Jailing Jihadis for Destroying Treasures – The Daily Beast

2016/08/25 Leave a comment

Appropriately, this trial and verdict are getting considerable attention:

The monsters of al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State probably never will be held to account the way the Nazis were at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. The snarled red tape and convoluted politics of today’s international organizations will frustrate such grand designs for justice, even after the self-proclaimed “caliphate” is reduced to dust on the ground and unread footnotes in history.

But the trial going on at the International Criminal Court in The Hague this week gives us a hint of what can be done, and, indeed, what must be done.

The defendant, Ahmad al Faki al Mahdi, served the branch of al Qaeda in North Africa that very nearly took over all of the nation of Mali in 2012, until French troops intervened. The terrorists’ greatest prize was the ancient city of Timbuktu, al Mahdi’s hometown, and he did everything he could to show he supported his fanatical mentors’ gruesome diktats.

But al Mahdi is not on trial for the amputations, beheadings, torture, and rapes associated with the “holy war” waged by al Qaeda, ISIS, and their offshoots.

Al Mahdi is on trial for massacring history.

We have seen a lot of savage iconoclasm over the last 15 years. In 2001, the Taliban brought down the towering twin statues of Buddha in Bamayan, Afghanistan—a prelude to the operation by their allies in al Qaeda, who brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York only a few months later.

More recently we’ve seen the devastation wrought by ISIS on the ancient monuments of Nimrud in Iraq, and those of Palmyra in Syria: winged bulls turned to gravel with jack-hammers, the Temple of Baal erased from the map with high explosives.

These would-be holy warriors claim to have a direct line to God, a unique and exclusive understanding of His Truth. They are determined to destroy anyone and anything that does not fit their view, and they do all this in the name of Islam.

So it is worth noting that al Mahdi is on trial, specifically, for leveling the mausoleums of Muslim saints in a city that was one of the cradles of Islamic civilization, and that the prosecutor who leveled the charges against al Mahdi in court on Monday, Fatouh Bensouda, is a Gambian woman from a large Muslim family. She knows where this guy is coming from, which may account in part for the power and passion of her opening statement.

This trial, said Bensouda, is about answering “the destructive rages that mark our times, in which humanity’s common heritage is subject to repeated and planned ravages.”

The mausoleums al Mahdi destroyed were “the embodiment of Malian history, captured in tangible form, from an era long gone yet still very much vivid in the memory and pride of the people who so dearly cherished them.”

“Your honors,” Bensouda told the judges, “culture is who we are.”

Bensouda has been criticized for failing to make the ICC a new Nuremberg. But the criteria she has to work with are suffocating and contradictory.

The court has no jurisdiction over territories where the government is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the court in 1998. So the court has no territorial jurisdiction over the ISIS heartland that straddles Iraq and Syria, neither of which signed on.

 Source: Jailing Jihadis for Destroying Treasures – The Daily Beast

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UK: Islamist terror threat to west blown out of proportion – former MI6 chief

2014/07/09 Leave a comment

Sensible and refreshing comments:

He made it clear he believed the way the British government and the media were giving the extremists the “oxygen of publicity” was counter-productive. The media were making monsters of “misguided young men, rather pathetic figures” who were getting coverage “more than their wildest dreams”, said Dearlove, adding: “It is surely better to ignore them.” …..

Dearlove said he was concerned about the influence of the media on the government’s security policy. It was time to take what he called a “more proportionate approach to terrorism”.

MI5, MI6, and GCHQ devoted a greater share of their resources to countering Islamist fundamentalism than they did to the Soviet Union during the cold war, or to Irish terrorism that had cost the lives of more UK citizens and British soldiers than al-Qaida had done, Dearlove noted.

A massive reaction after the 9/11 attacks was inevitable, he said, but it was not inevitable the 2001 attacks would continue to “dominate our way of thinking about national security”. There had been a “fundamental change” in the nature of the threat posed by Islamist extremists. Al-Qaida had largely failed to mount the kind of attacks in the US and UK it had threatened after 9/11.

It was time, he said to move away from the “distortion” of the post-9/11 mindset, make “realistic risk assessments” and think rationally about the causes of the crisis in the Middle East.

The al-Qaida franchises that had emerged since had largely “fallen back” on other Muslim countries, Dearlove said. What was happening now was a long-awaited war between Sunni and Shia Muslims that would have only a ripple effect on Britain, he suggested.

Pointing the finger at Sunni Saudi Arabia, Dearlove said the Isis surge in Iraq had to be the consequence of “sustained funding”.

Islamist terror threat to west blown out of proportion – former MI6 chief | UK news | The Guardian.

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ICYMI – Debate: Is al-Qaeda a global terror threat or a local military menace? – The Globe and Mail

2014/06/02 Leave a comment

Globe debate on Al-Qaeda and whether its strength today. Arguing for it being weaker is J.M. Berger:

Al-Qaeda has not abandoned terrorism, but it has adopted a default position of encouraging “lone wolf” attacks by non-networked supporters in the West. While this obviously represents an ongoing problem, individual actors do not represent the same magnitude of threat that manifested itself on September 11, nor do they require al-Qaeda to spend its own resources.

Holding territory is an inherently local activity, which has focused the resources of many jihadists on the countries where they dwell, rather than on attacking the U.S. homeland. Even al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — widely held to be the most dangerous al-Qaeda threat to the West — has attempted only a handful of attacks on the U.S. homeland. Each of the plots that have become public knowledge were lightly staffed and funded on a shoestring budget. AQAP’s resources are instead overwhelmingly devoted to battling the government of Yemen, where it is based.

For the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross argues the contrary:

But we should be cautious about repeating past mistakes, and prematurely penning the obituary of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership.

For their own part, al-Qaeda insiders reject the characterization that the group has become decentralized. Abu Sulayman al-Muhajir, an al-Qaeda official currently in Syria with its official affiliate, the Nusra Front, recently spoke at length about al-Qaeda’s bureaucracy. He described system known as aqalim – regionalization — wherein a different leader oversees each of the geographic locations where the group operates, but is subordinate through an oath of bayat (fealty) to al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri. One senior al-Qaeda official, known as the masul aqalim, is responsible for overseeing all the affiliates operating in different regions, coordinating with the regional emirs. Rather than disparate groups connected by little more than “loose ideology,” Abu Sulayman described a group with bureaucratic direction. His account appears more credible than that of The New York Times.

Debate: Is al-Qaeda a global terror threat or a local military menace? – The Globe and Mail.

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