up to America. GARDNER: Opinion polls of course are not a perfect science and the numbers of Al-Qaeda supporters and sympathisers are constantly shifting, almost like a coastal side, reacting to events overseas and at home. ABU IZZEDEEN: They’re going to kick your door down when you’re in bed with your wife! They’ll drag you from your own bed under any guise and you all know as a Muslim you’re a second class citizen here! Don’t push me! GARDNER: A classic show of standing up to Western authority. This was the now jailed British jihadi, Abu Izzedeen, also known as Omar Brooks, challenging John Reid who was then Home Secretary when he visited East London two years ago. Dr Reid was trying to tell Muslim parents they needed to watch their children more closely. ABU IZZEDEEN: How dare you come to a Muslim area? How can we decide it like this? Do you know how Muslims … (fades under) QADIR: That gave Muslims up and down the country, especially Waltham Forest, it gave them a degree of excitement that we have a person who just went in there and challenged this Western leader. GARDNER: Hanif Qadir, the reformed jihadi, who remembers it well. This very public standoff took place in his neighbourhood. QADIR: And I know Abu Izzedeen personally. He challenged the system. His body language, his method of approach. GARDNER: He’s a big guy as well. QADIR: He’s a big guy, yeah. That was a negative. He’s a negative leader. We needed a positive and that’s what I’ve been trying to do for a long time, is to try to replace that. We try to provide our young people with a strong community leadership where they can voice their concerns. Luckily for us, we’ve got a lot of support from the police and the police are quite willing to come down and talk to our young people. But we haven’t got involvement from politicians, government ministers who would be willing to come down and in this safe space have a critical dialogue. But there’s a lot of people out there who can direct that frustration towards their own agendas. GARDNER: And who’s leading them down this track? QADIR: This is one thing that we have to understand. It’s not the imams or scholars in mosques, but it’s people who are operating in our community behind the walls of silence. In their little, close-knit meetings in small, little centres or in their own homes, they do encourage young people to go off to carry out you know jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan. But when they have their secret meetings, they justify suicide attacks on tube stations, on buses and shopping centres. GARDNER: So are Western analysts deluding themselves that theological attacks on Al-Qaeda are going to have any real impact on its operational capability? Nigel Inkster of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. INKSTER: I certainly wouldn’t argue that Al-Qaeda is in full retreat. The Al-Qaeda ideology is a virus which easily attaches itself to different host organisations and is you know adept at exploiting situations when they come along. Nonetheless, I think it is helpful that doubts be raised about the religious and theological validity of Al-Qaeda’s argumentation. It’s probably not going to have that much direct effect on young men who are probably more attracted by the romance and the adventure of the jihadi enterprise than by any finely wrought theological arguments, but it is certainly going to have an effect on major Islamic populations, on the bulk of the populations - if you like the water within which the fish have to swim. And I think from that point of view it’s very important that in the wider Islamic community, the jihadist message becomes challenged and discredited. GARDNER: In Britain, the Government has been becoming increasingly aware of its need to challenge Al-Qaeda’s message, what it calls the Al-Qaeda brand. Officials sense an opportunity to drive more of a wedge between hardcore extremists and those who are wavering. But there is one issue that tends to bind Muslims together and unite them against the US. That’s Israel. Nigel Inkster predicts it’ll feature more in Al-Qaeda’s strategy. INKSTER: It’s interesting to see now that Al-Qaeda, having effectively had to prepare their followers for strategic failure in Iraq, are now turning their attention more to Israel. They haven’t yet succeeded in doing very much against Israel, but it’s clear that Zawahiri sees Al- Qaeda’s credibility as increasingly tied up with its ability to inflict damage on Israel. There are signs that more focus is being directed to that area and it would obviously be a major boost for Al-Qaeda’s credibility if they could demonstrate convincingly that this was something that they were engaged in. GARDNER: Jihadi thinkers may differ sharply over the rights and wrongs of suicide bombings in Iraq, say, or the London bombings over here, but when it comes to Israel the gaps between them are far harder to discern. People like Dr Helbawi, who’ve openly condemned the 7/7 attacks, are unwilling to condemn similar attacks on civilians if the victims are Israelis - something justified publicly by the leading Muslim Brotherhood scholar Sheikh Yusef Al-Kardawi. HELBAWI: I do propose to the West bring Sheikh Al-Kardawi back again. Don’t prevent him from coming to UK because he is an authority. GARDNER: I think opponents