Algeria: Taking the Pulse of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, War on Terror, NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror

Algeria: Taking the Pulse of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

Coming Home to Roost?

By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton

June 24, 2009

The Devolution of Al Qaeda

The GSPC began as a splinter of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in 1998 as the civil war in Algeria was winding down. At that time, Hassan Hattab led a group of other disaffected GIA members who disagreed with GIA’s targeting of unarmed civilians. Hattab and his followers wanted to distance themselves from the large-scale massacres that had taken place while continuing their struggle against the Algerian government. They formed the GSPC to give themselves a fresh name and a new start.

Hattab eventually ran into disputes within the GSPC as the group was increasingly drawn to the transnational jihadist campaign espoused by al Qaeda. He “resigned” (though he was effectively deposed) as the group’s leader in 2001 and was succeeded by Nabil Sahraoui, who declared the GSPC’s allegiance to al Qaeda. Security forces killed Sahraoui in 2004.

In a message issued on Sept. 11, 2006, al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri announced that the GSPC had joined forces with al Qaeda in a union he hoped would be “a thorn in the neck of the American and French Crusaders and their allies, and an arrow in the heart of the traitors and apostates.” On Sept. 13, GSPC acknowledged the merger on its Web site with a message from its emir, Abu Musab Abd al-Wadoud, who wrote, “We have full confidence in the faith, the doctrine, the method and the modes of action of [al Qaeda’s] members, as well as their leaders and religious guides.”

http://newageislam.com/algeria--taking-the-pulse-of-al-qaeda-in-the-islamic-maghreb--/war-on-terror/d/1512

Egypt: Total cultural collapse, Islamic Society, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Society

Egypt: Total cultural collapse

Magdy Hussein, editor of the online Islamist paper Al Shaab, seems to think that change is upon us. “It’s the end of an era summed up by the fact that Egypt got no votes at all in the competition to hold the 2010 World Cup, a symbolic statement of the total cultural collapse we are in,” he wrote. “But this is happening at the same time that the American plan for hegemony in Arab and Islamic countries has witnessed a huge setback in Iraq, and this opens great possibilities for liberation from the American-Zionist alliance. This only confirms what we have been saying all along: that American power is in a state of retreat, not advance.”

This is an Islamist critique of Arab regional politics that concurs in essence with that of nationalists such as Muhammad Hassanein Heikal—Egypt and other Arab countries simply need more confidence in order to create bold new Arab alliances that can challenge U.S.-Israeli domination. With the descent of the Iraq project into chaos, the “new Arab liberals” are also under attack. Al Jazeera’s “The Opposite Direction” took up the topic in a recent show, giving a public airing to the view that pro-democracy activists made a big mistake in thinking that America’s Iraq adventure would allow them to replace the Arab regimes. Last month’s G-8 summit in the United States left the pompous and ridiculous Greater Middle East Initiative bereft of any real content—yet another great plan to democratize the Arab world crushed by the realities of Israel’s crazed mission to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population.

http://newageislam.com/egypt--total-cultural-collapse-/islamic-society/d/172