Scores killed in Algeria attack

At least 43 people have been killed in a suicide attack on an Algerian police school, the country's interior ministry has said.

The attack occurred in the town of Issers, in the Kabylie region of Algeria, 60km east of Algiers, the capital, on Tuesday, wounding 38 others.

The attacker drove a car packed with explosives at the main entrance to the school as candidates for an entry exam were waiting outside, witnesses said.

Civilians as well as police officers were among the victims, they said.

Carnage

The casualty figures were still provisional, the ministry said in a statement.

But it is already the deadliest attack in the country in several months, worse than the December 2007 attack in Algiers against government and UN buildings, which killed at least 41 people and injured many others.

The explosion left a crater several metres across.

"It's utter carnage," said the father of one of those killed in the attack.

"It's a catastrophe. May God punish them for the crime they have committed against these youngsters, and their country."

Another candidate survived because he went to buy cigarettes but his father, mother and brother were killed in the blast, witnesses said.

As well as devastating the entrance to the school, the blast destroyed several nearby houses and blew out windows in nearby shops.

Emergency workers gathered up the remains of the dead, wrapping them in blankets and placing them in waiting ambulances.

[More]

Comment:

It's things like this that really make me think that Apostasy must be some sort of disease. The actions of whomever is responsible for this (possibly al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, though I suspect it may have been someone acting independently) have nothing to do with tactics, or strategy, or reason. This was not a part of any jihad, holy or unholy. It was an act of hate, pure and simple, of an immense loathing and a desire to cause as much suffering as possible. They have certainly succeeded.

Radical web of Islam's Terror

A new generation of Islamist terrorists is connecting through the Internet, not al-Qaeda. Their lack of central organization makes them even more terrifying than their forebears

The world's most dangerous jihadists no longer answer to al-Qaeda. The terrorists we should fear most are self-recruited wannabes who find purpose in terror and comrades on the Web. This new generation is even more frightening and unpredictable than its predecessors, but its evolution just may reveal the key to its demise.

[snip]

WHY THEY FIGHT

Any strategy to fight these terrorists must be based on an understanding of why they believe what they believe. In other words, what transforms ordinary people into fanatics who use violence for political ends? What leads them to consider themselves special, part of a small vanguard trying to build their version of an Islamist utopia?

The explanation for their behaviour is found not in how they think, but rather in how they feel. One of the most common refrains among Islamist radicals is their sense of moral outrage. In the 1980s, the most significant source of these feelings was the killing of Muslims in Afghanistan. In the 1990s, it was the fighting in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. Then came the second Palestinian intifada beginning in 2000. And since 2003, it has been all about the war in Iraq, which has become the focal point of global moral outrage for Muslims all over the world. Along with the humiliations of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Iraq is monopolizing today's conversations about Islam and the West. On a more local level, governments that appear overly pro-American cause radicals to feel they are the victims of a larger anti-Muslim conspiracy, bridging the perceived local and global attacks against them.

In order for this moral outrage to translate into extremism, the frustrations must be interpreted in a particular way: The violations are deemed part of a unified Western strategy, namely a "war against Islam." That deliberately vague worldview, however, is just a sound bite. The new terrorists are not Islamic scholars -- jihadists volunteering for Iraq are interested not in theological debates but in living out their heroic fantasies.

How various individuals interpret this vision of a "war against Islam" differs from country to country, and it is a major reason why homegrown terrorism within the United States is far less likely than it is in Europe. To a degree, the belief that the United States is a melting pot protects the country from homegrown attacks. Whether or not America is a land of opportunity, the important point is that people believe it to be. A recent poll found that 71% of Muslim Americans believe in the "American Dream" -- that's more than the American public as a whole (64%). This is not the case in Europe, where national myths are based on degrees of Britishness, Frenchness or Germanness, and non-European Muslim immigrants do not truly feel they belong.

Feeling marginalized is, of course, no simple springboard to violence. What transforms a very small number to become terrorists is mobilization by networks. Until a few years ago, these networks were face-to-face groups. They included local gangs of young immigrants, members of student associations and study groups at radical mosques. The group acted as an echo chamber, amplifying grievances, intensifying bonds to each other and breeding values that rejected those of host societies. These natural group dynamics resulted in a spiral of mutual encouragement and escalation, transforming a few young Muslims into dedicated terrorists willing to follow the model of their heroes and sacrifice themselves for comrades and cause. Their turn to violence was a collective decision, rather than an individual one.

