THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Islamists have had a marginal role in these revolutions – but that could be changing, writes Peter Bergen.
As the fortunes of Colonel Gaddafi's forces and the Libyan rebels continue to see-saw, many commentators are calling for the West to arm the opposition forces. Yet the disclosure on Tuesday that US intelligence agencies have picked up "flickers" of an al-Qaeda presence among the rebels has set off a fierce debate within the Obama administration – and the wider coalition – about whether giving them weapons may inadvertently help the enemies of the West.
Part of the problem, according to a senior US intelligence official, is that the American government is largely flying blind when it comes to the exact make-up of rebel forces. So how legitimate are the worries about al-Qaeda opportunistically inserting itself into the civil war?
Much of the concern centres around the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a jihadist organisation founded in the mid-1990s that waged a low-level guerrilla war against Gaddafi. In recent years, it had publicly rejected al-Qaeda's ideology and entered into a ceasefire with the government, as a result of which 700 militants have been released from jail over the past four years.
Some of these have since joined the rebels, meaning that Islamist militants certainly make up some unknown percentage of their forces. Yet Noman Benotman, a former LIFG leader based in London, points out that the LIFG "never carried out attacks against the West nor against civilians", suggesting that its members are more interested in regime change in their own country than a global holy war.
Weighed against this, however, is the fact that al-Qaeda's overall number three is a Libyan known as Abu Yahya al-Libi, who has recently appeared on a half-hour videotape on jihadist forums claiming that the West is propping up Arab dictators and exhorting his countrymen to take up arms against Gaddafi. Also, there is the cache of al-Qaeda documents recovered in Iraq in 2007, containing information about some 700 foreign fighters, many of whom had volunteered to be suicide bombers. Around 20 per cent were from Libya – one of the smaller Arab countries in terms of population – and of these, most were from the east, the heartland of the opposition to Gaddafi. Continue reading and comment » | Peter Bergen | Thursday, March 31, 2011
