Al-Qaeda urges attacks on Canadians

Saif al-Adel

Hit easy targets that are not protected, it says. From The National Post via the SITE Institute, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

A new al-Qaeda manual posted on the Internet is calling for terrorist attacks against Canadians, and specifies that businessmen, politicians, scientists, soldiers and tourists should be targeted, according to U.S. researchers.

Canada is one of six nations whose citizens are identified as "human targets" in the Arabic-language publication, which is reported to be the work of senior Egyptian al-Qaeda figure Saif al-Adel.

The manual, called The Al-Battar Military Camp, ranks Canadians as the fifth most important "Christian" terrorist targets, behind Americans, Britons, Spaniards and Australians. Italians were ranked sixth.

The manual was obtained and translated by the SITE Institute, a terrorism research centre in Washington, D.C. It is the latest edition of a publication that is said to be aimed at new al-Qaeda adherents scattered around the world.

"This al-Qaeda magazine is published and circulated through the terrorist group's Web site, along with other propaganda," Rita Katz, executive director of the institute, told the National Post yesterday.

"It contains specific military guidance and instructions on how to effectively target al- Qaeda's enemies. There are physical training programs, diagrams of weapons and chapters dedicated to combat strategy. Canadians should take very seriously the fact that their country is identified as a top potential target by al-Qaeda."

“Terrorists are also victims. They suffer an occupation of the mind.”

This profile of the courageous Walid Shoebat is a few weeks old, but on this day of so much worldwide terrorist activity, it is worth perusing again. From FrontPage, via Abrahamic-Faith.com:

To devout Muslims, renouncing the “one true faith” is an act of apostasy warranting a death sentence. By Islamic measures, however, Walid Shoebat has three strikes against him: In 1993, he renounced Islam, converted to Christianity—and, unlike most Middle Eastern Christians tutored in replacement theology—Shoebat adopted ardent Zionism along with his new found faith.

“Christ is a Jewish rabbi,” he insists today. “He was a Zionist.” Shoebat believes that God loves Israel. “How can anyone claim to be Christian and hate Zionism?” he asks, citing Psalm 53. “Christians seek ‘salvation’ and true Christians know that ‘salvation’ comes out of Zion, ‘When God bringeth back the captivity of his people.’”

A Muslim who converts to Christianity takes his life in his hands. Even in the U.S., according to Shoebat, former Muslims are often murdered by their families. In such cases, he adds, news reports seldom cover the Islamic motives. One noted scholar of Islam, the former Muslim Ibn Warraq, writes under a pseudonym to protect his life. In Leaving Islam he collects the accounts of more than two dozen apostates that poignantly demonstrate the need of former Muslims for security precautions.

Yet Walid Shoebat’s journey from Islam to Christianity and Zionism is especially remarkable. A self-described former Palestinian terrorist, Shoebat’s dream in the 1970s was to die as a “shaheed, a martyr.” He spent his youth engaging in riots. He confronted soldiers, hoping to be shot—a virtual impossibility, since the Israelis never targeted the torso “without good reason.” Once, he tossed a fire bomb. Another time, he nearly killed an Israeli solider, who was saved only when Israeli reinforcements arrived. Today, Shoebat seeks forgiveness for his terrible crimes.

Born in 1960 in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem—in so-called West Bank territory that Jordan occupied illegally in 1948—Shoebat was raised in the jihad doctrine. Under Islam, he reports, Palestinian children are inculcated to hate non-Muslims, and especially to hate Jews and Israel.

“The Arab war against Israel is a jihad,” Shoebat says. “Of course it’s a jihad. It is a religious, holy war. What part of ‘religious, holy war’ can’t the world understand?” Even Christians are indoctrinated in jihad ideology, he notes. Rejection of Jewish rights and history in Israel underlies the foundation of this Islamic jihad doctrine. [1]

In the Middle East, jihad theology has deep historical roots even for some churches. In the mid 19th century, according to noted Islamic scholar Bat Ye’or, the papacy allied with French imperialists to promote Arab nationalism among Arabized Middle Eastern Christians in the Ottoman provinces. They hoped to defeat Britain and Zionism. These efforts failed, she writes in her seminal Islam and Dhimmitude. But in 1970, the Vatican dispatched an apostolic delegate to Jerusalem to establish a Catholic Justice and Peace Commission. That was when the Latin Catholic, Orthodox and other Palestinian churches began building “an Arab Palestinian identity hostile to Israel and shared by Christians and Muslims.”[2]

Coincidentally, as the seeds of these alliances began to bear their malicious fruit, Walid Shoebat came of age in Beit Sahour. Until fifth grade, he was the sole Muslim in a Christian school. He was taught that Jews were usurpers and thieves, fit only to be “beneficiaries” of virulent, mass-produced hatred—and all that implies. In Islamic school in sixth grade, Shoebat’s jihad indoctrination continued along the same lines. Every song he learned incited blood and murder. “The end product was a terrorist,” he explains.

Not surprisingly, Beit Sahour is also home to Ghasson Andoni and George Rishmawi, are the co-founders of the Rapprochement Center. They also co-founded the International Solidarity Movement with Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro. Both organizations appear to be driven by the malevolent jihad ideology that Walid Shoebat describes. Indeed, at the third annual Palestine Solidarity Conference at Ohio State University in November, ISM featured such radical speakers as Khalid Turaani, executive director of American Muslims for Jerusalem. According to Steven Emerson, AMJ is a radical group that “routinely invokes ‘Zionist’ conspiracies and has featured calls at its conferences for the killing of Jews….” [3] Last May, the ISM held a $40 per plate dinner co-sponsored by an Islamist group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Another sponsor: the American Friends Service Committee.

The jihad against the Jewish people in the holy land dates back centuries. But in March 1920, Yasser Arafat’s idol and relation, Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini, reignited the Islamic reign of terror, says Shoebat. El-Husseini sent for muhajideen from Syria to stage bloody riots. Soon afterwards, he led violent agitations to win the coveted role of Jerusalem Mufti over another candidate who apparently did not espouse jihad. [4]

As a child, Shoebat heard tales of jihad incitements from Beit Sahour elders like Dheib Abd Rabbo: “Hajj Amin el-Husseini said, ‘Do not have pity on them. Take your gun and your sword, and murder the Jews and rape their women.’ At that point, Rabbo decided he would not do this. He would not rape. So he took his gun and his sword and he went home.”

Plenty of others participated, however. “In Hebron and in our village, even before World War II, jihad was genocide,” Shoebat notes. In 1920, Arabs murdered nine Jews in Halsa and Bnei Yehuda. On August 26, 1929, they killed 133 Jews in Hebron, Safed, Motza, Tel Aviv and elsewhere and wounded 339. In 1936, they murdered at least another 70 Jewish civilians, wounded hundreds more, and destroyed Jewish farms, homes, villages, crops and cattle. [5] El-Husseini influenced Hitler, saluted the Nazi Arab legion, helped create the Muslim S.S. unit that committed genocide in Bosnia and, in 1944, broadcast another call to jihad from Berlin:

“Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honour. God is with you.” [6]

Michael Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, taught Islamology and Arab philology for decades. According to Shoebat, he hews to Islamic jihad dogma as well. [His] doctrine of Jew-hatred rests on an Islamic foundation well-laid by Sabbah’s predecessors, Bat Ye’or confirms. In the 1970s, the Greek Melkite Archbishop Hilarion Capucci was convicted of gun-running for the Palestine Liberation Organization and deported to Brazil. Shoebat, who joined the PLO in the 1970s, once started a major riot in Beit Sahour at Capucci’s command.

Islamic thinking motivated one high-ranking official to recommend that European churches subordinate to Islam through an Eastern “wisdom of sufferance.” Thus Kenneth Cragg, assistant and honorary [Anglican] Bishop of Jerusalem from 1970 to 1985, ignored frequent historical collaboration of church leadership with Islam for personal gain. He also minimized Islamic destruction of holy land churches, abductions, assassinations and forced conversions of pilgrims—Muslim practices ongoing in Israel today—and the Turkish jihad that decimated 1.5 million Christian Armenians. To avoid blaming the real enemy of Eastern Christians, Cragg usurped the false, inverted characterizations first used by Arnold Toynbee, who maliciously cast Jewish victims of Islamic genocide as Nazis who “crucified” Palestine. [7] “Christians should be appalled by this rendering,” says Shoebat.

Jerusalem Patriarch Sabbah also promotes Islamic loathing of Jews in Palestinian churches. Following a theological map created in 1983 by the al-Liqa Catholic center and a CJPC pamphlet, “Moslems and Christians on the Road Together,” Sabbah supports the Sabeel “Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center,” whose very name suggests a Christian brand of jihad. [8] In language “stuffed with expressions of compassion, justice, and peace toward and evil Israel,” Sabeel director Naim Ateek refined his perverse jihad ideology, [9] which Palestinian churches now export to the U.S. at every opportunity.

Palestinian Christians behave much like medieval serfs, and function as subservient little dhimmis. But their acceptance of jihad dogma is a futile enterprise, Malik stresses. Even “removing Israel from the equation and satisfying the Palestinians beyond their wildest dreams would not eliminate the violence against non-Muslims inherent in political Islam.” [10]

Other Middle Eastern Christian churches better deflected Islam’s corrupting jihad ideology. Rooted in indigenous pre-Islamic cultures, languages and faiths, the Armenian, Assyrian, Serbian, Coptic and Lebanese Maronite churches maintained some religious autonomy before Islam’s timeless advance, according to Bat Ye’or. However they also “react as hostages struck dumb with fear,” she observes. [11]

Only in 1998 did the Middle East Council of Churches at last awaken to its peril. That year, the council expanded its agenda from a “hitherto exclusive fixation on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian problem,” observes Maronite Lebanese scholar Habib Malik. Now they now also address the welfare of native, mainly Christian non-Muslim minorities, Christian unity and human and women’s rights. [12]

No one better understands the dangers that Islam presents to Middle Eastern Christianity than former Islamic terrorist Walid Shoebat. “The slogan known to all Palestinians is, ‘Saturday people first and Sunday people next’,” he reports. “It means if Israel and the Jewish people were ever defeated, Christians will be next.” From recent events, that should be obvious. By fighting Israel, Christian leaders like Hanan Ashrawi and George Habash abet their own people’s demise, Shoebat says.

Unfortunately Palestinian Christian leaders stand neck deep in corruption. They take extensive profits from dealings with Islamic terrorists, according to Shoebat. “For American churches, their packaged message is ostensibly peace and justice,” he says, explaining a policy of blatant duplicity. “Do you really think Capucci reformed? He’s a terrorist. They facilitate terrorists. Their message at home is very different from the one they deliver here.”

Occasionally, the politically correct façade maintained for U.S. churches cracks open. Emil Salayta, who heads the Latin Patriarchate schools in Jerusalem, once spoke on ‘peace’ at the Presbyterian Church in Walnut Creek, California. Shoebat attended and challenged Salayta. Could peace be achieved by bombing Israeli buses, he asked. “I have him on tape. ‘Israel must be eliminated, by whatever means,’ he replied.” No one else seemed concerned.

Shoebat cautions U.S. churches and universities to be more wary. “These people back terrorists,” he warns. “Michael Sabbah, Niam Ateek, Elias Chacour, Riah Abu el-Assal and Emil Salayta are evil.” In 1993, at age 33, Shoebat read the Bible for the first time. Only then did he learn—contrary to everything he had been taught—that it was written in Hebrew, and repeatedly invokes peace and praises Israel. He was shocked.