During the past two or three years, however, face-to-face radicalization has been replaced by online radicalization. The same support and validation that young people used to derive from their offline peer groups are now found in online forums, which promote the image of the terrorist hero, link users to the online social movement, give them guidance and instruct them in tactics. These forums have become the "invisible hand" that organizes terrorist activities worldwide. The true leader of this violent social movement is the collective discourse on half a dozen influential forums.

At present, al-Qaeda Central cannot impose discipline on these third-wave wannabes, mostly because it does not know who they are. Without this command and control, each disconnected network acts according to its own understanding and capability, but their collective actions do not amount to any unified long-term goal or strategy. These separate groups cannot coalesce into a physical movement, leaving them condemned to remain leaderless, online aspirations. Such traits make them particularly volatile and difficult to detect, but they also offer a tantalizing strategy for those who wish to defeat these dangerous individuals: The very seeds of the movement's demise are found within the movement itself.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END?

There has been talk of an al-Qaeda resurgence, but the truth is that most of the hard core members of the first and second waves have been killed or captured. The survival of the social movement they inspired relies on the continued inflow of new members. But this movement is vulnerable to whatever may diminish its appeal among young people. Its allure thrives only at the abstract fantasy level. The few times its aspirations have been translated into reality -- the Taliban in Afghanistan, parts of Algeria during its civil war and, more recently, in Iraq's Anbar province -- were particularly repulsive to most Muslims.

What's more, a leaderless social movement is permanently at the mercy of its participants. As each generation attempts to define itself in contrast to its predecessor, what appeals to the present generation of young would-be radicals may not appeal to the next. At present, the major source of appeal is the anger and moral outrage provoked by the invasion of Iraq. But as the Western footprint there fades so will the appeal of fighting it.

The U.S. strategy to counter this terrorist threat continues to be frozen by the horrors of 9/11. It relies more on wishful thinking than on a deep understanding of the enemy. The pursuit of "high-value targets" who were directly involved in the 9/11 operation was an appropriate first step to bring the perpetrators to justice. And the United States has been largely successful in degrading the capability of al-Qaeda Central. But this strategy is not only useless against the leaderless jihad, it is precisely what will help the movement flourish. The main threat to radical Islamist terrorism is the fact that its appeal is self-limiting. The key is to accelerate this process of internal decay.

Terrorist acts must be stripped of glory and reduced to common criminality. Most aspiring terrorists want nothing more than to be elevated to the status of an FBI Most Wanted poster. "[I am] one of the most wanted terrorists on the Internet," Younis Tsouli boasted online a few months before his arrest in 2005. "I have the Feds and the CIA, both would love to catch me. I have MI6 on my back." His ego fed off the respect such bragging brought him in the eyes of other chat room participants. Any policy or recognition that puts such people on a pedestal only makes them heroes in each other's eyes -- and encourages more people to follow the same path.

It is equally crucial not to place terrorists who are arrested or killed in the limelight. The temptation to hold press conferences to publicize another "major victory" in the war on terror must be resisted, for it only transforms terrorist criminals into jihadist heroes. The United States underestimates the value of prosecutions, which often can be enormously demoralizing to radical groups. There is no glory in being taken to prison in handcuffs. No jihadi Web site publishes such pictures. Arrested terrorists fade into oblivion. Only martyrs live on in popular memory.

This is very much a battle for young Muslims' hearts and minds. It is necessary to reframe the entire debate, from imagined glory to very real horror. Young people must learn that terrorism is about death and destruction, not fame. The voices of the victims must be heard over the bragging and posturing that go on in the online jihadist forums. Only then will the leaderless jihad expire, poisoned by its own toxic message.

Via the National Post. H/T Muslims Against Sharia.


Comment:

While I'm not by any means convinced of their explanation of the source of Apostasy, they do still make a number of good points.

Time to forget the Crusades

The following is an editorial written by John Tolan for Al Jazeera:

French historian Joseph Francois Michaud (1767-1839), in his Histoire des Croisades, affirmed that the Crusades had proven the superiority of Europeans over Muslims and showed the way to the conquest and civilisation of Asia.

