Sweet Music to Sageman’s Ears
So, OK, it’s on Fox but it’s worth looking at anyway: New Al Qaeda Manual Reflects Changing Face of Terror:
WASHINGTON – A newly discovered online Al Qaeda manual is giving intelligence officials new insight into how the group’s leaders are training recruits to further move the organization from a centralized operation toward smaller global cells.
The manual, called “Method for Building the Personality of a Terrorist Mujahid” and written by an Islamist forum contributor nicknamed “Shamil al-Baghdadi,” encourages militant followers to stop focusing on pulling off attacks on the scale of 9-11 and to start executing numerous smaller attacks.
It states that if for some reason the mission fails, the Jihadi must not abort, but instead carry on alone – as a one-man cell.
Will McCants at Jihadica did actually look at this material from an ideological perspective back in June, and tells us that Shamil blogs here, his blog name appearing to be something along the lines of ‘Be Prepared’.
Here are a few more snippets from the Fox article:
The new manual, which allegedly surfaced on an Islamic Web forum sometime in March, outlines a number of lessons, from how to form a terror cell to fundraising efforts.
It advocates assassinations by shooting, poisoning and booby-trapping cell phones and computers.
Recruits are also told to organize credit card scams and to rob police stations in order to get weapons.
Most shocking are the lessons on kidnapping, with orders to slaughter hostages in a way that will terrify the public.
Cell members are also persuaded to carry out attacks on cultural and business centers, taking warfare to the streets.
As Al Qaeda cells become localized and more autonomous, terror experts say the techniques outlined in the manual illustrate the changing face of the organization itself.
It’s an oft-stated truism that terrorist networks come to resemble the technologies they use. Also, Marc Sageman could obviously feel mildly vindicated in his assertion of leaderless jihad (after Louis Beam’s 1983 essay, “Leaderless Resistance“). Without wishing to rehash that whole Hoffman/Sageman debacle (please, no, not again) it’s worth restating that such leaderless/self-radicalised/’lone wolf’ activity does not preclude more hierarchical, ‘top-down’ organisation elsewhere.
I’d be interested to hear from anyone with a translation of this so-called manual. Shamil’s blog posts are here, here and here. Of further interest is the fact that you can submit these posts to Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, etc, via social bookmarking buttons should you feel so inclined. There’s an awful lot more that could be written about this particular case regarding provenance, effectiveness, legal status, etc, but for the time being it’s another classic example of open source intelligence.
Update 18 Aug 2008: Peter Bergen agrees re Hoffman and Sageman in Al Qaeda at 20: Dead or Alive?
“It advocates assassinations by shooting, poisoning and booby-trapping cell phones and computers.
Recruits are also told to organize credit card scams and to rob police stations in order to get weapons.
Most shocking are the lessons on kidnapping, with orders to slaughter hostages in a way that will terrify the public.”
This is a reversion to Sergei Nechaev and is good news in the sense that as a revolutionary strategy it is a much proven dead end (though the socially isolated losers turned Islamist fanatics inspired by this will cause much misery to individuals and families).
Hi Mark,
…though the socially isolated losers turned Islamist fanatics inspired by this will cause much misery to individuals and families.
You may well be right about the futility of pursuing such a strategy, but I suggest that ’socially isolated losers’ is not a particularly useful way of describing these actors. Many are embedded in very strong family and friend networks and are not ‘losers’, except perhaps in the eyes of the state and the media. It remains true though, I think, that the ‘lone wolf’ MO remains an attractive proposition to those who might fit the profile of the socially alienated/marginalised/
disenfranchised for perceived reasons of empowerment and worth.
I know little about Nechayev but he was very much an “ends justify the means” type of revolutionary which would seem to fit here. The interesting point in this discussion is not so much the ends – confused and contradictory at the best of times – but the means, as you point out, and how actors are ‘organised’ to commit these acts of violence and criminality. Is this organisational structure actually comparable to Nechayev?
Of greater interest to me, is the fact that this lone wolf leaderless stuff – connected or not – all seems to fit very nicely into Abu Musab al Suri’s writing. While i doubt it is necessarily coordinated thus (in that AMS wrote it and others did it) – i do think his writing is worth looking at to see the direction it might evolve in. For example, he talks about different media, leadership, fundraising, and action cells – all unconnected, but moving in the same direction: could the recent Operation Praline lot (http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/Background-From-toys-to-terrorism.4401450.jp) be an example of what this might look like in the future? R
Hi Raffaello,
Good point re al-Suri. I, ahem, confess I haven’t read Brynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad. From what I’ve heard though you’re right on the money. Al-Suri wanted a “method which the enemy has no way of aborting”, and where better to place one’s energies than in learning from past mistakes, getting past the “Tora Bora mentality” and concentrating on the creation of autonomous cells/individuals guided along similar trajectories?
Hey Tim – meant to write this earlier, but just noticed it again today – the Al Suri book is actually on sale in our library at the moment….i would highly recommend it…(we also have Simon Reeve’s book, the New Jackals about Ramzi Youssef on sale, which i would also recommend)…Raff