The Palestinian Authority condemns the supposed Israeli theocracy. Yet in December 1920, Musa Kazem el-Husseini, of the Mufti’s clan, demanded restoration of Islamic theocracy in Palestine in a letter to British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. [13]. The PA Constitution, moreover, formally adopted the rigid, anti-democratic Islamic sharia. Lest there be any doubt of its meaning, Islamic law carefully spells out the institutional inferiority that has been forced on non-Muslims by majority Muslim societies since the time of Mohammed. As Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim al-Mahdi explained on official Palestinian Authority TV in 2001, Muslims

of Palestine want to meet Allah and we are the soldiers of the Caliphate, that was announced by the Prophet... Therefore, the Caliphate will be in accordance with the prophecy, in Al-Aqsa, in Jerusalem, and in its surroundings...

…We welcome, as we did in the past, any Jew who wants to live in this land as a Dhimmi, just as the Jews have lived in our countries, as Dhimmis, and have earned appreciation, and some of them have even reached the positions of counselor or minister here and there. We welcome the Jews to live as Dhimmis, but the rule in this land and in all the Muslim countries must be the rule of Allah... Those from amongst the Jews and from amongst those who are not Jews who came to this land as plunderers, must return humiliated and disrespected to their countries. [14]

Shoebat relates historical and current incitements in Israel to the Armenian genocide, which was also religious war. Armenian Christians were poor and weak, he says, but Muslims were told, “Do not have pity on them. It is your duty to cleanse the land of these people.”

In late 1914, pamphlets throughout the Muslim world called for jihad, Peter Balakian reports in The Burning Tigris. The Ikdam Turkish paper underscored the call to jihad. “The deeds of our enemies have brought down the wrath of God. A gleam of hope has appeared. All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women and children must fulfill their duty….If we do it, deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured.” [15]

A 31-page Universal Proclamation to all the People of Islam circulated widely in 1915 urged Muslims to complete “the deliverances of all the Islamic kingdoms from the hands of the infidels.” Muslims everywhere must, it continued,

rise up and as the rising up of one man, in the one of his hands the word and in the other the gun, and in his pocket balls of fire and annihilating missiles and in his heart the light of the Faith, and that we lift our voices to the utmost, saying----India for the Muslim Indians, Java for the Muslim Javanese, Algeria for the Algerians among the Muslims, Morocco for the Moroccans, Tunis for the Muslim Tunisians, Egypt for the Muslim Egyptians, Iran for Muslim Iranians, Turan for the Muslim Tureks, Bokhera for the Bokharians, Caucasus for the Caucasians and the Ottoman kingdoms for the Muslim Turks and Arabs. [16]

Often, Islamic clerics called directly for the extermination of Armenian Christians.

Despite a previous decision concerning the elimination of the Armenia Race, as the necessities of time did not allow the fulfillment of this holy intent, and now, after we eliminated all obstacles, and seeing that the time has come to redeem our nation from the dangerous race. We have in-trusted you, and we insist, that you do not surrender yourselves to the feelings of pity, as you face their miserable situation. For the cause of putting an end to their existence, you need to work with all your strength, to completely destroy the Armenian name in Turkey, once and for all. [17]

Jihad pogroms began exterminating countless Armenian Christians in the late 19th century, according to Balakian. But calls to jihad reached a crescendo in 1914 and 1915. This led Turkish Muslims to butcher 1.5 million Armenian Christian men, women and children. They openly sought to destroy Christianity in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, says Shoebat.

The current jihad in Israel, he says, is of precisely the same nature. “Thomas Friedman wrote that terrorism is an issue of education and an issue of jobs,” says Shoebat. “Excuse me. It isn’t. My own family is very well off.”

Shoebat’s family is better off since his conversion to Christianity: They stole his property in Beit Sahour, he says, and Islamic law prohibits his reclaiming it. An attorney he knows called to warn him: “‘If you ever go back to Beit Sahour, you will lose a lot more than property. Your children will be taken, and your wife will not be yours.” Islam allows no rights whatever to born Muslims who leave the faith—formally, murtadd fitri—including the right to life.

Frequently, extra-judicial executions of former Muslims and non-Muslims are conducted by slitting the victim’s throat. Former Muslims must therefore sometimes live under police protection. This is the sad case for Sabatina James, who immigrated to Austria with her family from Pakistan. As a former Muslim convert to Christianity, the young woman requires constant protection from family threats.

“I was a terrorist,” says Shoebat today. After coming to the U.S. in 1978 as a student, he participated for years in Arab Muslim “activism,” attended political events, and called, like most Palestinian Americans, for Israel’s destruction. In 1993, he married a Christian woman and now has Christian children.

Shoebat also rescued his American mother from Beit Sahour, where he says she was effectively held prisoner by Islam for 40 years. He was never told that she was herself a Christian. He remembers that once, his mother took him and his brother to run away. But the neighbors spying from their balconies reported her departure. When they arrived at the station, Muslim relations were waiting to take them back. Shoebat’s father cracked his mother’s skull with a hammer. After that, he watched her closely.

Now, Shoebat is surprised by reporters’ facile acceptance of Palestinian political goals. He worries that too many U.S. churches and universities promote Palestinian “peace” emissaries so unquestioningly. Their apparent messages of “justice,” in reality, are thinly-veiled calls to jihad and genocide, he says. “They have no shame for killing. If a Jew ever walks in the streets of the West Bank, he’s dead.”

Despite all this, Shoebat says he loves his fellow Palestinian Arabs as much as he loves the Jewish people and Israel. How so? “Terrorists are also victims. They suffer an occupation of the mind.”

NOTES:

1 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002), pp. 279-286.

2 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 280.

3 Steven Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (2002), p. 203.

4 Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini Founder of the Palestinian National Movement (1993), pp. 10-15; Samuel Katz, Battlegroud, pp. 63, 68.

5 Martin Gilbert, Routledge Atlas of the Arab Israeli Conflict (2003), pp. 10-13,

6 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 283.

7 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 284-285.

8 Bat Ye’or, email correspondence, Aug. 5, 2003.

9 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 281.

10 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, pp. 289-291.

11 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 289-290.

12 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 290.

13 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 153.

14 “A Friday Sermon on PA TV: We Must Educate our Children on the Love of Jihad,” special dispatch # 240, Memri.org, Jul. 11, 2001.

15 Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2003), pp. 169-170.

16 A Universal Proclamation to all the People of Islam, National Society of Defense, Seat of the Caliphate, 1333 (Muthba’at’el Haireyet, 1915) p. 21.

17 Na'aeem Bek, Armenian Atrocities, p. 43.

Link: Al-Qaeda and Saudi intelligence agency

Prince Turki (Time)

Two private Saudi firms linked to Al-Qaeda are also mixed up with Saudi intelligence. From the Chicago Tribune, with thanks to LGF:

HAMBURG, Germany -- Two private Saudi companies linked with suspected Al Qaeda cells here and in Indonesia also have connections to the Saudi Arabian intelligence agency and its longtime chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal, according to information assembled by German intelligence analysts.

The Twaik Group and Rawasin Media Productions, both based in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, have served as fronts for the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, according to an inquiry by Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND.

Twaik, a $100 million-a-year conglomerate, has diverse holdings inside and outside Saudi Arabia. Rawasin reports earnings of about $4 million a year from producing and selling audio and videotapes promoting the Wahhabi version of Islam that is Saudi Arabia's dominant religion.

The conclusions reached by the BND inquiry were presented to the office of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder late last year and subsequently circulated within the German intelligence community.

The inquiry determined that Twaik, like Rawasin, was what one source described as "an organ of Saudi Arabia intelligence."

In the late 1990s both Twaik and Rawasin employed Reda Seyam, a 44-year-old Egyptian suspected by Indonesian authorities of having helped finance the Bali nightclub bombing. Germany's federal prosecutor is investigating Seyam on suspicion of supporting a foreign terrorist organization, namely Al Qaeda.

The German inquiry also discovered that, during 1999 and 2000, Seyam took several flights from Saudi Arabia to destinations in Europe on aircraft operated by the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, or GID.

The Tribune reported last year that between 1995 and 1998, Twaik deposited more than $250,000 in bank accounts controlled by Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian-born Hamburg businessman and longtime Al Qaeda associate with close ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers during their years in the northern port city of Hamburg.

Abdulrahman Al-Fahhad, then the Twaik executive responsible for the company's rental-car operations in the Balkans, acknowledged hiring Darkazanli in 1995 to supply cars from Germany for Twaik's branch office in Albania. The money, Al-Fahhad said, had been for Darkazanli's use in purchasing those cars.

Rental-car job

Al-Fahhad also acknowledged hiring Seyam to manage Twaik's rental-car office in nearby Bosnia-Herzegovina. In telephone interviews last year and earlier this month, Al-Fahhad continued to maintain that he could not remember how he met either Darkazanli or Seyam.

Twaik's founder and owner of record, Saudi businessman Saleh Abdulaziz Al-Fahhad, did not respond to several written requests for comment on his company's purported connections with Saudi intelligence, Rawasin and Seyam.

Rawasin did not respond to e-mailed requests for information beyond stating, "You can find our products in Islamic cassette shops."

The BND inquiry has concluded that Seyam, one of whose specialties was videotaping Muslim fighters in action around the world, was sent to Indonesia by Rawasin a year before the October 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people and wounded more than 300.

It is not clear whether Seyam was working on his own or on behalf of Rawasin while he was distributing what Indonesian investigators said was tens of thousands of dollars to militant Islamists in Indonesia, including the convicted mastermind of the Bali bombings.

Neither Seyam nor Darkazanli, both of whom emigrated to Germany in the early 1980s and subsequently became naturalized German citizens, has been charged with any crime in Germany. Darkazanli is the target of a separate investigation by the federal prosecutor into the suspected laundering of Al Qaeda funds.

In 2002 and 2003 Seyam served a 10-month jail sentence in Indonesia for violating that country's immigration laws. Darkazanli was accused in a Spanish indictment last year of having served as Osama bin Laden's "financier in Europe."

Link established

According to information gathered by the BND, the relationships between Twaik, Rawasin and the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate were established while the GID was headed by Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, the eighth and last son of the late Saudi King Faisal and currently the Saudi ambassador in London.

Prince Turki served as the chief of Saudi intelligence from 1978 until 2001. The Twaik Group was formed in 1985, and Rawasin in 1998, according to business records on file in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. In a March 18 letter faxed to the Tribune, Prince Turki stated only that "I have not developed any relationship with either group."

Less than two weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the prince surprised observers by resigning after 23 years as head of Saudi intelligence. The official Saudi news agency said the resignation had been the prince's decision.

In a February 2002 speech to an alumni reunion at Georgetown University, his alma mater, Turki recalled having met with Osama bin Laden on five occasions in the late 1980s, at a time when both the Saudis and the U.S. were supporting bin Laden and other Muslims battling the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

Turki described bin Laden, whom he met in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as "a relatively pleasant man, very shy, softspoken."