Shortly thereafter, Louis Philippe, the King of France from 1830 to 1848, commissioned a Salle des Croisades at Versailles, replete with monumental romanticised paintings of scenes from the Crusades. It is perhaps no accident that at the same time the French were embarked upon the conquest of Algeria.

For numerous French and British of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the Crusades were a precursor to their brave new colonial adventures in the Orient.

In reaction, Turkish and Arab writers denounced the European colonial enterprise as a re-enactment of the fanaticism and violence of the Crusades.

The Crusades have long stirred emotions of admiration or revulsion, from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata (1580) to Youssef Chahine's film Saladin the Victorious (1963) and beyond.

Arguing the clash

The legacy of crusading, simplified and distorted, is evoked to argue the inevitability of a present and future "clash of civilisations".

When Osama bin Laden speaks of countering the attacks of American and European "crusaders", he taps into a 19th-century European tradition of seeing the medieval crusades as precursors to the colonial (and subsequently post-colonial) relations between Europeans and Arabs.

But, the Crusades played little part in Arab conceptions of history from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

Until that time, the Crusades were a relatively minor phenomenon in the broad sweep of Muslim history. Of course, chroniclers such as Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Al Qalanisi or al-Maqrizi, close to rulers who fought against the Faranj (rulers like Saladin, al-Kamil, Baibars), made much of the threat posed by the Europeans and the heroic exploits of the sultans who defeated them.

Ibn al-Athir explained that the attack on the Muslim Mashreq (Middle East) was part of a movement of Faranj that included the Castilian capture of Toledo (in 1085) and the Norman conquest of Sicily (1072-91).

Yet for other Arab writers of the Middle Ages, the invasions of the Faranj were a minor inconvenience: they were simply another group of Christians who, like the Byzantines or Armenians, could seize small territories and pose threats to local Muslim rulers.

The Mongol threat

Far more troubling were the invasions of the Mongols, who captured and plundered large swaths of the Muslim heartland, sacking Baghdad in 1258 and Damascus several times.

The Mamluks' victory over the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in 1260 was far more vital than their victories over the string of small and powerless crusader enclaves such as that of Acre, which the Mamluks captured in 1291, ending the Crusader presence in the region.

Ibn Khaldun, in his great works of historiography, the Muqaddima and the Kitab al-'Ibar, has little to say of Crusades and Crusaders, much more about Mongols (including Timur, whom he met) and about the Berber dynasties of the Maghreb.

Few Arab authors of the following centuries take much interest in the Crusades, which are largely seen as a footnote to the sweep of Muslim history.

In Europe, meanwhile, the Crusades, and their failure to galvanise and unify European Christendom, were an obsession to many authors. In the aftermath of the loss of Acre in 1291, various Europeans called on kings, princes and popes to organise fresh crusades against the Mamluks and increasingly against the Ottomans.

Most of the anti-Turkish "crusades", like those of Nicopolis (1396) and Varna (1443) ended in crushing defeat for the European troops. But various European Christian authors continued to use the language of the Crusades to try to fire their co-religionists into attacking the Ottomans or other enemies, including Protestants and "heathen" American Indians.

The historians and philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, in contrast, vilified the notion of war in the name of God: for them, holy war represented the epitome of medieval fanaticism. Voltaire depicts the Crusaders as blood-thirsty fanatics, while portraying their opponents, particularly Saladin and al-Kamil, as wise and just monarchs.

European nationalism

Yet this negative vision of crusading is swept aside in 19th-century Europe by three powerful forces in European culture: Romanticism, nationalism, and colonialism.

The Romantics rehabilitated the Crusades which they portrayed as, at times, bloody and senseless, yet redeemed by a remarkable and admirable idealism. This idea is embodied in the novels of Walter Scott, such as Ivanhoe (1819) and the Talisman (1825).

Francois de Chateaubriand, in his Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem (1811), takes umbrage at those who speak ill of the Crusades.

On the contrary, for him, despite their shortcomings the Crusaders were imbued with a faith and a selfless sense of mission that pushed them to abandon wives, children, lands and material riches to wrest Christ's tomb from the grasp of the Muslims.

In Jerusalem, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Chateaubriand was dubbed into the Order of the Holy Sepulcher by a Franciscan friar wielding what was supposed to be the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon, knight and first ruler of Crusader Jerusalem.

Chateaubriand and other Europeans dreamed of a return to the heroic age of the Crusades.

