Before Sayyid Qutb became a leading theorist of violent jihad, he was a little-known Egyptian writer sojourning in the United States, where he attended a small teachers college on the Great Plains. Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence. Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: “The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”
Such grumbling by an unhappy crank would be almost comical but for one fact: a direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri. From them, the line continues to another quietly seething Egyptian sojourning in the United States—the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Qutb’s gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center: Why do they hate us?
Born in 1906 in the northern Egyptian village of Musha and raised in a devout Muslim home, Qutb memorized the Koran as a boy. Later he moved to Cairo and found work as a teacher and writer. His novels made no great impression, but he earned a reputation as an astute literary critic. Qutb was among the first champions of Naguib Mahfouz, a young, modern novelist who, in 1988, would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. As Qutb matured, his mind took on a more political cast. Even by the standards of Egypt, those were chaotic, corrupt times: World War I had completed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and the Western powers were creating, with absolute colonial confidence, new maps and governments for the Middle East. For a proud man like Sayyid Qutb, the humiliation of his country at the hands of secular leaders and Western puppets was galling. His writing drew unfavorable attention from the Egyptian government, and by 1948, Mahfouz has said, Qutb’s friends in the Ministry of Education were sufficiently worried about his situation that they contrived to send him abroad to the safety of the United States. More here from Smithsonian.
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The Secret Islamist Society That Nurtured Jihadist Terrorism
In the ’50s and ’60s, Islamist radical and theorist Sayyid Qutb cultivated and trained a generation of Muslim radicals who would sow the seeds of ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Gerges: After the attacks on the U.S. homeland on September 11, 2001, Sayyid Qutb, master ideologue of radical Islamism and agitator, became a household name in America. He was seen as the godfather of global jihadism like al-Qaeda and an inspiration to radical religious activists worldwide. Security experts mined his writings for signposts about the drivers behind radicalization. An analyst called him “the philosopher of terror.” It has become more difficult to disentangle myths and facts about this Islamist agitator and theoretician who is mythologized by both disciples and distractors.
In contrast, my new biography of Qutb presents a more complex and multidimensional personality than has usually been presented, whose legacy is often deliberately misinterpreted by Islamists themselves. While Qutb’s writings have been debated by scholars,[i] his life in prison between 1954 and 1964 and in the underground has not been fully and critically examined. The prison years are pivotal. His decade-long experience in the prison camps radicalized him and convinced him of the urgent need to overthrow the secular order and replace it with a system firmly grounded in the Qur’an.
As one of Qutb’s devoted jail companions, Sayyid Eid, put it, “The prison years transformed Qutb’s thinking and writing. He turned his pen into a deadly weapon against what he called the tawagheet [tyrants] and aimed at awakening the ummah [worldwide community of Muslims] from its prolonged slumber.”
It is behind the bars of Nasserist jails that Qutb constructed his subversive manifestos that promoted an alternative revolutionary Islamist project and attempted to put it into practice. From November 1954, when he began a 15-year sentence, Qutb worked on radical amendments to his multiple-volume commentary on the Qur’an called In the Shadow of the Qur’an. Representing a rupture with his previous moderate views, this new and firmly ideological outlook emphasized revolutionary Islam and the inevitability of the confrontation with jahiliyya, a term historically used to refer to the spiritual ignorance of Arabian society prior to the arrival of Islam. Qutb drew a direct line between the “the old jahiliyya of the Arabs” with what he called al-jahiliyya al-haditha, the modern jahiliyya.
Qutb defined jahiliyya as a deviation from the worship of One God. He made a correlation between the Egypt in which he lived and the environment in which the Prophet Muhammad had first spread the message of Islam. To this end, he took a radical step in categorizing contemporary Egyptian society as jahili.
If jahiliyya amounted to the servitude of humans to other humans, for Qutb, true Islamic life involves total submission to God. Qutb preached that Islam would ultimately prevail but its triumph would not occur simply by virtue of its revelation by God but rather through a group of people understanding the task, believing in it completely and conforming to it as closely as possible.” Qutb called for the creation of a Qur’anic generation which would act as a vanguard “to point out the road of salvation to humanity and to build the road as well.”
Qutb and Al-Tanzim al-Sirri
This is all familiar by now. What is little known is that from the second half of the ’50s, Qutb embarked on a mission, while in prison, to recruit fellow Islamist prisoners and to rally them to his revolutionary cause. He was in a paramilitary organization subsequently named al-Tanzim al-Sirri (the Secret Organization) by the Egyptian authorities. Qutb provided ideological and practical guidance to operators who numbered in the hundreds inside and outside prisons. According to his disciples, Qutb’s goal for agreeing to be in charge of al-Tanzim was to protect the Islamist movement and ultimately topple the Nasser regime and Islamize state and society. The historical importance of al-Tanzim lies in that it served as a template for subsequent underground jihadist organizations. Qutb’s revolutionary ideas and actions continue to resonate with radical religious activists worldwide, even though there is no straightforward line between the pioneer Islamist agitator and today’s wave of Muslim extremism.
In the summer of 1965, Nasser’s security forces accidentally discovered al-Tanzim after a member they arrested exposed the underground organization. Qutb and his men lost the fight before “firing a single shot,” as one of his young lieutenants Ali Ashmawi put it. The authorities acted swiftly and aggressively to dismantle al-Tanzim’s cells and to complete the destruction of the Brotherhood. After al-Tanzim was exposed and its members arrested, Qutb took full responsibility for his operational role trying to shield his disciples and followers. In his last testament, Why They Executed Me, he implied that his goal had been to bear the brunt of the burden and to minimize the costs to al-Tanzim’s members.
The Egyptian government used confessions extracted under torture from members of al-Tanzim to indict both Qutb and the Brotherhood leadership. Qutb and al-Tanzim’s six top lieutenants were sentenced to death. According to Nasser’s chief of staff, Sami Sharaf, Nasser had taken a particularly strong line. “Nasser said that executing Qutb would deal the Ikhwan a mortal blow, as well as any future counterrevolution by religious fanatics,” he said. Thousands of members of the Muslim Brothers, including senior leaders, were arrested, allegedly tortured, and given long jail terms. “We wanted to bury the Ikhwan, period,” confessed Sami Sharaf. “Our goal was to remove the cancer from the Egyptian body politic.”