If the BND's conclusions are correct, the linkage of Twaik to Saudi intelligence may resolve a question that has puzzled criminal investigators: Why would a conglomerate that then ranked 67th among all Saudi corporations choose a Muslim ideologue with no apparent business experience to manage its struggling rental-car operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

Those conclusions may also explain why a company whose operations within Saudi Arabia range from waste removal to the management of government hospitals undertook not one but two risky business ventures in the strife-torn Balkans, where several Saudi-based Muslim charities were spending tens of millions of dollars to aid the Muslim population.

Frayed relations

Relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have been frayed by the Bush administration's contention that wealthy individuals, companies and Islamic charities in that country may have contributed, consciously or otherwise, to the support of Islamic terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda.

There has been no indication thus far that any agency of the Saudi government or member of the Saudi royal family played a conscious role in supporting terrorist activities. A source familiar with the BND investigation said Saudi government officials outside the GID "probably" had no idea of the relationship among Rawasin, Twaik and the GID.

The BND's conclusions might also raise questions about whether at least some of the Saudi government's acknowledged support for armed struggles by Muslims in Afghanistan and elsewhere may have been diverted to attacks on Western interests.

No direct link

No direct connection between Saudi money and the Sept. 11 plotters in Hamburg has been found, though investigators here and in the U.S. continue to search for one. A senior FBI official acknowledged recently that the agency still did not know the "ultimate source" of the estimated $500,000 that financed the Sept. 11 hijackings.

Though both men are free, Seyam and Darkazanli are being kept under surveillance while the federal prosecutor's investigation of their activities proceeds.

The investigation of Seyam has been hampered by the fact that, until two years ago, supporting a foreign terrorist organization like Al Qaeda was not illegal in Germany.

That loophole, which also has caused problems for the prosecutions of two accused Sept. 11 conspirators in Hamburg, has since been closed. The loophole is not an issue in the Darkazanli investigation, which is focused on ordinary criminal statutes that prohibit money laundering.

The new anti-terrorism statute, forbidding support for any organization foreign or domestic, is not retroactive. A decision on whether to arrest Seyam and to indict him on terrorism charges will depend on what prosecutors learn about his activities after the law was changed in August 2002.

Under German law, intelligence information like that collected about Seyam by the BND cannot be used to build a criminal case, something a source familiar with the BND's investigation of Seyam described as "very frustrating."

Seyam still could be charged with an ordinary crime not related to terrorism if the evidence to support such a charge exists. His ex-wife, a German woman named Regina Kreis, has emerged as a leading witness in the criminal investigation, which is being conducted by the German federal police, the BKA.

A ride to Germany

One BKA official, cautioning that his agency was not entirely convinced of Kreis' credibility, said she had recalled for investigators riding in a car from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Germany with her husband and another man sometime in 1996.

From photographs Kreis identified the mystery passenger as Ramzi Binalshibh, who moved to Germany from Yemen the previous year and would later become the self-described "coordinator" of the Sept. 11 hijacking plot. Binalshibh is now in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location.

The journey with Binalshibh was first disclosed by the German magazine Der Spiegel, which reported last week that German authorities now consider Seyam "to be one of the most important Al Qaeda agents in Europe."

Another German magazine, Focus, previously quoted Kreis as saying Seyam had been "in touch with Al Qaeda leaders" while the couple was living in Bosnia-Herzegovina and had taken part in a firing squad that executed a Serb in the summer of 1995.

Herbert Gude, a Focus reporter who interviewed Kreis while she was in the BKA's witness protection program earlier this year, said she had been kept in the dark about her husband's business affairs and could not explain how and why Seyam had been hired by Twaik.

Kreis, who converted to Islam after her 1988 marriage to Seyam and was divorced by her husband in 2001, was not living with Seyam in Jakarta when he was arrested there in September 2002.

Evidence of financing

Muchyar Yara, the spokesman for the Indonesian State Intelligence Bureau, or BIN, at the time of Seyam's arrest, said investigators uncovered evidence indicating that Seyam was financing several suspected terrorists in Southeast Asia.

Yara said that when agents searched Seyam's rented $4,000-a-month house, they recovered documents that included the names of suspected terrorists on Seyam's payroll.

One of those names was Omar al-Farouq, believed by the U.S. to be a senior Al Qaeda representative in Southeast Asia. It was al-Farouq's capture in Indonesia in June 2002, Yara said, that led BIN to Seyam.

Seyam's "salary list," Yara said, also included the name of Imam Samudra, a Balinese Islamic cleric sentenced to death last year after his conviction for masterminding the Bali attacks.

Samudra has admitted his role in the nightclub bombings. At his trial, Samudra reportedly declared that he was "grateful" for the deaths of more than 3,000 people in the Sept. 11 attacks.

In all, Yara said, Seyam apparently handed out many thousands of dollars during his Indonesian sojourn, including one particularly suspicious expenditure of $74,000 for a "speedboat."

The BIN never found the speedboat, Yara said, noting that speedboats were "not such a common thing" in Indonesia. But he added that "we can't say directly that the money was used for the Bali bomb."

Despite the BIN's conclusion that Seyam was "a very high-ranking officer of the international terrorism network," Yara said, he was convicted only of working as a journalist while holding a tourist visa.

Seyam was not prosecuted on terrorism charges, Yara said, partly because of loopholes in the Indonesian anti-terrorism laws, and partly because of his German nationality. "We decided that his case would be better handled by Germany," Yara said.

When Seyam's jail sentence ran out in July 2003, he was handed over to the BKA, who returned him to Germany for questioning.

Interviewed by Der Spiegel in the small town near Stuttgart where he now lives, Seyam said he was being "persecuted" because of his reporting of injustices to Muslims while working as a correspondent for Al Jazeera, the Arab-owned satellite TV channel.

Al Jazeera's Jakarta bureau chief, Othman al-Battiri, said in a telephone interview that Seyam had never been an Al Jazeera correspondent, and that his application for a job as a cameraman had been rejected. Editors at Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar confirmed that the organization had never employed Seyam.

Naturalized German

A heavily bearded man with what acquaintances describe as a brooding manner, Seyam arrived in Germany in the early 1980s to study mathematics in Freiberg. He became a naturalized German citizen after marrying Kreis.

"He was an ordinary Muslim who became a fanatic," a senior BKA official said.

According to Abdulrahman Al-Fahhad, when Seyam took over the management of Twaik Rent-a-Car's office in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in October 1997, his instructions were to liquidate Twaik's operation.

"We hired him to close the business," Al-Fahhad said.

But Twaik's deputy manager in Sarajevo, Haytham Elshazli, remembers Seyam struggling to make Twaik Rent-a-Car a going concern, albeit one with a radical Islamic face.

Soon after taking over Twaik, Elshazli said, Seyam fired the company's only two female employees. He also brought a copy of the Koran to the office and began playing religious tapes during working hours.

When Seyam discovered that Twaik had rented a car to a woman with dual Israeli and American citizenship, Elshazli recalled, "He said, `Why are you renting to Israeli people, to Jews, to people like that ...? You don't have to be in contact with Jews, with such people.'"

Seyam's exhortations drove away another Twaik employee, a non-observant Bosnian Muslim who spoke to the Tribune on condition that he not be identified.

"He said, `This is not good, you must have a wife, not a girlfriend, you mustn't drink, you must go to mosque,'" the former employee recalled.

When the former employee told Seyam he intended to submit his resignation to Abdulrahman Al-Fahhad, he said Seyam replied that that wouldn't be necessary, because "I'm the owner of Twaik now."

Once Seyam took charge, Elshazli said, Abdulrahman Al-Fahhad's inspection visits to Bosnia-Herzegovina ceased. At one point, Seyam brought in a dozen or so Arabs, men Elshazli described as hard-line Islamists, explaining that they were "accountants."

The men copied every document in the Twaik files, Elshazli said, including the names and addresses of clients from the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.

Within a few months of Seyam's taking over, Elshazli was also out the door. "He said, `The company is ours now, and we are not satisfied with you anymore,'" Elshazli recalled. "Six months of nightmare."

Whether despite Seyam's efforts or because of them, Twaik's enterprise in Bosnia-Herzegovina failed, and in 1998 Seyam disappeared from Bosnia-Herzegovina along with Twaik.

According to the BND investigation, he turned up the next year in Saudi Arabia, working for Rawasin Media Productions.

In early 2001 Seyam began shuttling between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, where he reportedly videotaped fighting between the Muslim majority and the Christian minority in Indonesia's remote Moluccas Islands. That little-publicized struggle is believed to have claimed thousands of lives over the past four years.

While Seyam was in Riyadh, according to Der Spiegel, "high-ranking Al Qaeda members" were seen visiting his house.

Among Seyam's alleged visitors, the magazine said, was Osama bin Laden.

No more Somalias: US vows to stay the course

Smiling at the massacre

From Reuters:

The United States vowed on Wednesday to stay the course in Iraq after three American contractors were killed in an ambush and their bodies dragged through the streets of Falluja in an incident reminiscent of the grisly fate of U.S. soldiers attacked in Somalia in 1993.

Four contractors to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority that has run Iraq since last year' U.S.-led invasion to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein were attacked by guerrillas on a main road in the town, 32 miles (50 km) west of Baghdad.

A crowd of Iraqis then set the vehicles ablaze, hurled stones into the burning wreckage and dragged the charred and mutilated bodies through the streets of the town, a center of resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.

Television film of a similar incident in Somalia sickened Americans over the U.S. mission there and was a factor in the decision to pull U.S. forces from the African state.

In a separate incident on Wednesday, five U.S. soldiers died when a roadside bomb was detonated near their convoy west of Baghdad.

"These are horrific attacks by people who are trying to prevent democracy from moving forward, but democracy is taking root," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, saying the United States would stick to a June 30 deadline to hand over power in Iraq to some sort of transitional Iraqi government.

"We mourn the loss of life and there is an important effort that is well under way in Iraq to provide the Iraqi people freedom and democracy and we will not turn back from that effort," McClellan said.

A U.S. official in Washington who did not wish to be named said that three of the four contractors were U.S. citizens.

Television pictures showed one incinerated body being kicked and stamped on by a member of the jubilant crowd, while others dragged a blackened body down the road by its feet.

As one body lay burning on the ground, an Iraqi came and doused it with petrol, sending flames soaring. At least two bodies were tied to cars and pulled through the streets, witnesses said.

The treatment of the four -- who appear to have been among the many civilian security contractors operating in Iraq, according to one U.S. official -- revived memories of the brutal treatment of U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993.

Somali militia fighters ambushed U.S. Army Rangers and special forces troops in bloody street battles on Oct. 3, 1993, that left 18 Americans dead. Some of their corpses were dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadishu by jubilant mobs.

President Bill Clinton later withdrew U.S. forces, who had originally been sent to Somalia on a humanitarian mission.

Sudan Arrests Islamic Opposition Leader

Hassan al-Turabi (AP)

A major jihad leader has been arrested in Sudan. From VOA News:

Sudan's security forces have arrested Islamic opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi and close to a dozen of his sympathizers and accused them of attempting to overthrow the government.

Authorities surrounded the home of the 72-year-old head of Sudan's Popular Congress Party and took him into custody during the early morning hours.

A leader of the Islamic movement in Sudan since the 1960s, Mr. al-Turabi has close personal ties to Osama bin Laden, and is said to be the mentor of al-Qaida number-two man Ayman al-Zawahri.

