Al-Qaeda Has Never Been More Dominated by States
This article was published on my old blog before I started with Substack.
In writing a chapter earlier this year about the current status of Al-Qaeda, part of the process was reviewing the organisation’s history since its formation in the late 1980s. What really struck me was how extensively Al-Qaeda is now manipulated, under the influence of, and in places even controlled by state powers. To mark the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11, I thought I could give a brief sketch of this development.
An aside before we begin, states loom very large generally in international terrorism when you examine it at an operational level. The dearth of public discussion about this stems in no small part from the fact Terrorism Studies, in so far as we can talk of such a thing, downplays this factor almost to the point of erasure. Those in the field who acknowledge the role of state intelligence services in international terrorism tend to see it as marginal, and many if not most regard the whole discussion as “conspiracy theory” talk.
That discussion of state intelligence services remains so muted in mainstream terrorism scholarship is all the stranger because of the recent experience with the Soviet Union. Throughout the Cold War, the idea that the KGB was behind the “national liberation” movements and the properly global terrorism that began in the 1970s, spearheaded by Palestinians, was regarded by most academics and journalists as a product of the fevered imaginations of Cold Warriors, “Right-wingers”, Birchers, and other disreputables. It was possible to know in real-time that the Soviets played an enormous role in international terrorism, and to suspect that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting to the contrary was—as it so often is—political warfare masquerading as analysis. Once there was access to the KGB archives after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, there was no longer any doubt. This did not, however, induce any introspection about why most experts had so signally failed to see something that the average reader of a newspaper could notice.
Back to Al-Qaeda. At one level, state entanglement with Al-Qaeda is nothing new. Before 9/11, Usama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda “Central” (AQC) were hosted by two states—Umar al-Bashir’s Sudan and Taliban Afghanistan—and became functionally indistinguishable from both. Thus, when Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote that the “‘nonstate’ actor … designation [of Al-Qaeda] was always more myth than fact”, he is definitionally correct. And it was hardly limited to two states.
To speak of Taliban Afghanistan axiomatically means bringing Pakistan into the picture, since the Taliban is a wing of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, and the inextricable intertwining of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and other jihadist elements makes telling Al-Qaeda’s story impossible to tell without mentioning the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment—something knowable long before Bin Laden was discovered at Abbottabad.
Saudi Arabia is the state most would probably associate with Al-Qaeda if they were pressed to think of an official collaborator with the terrorist group. There is a lot of exaggeration about the Saudi contribution to Al-Qaeda, made more complicated still by the nature of the Kingdom’s ruling system: defining “the Saudi state” is actually quite challenging. Nonetheless, there was clearly a flow of funds from figures within Saudi Arabia to Al-Qaeda in the 1990s that “Riyadh proper” did little to thwart, and Saudi diplomatic facilities in various places provided forms of tactical support to Al-Qaeda at times that look very dubious after 9/11.
Dwarfing any role the Saudis played in strengthening Al-Qaeda is Iran. The revolutionary theocracy established a relationship with Al-Qaeda in the early 1990s that enabled the organisation to become a truly global enterprise. The first road-test of this collaboration was in Bosnia, which might be counted as another state that has sponsored and abetted Al-Qaeda, albeit one is still really talking about Iran, since the Iranians captured the Bosnian security system and used it to assist Al-Qaeda.
Iran and Pakistan played crucial roles in saving Al-Qaeda when the United States and her allies came into Afghanistan in 2001, and these two states remain the primary patrons of AQC at the present time. President Donald Trump’s imminent surrender of Afghanistan will allow the Taliban-Qaeda forces to restore a state base for themselves—and that is another word for the Pakistani occupation of Afghanistan. Iran, meanwhile, has harboured Al-Qaeda’s religious and military leadership since 2002—keeping them safely out of reach of American drones, though happily not of Israeli commandos—and after the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has himself been close to the Iranians for decades, Al-Qaeda’s new leader is likely to be one of the operatives in Iran, who have come under the sway of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) over nearly two decades.
The big change from pre-9/11 Al-Qaeda is the geographic spread of the network and its structure of “affiliates”. It is with Al-Qaeda’s “affiliates” that the issue of state intelligence services infiltrating, manipulating, and controlling the organisation comes most sharply into focus, not least because some of these groups had an independent existence before they joined Al-Qaeda, and were compromised in their pre-existing forms.