European colonialism

Their dream was not long in the waiting. Beginning in 1830, French troops undertook the conquest of Algeria. French Crusader historians Francois-Joseph Michaud and Jean-Joseph Poujoulat praised kings Charles X and Louis-Philippe as new incarnations of Saint Louis.

In a preface to a school textbook on the Crusades, the authors present the feats of medieval French Crusaders as models for the youth sent off to conquer Algeria: "The narration of the great events of olden times shall serve as lessons of patriotism for our youth."

When Napoleon III addressed the troops ready to set off for Lebanon in 1860, he exhorted them to be "the worthy children of those heroes who gloriously carried Christ's banner into those countries".

The British similarly painted their victories over the Ottomans in the first world war: Richard the Lionhearted, who failed to take Jerusalem from Saladin, appears in the pages of Punch in December 1917, in the aftermath of Allenby's capture of Jerusalem, saying "At last, my dream come true!"

One could multiply the examples of British and French authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries who affirmed that their colonial empires were reviving the best traditions of medieval crusading: its idealism, its mission to bear European civilisation into the heart of the Middle East.

Independence dashed

At the Versailles peace conference at the close of the first world war, when the French and British argued over the partition of the Arab lands wrested from the Ottoman empire and the Arab envoys increasingly realised their hopes for independence would be dashed, one of the French representatives tried to ground his claims on French prominence in the Crusades.

Amir Faisal, in frustration, shot back: "Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the Crusades?"

It is through the French and British, principally, that Arabs of the 19th and 20th centuries rediscovered the Crusades. Modern Arabic terms for the Crusades, such as harb al-salib, were coined in the 19th century as translations of European terms; there had previously been no Arabic word for "crusade".

Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) warns that "Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us".

The first book in Arabic devoted specifically to the Crusades is Sayyid Ali al-Hariri's al-Hurub al-Ṣalibiya, published in Cairo in 1899. His work is grounded in both European scholarship and in knowledge of the medieval Arabic chroniclers.

Unify the Arabs!

Al-Hariri, like subsequent Arab scholars, accepted Michaud's assertion that the Crusades were a precursor for European colonialism. Arab nationalists responded by drawing their own historical lessons from this comparison: the new crusaders can be defeated just as their predecessors had been by the unification of the Arabs under leaders who, like Saladin and Baibars in the Middle Ages, will expel the intruders from Arab soil.

Since the middle of the 20th century, if Europeans or Americans compare the Crusades to colonialism, it is in order to denounce one, the other, or both. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, Westerners tend to see the Crusades as manifestations of violent fanaticism, not as expressions of admirable idealism.

It is now principally in the circles of radical Islam that the 19th-century European paradigm equating Crusades with European colonialism lives on.

Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s affirmed that "the Crusader spirit runs in the blood of all Westerners".

Similar statements have been proffered by more recent Islamists, including bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Crusaders and Zionists are implacable enemies with whom one neither speaks nor compromises.

The mirror term among more extreme western writers is Jihadists: Islamists (or for some, more broadly Muslims) are seen to be inordinately hostile to non-Muslims, against whom holy war is a sacred duty.

What clash?

These Manichean world views fuel pessimistic scenarios such as Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations". Yet when one looks closely at the age of Crusades, one finds that the lesson to be drawn is far less simplistic than Huntington or bin Laden would have us believe.

It is a time of trade, when Egyptian merchants bought spices in India and sold them in Spain, when Venetians and Genoese traders sold English or Flemish wool cloth in Alexandria and brought back to Europe Egyptian glass, Damascene metalwork, Indian spices.

Pilgrims - Christians, Muslims and Jews - bound for Mecca and Jerusalem, travelled together on Genoese or Pisan ships, along with merchants, mercenaries and adventurers.

It is a time when storms tossed their ships and all raised their voices to God in a multilingual supplication. Conflict, as always, was endemic, but it often crossed confessional lines.

The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (and the other Crusader principalities) did not, as some have claimed, comprise an "apartheid" regime of boorish European louts lording over cultured but abject Muslims.

Its inhabitants were in fact a cosmopolitan mix of Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Normans, Provencaux, etc.

In religion they were Shia and Sunni Muslim, Druze, Catholic, Monophysite, and Jewish.

