MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

It has been said before, and it is worth repeating. There are many today who recognize that the Islamist ideology espoused by Al Qaeda and its ilk has metastasized since 9/11 throughout the Muslim world.  Unfortunately, the call to reality has largely fallen on the deaf ears of Western leadership. Nations can fight against armies, against a foe that is well defined, but a religious ideology that recognizes no borders, no limits, no definition of peace apart from its own is an ideology that no nation will ever defeat, and an ideology that will continue to become more mainstream each and every day until its fiery end at the epiphany of Christ Jesus in power and great glory …

By Mawassi Lahcen, Magharebia – “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s recent appeal for recruits is setting off alarm bells around the world. The new message from al-Qaeda urged supporters to fight at home against secularists and liberals.

The plea for aid from like-minded Islamists was met with a warm response by Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia, further heightening concerns that the country could become a new battleground for the terror network. Magharebia sat down with Moroccan researcher Abdellah Rami to get a better understanding of al-Qaeda’s potential plans to open a new front in Tunisia.

Magharebia: What’s new about the latest message from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)?

Abdellah Rami: What interests me is the attention paid by the leadership of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to the issue of the departure of the mujahideen from their countries of origin to battlefields abroad.

In the last paragraph of the message, al-Qaeda warned against leaving governance to secularists and their ilk. They are calling on jihadists to do the job.

In fact, this is not new. Al-Maqdissi in Jordan [ed: Mohamed Maqdissi, the mufti of Al-Qaeda known as the “spiritual father” of global jihad] warned against this. It was a point of disagreement between him and his disciple [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi in Iraq. Political Islamist groups in Iraq did the same thing when they decided not to leave parliament to the secularists.

Here it should be noted that some Syrian opposition armed groups stopped letting jihadists join the battlefield. I do not know if this decision had any relationship with the new position of AQIM.

Magharebia: In the March 17th communiqué, al-Qaeda called for dawa, not jihad. Is this a new strategy designed to activate sleeper cells in the Maghreb?

Rami: No, the message calls for not leaving the internal front empty, rather than focusing on travel to other fronts.

It seems that al-Qaeda is trying through this message to give a new direction to the jihadists in order to focus on building a solid local nucleus and structured organisations, to expand and spread within the local community instead of focusing on external fronts. The message is not an invitation to carry out operations.

In Tunisia, jihadi salafism became a declared movement active in the daylight. In Morocco, they are publicly expressing in their slogans the loyalty to al-Qaeda, and chanting the name of bin Laden in their demonstrations and protests.

However, things have changed somehow; people affiliated with the ideology of al-Qaeda are not necessarily fighters. This does not mean either that they have abandoned the doctrine of jihad; they still adopt it at the theoretical level, but do not translate this belief in practice, at least locally, though maybe on the battlefield.

At the local level, the main target of jihadists has become penetrating society and permeating it, because circumstances have changed. They are now working publicly and no longer hide their faces.” Read more.