In West Africa, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) emerges from the war in Algeria in the 1990s, where the state defeated—politically, as well as militarily—a jihadist rebellion by employing the most cynical, blood-drenched tactics of the KGB that trained its secret police. The “strategy of tension” pursued by the Department of Intelligence and Security (DRS) ensured that the Islamists were drawn into a confrontation, and once it became a battle, the DRS heavily infiltrated jihadist ranks, sowing dissention to splinter and weaken the insurgency, and well-placed DRS agents pushed the Islamists into the most extreme and self-destructive behaviour, notably the wholesale massacre of civilian villages. The insurgency was so discredited within a couple of years that even some of the Islamist rebels abandoned it and sought shelter behind the state. With the insurgency destroyed by 2002, the remaining irreconcilable Islamists took to the road, becoming AQIM in 2007. Subordinate units like Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM) have been spun off since then. But the shadow of the DRS continues to hang over Maghrebi jihadism. Structurally, AQIM is fragmented and spread over a vast space, its cells often struggling to communicate and it relies on contraband revenue streams that incentivise internal competition, all of which leaves it vulnerable to manipulation.
In Yemen, under Ali Abdullah Saleh until 2012, the distinction between state and terrorist was rather hazy, symbolised in the repeated “jail breaks” Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) staged. As has become evident in the years since, this was not a Saleh-specific phenomenon. The societal particulars of Yemen—somewhat analogous to those of Afghanistan—can make detecting “sides” at all damnably difficult; even apparently solid loyalties and orientations often prove more conditional and ambiguous the closer you look. AQAP showed more coherence at times of strength, in the 2011-16 period when it was able intermittently to govern territory. The rise of Iran’s power in Yemen through Ansarallah (“the Houthis”), the intrusion of the Islamic State, and the post-2015 involvement of the Arab Coalition led by Saudi Arabia—all of them to varying degrees enemies of AQAP—has degraded the organisation. Weak, and trying to negotiate a crowded battlefield of competing and shifting agendas, AQAP has frayed, and it has become unclear whether AQAP’s leadership controls all the actors operating under its banner; some AQAP components seem to be outright fabricated by foreign intelligence agencies. Iran, in particular, seems to have co-opted sections of AQAP. [UPDATE: See here for more on the Iran-AQAP relationship.]
The extent of Iran’s co-optation of Al-Qaeda in Somalia, Al-Shabab, was set out in some detail in Foreign Policy recently, and this adds to the evidence about Iranian influence over AQAP, since Al-Qaeda has demonstrated for many years that the two sides of the Red Sea are best thought of as one theatre. The sources of money and weapons for Yemen and Somalia are shared to a significant degree, and they flow—as do personnel—freely between the two countries. [UPDATE: For a detailed look at the blurring of the lines between Al-Shabab, AQAP, and IRGC/Ansarallah, see here.] Another resemblance to Yemen: there are murky reports that the intelligence service of the recognised Somali government has been colluding with Al-Shabab. It has also been known for a while that Qatar can at least hire, if not buy, parts of Al-Shabab to serve its purposes, notably carrying out terrorism and other activities to undermine the position of Doha’s rival, the United Arab Emirates, on the Horn of Africa. The U.A.E. is not above responding in kind.
Syria is a more complicated case. Half-a-decade ago, it was clear Al-Qaeda in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, was able to draw on the same Iran-based support network as the rest of Al-Qaeda, and—like the Islamic State—to benefit from the connivance of the Bashar al-Assad regime, which has adopted a DRS-model strategy for survival after the uprising began in 2011, unsurprisingly since Assad’s military and intelligence services were also trained by the KGB. Since then, Al-Nusra has ostensibly severed its connections with Al-Qaeda, but has continued down the path of Al-Qaeda’s strategic reorientation, which began in the last years of Bin Laden’s life. Partly driven by weakness and incapacity—the factors that have elsewhere laid Al-Qaeda so open to state manipulation—Al-Qaeda has amended its ideology away from elitist vanguardism towards a more “populist”, localist stance. Al-Nusra, rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has taken this idea the furthest, openly disclaiming all transnational ambitions and trying to place itself under the patronage of Turkey, intending to gain physical protection from the pro-Assad coalition and a degree of political “normalisation” by turning its fiefdom in Idlib into a HAMAS-style enclave that is de facto recognised and accepted by the international system.
UPDATE (4 OCT 2020): The chapter on Al-Qaeda for the American Foreign Policy Council’s (AFPC) World Almanac of Islamism has been published.
UPDATE (23 OCT 2020): A second chapter I wrote for the AFPC’s World Almanac of Islamism, about Syria, has been published.