Over a two-year period, I spent countless hours attentively listening to Qutb’s surviving contemporary disciples and his right-hand men in al-Tanzim al-Sirri (the Secret Organization) who joined his underground network and spent years by his side in and out of prison. Reminiscing about their past moments with him, they confided what had transpired behind prison walls and drew an intimate portrait of the radical Islamist theoritician. They told me about Qutb’s antipathy to Nasser and his desire to rid Egypt of its faroun (tyrant). Having spent years with him in the solitude of prisons and outside, Qutb’s disciples are best positioned to clarify the background, intentions, and implication of some of his controversial terms and his vision in general. This small circle of followers were his eyes and ears and would have sacrificed their lives for him, as they have indicated.
Those old men in their seventies and eighties introduced me to a younger Qutbian generation that seeks to carry the revolutionary torch forward. Time and again, I was told by Qutb’s followers that by the late ’50s their mentor was essentially in charge of the Brotherhood and tried to revolutionize the timid Islamist organization. Although in 1966 Nasser hoped to extinguish the Qutbian fire by sending Qutb to the gallows, his “martyrdom” provided the fuel that has powered several jihadist waves, according to his contemporary disciples. Qutb’s loyalists say that he knew that his blood would be a curse to haunt Muslim tawagheet (tyrants) and to quench the thirst of the ummah (the global Muslim community) for sacrifice and cultural and political renewal.
I have extensively relied on these firsthand interviews, recollections, and memoirs of Qutb’s contemporaries to reconstruct his life journey—from a public intellectual with a secular mentality to a revolutionary Islamist. My uninhibited access to Qutb’s most inner circle and that of the Brotherhood’s old guard and younger activists provides a unique window into a shadowy, secretive universe, allowing my biography of Qutb to zero in on these prison years and trace his footsteps and actions, thus filling a major gap in the literature.
My interviews with al-Tanzim’s key lieutenants illuminated Qutb’s role in the organization explaining the influence of prison and torture on his ideological transformation between 1954 and 1965. Moreover, Qutb’s contemporaries elaborate on the relationship between al-Tanzim and the rest of the Brotherhood and the extent to which the rift haunted the Islamist group in the following decades. These illuminating conversations highlight what has been a mysterious presence in discussions of the relationships between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nasserist state, but more importantly, they offer a new dimension to understanding the influence of Qutb and the transformation that he underwent during the prison years from 1954 till 1965.
The stirring of militancy from the ruins of the Brotherhood
In the early ’50s, the Brotherhood represented the largest social force in Egypt. Thus, when the Free Officers clamped down on the Islamist organization in 1953-1954, this confrontation ultimately morphed into a prolonged struggle between secular-leaning Arab nationalism represented by the Nasserist state and an emergent radical Islamist current led by Sayyid Qutb. After Nasser launched first wave of mass arrests against the Muslim Brothers in mid-January 1954, it only took the Islamist group a short while to get up and running again despite the imprisonment of thousands of its senior leaders and members. By June of that year, there were already reports of a revival of Brotherhood activism with the intent of securing the survival of the organization.
In the midst of the 1954 clampdown, the dominant view among senior Muslim Brotherhood, led by the General Guide Hasan al-Hudaybi, was that the organization should endeavor to absorb the shock and wait for more favorable political conditions. Meanwhile, the imprisoned members were already plotting their next moves against the state. A divide between the traditional leadership and the lower-rank members was now gradually developing. The Brothers were angry and bitter because they felt betrayed by Nasser who, without the organization’s support, would have not been able to seize power in 1952. As frustration deepened among some imprisoned Brotherhood members, their resentment increased against their own leadership for its quietism and the prisons thus became a key forum for activism.
Moreover, those who had not been caught up in the crackdown did their best to continue their activities under the oppressive new conditions. One of them was Ahmed Abdel Majid, who was both a member of the Brotherhood and an officer in the Egyptian military intelligence service during the prison years. “After the Nasser regime dismantled the Ikhwan [Islamist movement]—young men— sought to absorb the shock and plot our next moves,” he confided. “Initially, there existed no centralized authority. Each unit did its own thing. Others prayed together and talked politics… In the first two years, we kept a very low profile and refrained from recruitment outside our closest circles,” he explained. Although similar efforts were underway elsewhere, they remained organic and dispersed. “We had no idea that throughout the country other young Egyptians had organized themselves in similar cells and shared our goal,” added Abdel Majid, who was a founding member of al-Tanzim. Therefore, the repression exerted by the Nasserist state only hardened attitudes among some sections of the Muslim Brothers and supporters, both inside and outside the prisons.
The Emergence of al-Tanzim
This context is important to understanding the emergence of al-Tanzim. It formed out of units created by some of those who had remained at liberty after the 1954 clampdown and who were determined to continue their armed activism. Gradually, al-Tanzim developed into a somewhat coordinated paramilitary operation, concentrated in urban areas like Cairo and Alexandria. In the late ’50s, as various cells began to link up with one another, they soon realized they needed to put forward a clear vision or road map for the future.
Al-Tanzim’s beginnings were humble. With the dismantling of the Brotherhood’s institutions and networks, followers and supporters had lost their political equilibrium and they sensed danger. Undeterred by the Nasserist state’s concerted effort to destroy the Islamist group, and with hardly any financial backing or military experience, these young activists took great risks in an uncertain bid to unseat Nasser. The power of ideas is key to understanding their self-conscious action, regardless of how reckless and suicidal it may seem to outsiders. The lesson we can draw from al-Tanzim is still relevant to understanding the rise of paramilitary Islamist groups today, insofar as it speaks to the marrying of radical religious ideas with a sense of injustice, victimhood, and persecution.
The first emir (leader) of al-Tanzim was Abdel Aziz Ali, a former army general and minister who was one of the heroes of the 1919 revolution against the British. However, he was still very much wedded to the old ways of thinking and acting. Al-Tanzim’s lieutenants, in contrast, were ambitious, impatient, and determined to pursue the riskier strategy. They thus searched for a charismatic leader with the capacity and the temperament to make their nascent organization more effective. It was at this stage, having become disillusioned with Abdel Aziz and having been turned down by Abdel Khaleq, that members of al-Tanzim began to put out feelers to Qutb. “The key word was ‘inspiration.’ We searched for a leader who would inspire us and educate us about the duties and responsibilities of jihad,” said Abdel Majid, who was head of al-Tanzim’s intelligence committee. “We were less interested in military and intelligence drills, and more so in theological and ideological renewal and transformation. Sayyid Qutb was an inspirational role model who could empower our nascent jama’a [the community].”