In 1989, Mr. al-Turabi's National Islamic Front took part in a coup that overthrew Sudan's elected government and set up a police state that drew worldwide condemnation for mass executions, torture of prisoners, and suppression of political freedoms.

But an expert on Sudan at Cairo's Al-Ahram newspaper, Asmaa el-Husseiny, says she interviewed Mr. al-Turabi on Monday and he denied any attempt to overthrow the government.

She says Mr. al-Turabi acknowledged the failure of the last coup, which led Sudan into civil war. He said rather than resort to armed insurgency again, he and his followers would continue to put non-violent pressure on the government to resolve disputes over territory, security and authority in the troubled regions of Sudan.

Rebels in the western Sudan's Darfur region have been battling government forces for over a year, creating a humanitarian catastrophe. Peace talks collapsed late last year, but a new round has opened in neighboring Chad.

Ms. el-Husseiny says the Sudanese government believes Mr. al-Turabi enjoys significant support among ethnic rebel groups in southern, eastern and western Sudan, and may have been inciting sedition within the military.

She says his arrest reflects an escalation of the political unrest throughout the country.

Prior to Wednesday's arrest, Mr. al-Turabi had spent nearly three years in custody but was released in October of last year.

Gunmen Seize Explosives in Thailand's Muslim South

Bhokin Bhalakula

The Thai jihad continues apace. From Reuters:

Heavily armed raiders stole a large quantity of explosives from a quarry in Thailand's largely Muslim south, just days after a bomb attack in the region and prompting fears of another, officials said on Wednesday.

"With this amount of fertilizer, you could blow up a whole town," Pallop Pinmanee, deputy chief of the Internal Security Operations Command, told Reuters at the scene of the robbery, which included 1.4 tonnes of ammonium nitrate.

The government ordered a full alert, not only in three provinces near the Malaysian border under martial law since January, but also two more along the frontier ahead of next month's Thai New Year celebrations which draw many Malaysians.

"These people are apparently seeking to destabilize the situation and hurt the tourism industry," Interior Minister Bhokin Bhalakula told reporters.

"We have ordered a full alert for government installations, public places and tourist resorts in many areas," he said after 10 masked men armed with AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles raided the quarry in Libon, 70 km (40 miles) from the Malaysian border.

They made off with 1.4 tonnes of ammonium nitrate used in making explosives for blasting, 58 sticks of dynamite and 180 detonators, police said.

The Manu Rock Grinding Co quarry was closed when the raid took place on Tuesday evening with only two security guards on duty and the raiders went straight to the separate, poorly locked sheds where each item was kept, they said.

That suggested they knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find it, they added.

SEPARATIST FEARS

Bhokin said the alert covered the southern commercial hub of Hat Yai and the west coast town of Satun which draw thousands of Malaysian tourists during Thailand's Songkran New Year celebrations from April 13 to 15.

"There is a possibility that they might act before or during Songkran," he said.

The two towns are in different provinces from the three put under martial law in January after armed men killed four soldiers and stole many weapons, including M-16s, in a raid on an army camp in the area in January.

Since then, 60 people, most of them officials and police but including three Buddhist monks, have been killed in a surge of violence some officials think marks a revival of a low-key separatist war fought in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fears the violence could escalate have risen sharply since a motorcycle bomb wounded 28 people, including eight Malaysians, at a karaoke bar in the border town of Sungai Kolok on Saturday.

That was the first major attack aimed at civilians since the raid on the army camp and the government believes it marked a shift in tactics.

"They have intensified their campaign, raising the level of violence and aiming at tourist spots so as to drive tourists away," Bhokin said of an industry which draws 10 million foreigners a year and accounts for six percent of gross domestic product.

"We are now trying to read their minds to find out where they will strike next to stop tourists from coming."

A Testimony on Suicide Bombers' Recruitment to Ansar Al-Islam

A forensics expert collects evidence at a suicide bombing site in Israel (AP)

Is suicide bombing really all about economic and social grievances? From MEMRI: "The London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat published the story of a member of the Islamic terrorist organization Ansar Al-Islam, who planned to blow himself up in the Interior Ministry building in Al-Suleimaniya, but was arrested by the Kurdish authorities. The Kurdish security authorities accuse Ansar Al-Islam of attacking American forces and their allies in Iraq and of responsibility for the suicide bombings at the headquarters of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in early February, which killed 109 people. On March 23, 2004 the U.S. government officially listed Ansar Al-Islam as a terrorist organization. The following are excerpts from the article: [1]"

Recruitment Tactics of Ansar Al-Islam

"Kaywan Qader, 18-years old, grew up in Al-Suleimaniya. He was one of 10 brothers and sisters of a moderately religious family. His mother did not wear a veil and he prayed [only] once a day in the mosque where he met someone named Sawara Ahmad Ali, who later became his recruiter to Ansar Al-Islam. Qader says that Sawara Ali discussed religion with him and told him that it was his duty to carry out Jihad operations against the KDP and that prayer alone was not sufficient. He stressed to him the necessity to join Jihad in order to become a good Muslim. Qader says that he greatly fears Allah and that Ali exploited that.

"It was the year 2001, Ansar Al-Islam had not been established as of yet, and Ali was a member of one of the offshoots of the Islamist Movement in Kurdistan. The group was established in December of that year, and in 2003 the American and Kurdish forces in northern Iraq attacked its bases, its members fled to Iran where they regrouped and then infiltrated back into Iraq to join the fight against the American-led occupation. Later, Ali was able to convince Qader that Jihad would offer him paradise and save him from hell. Qader agreed to join Ali in one of the villages to prepare himself for Jihad, and all of his father's efforts to dissuade him from that failed. Qader told his father that Allah's wish supercedes the family's wish. He joined a camp where about 400 members of the group were training, but his father persuaded him to return [home] promising him a possible job ... but he continued his training with the rest of the members.

"Qader says that the Kurdish and American forces carried out an intensive attack on the group's position on the eve of the war against Iraq, which forced the survivors to infiltrate into Iran where he was arrested and returned to the border. But he was able to enter Iran again, where he stayed for a month."

'Suicide Mission is the Highest Level of Jihad'

"In the camp, Qader was paid $22 per month. He agreed to carry out a suicide mission because he was told that it is 'the highest level of Jihad.' Ali sent his name to the group's command in Biyara, their stronghold in the mountainous area adjacent to Iran.

72 Virgins in Paradise

"Another detainee who spent time in Ansar Al-Islam's camp says that they listened to lectures where they were told that [each of] the Shuhadaa [martyrs] will find 72 virgins [waiting for him] in paradise. He added that the group has what is known as 'TNT camps' where the suicide bombers wear protective jackets and are trained on how to blow themselves at the right location.

"Umar Fattah, the KDP's head of security, says that Ansar Al-Islam uses C4 explosives which are more powerful than TNT. He added that Ansar Al-Islam creates groups of 3-8 youngsters between the ages of 15 and 25, who participate in one month of lectures, brainwashing, and intensive military training.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), March 18, 2004.

The growth of radical Islam in Central Asia

Background on the jihad in Uzbekistan, from Asia Times. Note that the jihadis were from middle-class families:

Recent reports

Prior to the recent terror attacks in Uzbekistan which claimed at least 19 lives, a spate of reports from the region shows ongoing Islamist activity and law-enforcement efforts to contain it. One report details the state of affairs in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Other reports suggest that Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Party of Islamic Liberation - HT), an organization that now stands at the center of concerns over rising Islamist activity in Central Asia, is increasingly tailoring its recruiting efforts to match local dynamics in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, targeting individuals from the dominant ethnic group with a higher education and ties to state institutions.

In Tajikistan, the authorities arrested a group of HT activists in Khujand in February. Various reports placed the number of individuals detained between 14 and 22. Tribune.uz, an independent Internet publication funded by George Soros' Open Society foundation, reported on February 25 that the men were all aged 20-22 and from middle-class families. Moreover, they were all ethnic Tajiks "whose parents came from the most 'Tajik of regions' of southern Tajikistan". Previously, ethnic Uzbeks and Uzbek citizens from the Ferghana Valley had figured prominently in reports of HT activity in Tajikistan. Asia Plus-Blitz also reported that three of the activists were relatives of officials in the Kulob city government and prosecutor's office.

In Kazakhstan, a court in Shymkent sentenced 23-year-old Nurzhan Zhakipov to three years in prison for HT activities on March 2. In a March 3 report, Kazinform contrasted the Zhakipov case with another HT-related incident in November 2003: "Not long ago in Shymkent, Arysi, and a number of other regions in the southern Kazakhstan Okrug, some 20 HT members were tried. In November, they took to the streets for an unsanctioned demonstration in which their organization called for the overthrow of [Uzbek President Islam] Karimov's regime. They were fined 18,900 tenges [US$135] each; two participants who resisted arrest were sentenced to 10 days in jail. The majority of the people who have been 'nabbed' in connection with HT are poorly educated and ignorant. This is why Zhakipov so surprised the journalists at his trial - he is a man from an urban family who attended Soviet school and received a higher education ..." A March 5 report in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda noted that "while the recruitment activities of HT emissaries in Kazakhstan initially focused on low-income individuals, recent efforts have targeted potential members among government officials, law-enforcement authorities, well-off businessmen, intellectuals, and students".

In Kyrgyzstan, on February 17, a court in Bishkek sentenced two IMU members - both Uzbek citizens - to death for their role in a December 2002 explosion at a Bishkek market that killed seven people. A March 2 report in Vechernii Bishkek described how "unofficial" mullahs - possibly with HT ties - in the southern Aravan region were inculcating the tenets of radical Islam in young people. According to the report, if 100-120 young people in the area are receiving a religious education from "official clerics", an equal number is learning different lessons from what the article terms "nontraditionalists".

A March 1 report by Deutsche Welle focused on IMU members, many of whom fled to Pakistan after the US-led antiterrorist operation smashed the Taliban movement, and with it the IMU's stronghold in Afghanistan. According to the report, a group of approximately 120 militants has relocated to Pakistan's northern Balochistan province. The group consists of fighters from Central Asia, Tatarstan, ethnic Russian converts to Islam, and people from the Caucasus; many of them are IMU members. Operating in groups of 25-30, they have recently moved to mountainous regions of Pakistan, including the city of Quetta, capital of Balochistan province.

The same report featured an interview with a former IMU member, who said that the IMU's leaders now reside in Wana, Pakistan - scene of the recent Pakistani military operations to track down al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters seeking refuge in the tribal regions. The movement's key leader remains Tahir Yuldashev. His first deputy for financial affairs is Dilshod Hojiyev. The military commander is Ulug'bek Holik, who also goes under the name Mohammed Ayub. All of the men are originally from Uzbekistan's Namangan Oblast.

The IMU maintains a number of unofficial daftars, or offices, in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. An office in the Pakistani port city of Karachi handles financial contributions, primarily from Arab countries. According to the main source for the report, a 34-year-old Uzbek native of Navoiy Oblast who recently took advantage of an amnesty offer and returned home from Pakistan, the fighters also earn money on their own "through military operations financed by Pakistani special services against American forces in Afghanistan and through raids in Kashmir".

The source also told Deutsche Welle that a split had taken place in the IMU, with a group of combat-weary fighters rebelling against Yuldashev. In order to combat the dissenters, Yuldashev apparently summoned Ilhom Hojiyev, also known as Commander Abdurahmon, from Tajikistan. Ilhom Hojiyev is the cousin of Juma (aka Jumaboi) Namangani, the IMU military commander believed (not confirmed) to have been killed when the Taliban fell in late 2001.

