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The Eurasian Politician - November 2003
Anssi Kullberg, 10 Nov. 2003
Nordic people are too willing to believe that the struggle against terrorism is a challenge only for the United States and such states, where there are active domestic terrorist organizations. In the north, we are not used to actual terrorism, or politically motivated violence targeting civilian population in order to raise fear. Single "acts of terror", like the suicide bomb of the Myyrmanni shopping mall in 2002 in Finland, or political murders, latest the murder of the Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh, have not been part of organized terrorism.
In other parts of Europe, however, there are several active terrorist organizations, which mainly belong to the communist and nationalist categories of terrorism. The beginning of modern terrorism could be traced back to a single date: On 18th May 1967, an exceptionally unscrupulous man, Yuri Andropov, became the head of the Soviet secret service KGB, and among his first actions was to return "special" operations as a KGB policy, in order to bring about a global wave of subversion against Western democracies. In 1967-1968 the KGB organized extreme leftist revolutionary movements all over the West, and globally coordinated founding of terrorist cells and mutual networking of terrorist organizations. The activity was launched in the Islamic world in December 1967, and the founder of the Palestine pro-Soviet terrorist organization PFLP, a Lebanese George Habash, became the coordinator of KGB terrorist activity in the Middle East. Although the PFLP as such moved to the shadows, its shadow indeed was to be cast over decades to come, and the PFLP's role in the core of the financing, arming and networking of international terrorism extended from the Middle East as far away as Japan and South America.
When the star of communism began to fall by 1980s, a new radical and anti-Western force, radical Islamism, rose from the Islamic world, adopting the role of Marxism in the struggle against Western interests in the Middle East and South Asia. The roots of radical Islamism can basically be traced back to the genesis of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, but radical Islamism reached its radical political internationalism in two waves, influenced by the two European radical ideologies, fascism and socialism. At the core of this development were two Arab countries of the Middle East: Egypt and Syria.
The "rightist" type of radical Islamism, which drew inspiration from fascism, was centrally incarnated in the Muslim Brotherhood (al Ikhwan al Muslimun). Besides of being a reaction to the activities of the Zionists (also the founders of Israel advocated their cause with the use of terrorism), anti-Semitism was among the features directly borrowed from Western European fascists, whose writings were used and employed by the ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood, like the Egyptian Sayid Qutb. An even more radical movement, however, evolved in the "leftist" type of radical Islamism. By summer 1968, the KGB had turned Egypt into its main platform for subversive actions and extremism in the Middle East, but the former Muslim Brother, President Anwar Sadat, cleansed most of the KGB agents and expelled the Russian advisors in July 1972. This resulted a division of the "rightist" radicals: the most radical Muslim Brothers allied themselves with the remaining network of the KGB. The extremes found each other.
In many senses, al Qaida is an end result of the alliance of extremes, which began at that time. The extreme end of the Muslim Brotherhood was represented by the Egyptian physician, Ayman al Zawahiri, who broke up with the original Muslim Brothers, opposed not only Sadat but also the "rightist" type of Islamism, and founded perhaps the most important terrorist organization of the new kind of radical Islamism, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (al Jihad al Islamiyya al Misr). More than 60 per cent of the key leaders of today's al Qaida are Egyptian terrorists of Zawahiri's organization, and Zawahiri himself is the most important ideologue of al Qaida.
The founder of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was Maruf al Dawalibi, who in the 1950s acted as a minister of finance, and later as an advisor to the Saudi king, until in the 1970s he ended up leading Islamist world organizations. Dawalibi declared that the Arabs "wanted thousand times more to become a Soviet republic than to remain looted by the Jews". While he was active in Saudi Arabia, also the future figurehead of al Qaida, Usama bin Ladin, drew inspiration from the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both bin Ladin's mother and first wife were Syrian, and his mentors included, besides of the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, the brother of the head ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Qutb. Bin Ladin's father was Yemeni, and in fact the first target of Usama bin Ladin's political interest abroad was the communist satellite of South Yemen, although it seems that this period of bin Ladin's activities in the 1970s is the least known section of his life.
Radical Islamists have managed to capture state power only thrice: Iran 1979; Sudan 1989; and Afghanistan 1996. In the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the KGB set to support the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini, and it was then latest that the KGB learned that radical Islamism was more suitable than communism to be employed in the struggle against Western interests in the Middle East and South Asia. The Soviet invasion to Afghanistan, which started the same year, did not cause protests by the regime of Islamist Iran.
