The frightening evolution of al-Qaida

‘Bleed back’ from Iraq
The CIA has a new name as well for the Iraqi effect on public opinion — and terrorist recruiting — in Islamic nations: “bleed back.”  This unartistic term is meant to capture the anger Muslims, particularly young Muslims, have about the war in Iraq and the United States.

Goss, a Bush appointee, admitted as much in recent Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, saying, "Those jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

Is bin Laden likely to have been upset by this turn of events? No, says a senior U.S. intelligence analyst. “It was his plan all along to have al-Qaida as a base of broader operations. Al-Qaida, after all, means ‘the base.’”

Al-Qaida’s evolution began in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, according to several Western intelligence and counterterrorism officials. Al-Qaida first realized that it had underestimated the attack’s chances for success. “They didn’t expect the buildings to come down,” said a U.S. analyst. “They didn’t anticipate the economic effects.”  Moreover, he says, most of al-Qaida’s leadership did not expect the U.S. response to be as fulsome and as effective as it was. “They had seen what we had done in Beirut and Mogadishu. We pulled out. They expected that at worst, we would go into Afghanistan, where they would bleed us as they had the Soviets.”

But things moved too quickly. As the Taliban regime collapsed, bin Laden made a tactical decision that would ultimately result in a strategic change in direction. The leadership of the group was sent to Pakistani cities to hide. The management was sent to Iran. Cells around the world found themselves trying to get direction from both centers.

Leaders whisked away
Al-Qaida leaders suddenly found themselves bundled onto a CIA Gulfstream V or Boeing 737 jet headed for long months of interrogation. Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaida’s “dean of students,” who directed training and placement for the group, was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in February 2002, Ramzi Bin al Shibh, the organizer of the Hamburg, Germany, cell that formed the core of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was captured in Karachi, Pakistan, on the first anniversary of the attacks, leading ultimately to the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of Sept. 11 and the financier of the first World Trade Center attack, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003 and Tawfiq Attash Kallad, the mastermind of the USS Cole attack, a month later in Karachi.

In the midst of this, says Spanish counterterrorism judge Baltasar Garzon, al-Qaida convened a strategic summit in northern Iran in November 2002. Without bin Laden present, but with many of the top leaders, the group’s “shura,” or consultative council, met secretly to decide how to operate within the new restraints and confinements.

Leading the discussion was a Syrian, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar.  He looked unlike most Arabs, being fair-skinned and red-haired, and carried a Spanish passport, having married a Spanish woman in 1987. Setmariam Nasar, derisively called a “pen jihadist” by some at the CIA but a “strategist” by Spanish counterterrorism officials, said it was time for al-Qaida to carry out the February 1998 fatwa bin Laden wrote and transmitted widely across the Arab and Muslim world.

“He told the shura that al-Qaida could no longer exist as a hierarchy, an organization, but instead would have to become a network and move its operations out over the entire world,” said Garzon, the prosecuting judge who investigated the role of Spanish citizens in Sept. 11 as well as the Madrid attacks.  “He pointed to the Feb. 23, 1998, fatwa for inspiration.”

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