The Latin rulers gradually "orientalised", marrying the daughters of prominent indigenous Christians, learning Arabic, eating and dressing like natives, making truces and alliances with neighbouring Muslim rulers and promoting commerce.

Yet one should not imagine an idyllic land of tolerance: social distinctions were real, and often followed lines of religion and ethnicity.

Seeking historical understanding

In this, as in the violence with which they imposed and enforced their rule, the Latins differed little from other contemporary interlopers in Syria/Palestine: Turks, Byzantines, Kurds, Egyptian Fatimids and Mameluks.

The historical fallacy of identifying modern struggles with those of the Middle Ages continues to be an impediment to a real historical understanding of Arab-European (and more broadly Western-Muslim) relations.

The motivations for al-Qaeda's violence have more to do with internal Saudi politics and resentment of US policy in the Middle East than with a supposedly eternal clash between "crusaders" and "jihadists".

The roots of Iranian anti-Americanism can be found in decades of American alliance with the Shah, rather than in centuries of a supposed clash of civilisations.

The solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is to be found in the righting of the wrongs of the past 60 years, not in invoking the age of the Maccabees or Saladin.

It is time to put to rest simplistic notions of the clash of civilisations based on a falsified image of a long-vanished past. Our current problems are real enough to merit being understood on their own terms.

John Tolan is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes (France). He is the author of Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), and St Francis and the Sultan: An Encounter Seen Through Eight Centuries of Texts and Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; French edition published in Paris: Seuil, 2007).

Suicide bomber strikes in Algeria

At least 15 people have been killed after a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of people shortly before a visit by Algeria's president. Abdelaziz Bouteflika visited some of the 60 wounded in a hospital in the eastern town of Batna, 430km from the capital, Algiers. The president accused the attackers of trying to damage his policy of national reconciliation, which is aimed at ending 15 years of fighting between the army and rebel groups. There was no immmediate claim of responsibilty for the attack. [More]

Comment:

Maybe not, but there's only one really active terrorist group in Algeria, and that's al-Qaeda. Some things go without saying.

Explosions rock Algiers

Two large explosions in the Algerian capital have killed at least 23 people and left dozens more wounded.

One bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the Algerian prime minister in central Algiers on Tuesday morning, causing a blast that could be heard 10km away.

Another explosion targeted a police station in Bab Ezzouar, an eastern suburb of the city near the international airport, damaging a nearby electricity sub-station.

The government has not said what caused the two blasts - although some witnesses reported that the attacks were suicide bombings.

APS, Algeria's official news agency, put the combined toll from the two explosion at 23 with 160 others wounded.

Reuters news agency, however, reported that a total of 30 people had been killed in the bombings.

Al Jazeera television's bureau in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, received a phone call from a man who said he was a member of al-Qaeda and wanted to take responsibility for the explosions.

The caller said that the explosions were the result of three al-Qaeda members who had carried out suicide car-bombings. His claims could not be independently confirmed.

PM denounces attack

Abdelaziz Belkhadem, the Algerian prime minister, was unhurt and referred to the attacks "criminal and cowardly". He said an investigation would be carried out to determine their cause.

Abdel Karim Dahmen, a member of the ruling party, referred to the blasts as "bombs of terror" and said they could be an attempt to destabilise the country before elections due next month.

Omar Dalal, the editor of the Al Shaab newspaper, was near the scene when one blast happened at 11:30am local time and said it took place in the street parallel to the 17-storey building that houses the prime minister's office and several ministries, including the interior ministry.

The main anti-government rebel group, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (the GSPC) has claimed responsibility for several attacks in recent months and has also declared itself to be a part of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation.

More than 100,000 Algerians died in a civil war between the government and Islamist fighters in the 1990s.

Via Al Jazeera.

Day 2,002

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb today claimed responsibility for an attack on Monday that killed seven policemen near the capital of Algeria.

In Afghanistan, Coalition forces began Operation Achilles, a major attempt to regain control of the south. One British soldier has been killed so far. The operation has already begun to yield fruit, in the form of several captures of Taliban and al-Qaeda officials.

One of the officials, Taliban commander Mullah Mahmud, was apprehended while demonstrating a surprising trend towards a more tolerant view of sexual mores on the part of the Taliban, as al-Jazeera has reported he was dressed in, of all things, a burqa. It is unknown what attitude his wife has taken towards his cross-dressing.