Rising Leader for Next Phase of Al Qaeda's War
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/world/asia/04qaeda.html?th&emc=th
By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET
Published: April 4, 2008
On the night of July 10, 2005, an obscure militant preacher named Abu
Yahya al-Libi escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan and
rocketed to fame in the world of jihadists.
The breakout from the Bagram Air Base by Mr. Libi and three cellmates
-- they picked a lock, dodged their guards and traversed the base's
vast acreage to freedom -- embarrassed American officials as deeply as
it delighted the jihadist movement. In the nearly three years since
then, Mr. Libi's meteoric ascent within the leader****p of Al Qaeda has
proved to be even more troublesome for the authorities.
Mr. Libi, a Libyan believed to be in his late 30s, is now considered
to be a top strategist for Al Qaeda, as well as one of its most
effective promoters of global jihad, appearing in a dozen videos on
militant Web sites in the past year, counterterrorism officials said.
At a time when Al Qaeda seems more inspirational than operational, Mr.
Libi stands out as a formidable star whose rise to prominence tracks
the group's growing emphasis on information in its war with the West.
"I call him a man for all seasons for A.Q.," said Jarret Brachman, a
former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency who is now research
director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "He's a
warrior. He's a poet. He's a scholar. He's a pundit. He's a military
commander. And he's a very charismatic, young, brash rising star
within A.Q., and I think he has become the heir apparent to Osama bin
Laden in terms of taking over the entire global jihadist movement."
The secrecy that envelops Al Qaeda's leader****p structure makes such
estimates speculative, other analysts noted. But one Islamist insider
said that in addition to youth and charisma, Mr. Libi possessed one
skill that Al Qaeda's leaders had been lacking: religious scholar****p.
Perhaps with this in mind, Al Qaeda is featuring Mr. Libi, who spent
two years in Africa studying Islam, in as many of the videos as the
group's top leaders, Mr. bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri.
"Bin Laden is an engineer and Zawahri is a medical doctor," said Dr.
Muhammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident who lives in London. "So it is
im****tant that they also present someone who has the role of scholar."
The varied roles that Mr. Libi plays in these videos, from recruiter
to ideological enforcer, also shed light on Al Qaeda's ****fting
tactics. In recent months, those tactics have come to include
defensive maneuvers aimed at defusing the media counteroperations of
the United States and its allies.
Mr. Libi delivers his message with a preacher's cadence. His black
turban drapes down his chest, and he alternates between white Arabic
robes and camouflage jackets.
"O Muslim youth in the East and West, who listen to God calling you:
'Go forth to war, whether it be easy or difficult for you, and strive
hard in God's cause with your possessions and your lives,' " he said
in a video sermon released this year.
But increasingly, Mr. Libi uses his videos not to expand Al Qaeda's
base, but to shore it up. He has lashed out at moderate Muslim
scholars who accuse Al Qaeda of using false interpretations of the
Koran to justify jihad. He has mocked Saudi Arabia's efforts to
persuade jailed militants to give up the fight.
In a 93-minute speech released last fall, Mr. Libi urged sup****ters to
brace themselves for a surge in psychological warfare loaded with
false propaganda. He cited a rumor that Al Qaeda's constitution calls
for killing anyone who breaks from the group: "Al Qaeda and its
leaders are too noble and pure to descend to the rotten level of such
nonsense."
These and other frank communications by Mr. Libi have led intelligence
analysts at the West Point center and elsewhere to ****e over his
videos like Kremlinologists looking for operational clues to Soviet
intentions.
Mr. Libi began as a militant on a scholarly path, according to a
Libyan man who says he knew him. His older brother, now imprisoned in
Libya, had been a crucial figure in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group,
whose members went to Afghanistan to help defeat the Soviet Union.
Mr. Libi, who went to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, was sent back to
northern Africa to study Islam in Mauritania. When he returned two
years later, Afghanistan was no longer a battleground for militant
Libyans, but rather a haven: the Taliban controlled most of the
country.
Mr. Libi's training in warfare was minimal, and his early work as a
preacher rarely touched on militant action, according to the Libyan
man who said he had met Mr. Libi in Afghanistan, and who spoke on
condition of anonymity out of security concerns. "He started to visit
training camps and talk about Shariah," or Islamic law, this man said
in a telephone interview, about "morals, etiquette, how to act."
Then a year after 9/11, Mr. Libi was seized by Pakistani authorities
and turned over to American authorities, who eventually put him in the
Bagram prison.
In one video produced after their escape in 2005, Mr. Libi and his
fellow fugitives recounted their breakout, crediting God with
distracting their captors. A new version now circulating on jihadist
Web sites re-enacts some of the escape with dramatic flair.
Mr. Libi, who has also used the names Hasan Qaiid and Yunis al-
Sahrawi, is assumed to be in the Afghan-Pakistani border area.
He appears to have worked his way quickly into Al Qaeda's inner
circle. He was among the leaders who sent letters of rebuke to Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, the militant leader who was killed in Iraq in 2006,
who they felt was undermining the group's global strategy by killing
too many civilians.
1 2 Next Page >>
Margot Williams contributed re****ting.
|
