THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: As America celebrates the death of its greatest foe, a younger cadre is ready to direct jihad against the West – including one whose real name no one knows.
["]History," wrote Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden's mentor, "does not write its lines except with blood… Glory does not build its lofty edifice except with skulls; honour and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses." Osama bin Laden has become one of those corpses. But even as America celebrates the death of the man who more than any other came to represent evil in our time, there is little reason for jubilation.
The stark truth is this: a decade after 9/11, the jihadist movement is more powerful than at any time in the past. Bin Laden himself, the scholar C. Christine Fair has noted, has emerged as a "kind of Che Guevara of the jihadist movement" – an inspirational icon who could fire the imagination of young recruits. Bin Laden's death – or, to the faithful, his martyrdom – might prove to be his last service for his macabre cause.
In 2001, on the eve of 9/11, al-Qaeda had a core of just less than 200 cadre – 120 of them in a crack fighting unit. Perhaps 1,000 men had graduated from its Afghan training camps, but they were riven by ideological dissension. Now, jihadist groups that associate themselves with al-Qaeda's project are asserting influence from eastern China and central Asia to the furthest reaches of North Africa. The war against terror has thus seen al-Qaeda flower, not die. Continue reading and comment » | Praveen Swami |
Monday, April 02, 2011