To their delight, al-Tanzim’s lieutenants were able to get in touch with Qutb in prison in the late ’50s via two women who acted as intermediaries: Qutb’s sister Hamida and an audacious Ikhwan activist called Zeinab al-Ghazali. Having thus made contact with Qutb, al-Tanzim’s operatives pleaded with him to be their leader and pledged to swear bay’a to him. “We were elated when word reached us that Qutb had consented to our request,” recalled Abdel A’l Aw’d Musa, an intense 76 year old who was then in his twenties and who established one of the first underground cells outside Cairo.
Before Qutb joined, al-Tanzim had consisted only of disconnected underground cells. With Qutb at the helm, a coherent and unified organization emerged, and the goal shifted from the ouster from power of Nasser and his inner circle to the transformation of society as a whole.
From Qutb’s viewpoint, the decision to offer “guidance,” as he noted in his confessions, to the organization’s young members bordered on suicidal. Sayyid Eid, the prison companion, recalled Qutb saying that he fully expected to be killed by the Egyptian authorities and that “Al-Shahid [the martyr] acted and behaved as if he was destined to be martyred at any moment,” recalled Eid. As Shazili and others noted, Qutb was not a traditional critic or a theorist confined to an ivory tower. “Qutb did not only theorize about the urgent need for a vanguard but devoted the last decade of his life to building a real vanguard,” explained Abdel Majid al-Shazili, who was in charge of a branch of al-Tanzim in Alexandria during this period, during one meeting in his apartment in Alexandria.
Pressed on the question of whether Qutb sanctioned the use of violent means to effect political change, Ashmawi, the young lieutenant, responded: “Yes, Qutb aimed at violently overthrowing the whole social and political order, not only the Nasser regime.” Furthermore, according to Ali Ashmawi, who was an operational commander, Qutb also played a pivotal role in the education and indoctrination of al-Tanzim’s cadres. “Before we connected with Qutb, we were theologically naive, blind and deaf, feeling our way in the darkness,” he said, with a loud laugh. “He opened our eyes and ears to the truth and showed us the way.” Qutb was able to endow al-Tanzim with a theological vision based on his own interpretation of the Qu’ran for the transformation of Egyptian society. Qutb’s texts were smuggled out of the prison and distributed to the five men of the leadership committee of al-Tanzim who would then spend hours studying Qutb’s words.
The Brotherhood Divided
From the second half of the ’50s until his temporary release from jail on health grounds at the end of 1964 at the behest of the prime minister of Iraq, Abdel Salam Arif, Qutb embarked on a mission to recruit fellow Islamist prisoners and to rally them to his revolutionary cause. Having suffered from breathing problems before he was imprisoned, he spent most of his years of incarceration in prison hospital facilities. During a spell in the Tura prison hospital, he interviewed scores of visiting cellmates from various prisons, particularly al-Qanatir, to find out who would be receptive to his revolutionary ideas. He succeeded in recruiting dozens of prisoners to his underground project. Although Qutb’s followers were a minority—nearly one hundred members among the incarcerated Muslim Brothers, who numbered in the low thousands—their very existence shattered the unity of the Islamist group and exposed internal ideological and doctrinal fault lines.
Throughout this time, Qutb never requested authorization from the Brotherhood leadership to recruit imprisoned members to his cause. He went to great lengths to mask his proselytizing efforts from the top leaders of the movement, and when they confronted him, he denied converting detainees. By covertly recruiting prisoners to his revolutionary scheme, Qutb went against the ethos of absolute obedience to the hierarchy that had long been a core principle of the Islamist organization. He possessed no official function or authority to replace the Brotherhood’s worldview with his own interpretation.
Senior leaders were appalled when news reached them that Qutb had been preaching subversive ideas to the rank and file. The most alarming news was his idea of takfir (excommunication), including the whole of Egyptian society: the state, ordinary people, and the ulama. Faced with this new challenge, the Brotherhood leadership grilled Qutb and demanded that he refrain from spreading fitna (sedition).
“A fitna almost tore apart the ranks of the jailed Ikhwan,” acknowledged Abdel Khaleq, Hudaybi’s trusted man. But he claimed that “the supreme guide swiftly cautioned Qutb against any unauthorized teaching and preaching, and nipped the fitna in the bud.” According to Abdel Khaleq, who as Hudaybi’s right-hand official was privy to the confrontation, Qutb disavowed such heretical views and insisted that he only taught prisoners Qur’anic lessons. “He was agreeable and nonconfrontational, seeking to dispel suspicions that he had gone rogue,” Abdel Khaleq said.
In contrast, Sayyid Eid, who was in Qutb’s camp, said that his mentor’s seemingly conciliatory stance was but an artifice. “We [both sides] put the best face on a dangerously embarrassing situation. Qutb had a low opinion of the tired old men of the Ikhwan who suffered in silence at the hands of Nasser and who willingly refused to resist oppression and injustice. He viewed them as being out of touch with the emancipatory and revolutionary power of ‘aqida,” Eid told me. “Sayyid Qutb had contempt for the Ikhwan political leadership, whom he derisively called functionaries,” he added. “He dismissed them as stupid and spineless, status quo men.” Despite his reassurances to Hudaybi and other Muslim Brothers, Qutb had unambiguously excommunicated Nasser. According to Eid, Hudaybi’s intervention did little to calm the dissidents. “Far from it,” he said. “Dozens of Ikhwan members, including myself, were steadfast in their support of Qutb’s defiance of the Nasser regime and the need to build a vanguard to carry out an Islamist revolution.”