In Uzbekistan itself, harsh measures against any hint of Islamist activity remain the order of the day, with courts routinely meting out long prison terms for any real or suspected HT involvement. But with severe restrictions on the media, the situation is difficult to gauge. Human rights organizations charge that some 5,000 political prisoners are better characterized as victims of a repressive regime than as wild-eyed Islamists intent on installing a fundamentalist regime of their own. Meanwhile, Uzbekistan's role as a strategic partner of the United States in the "war on terror" has politicized the debate over the threat of radical Islam, often to the detriment of dispassionate analysis.

The main players: HT and the IMU

As the reports above indicate, Hizb ut-Tahrir and the IMU and are the primary organizations of concern in Central Asia.

The HT's rise to prominence in Central Asia marks a departure from the usual pattern for radical groups. Most groups achieve notoriety through the "propaganda of the deed", committing acts of terror or making obvious attempts to seize power. Instead, HT has drawn notice for its radical program and conspiratorial organizational structure. The organization's stated goals are the restoration of the caliphate and the establishment of strict Islamic law. It operates through a network of secretive party cells reminiscent of the underground network the Bolsheviks employed as they laid the groundwork for their successful seizure of power in Russia in 1917.

Founded in the early 1950s by Palestinians in Jordan, HT is today active in more than 30 countries worldwide, including Western Europe. It arrived in Central Asia in the mid-1990s, and is now active in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Only in the latter is it seen as having a possibly significant presence, however. According to a June 30 report by the International Crisis Group, "Estimates of [HT's] strength vary widely, but a rough figure is probably 15,000 to 20,000 throughout Central Asia."

As noted above, the perception of HT as a threat stems from the radical nature of the organization's program, which implies the overthrow of all of the region's current regimes. US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Elizabeth Jones, told the House Committee on International Relations on October 29: "[HT] is stridently anti-Western. Although there is no confirmed evidence of HT's involvement in violent actions as an organization, HT propaganda has praised martyrdom operations against Israel and called for attacks against coalition forces in Iraq. HT leaflets have also claimed that the United States and the United Kingdom are at war with Islam, and have called for all Muslims to defend the faith and engage in jihad against these countries. It seeks to replace the regimes of the region with a supranational Islamic caliphate."

The IMU has followed a more traditional path. Historian Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution provided a useful summary of the group's history and activities in her prepared statement to the above-mentioned House committee hearings: "The IMU was a self-proclaimed radical Islamic and political group, which was formed around 1997 by two ethnic Uzbeks from the Ferghana Valley with the express goal of overthrowing the government of President Islam Karimov and establishing an Islamic state in Uzbekistan. Having been expelled from Uzbekistan in the early 1990s, the two founders of the IMU [Juma Namangani, the group's military leader and a former Afghan veteran, and [Tahir Yuldashev], its political leader] followed the pattern of other Islamic militant leaders. They traveled variously and separately in Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates - as well as to Chechnya - and established contacts with Islamic movements, financial sources and intelligence services. After the 1996 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the IMU founders established close relations with Taliban leaders and were reported to have secured the support and financial backing of Osama bin Laden in their creation of the IMU.

"From 1997-2001, using the remote mountainous regions of Tajikistan as its base, the IMU carried out kidnappings, assassinations and other atrocities, including a series of armed raids deep into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that also targeted foreign visitors and tourists. Eventually, the IMU relocated its base of operations permanently to Afghanistan, extended its mandate to overthrow all regional governments - changing its name to the Islamic Party of Turkestan [IPT] - and threw in its lot with the Taliban. President [George W] Bush named the IMU as one of the terrorist movements linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in his speech to Congress on September 20, 2001. At this juncture, reports from the region and Western intelligence sources put the numbers of IMU militants at between 3,000-5,000 ... It was only the US intervention in Afghanistan that curtailed IMU activities in Central Asia. The IMU's military commander was killed in action with the Taliban near Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan in November 2001, and its political leader went into hiding."

The threat: Real or imagined?

With the geographically isolated IMU still regrouping militarily and HT maintaining a policy of nonviolent organization-building, observers differ, sometimes profoundly, in their assessments. The majority view is that the increasingly repressive regimes in Central Asia, and in Uzbekistan in particular, themselves pose the greatest threat to regional stability by creating ideally wretched conditions to nurture an implacably radical opposition. Meanwhile, a vocal minority insists that the IMU, HT, and perhaps other movements that have yet to catch the public eye, still represent the gravest danger.

Examples of the former view abound. In her prepared statement to the House committee, Fiona Hill wrote: "I would suggest that harsh government repression of dissent is as much, if not more, of a threat to Central Asian stability today and in the immediate future as the radical Islamic movements ..."

Martha Brill Olcott, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, seconded this view in her own prepared statement: "The Central Asian elites are exaggerating the threat to the state that is posed by those advocating radical Islamic ideologies, and US policymakers will be making a grave mistake if they allow shared goals in the 'war on terror' to blind us to the short-sighted and potentially dangerous policies that are being pursued in the region with regards to religion."

In a spring 2003 article in the Journal of International Affairs, Edward W Walker wrote: "There is little risk that Islamists will come to power in the region soon, especially now that the collapse of the Taliban means Afghanistan is no longer a safe haven. The greater risk is that Central Asia's ruling elites will use the specter of Islamism as an excuse to avoid economic and political reforms that would mitigate the conditions under which militant Islamism takes root and survives."

A December 22, 2003 study by the International Crisis Group titled "Is Radical Islam Inevitable in Central Asia: Priorities for Engagement", suggested a similar conclusion. The study warned that "if Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are to avoid the fate of other countries in which terrorist or extremist movements have emerged ... it is imperative to build open political systems ... Authoritarian regimes relying on fear and repression, while stifling individual freedoms will only discredit democracy and push people to act outside constitutional frameworks."

This view is not universally held. In his prepared statement to the House committee, Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation noted the unsavory nature of the region's authoritarian regimes without defining it as the most pressing danger. Instead, he stressed that "anti-Americanism, extremism and preaching the violent overthrow of existing regimes make Hizb ut-Tahrir a prime suspect in the next wave of violent action in Central Asia ...." He concluded: "Hizb ut-Tahrir represents a growing medium and long-term threat to geopolitical stability and the secular regimes of Central Asia and ultimately poses a potential threat to other regions of the world. It seeks to overthrow and destroy existing regimes and establish a Sharia-based caliphate. Hizb may launch terrorist attacks against US targets and allies, operating either alone or in cooperation with other global terror groups such as al-Qaeda. A Hizb takeover of any Central Asian state could provide the global radical terror movement with a geographic base and access to the expertise and technology to manufacture weapons of mass destruction."

Prospects and conclusions

Even those observers who disagree on the extent of the Islamist threat generally concur that the current drift of the region's regimes is less than encouraging. In fact, the leitmotif of recent writing on radical Islam in Central Asia is the following contradiction: writers insist that the best remedy for Central Asia's ailments is to strengthen civil society, pursue economic reforms, encourage greater political participation, expand basic freedoms and improve socioeconomic conditions for the populace; yet the same writers glumly conclude that the dominant trend is movement in the opposite direction. Conditions are worsening - slowly in countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and with gathering speed in Uzbekistan.

But the miserable conditions that observers note are not particular to Central Asia. Sadly, many of the world's countries are dismal places ruled by dingy regimes. Those places where Islamist movements have come to power - Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan, for example - have suffered from pervasive misgovernment, gross socioeconomic inequalities, and a dearth of basic freedoms. But many other nations labor under similar curses, and Islamists have had scant success in exploiting them to their advantage.

In fact, the single greatest failure of the Islamist movement to date is its inability to fashion a global movement to match its global agenda. In Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan, indigenous movements came to power with indigenous agendas under particularly favorable indigenous conditions. Though their stated aims at times extended beyond their borders, these dissimilar movements proved largely incapable of expanding their influence beyond the ethnic, sectarian, linguistic and state boundaries in which they arose.

This fact has not been lost on Central Asia's regimes. Even Uzbekistan, the most heavy-handed among them in its repression of Islamist activity, hammers away at this tension between the national and the supranational in its official anti-Islamist propaganda. For example, an article in Uzbek on the pro-government website stability.uz takes an explicitly nationalist stance against HT's pan-Islamic program: "According to HT's strategy, Uzbek territory that was acquired [for Islam] through 'a jihad war' is not Uzbek territory; rather, the Uzbek people have the right to use those lands. The right to exercise sovereignty over Uzbekistan's territory would, according to their ideology, belong to the centralized structure of the reconstituted Islamic caliphate ... [HT supporters] say prayers, fast, and know a few lines of the Koran, but they have no profound knowledge of the basic tenets of the Islamic faith. Nevertheless, they claim that their ideas represent absolute truth. These self-proclaimed 'defenders and armies of Islam' appear to be marionettes in the hands of those who hope to Arabize Central Asia."

But if pan-Islamic movements have often foundered on contradictions between the national and supranational, this failure does not in and of itself consign radical groups with supranational aims to the ash heap of history. The global terrorist international as exemplified by al-Qaeda, for example, has proved itself capable of mounting destructive attacks in diverse locations. It is here that conditions in Central Asia are particularly worrisome. In an October 2001 article in Prospect (No 68), Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recalls: "I gained certain insights into the roots of Muslims extremism during my work as a stringer for The Times in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late 1980s - not only through meeting some precursors of the Taliban among the Afghan mujahideen, but among radical groups in Pakistan. I especially remember a long conversation with some young members of a 'fundamentalist' group in Lahore. Some of them came from longstanding Lahori families, others from recent migrants from the countryside. None were from the bottom of society. Instead, they came from that classic breeding ground of fascistic and religious extremism, the proud but struggling lower middle class and actual or former upper peasantry.

"They were under threat not only of sinking into the immiserated, semi-employed proletariat ... but of only being able to escape and rise through entry into the junior ranks of organized crime, and especially heroin smuggling ... In these depressing circumstances, adherence to a radical Islamist network provided a sense of cultural security, a new community and some degree of social support - modest, but still better than anything the state can provide."

In his prepared statement to the House committee, Stephen Blank, a professor of national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, disputed arguments linking poverty and extremism, echoing Lieven's comments: "We have rarely seen that the Islamist parties or movements or their recruits are the result of the kind of poverty and societal degradation that we find in Central Asia. If anything we find the opposite, that these recruits are often from educated upwardly mobile backgrounds whose ascent is somehow blocked or 'cramped' by the structure of the existing society ..."

It is in this context that one notes with some concern the anecdotal evidence of better-educated and better-connected recruits to HT. HT itself does not appear to represent an imminent threat to the entrenched regimes of Central Asia, nor does it seem to have a coherent blueprint for achieving its radical goals. But its increasing ability to draw a new class of adherents, if confirmed by further evidence, may indicate that HT is on the verge of an organizational breakthrough, or that it may soon serve as a stepping stone to more direct, and possibly more destructive, forms of extremist activity.

