Jan 3, 2014

Al-Qaeda the organization(s) and al-Qaedism the idea are thriving across the Arab world like never before due to the failure of the Arab Awakening to create competent reformist governments. The counterrevolution keeping old autocrats in power or putting new ones into power is already creating the next generation of al-Qaeda converts.

Less than three years ago, al-Qaeda, the organization and its ideology, was on its back foot. Osama bin Laden, its charismatic founder and leader, was killed in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad. Many of his key lieutenants, including the Pakistani Ilyas Kashmiri and the Yemeni-American Anwar al-Awlaki, were hunted down and killed by drones. The al-Qaeda narrative that only violent jihad and terror can bring change to the Muslim world came under attack as dictators were toppled from Tunis to Cairo to Sanaa by mostly peaceful protest. The Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda’s old adversary, seemed poised to dominate Arab politics and demonstrate that real change was possible without terror.

It was Awlaki who predicted al-Qaeda’s comeback. Writing in his English-language journal Inspire, Awlaki described the Arab Awakening as a “tsunami” of change that would inevitably benefit al-Qaeda. He said the hopes of reformists and democrats would be shattered against counter-revolutionary plots by reactionaries and that the breakdown of law and order would benefit the global jihad.

As 2014 begins, the picture is very different from 2011. Most dramatic has been the rise of al-Qaeda-affiliates in the Fertile Crescent, from Beirut to Baghdad. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, once wrongly proclaimed defeated by the surge, has revived and is more deadly than ever as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Today, it is fighting again to take control of the Anbar province. It successfully gave birth to a Syrian franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra, and now competes and collaborates with its own offspring for power in Syria. Together, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra are trying to destroy the century-old borders of the region, erasing the hated Sykes-Picot boundaries drawn by London and Paris in the aftermath of World War I. Thousands of jihadis from across the Muslim world, many of them from Europe, have flocked to Syria to join the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence is multiplying, feeding a fire that al-Qaeda has long stoked.

Al-Qaeda’s franchise in Lebanon, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, is trying to import the Syrian civil war into the country. Named after the Palestinian ideologue and key bin Laden partner in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the brigades took credit for the attack on the Iranian Embassy in Beirut last November and have since been linked to other car bombings. The recent arrest in Lebanon of its leader, Majid bin Mohammad al-Majid, a Saudi, is not likely to put an end to its efforts. Of course, al-Qaeda is getting enormous assistance in spreading the civil war into Lebanon from Hezbollah’s blatant support of the Assad regime in Damascus and its own car bombings in Beirut.