Self-Infl icted Wounds Debates and Divisions within al-Qa’ida and its Periphery Editors: Assaf Moghadam Brian Fishman SELF‐INFLICTED WOUNDS: DEBATES AND DIVISIONS WITHIN AL‐QA’IDA AND ITS PERIPHERY Edited by Assaf Moghadam and Brian Fishman HARMONY PROJECT COMBATING TERRORISM CENTER at West Point www.ctc.usma.edu December 16, 2010 The views expressed in this report are those of the editors and contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Combating Terrorism Center, the United States Military Academy, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government agency. 1 2 Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...i Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………….iii Executive Summary……………………………………………………………………………..v Chapter 1: Debates and Divisions within and around Al‐Qa’ida Assaf Moghadam and Brian Fishman…………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 2: Tactics, Takfir, and anti‐Muslim Violence Mohammed M. Hafez……………………………………………………………………………19 Chapter 3: Strategic Fissures: The Near and Far Enemy Debate Steven Brooke…………………………………………………………………………………….45 Chapter 4: Al‐Qa’ida Central and Local Affiliates Vahid Brown……………………………………………………………………………………..69 Chapter 5: Jihadi Strategists and Doctrinarians Brynjar Lia……………………………………………………………………………………...100 Chapter 6: Arab and non‐Arab Jihadis Anne Stenersen…………………………………………………………………………………132 Chapter 7: Jihadis and the Ikhwan Marc Lynch……………………………………………………………………………………..155 Chapter 8: Jihadis and Hamas Reuven Paz……………………………………………………………………………………..183 Chapter 9: Jihadis and the Shi’a Bernard Haykel…………………………………………………………………………………202 Chapter 10: Do Jihadi and Islamist Divisions Matter? Implications for Policy and Strategy Brian Fishman and Assaf Moghadam………………………………………………………….224 3 4 Acknowledgements The editors thank their colleagues at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), all of whom supported this endeavor in one way or another. We thank GEN (ret.) John P. Abizaid for encouraging us to know our enemy while reminding us to challenge our own assumptions in the process. LTC Reid L. Sawyer deserves our thanks for being a staunch supporter of this project from the outset and for offering thoughtful comments throughout. Bill Braniff, Vahid Brown, Nelly Lahoud, and Don Rassler read chapters of this volume and provided valuable feedback. We thank the entire CTC staff, past and present, for enriching our knowledge on the jihadi threat in the course of countless hours of conversations and discussions. We thank COL Michael J. Meese, COL Cindy Jebb, and the Department of Social Sciences at West Point, which served as a warm, inspiring, and intellectually challenging academic home to us. And we salute and thank all of our cadets, many of whom are serving in dangerous places. The United States Special Operations Command deserves our gratitude for the assistance it provided for this project. Our valued colleague Peter Bergen offered helpful thoughts on several chapters. We thank especially Thomas Hegghammer for serving as an external reviewer to this report and offering his sage advice in the process, which resulted in a much improved manuscript. And last, but not least, Katherine Cleary deserves our gratitude for her skillful editing of this manuscript. Needless to say, all remaining errors are our own. ‐‐A.M., B.F. i ii Contributors Dr. Assaf Moghadam is Director of Terrorism Studies at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and Assistant Professor at the United States Military Academy’s Department of Social Sciences. Dr. Moghadam is the author of The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) and The Roots of Terrorism (Chelsea House, 2006). He is also editor of the forthcoming volume Militancy and Political Violence in Shiism: Trends and Patterns (Routledge, 2011). Dr. Moghadam earned a Ph.D. in International Relations from The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Brian Fishman is Counterterrorism Research Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and is a Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, where he served previously as the Director of Research. Fishman is the author of numerous reports and journal articles, including “Dysfunction and Decline: Lessons Learned from Inside al‐ Qa`ida in Iraq” (CTC at West Point, 2009) and “The Battle for Pakistan: Militancy and Conflict Across the FATA and NWFP” (New America Foundation, 2010). Steven Brooke is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on Islamic social movements, the effects of repression in authoritarian systems, and political violence and extremism in the Middle East. Vahid Brown is a Harmony Fellow and FBI instructor at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC). He is the author of “Cracks in the Foundation: Leadership Schisms in al‐Qaʹida, 1989‐2006“(West Point, NY: CTC, 2007), among other CTC reports, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Dr. Mohammed Hafez is