In prison Qutb enlisted Muslim Brothers over the heads of their “legitimate” leaders and drove a wedge into the heart of the Islamist movement. Those who looked up to him for inspiration and guidance distanced themselves from the formal institutions of the mainstream Brotherhood, which caused a serious rift between Qutb’s men and other prisoners. According to Ahmed Ra’if, a well-placed member of the Brotherhood who was in contact with both camps at that time, the internal divide even poisoned the atmosphere in more than one jail. The two sides bickered so bitterly and intensely that Hudaybi issued a directive from his prison cell calling for a cessation to the hostilities, although neither camp adhered to a ceasefire and skirmishes frequently occurred.
Meanwhile, Qutb continued to disseminate his ideas during daily lessons to the prisoners. According to attendees, these primarily focused on two themes: ‘aqida (Islamic doctrine), and siyasa (politics). Qutb reminded his disciples that if they harnessed the hidden power of ‘aqida, they would be emancipated and fearless; they would become closer to God and act as his faithful agents in reinstituting a just and pure Islamic order on earth. “His aim was to transform members from mere religious activists into revolutionaries to confront the internal and external enemies of Islam,” confided Eid. “He made new men out of us, armed us with ‘aqida and summoned us to reestablish Islam in its purity and beauty in a similar way to that of the early Muslims.”
Eid’s recollections testify to the power of Qutb’s message, written especially for the youth who he hoped would spearhead the coming Islamist revolution. “Unfettered by previous conventional interpretations of the Qur’an, Qutb offered his own interpretation in a straightforward and accessible style and addressed us in captivating language that resonated with all of us,” Eid recalled. “My eyes welled with tears when Qutb dictated some passages of his masterpieces, Signposts and his Qur’anic exegesis,” said Eid, who transcribed books that Qutb dictated to him during their time together in prison. “I and many others felt that he was giving expression to our deepest aspirations and fears about the plight of Egypt and the ummah, and the threat posed by renegade rulers and their masters—crusaders and Zionists.”
The hardening of attitudes among some Muslim Brothers members translated into a determination to take practical steps to strike violently at the Nasserist state. Some of those who had moved in these circles at that time, whether inside or outside of prison, told me that they had wanted to kill Nasser and his close aides. More ambitious members had visions of overthrowing the regime as a whole and replacing it with a Qur’an-inspired government. A common thread among these newly radicalized recruits was visceral hatred of Nasser and what he represented.
“We wanted to pull Nasser’s junta up by its roots and liberate our Ikhwan brethren from captivity,” recollected Ali Ashmawi, who took steps to achieve these ends and planned to kill Nasser. “Initially, our aim was to prevent the Ikhwan organization from disintegrating and to prepare the ground for a future uprising against Nasser and his thugs. We wanted organizational continuity but with new blood and fresh faces unknown to the security services.”
Of all al-Tanzim’s lieutenants and foot soldiers, Ashmawi was the most forthcoming about the history of the organization because he had little to lose, having been demonized by the Brotherhood for breaking down under torture following his arrest in 1965 and exposing his co-conspirators. His old cohorts have never forgiven this “human act of weakness and treachery,” as he put it, although he assured me that when he found himself sitting next to Qutb in a courtroom some weeks after their arrest, the latter showed empathy for his plight. “I explained to him that the Ikhwan abused me and treated me like a pariah in prison. Qutb reassured me that he understood my predicament and that blaming the victim is wrong. ‘Nasser’s security men are the villains, not you,’ [he] added with a gentle smile on his face,” according to Ashmawi.
Ashmawi’s narrative is significant for this study as he was present at the birth of al-Tanzim and served as its military field commander. His is the most unscripted, comprehensive, and revealing voice on the issues at stake, and the least constrained by any existing connections with the Brotherhood. Most of Ashmawi’s recollections are corroborated by other members of al-Tanzim and independent sources.
Others who moved in these circles at the time also confirmed the shift to more militant views that was then under way. “We could not be passive while our brethren were being unjustly abused and oppressed,” said Ahmed Abdel Majid. “That would have violated one of the fundamental tenets of our religion; resisting injustice and defying renegade rulers.” Beyond the question of vengeance and a perceived duty to defend their oppressed co-religionists, taking action against Nasser under these circumstances was also seen as necessary in order to defend Islam itself. “Once Nasser’s regime persecuted the Ikhwan, it became obligatory for us to step forward and defend Islam,” said Abdel Majid. Challenged on his implicit assumption that the Brotherhood could be directly equated with Islam per se, he responded that “the Islamist movement is the guardian and protector of Islam… If you target its sons, you are harming Islam and hindering its growth.”
More and more former disciples of Qutb told me their priority had been to eliminate Nasser: “We concluded that Nasser must go. We wanted to kill the devil and rid Egypt of him,” agreed Abdel A’l Aw’d Musa, who was introduced to me by Abdel Majid. The two men knew each other from al-Tanzim and became best friends while in prison. “Blinded by hatred and revenge, many of us pledged to assassinate Nasser and be martyred in the process,” added Aw’d, who, as mentioned previously, was in charge of an underground cell which, although initially designed to assist the families of incarcerated Ikhwan members, became tasked with the more ambitious goal of subverting the Nasser regime. “My unit’s fundamental goal was to kill Nasser and avenge our persecuted Brethren,” he explained. “We recruited between fifty and seventy fit young men, raised one thousand pounds to carry out the operation, and trained and readied ourselves for an opportune moment.” The cell selected Alexandria as an ideal location and developed a plan to position three separate assassination teams armed with automatic weapons.
However, as division over whether it would be better to assassinate Nasser or overthrow the regime hardened, the plan never came to fruition. “As we talked to other members who had also organized themselves in small paramilitary units, our plot met with stiff resistance and opposition from senior leaders who warned against rash actions inspired by vengeance and emotion. We were told that killing Nasser would not dramatically change the system and that a like-minded secular dictator would replace him. It was not easy to postpone our short-term goal of punishing Nasser for his crimes, for the greater good of overthrowing the corrupt, decadent regime,” explained Aw’d. “While debating the decision with our Brothers, we cried and prayed for inspiration and wisdom. What you need to comprehend is that Nasser hurt us badly and left deep scars in both our souls and our bodies,” he emphasized.