of bringing him back would say well here is a man who has justified the killing of civilians in Israel, hasn’t he? I mean I think that’s … HELBAWI: You are talking about Britain and this is a mistake. I say it’s a fault of the way of thinking of some people in Britain. You are not talking about Palestine here; you are talking about Britain and security of Britain. If Israelis or Zionists occupied Britain, Britain will fight against them. Britain will not allow anyone to take Bristol and establish a new country on it. Israel is established 1948. There was nothing before that called Israel. So this is a different case. GARDNER: Dr Helbawi’s apparent irritation would imply that he’s quite convinced of the soundness of his logic. But do all Muslims agree with him? And should non-Muslims even get involved in this debate? There’s certainly been a dilemma in government circles about whether to oppose extreme Islamists while encouraging the moderates. Some even consider there is no such person as a moderate Islamist because by definition, they say Islamists, as opposed to mainstream Muslims, want to establish an Islamic state based on sharia law. Stephen Ulph from the Jamestown Foundation argues that the West has actually been remiss in not engaging more with the debate over Islamism. ULPH: It is important for us to understand the ideology so that we understand what the mainstream Muslim community are faced with and the challenge that they are having to confront in order for us to be able to know how we can contribute and support the mainstream Muslim community. And one of the things we should as part of this, is that we should avoid the temptation to stand aside and assume that well this is a debate that doesn’t concern us. This is tantamount to a form of racism. For instance, if you make some concessions that only Muslims can fully relate to each other and that engagement can only be made on Islamic cultural terms, then all you are doing is isolating Muslims into an intellectual and cultural ghetto. And of course by doing that, you’re handing them over on a plate really to the Islamists who have obviously rigged the argument in their favour with bogus calls to authenticity and the primacy of textualism over individual conscience. By doing this, you’ve just said well universal values, they apply to us but you can’t have them. So, again, you’ve isolated them, pushed them in a corner and you’ve really abandoned them. I feel that the era of polite disengagement has to end. The true definition of Islamophobia frankly should from now on mean something like to fear to engage with Islamic thought. GARDNER: But this is all still about theory and ideas, so will a change of heart amongst the scholars make any real difference to Al-Qaeda’s future? I put that question to Dr Kemal Helbawi. HELBAWI: No, it makes a difference, it makes a difference. Even prophets, Frank, when they came, very few people followed them; but later on people understood. So it may not bring a quick response, but I am sure it’s a big hammer on the head of Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is under attack. They are living in caves and I am sure that it has no clear future. GARDNER: Do you think Al-Qaeda’s going to be with this for at least another ten years? HELBAWI: Maybe. Yes, yes, maybe. BIN OTHMAN: Oh, it’s fatal for them because they’re losing people. They’re losing a lot of people. GARDNER: The Libyan former jihadi Nu’man bin Othman again. BIN OTHMAN: If you see now, it’s very important. Just give me one, a significant sharia scholar or cleric in the Muslim world supporting Al- Qaeda. Give me any intellectual, significant intellectual person supporting Al-Qaeda. GARDNER: What is your prediction, Nu’man, five years from now? What form and shape will Al-Qaeda be in? BIN OTHMAN: They will survive. Five years from now, yeah they’ll survive, because … GARDNER: Will they still be attacking Western cities and killing civilians, do you think? BIN OTHMAN: If they have chance, I think yeah. If they have chance, they will do that. And they will survive because of Afghanistan. It’s very hard to say they’re going to just disappear. No, they will stay there. But I can’t see they have any future outside Afghanistan honestly. They can’t mobilise people any more. GARDNER: Well can they or can’t they survive? Because we’ve now heard two completely conflicting views on this programme, and both of them coming from people who have first hand experience of jihad. The men of letters, Dr Helbawi and Nu’man bin Othman, say that Al-Qaeda is in trouble, while the London de-radicaliser, Hanif Qadir, says the opposite. The truth is there is no single narrative out there when it comes to Al-Qaeda’s prospects. Global jihadism is a dynamic phenomenon, sensitive to events. NATO planes bomb an Afghan wedding party and worldwide anger fuels recruitment. Jihadi bombs kill London commuters and then there’s a backlash against Al-Qaeda. With conflicts still raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Palestinian question unsettled, no-one can predict which way Al-Qaeda’s fortunes will go. But the longer their violent campaign persists, and the more blood that is shed, the greater the likelihood that criticism from within its ranks will corrode the very core of Al-Qaeda’s justification.