an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he specializes in Middle East politics, Islamism, and violent radicalization. He is the author, most recently, of Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom (2007). Dr. Bernard Haykel is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where he also is Director of The Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Professor Haykel’s primary research interests center on the history and politics of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Islamism. iii Dr. Brynjar Lia is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI), where he currently heads FFI’s research on international terrorism and radical Islamism. He is the author, among many other books, of Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus‘ab Al‐Suri (Hurst and Columbia University Press, 2007). Dr. Marc Lynch is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where he is the director of the Institute for Middle East Studies. He is also a non‐resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Dr. Lynch blogs on ForeignPolicy.com, where he is also editor of the Middle East Channel. Dr. Reuven Paz is the founder and director of the Project for the Research of Islamist Movements (PRISM) at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya. Dr. Paz holds a Ph.D. in the history of the Middle East from Haifa University. A specialist on Islam and modern Islamic thought, Dr. Paz has thirty years of research experience in Islamic culture, doctrine, and radicalism, as well as Palestinian society and politics. Anne Stenersen is a research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). She has an M.Phil in Asian and African Studies from the University of Oslo and is currently preparing a doctorate on the relationship between al‐Qaeda and the Taliban. iv Executive Summary As we approach the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks next September, the United States, its Western allies, and nearly all states in the Islamic world are facing a weakened jihadi enemy, but one still capable of inflicting, or threatening to inflict, spectacular acts of terrorist violence. The recent attempts to send package bombs on cargo planes is only the latest in a series of plots suggesting that although al‐Qa’ida and its cohorts have suffered a number of setbacks, the group and its affiliates and associates continue to pose a serious challenge to the security of the United States and its allies. Self‐Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions within al‐Qa’ida and its Periphery examines the internal, or endogenous, reasons that have hastened the decline of the jihadi movement. In doing so, it exposes the jihadi movement, with al‐Qa’ida at its helm, as one that lacks coherence and unity, despite its claims to the contrary. The report divides the jihadis’ endogenous problems into two categories: internal divisions plaguing al‐Qa’ida and the jihadi movement proper; and fault lines dividing the jihadi movement from other Muslim and Islamist actors. The internal jihadi divisions examined in this report include tactical disagreements over takfir (excommunication of Muslims) and the killing of Muslims; strategic disagreements over whether the jihadi struggle should focus on the near enemy (i.e., nominally Muslim regimes) or the far enemy (the United States and its Western allies); friction between jihadi pragmatists and jihadi doctrinarians; rifts between al‐Qa’ida Central and local affiliates; as well as the sometimes tense relations between Arab and non‐Arab members of the jihadi movement. The competition between the jihadis and their Muslim counterparts scrutinizes the jihadis’ relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and the Shi’a community. Three main counterintuitive findings can be gleaned from the discussion. First, while the net impact of divisions within and around the jihadis on their movement is negative, the jihadi movement is resilient to some of these divisions due to its unique structure and situational context. Even worse, and contrary to the received wisdom, intra‐jihadi rifts and fault lines between jihadis and other Islamic actors may even enhance some of the jihadi movement’s resilient traits. Second, we find that although the jihadi movement’s competition with its non‐jihadi Islamic counterparts is mostly harmful to al‐Qa’ida, such competition bestows certain advantages on the group. On the one hand, al‐Qa’ida cannot possibly compete with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, or Hizballah, who have far deeper v social bases and provide social services to their constituents. At the same time, al‐ Qa’ida’s status as a recalcitrant underdog affords it a higher degree of credibility among more extremist members of the umma. A third broad finding is that jihadi divisions matter in different ways. Quarrels over tactics and strategy tend to be more damaging to jihadis than dissent over goals and views of the enemy.