Allergic to the accusation that radical Islamism sprang from within their ranks, contemporary Brotherhood leaders deny even very existence of al-Tanzim as an armed force. “Why do you keep quizzing me about Qutb’s al-Tanzim?” Mahmoud Izzat, a 70-year-old multimillionaire who currently runs the organization in exile, demanded of me angrily, arguing that “the whole thing is a Nasserist construction invented by his intelligence thugs to use as a bludgeon against the Ikhwan,” he assured me. Others within the Islamist group, while acknowledging the existence of al-Tanzim, deny that it ever had the blessing of the leadership. Senior official Abdel Khaleq continually insisted that the senior leadership, particularly the General Guide, had not sanctioned Qutb’s paramilitary organization. “Hudaybi’s hands had already been burned, and he would not let a few well-meaning and excited activists ignite a fire that would destroy the organization,” he insisted.
Although Qutb kept his recruitment of followers inside the prisons, radical activist Zeinab al-Ghazali Ghazali seems to have acted as an intermediary between Qutb and Hudaybi, the General Guide, thus pointing to some kind of awareness and approval of the existence of al-Tanzim by the Brotherhood’s top leadership. The nature of this relationship goes to the very heart of a broader question regarding whether al-Tanzim was a paramilitary arm of the Brotherhood or an independent venture undertaken by young dissidents. From the time of the exposure of al-Tanzim in 1965, the Egyptian authorities launched a propaganda offensive aimed at undermining the Islamist group as a whole asserting that al-Tanzim was its affiliate. Against this background, officials of the Brotherhood have repeatedly denied that the broader movement and its leadership played any formal role in al-Tanzim and have accused the Nasserist state of manufacturing evidence.
Primary evidence suggests that Hudaybi did in fact sanction al-Tanzim. Abdel Majid recalled that after Abdel Khaleq, the General Guide’s trusted man, had refused to take charge of the organization, its members had approached Hudaybi directly to seek his approval. “We could not have moved forward without the authorization of the supreme guide because we needed religious legitimation,” said Ali Ashmawi. The young lieutenant. “We sought and promptly received Hudaybi’s approval.”
All surviving members of al-Tanzim say that from the outset, Qutb himself had refused to head the underground group unless he obtained an official decree from the General Guide. These contradictory internal accounts are unsurprising given that the Islamist organization was in a state of virtual paralysis. Hudaybi wanted to have it both ways: to shield the political organization against accusations, while keeping his options open with regard to the possibility of militarily confronting the Nasserist state.
The Clampdown on al-Tanzim
For his part, Qutb assured his disciples that his death would in fact serve as a catalyst for his cherished Islamist revolution. There are many accounts of the final hours leading up to Qutb’s execution on August 29, 1966. A common thread that runs through these stories is that Qutb went to the gallows with no hesitation or regret. From interviews with his disciples, a portrait emerges of the man as a crusader who was unafraid to die for his beliefs and in fact welcomed martyrdom. Well versed in Islamic history, Qutb knew better than Nasser the enduring and powerful role that iconic symbols and martyrs have played in Islamic tradition. One of the few images that exist of Qutb on the day of his hanging shows him with a smile on his face.
Qutb was buried in an unmarked grave in al-Qarafa al-Kubra (the Great Cemetery) but has remained alive in the minds and hearts of Islamists worldwide, endearingly referred to as al-Shahid al-Hayy (the living martyr). “Qutb’s words have a special resonance due to his steadfastness in the face of tyranny,” said Shazili, who would eventually be imprisoned after al-Tanzim was crushed in 1965; he spent almost a decade behind bars. “By practicing and living what he preached, he set an enduring model for future generations of religious dissidents.”
Conclusion
The relationship between Qutb and the Brotherhood was fraught with tensions and contradictions. Qutb was an outsider, a belated convert to the cause. Only 18 months after his official joining of the Islamist group in 1953, he was arrested and Qutb never really developed institutional links within the Brotherhood. A maverick with a volatile character, he was not the type to toe the party line.
According to his disciples, Qutb saw himself as guiding the Islamist caravan in the right direction and rescuing Islam from oblivion. His attempted coup against the Brotherhood shows the extent of his ideological transformation as a revolutionary Islamist theorist and ideologue, and his determination to bring about real change. He aimed at dismantling all existing institutions, including his own mainstream Islamist group. This fact does not match the emphasis typically placed by Qutb’s biographers on continuity over discontinuity, and their tendency to portray Qutb as simply an extension of the Brotherhood institutional family.
What emerges from Qutb’s formative years and early adulthood was his quest for recognition and deference, no matter which circles he navigated. Unsuccessful in the literary scene and with the Free Officers, his new reinterpretation of Islam finally won him the recognition for which he had so urgently strived. In his own writings, the carefully crafted image of Qutb is that of a prophet-like, selfless man whose total embrace of Islam allowed him to reestablish the sovereignty of God on earth (hakimiyya). In this context, it is unsurprising that the political struggle between the Nasserist state and the Qutbian Islamists has come to be invested with existential overtones. With both camps repeating mirroring narratives of the Other as an existential threat, violence became the norm.
Unfortunately, this vision is still a prevalent feature of Arab politics and has contributed to the rise of waves of radical jihadists, including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. This initial framing of the struggle as existential has been recycled by subsequent generations of religious activists and nationalists. Today this fierce struggle plays out in Egypt, the most populous Arab state, and in neighboring Arab countries. In their quest for power, both Nasser and the Brotherhood laid the foundation for an articulation of politics and of the relationship between ruler and people as strictly unitary and autocratic, thus paving the way for the institutionalization and normalization of one-party authoritarian rule and religious extremism.
Category Archives: Terror
Germany’s al Qaeda/Jihad Problems Include Welfare Payments
Primer: May 16. Ziyad K., a 32-year-old Iraqi Yazidi, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for raping two Chinese students, aged 22 and 28, at the University of Bochum in August and November 2016. Police linked the man, who was living with his wife and two children in a refugee shelter in Bochum, to both crimes through DNA evidence. “He has never shown remorse,” Prosecutor Andreas Bachmann said. “How could a person fleeing from violence and danger come to do this terrible violence to other people?”
The Muslim population of Germany surpassed six million in 2017 to become approximately 7.2% of the overall population of 83 million, according to calculations by the Gatestone Institute.
A recent Pew Research Center study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe estimated that Germany’s Muslim population had reached five million by the middle of 2016, but that number is short by at least a million.
