August 24, 2006
Al qaeda in gaza?
Analysts believe that al Qaeda has expressed an increasing interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict for a number of reasons, one of which is their major setbacks in Iraq. Their tactics of beheading and mass murder of innocent civilians have not been popular with the majority of Iraqis, and their leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. air attack two months ago.Al Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan have been dismantled after their allies, the Taliban, were overthrown by the U.S.-led war in October 2001, and their leadership has been forced to seek refuge in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Many of their top operatives have been arrested in the past four years.
This suggests that the American strategy for fighting al Qaeda has been successful. The violence in Iraq is apparently not related to al Qaeda anymore but to the ethnic divisions that were kept in check by Saddam's brutality. And now al Qaeda flees to Gaza? That doesn't seem very ambitious.
Gaza doesn't give al Qaeda much opportunity for global operations. (And this would be one more proof that opening the Gaza crossings without adequate security was a bad idea.)
If this is really al Qaeda, it should be viewed as a success in America's war on terror.
There are three assumptions in this article that bother me. 1) Targetting journalists is not new to Palestinian terrorists. (The demand to release Muslim prisoners held by America is new though.) 2) That poverty plays a role in building a terror organization. Terror organizations usually draw their personnel from the middle and upper (economic) classes, not the poor 3) the idea that Al Qaeda wants to get involved in the Palestinian conflict against Israel and then carries out a distinctly anti-American operation. Al Qaeda wants a higher profile and went to Gaza. Again that speaks well of the American war on terror.
via memeorandum
More at HyScience and the Jawa Report.
Technorati tags: Al Qaeda, Gaza.
