Al-Qaeda’s Statement on the Twenty-First Anniversary of 9/11
Yesterday, Al-Qaeda’s General Command released an essay through As-Sahab Media, entitled, “Gains of 9/11: ‘The Day of Criterion—the Day When the Two Armies Met: Between the First Criterion on the Day of ‘Badr’ and the Criterion of the Age on the Day of September.” The title is drawn from the Qur’an (8:41).
The essay begins by saying it will discuss “two of the major and defining battles [or raids: ghazwatayn] of Islam”. The first of these is the Battle of Badr on the “seventeenth day of Ramadan in the second year after the hijra”, corresponding to 13 March 624.
Badr is, by Tradition, the first major battle the Prophet Muhammad led against the enemies of Islam. Taking place in near Medina, Muhammad supposedly led a force of about 300 Sahaba (Companions) against an army of 1,000 pagan Arab Meccans from the Quraysh tribe led by Amr ibn Hisham, known in Islamic historiography as Abu Jahl (“the Father of Ignorance”). With help from a host of angels—either 1,000 [Qur’an 8:9] or 3,000 [Qur’an 3:124]—the Muslims prevailed.
As the Qaeda essay says, from the vantage point of Muslim historiography, this was a momentous occasion in history, “with the entire world divided [into what came] before and after”. The “major world powers … did not notice” the Badr battle, the essay continues, and only understood its significance when the armies of Islam under Muhammad’s successor—the second Rashidun Caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab (or Al-Faruq)—had overrun the Persian Empire and took away huge parts of the Roman (Byzantine) Empire.
The essay goes on at some length about the “superiority” of the pagan force in terms of men and equipment that the Muslims faced at Badr, emphasising that “the distinction between unbelief and belief”, and between those who had “the protection of Al-Rahman [God] and those who had the false protection of Satan”, is what made the difference.
(Historically, there is no evidence the Battle of Badr occurred in the location in the Hijaz, at the time and in the manner, told by Islamic historiography—indeed, little evidence it occurred at all. Even the two Qur’an references mentioned above about the angels intervening do not actually mention Badr: it was the later commentaries that said those passages described Badr. The broader problem with the Islamic narrative is that Islam, as such, did not exist at the time the battle is supposed to have taken place: Muhammad’s followers adhered to a kind of ecumenical Abrahamic monotheism—and their opponents were not pagans, but other monotheists of a similar kind, who were branded “pagans” in the manner that a Protestant polemicist would refer to Roman Catholics during the Reformation.)
If Badr was the first defining battle in this “glorious Islamic history”, setting the stage for the collapse of the two superpowers of its day, the second is the attack of this kind took place on 11 September 2001, accelerating American decline.
Al-Qaeda’s essay says that the Quraysh tried to distract people from the disaster they suffered at Badr by focusing on what they had lost in material from their caravan, rather than the number of men killed, and America did likewise by “focusing on scenes of the collapse of the World Trade Centre” to “divert attention” from the “great scandal” of “one thousand American military commanders” being killed at the Pentagon, “their military fortress”. 9/11 will remain “one of the eternal battles [al-ghazwat al-khalida] in Islamic history, an authentic extension of the first Battle of Badr, in which the pillars of Hubal of that era collapsed”, the essay adds.
The essay says that unlike the delayed realisation among the Romans and Persians after Badr, American historians realised the significance of 9/11 almost immediately, and “one of the best expressions” of this was from “the American” Paul Kennedy (who is in fact British). Kennedy is praised for understanding that everything had changed for the United States after “the destruction of its great symbols”, military and economic, and no effort to reassert American hegemony would be quite the same. Thus, “the September raid” was a “turning point in human history”.
Al-Qaeda’s essay invites readers to travel back to that Tuesday morning, when the news broke that America was under attack, and then it became clear “nineteen Muslim knights” were responsible for this attack upon “the Romans in their own land”. Soon it became clear that “a Muslim man named Usama bin Laden, from the farthest corner of the earth and its forests, had thrown four spears from Kandahar, and his spears had reached Washington and New York. Three of them had struck America’s military heart and her economic kidneys. His four spears killed [in total], according to announced estimates, more than 6,000 Americans, double the number that died in the attack on Pearl Harbour.”