The preceding suggests that observers need to move from general questions about the "threat of radical Islam in Central Asia" to specific queries about the precise numbers and backgrounds of new sympathizers, as well as any ties between existing organizations like HT and other groups with a more proactive agenda. Though some information is available, too much of it stems from media controlled or hobbled by regimes with a vested interest in presenting a specific version of a "threat" that they can then exploit for their own purposes. The information needed to answer the questions posed above cannot be gleaned from tidy reports of varying veracity; it must often be obtained the old-fashioned way - on the shifting ground where it first emerges. From our present vantage point, the availability such vital information may well be the most pressing issue of all.

UK Muslims urged to fight terror

Iqbal Sacranie (BBC)

What? You mean they haven't been doing this all along? From ABC:

Britain's Muslim leaders are urging followers of Islam to cooperate with the authorities to fight terrorism.

There is fear in the Muslim community that it will be stigmatised following the arrest of eight suspected terrorists and the seizure of half a tonne of the bomb making ingredient ammonium nitrate fertiliser.

The Muslim Council of Britain is concerned the public is already linking terrorism to followers of Islam.

I appreciate this concern. The MCB would have an easier task ahead if there weren't so many Muslims linking terrorism to followers of Islam.

General Secretary Iqbal Sacranie has reiterated that attacks like the recent bombings in Madrid are not sanctioned or supported by the wider Islamic community.

He is calling on Muslims to be vigilant and report any suspicious activities to police.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has congratulated Mr Sacranie for his public appeal.

More jihad in Uzbekistan

Tashkent checkpoint (AP)

More Uzbek jihad. From AP:

An explosion ripped through a district of the Uzbek capital Wednesday evening and caused casualties, according to a report, apparently the latest incident in a wave of terrorist-related violence that has gripped the city.

Interfax news agency reported the blast hit the Sabir-Rakhimovski district, which is in northern Tashkent. Interior Ministry anti-terrorism department deputy chief Ilya Pyagay said that police were carrying out an operation in that neighborhood. He gave no further details.

That area is not far from the scene of fighting Tuesday that officials said left 23 people dead, including three police officers.

A Western security official also said he had been informed of a blast, and that people had seen fire trucks racing to the area. Witnesses also reported seeing police cars speeding through the city center toward the Sabir-Rakhimovski district.

Prosecutor-General spokeswoman Svetlana Artikova, however, said that no new outbreaks of violence had occurred in the city.

Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency earlier reported that a blast also struck a residential building in the Fergana Valley city of Andijan overnight, citing police sources. The explosion could have been an accident, but police weren't ruling out terrorism. Officials declined to confirm the report.

The reported Tashkent blast came at the end of a day where police scoured the capital in pursuit of fugitive militants, and reportedly arrested at least 30. A police official said those in custody so far were adherents of the strict Wahhabi Islamic sect, which was believed to have inspired Osama bin Laden, not members of an extremist group President Islam Karimov has implied were behind the attacks.

At least 42 people have been killed in terrorist-related violence that began Sunday in Uzbekistan — the first unrest here since this Central Asian nation became a key U.S. ally in the war on terror.

Oleg Bichenov, Tashkent city police anti-terrorism deputy chief, declined to confirm how many had been arrested so far.

"The number (of the arrested) will be changing, and I hope it will be going up," he told The Associated Press. "We are continuing to search for suspects and making arrests."

Earlier, a Western security official in Tashkent told AP on condition of anonymity that police and security officers were looking for five suspects.

Nineteen people were killed and 26 wounded on Sunday and Monday in violence that included the first suicide bombings in this Central Asian nation. On Tuesday, 23 people died as Uzbek forces battled for hours with suspected terrorists, and were struck by two suicide attacks.

All the attacks appeared to target Uzbek authorities.

The U.S. Embassy in Tashkent said no new violence was reported Wednesday in the country. However, the Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan — where access already is strictly controlled — had been closed to all except diplomatic traffic, it said.

An embassy annex office remained closed, although visa operations resumed. Americans were urged to be on "highest alert," as the situation remained unclear.

Bichenov said those in custody were being questioned at length — but that interrogations so far found that none were members of the Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist group. Instead, he said the suspects were aligned with the Wahhabi sect of Islam.

On Monday, Kadyrov told journalists that religious literature from Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Wahhabi sect had been found at an alleged terrorist bomb-making factory in the central region of Bukhara.

Hizb ut-Tahrir — which claims to disavow violence, while not explicitly ruling it out in its quest to create an Islamic state across the world — has never been linked to any terrorist attacks. Its office in Britain, where the group is allowed to operate openly, denied responsibility for events in Uzbekistan.

Uzbek authorities claim Hizb ut-Tahrir is a breeding ground for terrorists and have sought unsuccessfully to have Washington label it a terrorist group.

The Wahhabi sect is dominant in Saudi Arabia and has attracted many followers across Central Asia and the Caucasus.

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday that the United States had no information on who was responsible for the attacks but noted the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan has been the dominant threat in the country.

That terror group was believed to have been decimated in the U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, and Pakistani forces this month hunting al-Qaida fugitives on the Afghan border said they wounded the IMU's political leader.

Security remained tighter than usual Wednesday in Tashkent, with soldiers and police searching vehicles at checkpoints. An armored personnel carrier also remained in place on the road leading out of the city toward Karimov's official residence, near the area of suicide bombings and battles between authorities and suspected militants.

Residents near the area of Tuesday's fighting said five men escaped, although it wasn't clear if some of them had been killed at another charred house nearby pockmarked with bullet holes, where residents said four bodies lay in the courtyard.

The Interior Ministry said the fighting Tuesday killed three police and wounded five. It said 20 terror suspects died and that all of them blew themselves up, but that contradicted accounts that government forces killed some of the militants in shootouts.

Bodies of foreigners dragged through streets of Fallujah; bomb kills five U.S. troops

From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm and DC Watson:

Jubilant residents dragged the charred corpses of four foreign contractors, one a woman, at least one an American through the streets Wednesday and hanged them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. Five American soldiers died in a roadside bombing nearby.

The four contract workers for the U.S.-led coalition were killed in a rebel ambush of their SUVs in Fallujah, a Sunni Triangle city about 35 miles west of Baghdad and scene of some of the worst violence on both sides of the conflict since the beginning of the American occupation a year ago.

It was reminiscent of the 1993 scene in Somalia, when a mob dragged the corpse of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, eventually leading to the American withdrawal from the African nation.

In one of the bloodiest days for the U.S. military this year, five 1st Infantry Division soldiers died when their M-113 armored personnel carrier ran over a bomb in a separate incident 12 miles to the northwest, among the reed-lined roads running through some of Iraq's richest farmland.

Residents said the bomb attack occurred in Malahma, 12 miles northwest of Fallujah, where anti-U.S. insurgents are active. U.S. Marines operate in the area, but it was unclear whether the slain troops were Marines.

In the deadliest previous incident this year, nine soldiers were killed when their Black Hawk medevac helicopter crashed near Fallujah, apparently after being shot down.

In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the four killed in Fallujah were contractors working with the coalition. He did not say what they were doing in the city.

Chanting ''Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans,'' residents cheered after the grisly assault on two four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles, which left both in flames. Others chanted, ''We sacrifice our blood and souls for Islam.''

Associated Press Television News pictures showed one man beating a charred corpse with a metal pole. Others tied a yellow rope to a body, hooked it to a car and dragged it down the main street of town. Two blackened and mangled corpses were hung from a green iron bridge across the Euphrates.

''The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep,'' resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed said. Some of the corpses were dismembered, he said.

Beneath the bodies, a man held a printed sign with a skull and crossbones and the phrase ''Fallujah is the cemetery for Americans.''

APTN showed the charred remains of three slain men. Some were wearing flak jackets, said resident Safa Mohammedi.

One resident displayed what appeared to be dog tags taken from one body. Residents also said there were weapons in the targeted cars. APTN showed one American passport near a body and a U.S. Department of Defense identification card belonging to another man.

U.S. military officials in Washington said the situation was still confused but they did not think the victims were American soldiers and believed the SUVs were not American military vehicles.

Witnesses said the two vehicles were attacked with small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades.

Hours after the attack, the city was quiet. No U.S. troops or Iraqi police were seen in the area.

Fallujah is in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where support for Saddam Hussein was strong and rebels often carry out attacks against American forces.

In nearby Ramadi, insurgents threw a grenade at a government building and Iraqi security forces returned fire Wednesday, witnesses said. It was not clear if there were casualties.

Also in Ramadi, a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy, witnesses said. U.S. officials in Baghdad could not confirm the attack.

On Tuesday in Ramadi, one U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded in a roadside bombing, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.

Northeast of Baghdad, in the city of Baqouba on Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew up explosives in his car when he was near a convoy of government vehicles, wounding 14 Iraqis and killing himself, officials said.

The attacked convoy is normally used to transport the Diala provincial governor, Abdullah al-Joubori, but he was elsewhere at the time, said police Col. Ali Hossein.

On Tuesday, a suicide bombing outside the house of a police chief in Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, killed the attacker and wounded seven others.

A bomb exploded late Tuesday in a movie theater that had closed for the night. Two bystanders were wounded by flying glass, said its owner, Ghani Mohammed.

The latest violence came two days after Carina Perelli, the head of a U.N. electoral team, said better security is vital if Iraq wants to hold elections by a Jan. 31 deadline. The polls are scheduled to follow a June 30 transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government.

Top U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said Tuesday he had appointed 21 anti-corruption inspectors general to government departments to try to prevent fraud. More will be named in coming days, he said.

The inspectors will work with two other newly formed, independent agencies. Together, they will ''form an integrated approach intended to combat corruption at every level of government across the country,'' Bremer said.

What will they say to those who are ready to sacrifice their blood and souls for Islam?

Hezbollah, Hamas offices reported in Iraq

From The Washington Times, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

The terrorist groups Hamas and Lebanon-based Hezbollah have opened offices in Iraq and are recruiting young men in the cities of Basra and Nasariyah, says the executive director of the American Islamic Congress.

"They have been recruiting young people. They pay them a little money and teach them their ideology," said Zainab al-Suwaij, who has been in Iraq for 10 months and travels in the country extensively under a U.S. Agency for International Development education contract.

But surely the vast majority of moderate Muslims will overwhelm these extremists with the peaceful teachings of the Qur'an, and doom their recruitment efforts to failure, right?

Ottawa raids lead to terror charges

Some conflict resolution going on in Ottawa

More on the Ottawa raids from CP:

An Ottawa man was charged Tuesday with two terrorism-related offences after police raids at his home and office, while shocked family members insisted upon his innocence.

Sounds like they're reading the playbook.

Mohammad Momim Khawaja, 29, was arrested Monday at his workplace and charged with participating in or contributing to the activities of a terrorist group and facilitating terrorist activity, the RCMP said in a release. The charges fall under Canada's anti-terrorism law.

Television reports said the Canadian-born Khawaja, a software developer, worked on contract for the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Qasim Khawaja, Mohammad Momim Khawaja's 26-year-old brother, said there was no evidence of terrorist activities in the home for police to find.

"I guess it's part of someone's sick imagination," he said Tuesday.

"They are looking for something that doesn't exist. They want to fabricate or create it somehow," he said.

"I'm just shocked they would authorize something like this. I would say it's a sad, sad day for Canadian democracy." ...

The Ottawa home is owned by Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja, the author of Muslims and the West, a book about Islamic fundamentalism that analyses global conflicts within the framework of Muslim civilization.

