The Beginning of the End for Al Qaeda? by Paul Cruickshank

The Beginning of the End for Al Qaeda?
By Paul Cruickshank


Peter Bergen (my colleague at the NYU Center on Law and Security) and myself have a cover story out in the latest issue of the New Republic -- published online last week and now on news stands --- entitled the ‘Jihadist Revolt against Bin Laden.’ We report that key figures in the Jihadist movement, many of them veterans of the Afghan anti-Soviet Jihad, are increasingly publicly repudiating Bin Laden, alarmed by Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the fact that most of its victims since 9/11 have been Muslim.

Although several veterans of the Afghan Jihad saw 9/11 as an illegitimate attack on civilians and a blunder by Bin Laden because Jihadists lost their ability to train in Afghanistan, the emergence of a fully-fledged ‘Jihadist Critique’ of Al Qaeda was almost certainly delayed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, ‘a cause celebre’ for Jihadists around the world.

Since then, however, al Qaeda’s brutal campaign of violence in Iraq (over 10,000 Iraqis have been killed by Al Qaeda’s suicide bombers) has horrified even battle-hardened Jihadists, and ideologues once closely aligned with al Qaeda. One such jihadist, Sayyid Imam al Sharif is profiled this week by Larry Wright (also a fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security) in the New Yorker.

While mainstream Muslim leaders have long criticized Al Qaeda, the new wave of criticism coming from key figures in the jihadist movement has real extra bite, because it is very difficult for Bin Laden to dismiss the arguments of jihadist leaders who once fought at his side, or provided guidance to his organization, or inspired his recruits. To the degree that this makes radical leaning youngsters from London to Lahore think twice about joining al Qaeda, this could be a watershed moment in the war on terrorism. Here is our assessment of just how impactful this new jihadist critique has been.
May 28, 2008 08:01 PM Link
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2008/05/the_beginning_of_the_end_for_a.php