Is Al Qaida's Stock Falling?

Snop's Commentary:

A New book by top al-Qaida strategist rebuts jailed militants rejecting violence. Ayman al-Zawahiri seems to be fighting a rear guard action against ex-jihadists that have turned against al-Qaida's violent ways.

This reaction by ex-jihadists is exactly what is needed to help delegitimize al-Qaida "the movement". According to the Militant Ideological Atlas, "Denouncements of prominent Jihadis by other prominent Jihadis are particularly damaging and demoralizing. "

"The treatise is a tacit admission that Al-Qaeda is facing an unprecedented ideological challenge." -- www.MEMRI.org

This is exactly the type of internecine spat that needs to be exploited to weaken al-Qaida's support base and reduce its recruiting pool.

The Associated Press
Published: March 3, 2008

CAIRO, Egypt: Al-Qaida's chief ideologue and strategist, Ayman al-Zawahri, has published a 212-page book on militant Islamic Web sites slamming his former radical colleagues in Egyptian prisons for disavowing armed struggle and turning their backs against violence.

The book, released on the Web sites Sunday, is the latest salvo in an intellectual war between the ideological founders of al-Qaida and Islamic militancy, many of whom are have become disillusioned with the suicide bombings and attacks on civilians that have become the hallmark of the movement.

"This message that I present to the reader today is the most difficult, if not the hardest I have written in my life," al-Zawahri wrote in the introduction to "Exonerations," published by al-Sahab, Al-Qaida's media wing.

He slammed a series of "revisions" renouncing violence published by prominent jailed Islamist thinkers, saying "it serves the interests of the Crusader-Zionist alliance with the Arab leaders to drug the mujahideen and drag them away from the confrontation."

The most recent renunciation came in 2007 from Sayed Imam, who was once a top leader in Egypt's Islamic Jihad group and an associate of al-Zawahri. Imam's writings in the 1980s laying an Islamic legal basis for violent action against "infidel" regimes, were highly influential among al-Qaida militants.

But his "revisions" argue that such violence is banned under Islamic law.

Imam followed in the footsteps of other jailed thinkers over the years from Egypt's radical groups that once fought a bloody guerrilla war against the state that resulted in over a thousand deaths and the imprisonment of tens of thousands but now condemn armed struggle.

Experts on Islamist movements say that these revisions could rob militant groups like al-Qaida of the entire ideological basis for their violent actions.

A video praising recently slain al-Qaida in Afghanistan leader Abu Laith al-Libi issued Wednesday included an advertisement for the book, describing it as a way to counteract an image of the Islamic world as "helpless, submissive, fearful," the way al-Zawahri said America and the West want Islam to be.

In the book, al-Zawahri maintains that far from being an internal reappraisal of the movement, these revisions are instigated by the United States to weaken a movement that has inflicted so many defeats on them.

"The entire crime of al-Qaida and the mujahideen is that they have faced the Americans, the Jews and the agents and so American-made propaganda, such as this document, have been unleashed so that the world would forget and ignore the real criminals," he wrote.

Al-Zawahri seen by many counterterrorism experts to be al-Qaida's operational chief, rather than Osama bin Laden is believed to play a large role in directing al-Qaida's strategy on the ground and issues frequent videos an audiotapes, often laying out the network's doctrinal line.

The former doctor was originally part of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the 1970s and was imprisoned and tortured by the Egyptian state before he escaped to Afghanistan and joined with bin Laden to form al-Qaida in the 1990s.