Mahboob Khawaja has also authored several other essays critical of American foreign policy, "corrupt Arab leadership," "American-Zionist political encroachment in the Middle East," and the West's response to terrorism and the war on terror.

He was once listed as a policy adviser and faculty member of International Affairs, Politics and Religions at Syracuse University but is currently in Saudi Arabia where he is the administrator of a polytechnical institute.

Mohammad Momim Khawaja's mother, Azra, was also detained Monday at a grocery store while his 18-year-old brother Mohsin was escorted away from the University of Ottawa where he is a student. Another brother, Tanzeel, 20, was detained when he arrived at the house later in the day.

The family was later released and put up in a hotel Monday night.

Australia: Sheikh called terrorist for 'divorce advice'

Zoud: What's the big deal?

Why would Zoud have called Abu Qatada? Isn't Abu Qatada an exponent of the tiny minority of extremists who have perverted Islam? From The Australian, with thanks to Jean-Luc:

IT'S late at night and Abdul Salam Zoud has a problem. The leader of Sydney's Islamic fundamentalists needs prompt answers to some serious and specific questions.

His fellow clerics around Australia are sound asleep or uncontactable.

So he telephones one of al-Qaeda's most dangerous figures halfway across the world.

Sheikh Zoud sees nothing wrong with speaking with Abu Qatada - accused of providing a British safehaven for terrorists, including the chief suspect in the Madrid train bombings. He knows nothing of these claims. Qatada, now detained as part of Britain's war on terror, is an expert in Islamic divorce and Sheikh Zoud needs his guidance.

This is Sheikh Zoud's explanation of a series of events that has led to him being named this month as a terrorist recruiter.

He denies claims in a French secret dossier that he is a recruiter for jihad in Australia and has links with terrorists around the world.

Prepared by a top anti-terrorism judge in France, the dossier is based on interrogations with jailed French terrorist suspect Willie Brigitte.

Zoud, by the way, is the guy who isn't sure that Osama bin Laden is guilty of the 9/11 attacks, despite Osama's boasting about them.

Pakistan: A curriculum of hatred

A controversy in Pakistan centers over jihad in the textbooks. From HiPakistan:

The religious parties in Pakistan are at loggerheads with the government on yet another issue: the so-called "exclusion" of some Quranic verses from the biology textbook for Intermediate classes. What has annoyed the MMA?

It all began three weeks ago when in reply to a question in the National Assembly, the federal education minister explained that the inclusion of Quranic verses is not a requirement of the curriculum.

While replying to a supplementary, the parliamentary secretary further provoked the self-appointed guardians of our morals, when he attempted to reinforce the minister's argument by questioning the relevance of the excluded verses to biology.

This created quite a rumpus in the House and the opposition staged a walk-out. It was later persuaded to return to the chamber to hear the information minister dutifully tender an apology and the education minister assure the House that no change was made in the curricula on any external pressure.

But, intriguingly, the controversy has refused to die down. A fortnight later the Punjab teachers union announced its decision to launch a protest movement from Gujranwala from April 15 if the verses, which pertain to jihad, were not reinstated.

It has been reported that at the heart of this controversy is a report released by the SDPI, an independent think tank. Titled The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, this report, which draws extensively from the research on the subject by Dr Rubina Saigol, an educational sociologist, without adequately and specifically acknowledging it, points out that the curricula and textbooks in Pakistan were insensitive to the existing religious diversity of the nation, incited militancy and violence, and encouraged prejudice, bigotry and discrimination towards fellow-citizens, especially women and religious minorities.

The religious parties are not too pleased that the curricula prescribed by the curriculum wing of the Ministry of Education and the books produced by the textbook boards have come under the spotlight.

Since the days when General Ziaul Haq used his authority backed by military power to induct religion into every sphere of national life and then use it to perpetuate a narrow right-wing ideology, the public sector education system in the country has been harnessed to promote a mindset which upholds retrogressive values.

But why was no notice taken of this state of affairs before? The fact is that for at least two decades the media has been trying to draw the attention of the authorities to the dismal state of the textbooks and the distortions in their contents. But all the editorials and articles have proved to be a cry in the wilderness.

Much before the SDPI commissioned this report, Dr Rubina Saigol wrote a profoundly insightful paper, "The boundaries of consciousness: interface between the curriculum, gender and nationalism" in a book called Locating the Self (published by ASR, Lahore, in 1994).

In this paper she showed with several examples how our textbooks construct India and Hindus as enemies and how they incite permanent enmity, hatred and alienation with India. The author's contention was that these books promote militarism and violence and indirectly justify a heavy defence expenditure.

Since then, she has been expanding relentlessly and painstakingly on this subject in several publications to show how an ultra-nationalist, hypermasculine, militarized state is constructed in our textbooks and what effects this has on our identity and society. Some other scholars, such as Dr Mubarak Ali and Prof K.K. Aziz have also published their reports on this issue.

In 1999, the National Committee on Education, which was constituted under the chairmanship of the federal education secretary on the prompting of some eminent educationists, prepared a report National Curriculum 2000: A Conceptual Framework calling for a paradigm shift in the curriculum in order to produce "involved, caring and responsible citizens". This report was stored away somewhere in the ministry's records on some dust-laden shelf.

Several women's groups have carried out extensive studies from time to time to identify the gender bias in our textbooks. The exercises they have carried out have demonstrated again and again how these books denigrate women and relegate them to a secondary status.

Therefore it is difficult to understand why at this stage the SDPI's report, which is not presenting something new, being in Dr Saigol's terms "a complete plagiarism of my work" and "intellectual dishonesty", should draw the ire of the religious parties. The SDPI has come under attack for implementing the "American agenda".

The furore this time can simply be explained in terms of the growing power of the religious parties which hold office in two provinces. They want to preempt the Musharraf government from heeding the voices of sanity being raised on this matter.

The fact is that after the nationalization of schools and colleges had all but destroyed the education infrastructure in Pakistan, the system has suffered from a serious dichotomy.

Two parallel streams have run side by side in the country. Those in power remained quite indifferent to the mindset of the masses fed on the ideological and hate contents of the government prescribed curricula.

As the impact of these textbooks filled with hate and the teachings of the madressahs is being felt generally, the syllabus has set the alarm bells ringing. The subtle poisoning of the mind of the students has been clearly established by another report produced by the Karachi-based Social Policy and Development Centre (SPDC).

In its Annual Review 2002-2003 (The State of Education), the authors of the report observe about the Pakistan Studies textbooks, "Entire periods of history are missing and other events have been casually mentioned. No attempt has been made to identify circumstances leading to particular events or to establish the relationships between different events."

It continues that as a consequence of these books, "Instead of being able to acknowledge diversity in points of view, they (students) are likely to look at the world in over-simplified, uncritical, 'black and white' and 'us versus them' terms and to develop single dimensional, exclusivist mindsets."

What the school textbooks are doing to the thinking of our students is indicated by a survey of school children. The opinions of children in Urdu medium schools (who are not exposed to progressive literature in the English language) are quite instructive.

A little less than half of them do not support equal rights to minorities. A third of them support the jihadi groups. Two-thirds of them want the shariah to be implemented. Nearly a third want Kashmir to be liberated by force and nearly 80 per cent of them support Pakistan's nuclear status.

In other words, it is not the madressahs alone which are creating hatred and militancy among the younger generation. The indoctrination is affecting everyone and probably this is now causing concern in the government circles which are now trying to battle religious bigotry.

In this context, the most meaningful recommendation in the SDPI report comes from Zarina Salamat in the chapter titled "Peace Studies; a proposed programme of studies in schools". Ms Salamat suggests that peace building and conflict resolution be taught to children from an early age. They should be told about the inhumanity of violence and the brutality of war and the forces which lead to them.

At the same time children should be made aware of the value of peace and the dignity of human life while they are taught the ways of developing their capacity to maintain peace in society and at the national and international level.

The positive aspect of the SDPI report - though one wishes the sources of the analysis had been adequately given credit where it was due - is that for the first time in years the issue of textbooks contents is receiving some attention from the authorities, although the press - at least this paper - and the educationists who care had been crying themselves hoarse for decades about the poor quality of the textbooks that are being taught in our schools.

Islamic Jihad promises heaven to teen recruit

Tamer Khawireh (AP)

While Mohammed Dockrat dresses his 6-year-old son in a mock suicide bomber jacket and then pontificates about how Palestinians would never really use a child in a suicide attack, Islamic Jihad tried to recruit a 15-year-old for just such an attack. Nor is he the only one. From the Jerusalem Post:

On Sunday, 15-year-old Tamer Khawireh ran home and buried his head in his mother's arms. Sobbing, he repeated over and over: "They tricked me, they tricked me."

Islamic Jihad had recruited Khawireh to be a suicide bomber for martyrdom and limitless virgins thereafter.

Khawireh is one of four Nablus boys recruited by terrorist groups and then arrested for an attempted suicide attack against Israel in the past month. And with the city's mayor forced out of office by threats, a police force long-since imploded, and a population at best ambivalent about suicide attacks, nothing seems able to hinder the recruitment.

"I want to stay here with you, I want to be part of this life," cried the boy, as recounted Tuesday by his eldest brother, Raed. An Islamic Jihad religious leader had wooed the youth, captivating him with the prospects of heaven's rivers of honey and the beautiful women he would find there.

A few hours after Khawireh's confession to Raed, IDF troops swooped down on the family's Nablus home, arresting him and another young man. Both remain in Israeli detention.

Like the other boys his age, Khawireh was easily bought. NIS 100, a new set of clothes, a cellphone, and some cigarettes had done the trick. One day Raed caught his brother smoking and using the phone. "I cuffed him and he promised to give the phone back," said Raed.

"Am I not a rich man?" asked Khawireh's stunned father, Massoud, on Tuesday, as he passed out pictures of his son to reporters in his upper middle class home.

Massoud said he called Islamic Jihad to demand an explanation. They apologized, lamely arguing that they mistook the gawky 10th grader for an 18-year old. They then promised not to do it again, said Massoud.

He and Raed believe the Islamic Jihad, or collaborators with Israel embedded within the group, fingered his younger son after it became clear that he chose life.

Khawireh's family called on the Palestinian Authority to launch an investigation to find out who is responsible for recruiting children.

"We discovered the plan only three hours before my brother was supposed to set out on the suicide mission," Raed said. "It's clear that he had been manipulated by suspicious elements and people who do not represent the Palestinian resistance."

The brother said that, a few days before the arrest, he discovered that Khawireh was smoking. "I had a serious talk with him and asked him to stop smoking, because it was something he had never done before," he added.

"But a day before he was arrested, I saw him in the city center, and he was talking on a cellphone and smoking. I was very angry with him and told him to go home immediately. I questioned him about the cellphone, and he said that it belonged to one of his friends who gave it to him to repair."

The following morning, the family's suspicions grew when they discovered that the boy did not show up for school. When Khawireh returned home later that evening, his brothers started questioning him about the reason for his absence from school.

"When he saw how worried we were, he broke into tears and said, 'They have fooled me, they have deceived me,' " Raed recalled. "He told us that the armed wing of Islamic Jihad was trying to recruit him for a suicide mission and that he had retracted and decided to return home. They tried to brainwash him, exploiting his young age and innocence. To a certain extent, they were successful."

As the PA crumbles around residents of Nablus, and terrorist groups assume the mantle, locals increasingly feel that they have no one to turn to.