Pew, for instance, “decided not to count” the more than one million Muslim asylum seekers who arrived in the country in 2015-2017 because “they are not expected to receive refugee status.” European Union human rights laws, however, prohibit Germany from deporting many, if not most, of the refugees and asylum seekers back to conflict areas. As a result, most migrants who arrived in the country will almost certainly remain there over the long term.
In addition, German authorities have admitted to losing track of potentially hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, many of whom are living on German streets and are believed to be sustaining themselves on a steady diet of drug dealing, pickpocketing, purse snatching and other forms of petty crime. Much more detail here.
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According to the German newspaper WAZ, Sami A. allegedly recruited young Muslims in Bochum mosques to join the “Holy War.” The paper also linked him to the radicalization of two members of the so-called Düsseldorf al Qaeda cell.
WAZ also reported that Sami A. had taught two terrorists in Bochum mosques: 21-one-year-old Amid C. from Bochum and 28-year-old Halil S. from nearby Gelsenkirchen. Both reportedly received ideological training from him for their alleged terrorist plan. The two young men are on trial in Düsseldorf, accused of planning an attack together with two accomplices. According to the indictment, they intended to plant a cluster bomb in a crowd of people and “spread fear and terror in Germany.” More here.
Newsweek: The alleged former bodyguard of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden has been found collecting welfare checks from the government in Germany, according to local media, because he cannot be deported—even though he was refused asylum status.
A report in the German tabloid Bild said the man, named only as 42-year-old Sami A to protect his privacy, cannot be deported to his native Tunisia because he is at risk of torture there. He has lived in Germany since 1997 and has a wife and three children.
Sami A collects around $1,430 a month in welfare from the German government, a figure revealed after the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) asked questions of the local authority where he lives in Bochum, near the Dutch border.
He was accused by witnesses in a terrorism trial back in 2005 of having been Bin Laden’s bodyguard near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a few months at the turn of the millennium, something the judge said he believed to be true, though Sami A denies it.
German authorities regard Sami A as a “dangerous preacher,” reported Spiegel Online in 2012, and prosecutors say he was responsible for the radicalization of two men who later former part of a terror cell caught planning a bomb attack.
Though considered a security risk, no charges of Al Qaeda membership have so far been brought against Sami A. He must report every day to the police in Bochum, which he has done so since 2006. He was refused asylum status because of the security concerns, the BBC reported.
Will Mohammed Haydar Zammar be Sent to Gitmo?
Mohammed Haydar Zammar is obviously still an enemy combatant and under President Trump’s pledge, he would make full use of the detention center. 
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Kurdish forces in Syria have detained a man who is believed to be a Syrian-born German jihadist suspected of recruiting some of the 9/11 hijackers to Al Qaeda, a senior Kurdish commander said.
The detainee, identified as Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who is his mid-fifties, was apprehended in northern Syria and was being interrogated, the commander told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday. His fate remained unclear.
The jihadist is best known for allegedly helping plan the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S., the report said, including recruiting some of the hijackers to the terror group.
Zammar fled Germany after the attacks and relocated to Morocco, where he was soon arrested in an operation involving CIA agents.
He was later handed to Syrian authorities who, in 2007, sentenced him to 12 years in prison for being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
He was released from prison after the Syrian civil war broke out in the region and most hardline jihadists and Islamists were released. Zammar, among many others, is believed to have joined the Islamic State group.
The Kurdish official didn’t say if Zammar has been actively engaged in fighting for the terror group in Syria.
The Pentagon hasn’t yet confirmed the suspect’s capture, but reportedly said it was looking into it.
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Zammar, a German citizen, was born in Syria. At ten he moved to Germany with his family. Even among his very religiously conservative family, Mohammed Zammar impressed many with his extreme devotion at an early age. He became well-known at many of the mosques in Hamburg, Germany. While still in high school, Zammar began to be associated with Jihadists through Mamoun Darkazanli, a fellow Syrian and al-Qaeda financier.
Zammar attended a metalworking college and planned to work for Mercedes-Benz. He worked as a translator in Saudi Arabia, and then took a job as a truck-driver back in Hamburg. But in 1991, he decided to make jihad his full-time job.
He flew to Afghanistan by way of Pakistan and underwent a training program for mujahideen fighters. His training included weapons knowledge, use of explosives, and advanced tactics. He performed well and was moved to an elite training camp near Jalalabad. By the end of the year, he had “graduated” and returned to Hamburg.
Zammar travelled extensively over the next few years. While working as a mechanic, he took long trips to Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Sweden. In 1995, he traveled to Bosnia to fight there. And in 1996, Zammar visited Afghanistan for a second time, this time to become a formal member of the group called al-Qaeda. He was reported to have been personally invited by Osama bin Laden. More here.
Meanwhile, beyond al Qaeda and Islamic State in Syria, a new terror group is finally named and identified. The original AUMF still applies.
A new and dangerous extremist group spawned from al Qaeda is consolidating power in northwestern Syria, while the U.S. has focused on fighting remnants of Islamic State elsewhere in the country and striking the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons facilities.
Since surfacing as the country’s most potent militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has battled Western-backed rebel groups to extend its control across Idlib province, enforcing its version of Shariah and raising funds by taxing flows of people and goods.
The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, a former al Qaeda fighter, has vowed to conquer Damascus and impose Islamic rule across Syria. in a January speech, he exhorted followers to engage in “a war of ideas, a war of minds, a war of wills, a war of perseverance,” according to the SITE Intel Group.
Abu Mohammad al-Julani, leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in a photo from 2016, when he headed a predecessor group, the Nusra Front. Photo: Associated Press
Thousands of fighters with the group—an offshoot of the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s former Syrian affiliate—have dug in around Idlib, analysts say, as the U.S. concentrates on Syria’s other battles and moves toward what President Donald Trump has said would be a quick exit from Syria.
“The area seems to be out of focus for Western powers,” said Hassan Hassan, a Washington-based analyst with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, a think tank. “The jihadis are having a honeymoon there.”
The group has also fought fiercely against adversaries. In February, after four months of fighting, it announced the surrender of Islamic State cells it defeated in Idlib. In March, it claimed the capture of about 25 villages in Aleppo and Idlib provinces, capturing tanks and armored vehicles.
