Posted by farleft | Posted on 22-05-2008
Category : Liberal Antidote
Tags: al Qaeda, Islamists, jihad, Morocco, terrorism
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Courtesy of Strategic Forecasting
Moroccan security services recently dismantled an 11-member militant jihadist network that operated in the cities of Fez and Nador, the official Moroccan government news agency Maghreb Arabe Press (MAP) reported May 19.
According to the report, the network was involved in recruiting young men to fight in Iraq and had also allegedly sent recruits to train in camps run by al Qaeda’s franchise, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), in neighboring Algeria.
The recent crackdown follows a string of similar arrests in Morocco in the wake of the Casablanca suicide attacks in 2003. These countermeasures, including an arrest in February of 35 alleged militants with ties to AQIM, have thrown jihadist militants in Morocco off balance. The arrests also underscore the difficulty jihadists face when recruiting in a country where infiltration efforts by the local security service are aggressive.
Posted by farleft | Posted on 28-02-2008
Category : Liberal Antidote
Tags: al Qaeda, Islamists, jihadists
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Courtesy of Strategic Forecasting
As Stratfor has observed for some years now, the global response to the 9/11 attacks has resulted in the transformation of the jihadist threat. Whereas six and a half years ago, the threat came from “al Qaeda the organization,” today it emanates from “al Qaeda the movement.” In other words, jihadism has devolved into a broader global phenomenon loosely guided by the original al Qaeda core group’s theology and operational philosophy. We refer to the people involved in the widespread movement as grassroots operatives.
In analyzing this metamorphosis over the years, we have noted the strengths of the grassroots jihadist movement, such as the fact that this model, by its very nature, is difficult for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to quantify and combat. We also have said it has a broader operational and geographic reach than the core al Qaeda group, and we have discussed its weaknesses; mainly that this larger group of dispersed actors lacks the operational depth and expertise of the core group. This means the grassroots movement poses a wider, though less severe, threat — one that, to borrow an expression, is a mile wide and an inch deep. In the big picture, the movement does not pose the imminent strategic threat that the core al Qaeda group once did.
