Jihadi groups alienate support base

By Paul Tate

Despite the best efforts of US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to recruit a new pool of terrorists for Al Qaeda, the atrocities in Saudi Arabia, Madrid, Istanbul and Iraq may contain the very seeds that have caused previous Islamist insurgencies to collapse.
The increasingly random, brutal and indiscriminate acts of Al Qaeda cells around the world appear to reveal an organisation that has fragmented into desperate groups of individuals with no overall command structure. A clear example of this is the organisation's change of tactics and its apparent inability to target high-profile symbols of US power. The foot soldiers of the organisation are still active and increasingly dangerous, but the brains are missing. Carefully selected targets representing US military and economic might have been replaced by so-called "soft targets". Drive-by shootings of Western civilians, beheading of hostages and blowing up of innocent civilians on commuter trains have become the order of the day.
Most damagingly for the militants, increasing numbers of Muslim bystanders are dying as a result. Of course, many Muslims died on Sept. 11 and in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, but the fact that the targets were chosen because they represented symbols of US power gave the militants a certain "credibility". As callous and barbaric as these attacks were, for many people, and not just in the Middle East, the fact that Al Qaeda was able to strike at such potent symbols of US economic and political power overshadowed the carnage.
The leaders of Al Qaeda were well aware of the "PR value" of these targets, something that cannot be said now. The murder and recorded beheadings of civilian contractors in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of commuter trains taking ordinary people to work in Madrid and the killing of innocent Muslim bystanders in Saudi Arabia, Istanbul and Iraq have done nothing for Al Qaeda''s credibility. In their lust for blood, the radical Islamists of Al Qaeda have failed to learn from their predecessors in the Egyptian Al Jamiah Al Islamiyah or the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria.
In both these countries, the militant groups were initially able to exploit widely held grievances not only against the ruling secular regimes, but also against the biased policies of the US towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now their support base has vanished and their activities all but ceased. This was not solely due to the repression suffered at the hands of the security forces, although this destroyed a large part of their leadership. To a large extent, it was also due to the fact that these groups, through their increasingly barbaric acts, destroyed any legitimacy they may once have had with the very people they claimed to represent. No terrorist organisation can operate without the tactic support of at least part of the local population.
The massacre at Luxor in 1997 was the final brutal act committed by the Al Jamiah Al Islamiyah. It sent waves of revulsion through the Egyptian population and caused increased hardship for those dependent on the tourist industry to feed their families. The terrorists in this attack were actually chased into the surrounding hills by enraged locals, with some reports claiming they were then beaten to death and their bodies set alight. Through their barbarity, the militants turned the very people they claimed to represent against them and found it increasingly difficult to operate.
Similarly, in Algeria, what started out as a "popular uprising" soon descended into an orgy of violence. The security clampdown fractured the command structure and the militant groups became disorganised, blood thirsty and indiscriminate in their attacks. The result was that the radicals alienated the majority of their original supporters, who turned against them and began reporting any suspicious incidents to the security services making it difficult for the militants to operate. As a consequence the violence eventually subsided.
Through their barbaric acts of violence, the above militant groups gained a reputation as psychopathic killers, as opposed to the heroic Mujahedeen. Their true agenda and complete disregard for the sanctity of human life became visible for all to see. There are signs that Al Qaeda is following an identical course. One wonders how much killing it will take in Iraq or elsewhere before a similar fate awaits the latest crop of militants.