This month, the group has been fighting Syrian government forces with artillery and snipers in Homs, Hama and Aleppo.
In areas under its control, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has set up a religious police force similar to that of Islamic State, residents say. It initially rewarded children with sweets for memorizing the Quran, but soon moved to breaking hookah pipes as part of a smoking ban and ordering clothes shops to cover heads of mannequins. Beauty salons were told to ditch makeup, Idlib residents say.
In its propaganda, the group likens Syria to a frail ship that can be kept afloat only by Islamic rule of law. Shariah ensures that “the ship doesn’t sink,” goes a slogan of the group. Griping of shortages under its rule, residents retort: “There is no water, so the ship can’t sink.”
The group has jailed men and women who socialize without being related, residents say, and closed a university in the town of al-Dana late last year because it held mixed-gender classes. In the town of Saraqeb, where residents last year faced down threats from extremists and held the first direct elections in Syria since 1953, the group has seized control of the local council.
“Yes, we are a conservative society, but these actions are very extreme,” one young resident of Idlib said.
Compounding the anarchy in Idlib has been the recent arrival of nearly 50,000 people, including rebels, from Eastern Ghouta outside Damascus, the scene of a brutal crackdown by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
The new arrivals have exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in Idlib, already home to about a million internally displaced Syrians. The poor conditions and lack of jobs has proved fertile ground for the recruiting efforts of extremist groups, which promise to pay anyone willing to fight for a living wage.
For now, the Syrian regime has been fixated on crushing smaller pockets of fighters, including with the suspected use of chemical weapons in Eastern Ghouta on April 7, an attack that killed dozens of civilians. But Damascus is now expected to eventually turn its attention to the high concentration of militants in Idlib in what could be as bloody a fight as the battle for Aleppo, which fell in 2016.
A week after the apparent chemical-weapons strike, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered military strikes on several regime targets alongside British and French allies. The attack hit facilities connected with Syria’s chemical-weapons program and was unlikely to diminish the regime’s conventional capabilities.
Mr. Trump had days before vowed a drawdown of U.S. troops, with Islamic State on the verge of defeat. After the weekend’s strikes his administration stepped up efforts to replace the U.S. military’s 2,000-strong contingent in Syria with troops from allied Middle Eastern countries.
Meanwhile, some U.S. officials have expressed worries over the resilience of other extremist groups now supplanting Islamic State. Brett McGurk, presidential envoy to the international coalition fighting Islamic State, has called Idlib “the largest al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”
U.S. troops in Syria are mostly focused on eastern Syria, joining Kurdish and other fighters battling the shrinking pockets of Islamic State militants. Turkey has been fixated on preventing a Kurdish militia that it considers terrorists from expanding on its southern border.
As a result, a hodgepodge of armed groups, many with extremist agendas, have thrived in Idlib, to the detriment of other forces opposing the Assad regime. “The space for moderate opposition continues to close in the northwest,” said a senior Western official who tracks Syria closely.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham now seeks to control important administrative sectors across Idlib through a body it calls the Salvation Government, which generates revenue by charging residents for electricity and water. HTS also controls the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey.
Members of HTS couldn’t be reached for comment.
“The Salvation Government tries to win people’s hearts by providing services,” one 27-year-old man in Idlib said. “At the same time, they try to dominate people.” Some have pushed back cautiously. University students attend classes in the open. Hospitals have threatened to close if the group interferes in their work. Among its many critics, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is privately known as “Hitish,” an echo of the pejorative acronym “Daesh” that people disdainfully use for Islamic State.
Yes, Secretary Mattis, there IS a Land Bridge
So, all terror roads in the Middle East still lead to Tehran. At the direction of Tehran, Hezbollah, the Iranian militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp operations is selection regions across the globe with wild abandon.
January 2018, in a question and answer session: Q: On Iran’s role in Iraq and Syria, do you believe that a land bridge exists between Iran and Syria through Iraq? And, if so, are you concerned about it? Is there anything the United States can do about it?
SEC. MATTIS: No, I don’t — I don’t think there’s a land bridge right now. There’s still enough rough times — you know, rough terrain, rough enemy units that haven’t been cleaned up, and all the usual cleanup going on, and — plus you’ve got the combination of where the people we’re fighting — advising and that sort of thing in Syria are abutting, in some cases, the Russian forces who are helping the regime, abutting the Turkish elements. There’s — I don’t think there’s a land bridge right now.
*** So, while the United States along with France and Britain delivered 105 missiles to take out three chemical weapons locations in Syria, other locations remain in addition to the Assad air assets. Russia, North Korea, and Tehran were all watching for weeks the actions of the West. Russia declares the most recent chemical weapons attack was at the hand of the White Helmets, then it was a ploy by Britain, then it was a CIA operation. Meanwhile, the chemical weapons inspection envoy arriving in Douma, the suburb of Damascus had to find cover after being fired upon.
That brings us back to domestic threats and the strategy as developed by the Trump administration in dealing with Iran and Russia, much less Iraq. Is there one other than the threat of exiting the JCPOA? Not so far it seems. The increasing threat? Satellite land bridges perhaps….from Latin America to covert cells across our homeland.
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Iranian-backed militants are operating across the United States mostly unfettered, raising concerns in Congress and among regional experts that these “sleeper cell” agents are poised to launch a large-scale attack on the American homeland, according to testimony before lawmakers.
Iranian agents tied to the terror group Hezbollah have already been discovered in the United States plotting attacks, giving rise to fears that Tehran could order a strike inside America should tensions between the Trump administration and Islamic Republic reach a boiling point.
Intelligence officials and former White House officials confirmed to Congress on Tuesday that such an attack is not only plausible, but relatively easy for Iran to carry out at a time when the Trump administration is considering abandoning the landmark nuclear deal and reapplying sanctions on Tehran.
There is mounting evidence that Iran poses “a direct threat to the homeland,” according to Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and chair of its subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence.
A chief concern is “Iranian support for Hezbollah, which is active in the Middle East, Latin America, and here in the U.S., where Hezbollah operatives have been arrested for activities conducted in our own country,” King said, referring the recent arrest of two individuals plotting terror attacks in New York City and Michigan.
“Both individuals received significant weapons training from Hezbollah,” King said. “It is clear Hezbollah has the will and capability.”