Raed, a level-headed 23-year-old with a marketing degree, has demanded an investigation into the incident. The PA said it would send someone to confer with the family, but Raed has heard nothing since Sunday. The only acknowledgment of the family's distress came in the form of a condolence call from Islamic Jihad. It was hardly the justice they were looking for.

Behind Massoud Khawireh, Tamer's pale mother paced as she read an article about her son in the Palestinian daily Al-Ayam. She said nothing throughout the 90-minute interview.

Abu Ahmed, the proprietor of the Bukhri restaurant in downtown Nablus, said the lawlessness of the city is such that "a man could be killed right outside this shop. Days later we would receive a leaflet telling us who it was."
When asked if someone would investigate such an incident he quipped, "What investigation, what authority? What legal action? We have none of that here, it is an absolute mess."

The recruitment of teenage bombers spurred Abu Ahmed to "constantly investigate the life of my son [who is 14]. I ask the grocer, his teachers and his mother, whom he met and what he did every day."

A few steps from Abu Ahmed's restaurant, a gaggle of men gathered around a reporter in Nablus's central market trying to uphold Palestinian honor in the only way they could. One man swore that the Shin Bet had fabricated the stories of youths being conscripted, that "no Palestinian group would do such a thing." When asked how many of them believed that version, all the men, young and old, raised their hands.

In private, Palestinians react differently. "I appeal to Israel to allow us to establish peace. I appeal to them to act against Palestinians who sabotage peace," said Massoud Khawireh. That was before guests arrived. In public, Tamer's father stuck to the standard Palestinian line: Israel is to blame.

Tamer Khawireh is the fourth boy of his age to be arrested in Nablus in recent weeks for planning to carry out a suicide attack. Last week, Husam Abdu, 16, was detained at the Huwara checkpoint south of the city with an explosive belt strapped to his body.

On March 16, another boy, Abdallah Quran, 11, was caught at the same checkpoint as he was carrying a bomb in a backpack. The boy was later released after it turned out that he was unaware that he was carrying a bomb given to him by two Fatah activists. In February, the IDF arrested another Nablus boy and his father, who were contracted by Hizbullah.

On March 25, a Nablus girl, Reem Salah, now 18, was sentenced to 32 months' imprisonment for planning to launch a double suicide attack along with a classmate. Her father, a Nablus cab driver, believed the accusations exaggerated. Still, he wagged an accusatory finger at the nebulous "them" for recruiting such a young girl, "for ruining her life, our life." There is no one to call, there is no one to complain to, he added, brandishing the Israeli court documents and the plea-bargain deal that got his daughter off relatively easy.

The militias in the city are so powerful that even their own supposed controllers say they can't rein them in. Abu Said, 30, the sturdy-looking leader of the Tanzim branch in the Balata refugee camp said that he begged the Aksa Martyrs Brigades – who sent Abdu – to leave the kids alone. "But it is hard to approach those who are armed," he said from his office. "We just provide them with money and supplies."

"My Six-Year-Old Wants to Be Martyr, Says Dad"

Uzair Dockrat, wearing his suicide bomber jacket, and his dad (Shayne Robinson, Sapa)

LGF has posted a couple of revealing articles about a South Africa boy who wants to grow up to be a suicide bomber. First, from AllAfrica.com:

This six-year-old boy, dressed as a Palestinian suicide bomber, complete with a belt of fake explosives strapped to his body, says he wants to go to heaven - and his father says his child wants to be a martyr.

Uzair Dockrat was taken by his father Mohammad to yesterday's march in Pretoria, organised by the Muslim community to voice anger at the killing of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin in Gaza City last week. ...

After prompting from his father, Uzair swore revenge on Israel for the killing. According to his father, Uzair expressed a wish to become a martyr.

"Martyrs are heroes ... they go to heaven," Uzair said.

"They (Israel) kill our people with tanks and helicopters. We can blow them up," he said.

Mohammad Dockrat said his son's costume was a "symbolic act of self-defence" against Israeli aggression.

"We are violent towards those who are violent towards us, and in this case, Israel is the aggressor," he said.

Dockrat defended Uzair's costume, arguing it was not intended to encourage violence, but "is a statement against the unlawful Israeli occupation of Palestine".

According to Dockrat, little Uzair would prefer to strive for victory through justice rather than violence.

"He understands the status of a martyr, but will rather see justice instead," he said.

Mmm-hmm. Onlookers seem to have missed these nuances:

Uzair was told by an unidentified adult protester: "You will be a martyr one day."

Note also the Left's cooperation with Islamic radicalism:

A few hundred protesters gathered in Lynnwood, Pretoria, before marching to the Israeli embassy.

The march was supported by the SA Communist Party, the Pan Africanist Congress and the Muslim Youth Movement.

Meanwhile, another story reveals that Uzair's father is not a desperately poor, oppressed individual with no other recourse but suicide bombing. On the contrary, he is a "university lecturer."

Mohammed Dockrat, a university lecturer, said: "Muslim children in South Africa have been aware of the attack on Islam since the war in Afghanistan.

"They saw other children being killed and maimed and are very aware of who the enemy is."

The academic said his son, Uzair, decided to wear the jacket to a protest march in Pretoria attended by about 300 Muslims.

Yet while encouraging this attitude in his son, Mohammed Dockrat shows a keen awareness of how to speak to Western reporters:

"I don't think we should make too much of the jacket. As an adult, he will have a better understanding.

"To me, the fact that he wore it symbolises that one can kill one generation, but there will always be a next generation to continue the struggle."

Dockrat said he didn't want his sons to be pacifists and he wanted them to be able to defend themselves.

He agreed there could be negative feelings towards Jewish friends in South Africa.

"But if you see what is happening in Jewish communities here, how they send their children for military training in Israel, then it seems to me that our children should be the ones to be afraid and not the other way around."

And despite his encouraging his son to glorify those who murder civilians, he has the gall to claim the moral high ground and repeat Al-Jazeera's wild claim that the Israelis fabricated the recent story about a teenage would-be suicide bomber:

Dockrat claims the recent case of a Palestinian teenager, wearing a suicide jacket, being arrested at an Israeli checkpoint, was an Israeli set-up.

"The Hamas group never uses children in suicide-bomb attacks and it occurs mostly on buses where there is a civilian target.

"We do not use children in the struggle, this is a principal of Jihad (holy war)."

"They were very religious." They had bomb-making chemicals

More on those eight terror suspects arrested near London, who, according to British officials, just happened to be Muslim and could very well have been Buddhist or Amish. From The Scotsman, with thanks to Nicolei:

Police today seized more than half a tonne of ammonium nitrate fertiliser which could have been used to carry out a terror bombing on UK soil.

Eight suspected Islamic terrorists, all British citizens of Pakistani descent, were arrested as 700 officers carried out 24 raids across London and the Home Counties.

Anti-terrorist detectives believe an al Qaida-supporting cell could have been plotting a “spectacular” attack.

The fertiliser – a key bomb-making ingredient – would have been enough to cause a blast on the same scale as the 1996 IRA bombs at South Quay, station, Canary Wharf in London, and the Arndale Centre in Manchester.

Ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which requires a “booster” explosive to set it off, is believed to have been used by al Qaida in an attack on the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998 and in the first World Trade Centre bombing in New York in 1993.

It was the major ingredient in the biggest of the bombs used by Islamic terrorists in Bali which killed 202 people in 2002 and was also used in bombings against British targets in Istanbul last year and in the 1995 Oklahoma bombing. ...

The neighbour added: “They were very religious. They never mixed with other people. They never spoke to us.”

Unless the Muslim community worldwide confronts the reasons why terrorism grows worldwide among Muslims who are "very religious," terrorism will continue to grow and thrive in that community.

New Indonesian edition of Spencer's Islam Unveiled

Jihad Watch is pleased to announce the publication of a new Indonesian edition of Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer's book Islam Unveiled. It is entitled Islam Ditelanjangi: Pertanyaan-Pertanyaan Subversif Seputar Doktrin dan Tradisi Kaum Muslim.

Thanks to publisher Paramadina and translator Mun'im A. Sirry. We applaud your courage and thank you for not caving in to intimidation and threats like the French.

New bomb find in southern Thailand

More Thai jihad. From The Straits Times, with thanks to Nicolei:

Tension in the border town of Sungai Golok in southern Thailand escalated dramatically following the discovery of another bomb here yesterday morning.

The bomb was found in a package at the Sungai Golok Customs Office, just metres from the Malaysian border, at 10am local time (11am Malaysian time) - peak hour at the gateway between the two countries, Bernama reported.

Thailand customs officials say the bomb was discovered in the luggage compartment of a four-wheel-drive vehicle belonging to the department.

According to Bernama, the Thai Army bomb disposal unit was called to detonate it. The border gate is only 2km from the town of Sungai Golok, in which Saturday's bomb blast occurred. In that incident, 28 people, including 10 Malaysians, were injured.

The bombing is part of a wave of violence in which 60 people have been killed since January.

Already, the fear and tension since the explosion over the weekend have caused tourists to desert Sungei Golok. The fear also hit the Thai stock market yesterday, causing it to fall 3 per cent.

The bombs are likely to have a devastating impact on the economy of Sungei Golok, at least in the short term.

'Certainly, the number of tourists will reduce and worries about safety and security will cause foreign tourists to cancel their trips to other spots along the border,' the chief of the Pattani Tourism Promotion Association Anusart Suwanmongkol told journalists.

Taking the long view of history

Hasan-i Sabbah

Perceptive insight into the battle we're facing from James P. Lucier of Insight (thanks to EPG):

Reports were filtering back into the West about a mysterious spiritual leader holed up in a mountain fortress. He attracted hundreds of young men by offering training in religious doctrine, devotional discipline and terrorism. He singled out for attack those he judged to have been corrupted by power and luxury or who, in his view, were insufficiently dedicated to the principles of Islam. In the dead of night his trained terrorists would enter the highly guarded precinct of the targeted victim and slit his throat, even though they were almost certain to be killed when the alarm was raised. This disadvantage was offset by a carefully taught theological conviction that, when slain, they would be rewarded instantly with the joys of paradise. These terrorists were called assassins, the Hashishiyyin, because they used cannabis to give them courage.

This is how, in the 12th century, the word assassin became part of the vocabulary of the Western languages. According to accounts brought back by the Crusaders, the Old Man in the Mountain had such control over his followers that he would amuse and terrorize visitors to his castle by ordering a few of his young men to jump off a cliff to demonstrate that they would obey his slightest whim. This man, of course, was not Osama bin Laden. Nor were the Crusader accounts mythological.

The Old Man in the Mountain was a real person, Hasan-i Sabbah, and his mountain fastness was the Castle of Alamut, perched on a barren peak at the south end of the Caspian Sea. Its ruins still may be seen today. Alamut was, like al-Qaeda, the base for a secret society, the Ismailis. Hasan's goal was to return Islam to its fundamental roots, and he sent preachers throughout the region, to Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo. And when preaching didn't work, there was always the dagger. He warred against the Seljuk Turks and assorted caliphs, sheiks and viziers. He was a believer in the Shia' tradition that the true succession of Islam came through Ali, married to the prophet's daughter, Fatima. The bewildering and complicated history is summed up for Westerners in a famous little book, The Assassins, by the indefatigabl