(In the early hours after 9/11, the reports did, indeed, estimate the fatalities at around 6,000. The reality turned out to be nearly exactly 3,000, and they were not all Americans: more than 100 states had nationals killed in the 9/11 atrocities.)
Al-Qaeda is proud that this makes the group the perpetrators of the largest “barb” (or “thorn”: al-shawka: lit. “fork”) against “the people of unbelief and idolatry [ahl al-kufr wal-shirk]”, and that it all played out live on global television. Returning to the Badr comparison, the essay adds that “they were just nineteen knights and they defeated six-thousand of those who disbelieved”, infiltrating a country protected by two great oceans and nuclear weapons, and “burying American prestige … to the point of the American President Bush’s flight and disappearance from the capital in panic”, creating “scenes [reminiscent] of the recent coup in Sri Lanka”—President Bush being aboard Air Force One is also compared the departure of Tunisia’s ruler, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali—and leaving New York and Washington, D.C., as “ghost cities”.
Not only America’s dignity was wounded, the essay goes on: usually the events that lead to the decline of a great power, its “weaknesses and decadence”, are imperceptible for decades, but the impact of 9/11 was evident immediately. The essay cites a British Foreign Office report “one month prior to these events, … [which] stated that it was almost certain the United States will remain until 2030 AD the only great military and economic power in the world”, but the “Islamic blow … changed the face of the entire world”.
A rather daring case is made by the essay that among the reasons America was “defeated” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and “will soon be defeated in Somalia and elsewhere”, is because Al-Qaeda killed “no less than one thousand” of its senior military officials in the strike on the Pentagon, which was more deleterious to American capabilities than all the tanks, submarines, planes, missiles, and even nuclear weapons. (In reality, about fifty military officials were killed at the Pentagon, and the U.S. was not defeated on the battlefield in either place: President Obama made an offer that was meant to be refused to the Iraqi government to secure the withdrawal in 2011, and President Biden made a similarly needless ideological decision to abandon Afghanistan last year without even that sort of fig-leaf.) Al-Qaeda also insists it is responsible for irreparable economic damage, producing the recent spectacle of America’s “savage people … begging the world for powdered milk for their children and fighting over a litre of gasoline”.
As well as the direct damage on the day, Al-Qaeda says America was forced to enter wars it was not prepared for, which had not only material costs, but political ones, specifically “igniting the flame of the Crusader strife”: “Western Europe with a Catholic majority, and Eastern Europe with an Orthodox majority, found an opportunity to bring down Protestant America” from its role as the sole superpower—an opportunity to break out of subservience to American leadership that might not come again. Al-Qaeda is also very pleased at outwitting American intelligence.
“No matter how much we describe the similarities … between the Day of Badr and the Day of September, and their gains, we will not be able to give this topic its due”, the essay concludes. “As was said: it was an event beyond imagination, its effects and repercussions are still continuing, and no one knows where it will end”. Al-Qaeda reiterates its belief that where Badr marked the countdown on the Romans and Persians, 9/11 did the same for the Americans. The essay finishes with a restatement of how shocking the 9/11 attacks were, noting that nobody, “no matter good an analyst of events he was, would have expected that nineteen Muslim knights would be able to kill six thousand infidels in the country of satellites, the Central Intelligence [Agency (CIA)], and manufacture of precise espionage devices. It was purely God’s granting of success to the umma [Islamic community] and its vanguard in the world, Jama'a Qaeda al-Jihad [the Base of Holy War Group]”.
The last page of the essay is the announcement of a forthcoming book by Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah (Abu Muhammad al-Masri) about the 9/11 attacks. Abdullah was struck down by Israel’s MOSSAD on 7 August 2020, the anniversary of the 1998 atrocities at the East African Embassy, in Tehran, Iran, where the bulk of Al-Qaeda’s military and religious leadership have been sheltered since 2002.
UPDATE: Al-Qaeda released Abdullah’s book on 11 September 2022. It is 270 pages long and entitled, “The September 11 Operations: Between Truth and Uncertainty”. It seems the book was written in the summer of 2019 and is dated September 2020: it was likely not released at that stage because of Abdullah’s assassination a month earlier.