The researchers studying al Qaida have traditionally started tracing the organization's roots in Peshawar, the Pakistani frontier city of the Afghan jihad, where an office (MAK) led by bin Ladin's former teacher Professor Azzam started to transmit funding, weapons and volunteers for the Afghan resistance struggle against Soviet occupation. However, the researchers have paid less attention on the fact that Azzam's office was turned from a support office of guerrilla war into a radical Islamist terrorist organization only in late 1980s, when the Egyptians of Zawahiri's school, with bin Ladin's backing, occupied the key positions of the organization, and finally assassinated Azzam and his two sons with a car bomb in autumn 1989. Having removed the original supporters of the Afghan jihad from their way, the capturers wanted to re-direct the organization from anti-Soviet activity to become an anti-Western one. Thus, al Qaida was born.
In Sudan, radical Islamists usurped power in 1989, and al Qaida, which had been recently captured by bin Ladin and Zawahiri, moved their headquarters and all infrastructure to Sudan as early as two years later. Their protector in Sudan was a graduate of Sorbonne, Dr. Hassan al Turabi, who was the Islamist ideologue of Sudan's new military regime. Afghanistan remained fighting its own civil war, until a radical Islamist movement, the Taliban, got overhand there in 1995-1996. At the same time, Sudan was under heavy international pressure to expel al Qaida, and the "rightist" Muslim Brothers turned against the radical school of Turabi. As a consequence, bin Ladin moved back to Afghanistan, to the Taliban's protection. However, it was the Sudanese years 1991-1996 that were crucial for the construction of al Qaida's global network of terror.
The Soviet Union had disintegrated in 1992, and thereby the single most important ideological sponsor of international terrorism was gone. Russia, however, maintained its position as a superpower of weapons trade, which reflected in the character of Islamist extreme organizations by 1990s. Al Qaida was smuggling weapons to the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan in co-operation with the Russian arms merchant Viktor But, a former KGB major. Old alignments lived on also in the "Terrorist International", which was founded in meetings held in Cyprus, Iran and Sudan in mid-1990s, chaired by Zawahiri and the feared terrorist leader of the Hizbollah, Imad Mughniyeh. The goal of bin Ladin and Zawahiri was to make al Qaida a global umbrella network of anti-American Islamist terrorist organizations, and as a part of the goal, Zawahiri and Mughniyeh buried the old hatchet between Sunni and Shi'a extremists.
Another goal of al Qaida was that the cells it had established around the world would become maximally self-sustaining in their activity, although not independent in ideology, which was under heavy scrutiny of al Qaida's "political officers", just like in the Marxist past. The esteemed Sri Lankan / Singaporean scholar of terrorism, Rohan Gunaratna, has paid attention on how al Qaida systematically put practical goals ahead of religious values. For example, al Qaida encouraged the terrorist organizations it had infiltrated to independent fund-rising by using both legal and illegal business. For the same reason, al Qaida has effectively infiltrated Islamist political parties, business as well as Islamic NGOs. Al Qaida also significantly exploits crime as well as sensitive fields of economy like weapons trade. The Algerian associated of al Qaida in Europe, for example, collected funds through credit card fraud.
In Europe, al Qaida exploited the already existing terrorist networks, which have been plenty in Europe since the 1970s. It was even often the fashion that membership in an organization classified as a terrorist organization in their homeland, and possible death sentence for terrorism at home, were nothing less than a basis for granting asylum in Western Europe. Finland was no exception in this sense, although here the numbers were in general much smaller than the Western European average, and on the map of extremist movements Finland is rather a side branch of Stockholm. However, the vicinity of Russian markets and smuggling routes may increase Finland's attractiveness.
In Finland, there is no immediate threat of terrorist attacks against us, but for our part, we must share responsibility of the international fight against terrorism. In Finland, counter-terrorism activity should lie in close contact with countermeasures against organized crime, especially "eastern crime", as has been written by the young terrorism expert Christian Jokinen from the University of Turku. Another emphasis should be on the recruitment and infiltration by radical Islamists among the immigrant populations of Western Europe. We should not forget that terrorists and terrorist organizations are quicker to change their names, their superficial ideologies and the colors of their flags than their basic methods of political activity (i.e. violence and subversion) or their international contact networks.