After more than a decade of receiving intelligence briefs, King said he has concluded that “Hezbollah is probably the most experienced and professional terrorist organization in the world,” even more so than ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Asked if Iran could use Hezbollah to conduct strikes on the United States, a panel of experts including intelligence officials and former White House insiders responded in the affirmative.
“They are as good or better at explosive devices than ISIS, they are better at assassinations and developing assassination cells,” said Michael Pregent, a former intelligence officer who worked to counter Iranian influence in the region. “They’re better at targeting, better at looking at things,” and they can outsource attacks to Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah is smart,” Pregent said. “They’re very good at keeping their communications secure, keeping their operational security secure, and, again, from a high profile attack perspective, they’d be good at improvised explosive devices.”
Others testifying before Congress agreed with this assessment.
“The answer is absolutely. We do face a threat,” said Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has long tracked Iran’s militant efforts. “Their networks are present in the Untied States.”
Iran is believed to have an auxiliary fighting force or around 200,000 militants spread across the Middle East, according to Nader Uskowi, a onetime policy adviser to U.S. Central Command and current visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
At least 50 to 60 thousand of these militants are “battle tested” in Syria and elsewhere.
“It doesn’t take many of them to penetrate this country and be a major threat,” Uskowi said. “They can pose a major threat to our homeland.”
While Iran is currently more motivated to use its proxies such as Hezbollah regionally for attacks against Israel or U.S. forces, “those sleeper cells” positioned in the United States could be used to orchestrate an attack, according to Brian Katulis, a former member of the White House National Security Council under President Bill Clinton.
“The potential is there, but the movement’s center of focus is in the region,” said Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Among the most pressing threats to the U.S. homeland is Hezbollah’s deep penetration throughout Latin America, where it finances its terror activities by teaming up with drug cartels and crime syndicates.
“Iran’s proxy terror networks in Latin America are run by Tehran’s wholly owned Lebanese franchise Hezbollah,” according to Ottolenghi. “These networks are equal part crime and terror” and have the ability to provide funding and logistics to militant fighters.
“Their presence in Latin America must be viewed as a forward operating base against America’s interest in the region and the homeland itself,” he said.
These Hezbollah operatives exploit loopholes in the U.S. immigration system to enter America under the guise of legitimate business.
Operatives working for Hezbollah and Iran use the United States “as a staging ground for trade-based and real estate-based money laundering.” They “come in through the front door with a legitimate passport and a credible business cover story,” Ottolenghi said.
The matter is further complicated by Iran’s presence in Syria, where it has established not only operating bases, but also weapons factories that have fueled Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s war on Israel.
Iran’s development of advanced ballistic missile and rocket technology—which has continued virtually unimpeded since the nuclear deal was enacted—has benefitted terror groups such as Hezbollah.
“Iran is increasing Hezbollah’s capability to target Israel with more advanced and precision guided rockets and missiles,” according to Pregent. “These missiles are being developed in Syria under the protection of Syrian and Russian air defense networks.”
In Iraq, Iranian forces “have access to U.S. funds and equipment in the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and Iraq’s Ministry of Interior,” Pregent said.
The Trump administration has offered tough talk on Iran, but failed to take adequate action to dismantle its terror networks across the Middle East, as well as in Latin American and the United States itself, according to CAP’s Katulis.
“The Trump administration has talked a good game and has had strong rhetoric, but I would categorize its approach vis-à-vis Iran as one of passive appeasement,” said Katulis. “We simply have not shown up in a meaningful way.”
What is the Syria Strategy from the West?
In the days ahead, it appears that Russia and the rogue friends they keep will respond to the West likely by a obscure cyber war. Take personal caution with your financial activity.
The other warning is news reports for are specific assassination attempts covered to look as suicide. While we heard about the poison assassination attempt in Salisbury, England of Skripal and his daughter, the United States had it’s own successful assassination in 2015 of Mikhail Lesin in Washington DC. Additionally, the UK had two another successful wet jobs as it is called going back to 20o6 and 2010. Those victims were Alexander Litvinenko and Gareth Williams who worked for GCHQ
There are many other hit operations that happened in Russia including the recent death of Maxim Borodin.
There are an estimated 250+ journalists that have been killed since the fall of the Soviet Union.
So, it is now declared that the United Nations quit counting the dead from the Syria civil war since the number has officially exceeded 500,000. What is disgusting however is, we sorta care about the dead but the methods no longer matter unless chemical weapons are used. How nuts is that? So, France, Britain and the United States respond to the most recent attack –> 
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check – round one of airstrikes
check – round two of airstrikes
Let’s give credit where credit is due. By John Hannah
First, U.S. President Donald Trump set a red line and enforced it. He warned that the large-scale use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would trigger a U.S. attack. When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crossed that red line a year ago, Trump responded with 59 cruise missiles that took out about 20 percent of Syria’s operational aircraft. A year later, Trump has acted again after Assad chose to challenge him a second time. This attack was twice as big and hit multiple targets, including what U.S. defense officials called the “heart” of Syria’s chemical weapons program, substantially degrading Assad’s ability to produce the deadly agents.
That ain’t peanuts. No, there’s no guarantee it will end Assad’s use of chemical weapons — in which case Trump and his military have made clear that they’ll strike again, almost certainly harder than the time before. And no, nothing that happened Friday night will, in isolation, alter the trajectory of Syria’s bloody civil war. But the effective deployment of U.S. power in defense of a universal norm barring the use of some of the world’s worst weapons against innocent men, women, and children is nevertheless to be applauded — limited an objective as it may be. Also to be praised is the possible emergence of a commander in chief whose threats to use force need to be taken seriously by U.S. adversaries. Once established, this kind of credibility (while no panacea) can be a powerful instrument in the U.S. foreign-policy arsenal. Once lost, it is hard to recover, and the consequences can be severe. For evidence, just see the post-2013 results, from Crimea to Syria.
A second important virtue of Friday night’s attack was its multilateral character. With barely a week’s notice, Britain, France, and the United States, the three most powerful militaries of the trans-Atlantic alliance, all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, seamlessly operated on the seas and in the skies of the Middle East to defend their common interests and values against a murderous Russian and Iranian client. What’s the worth of that kind of unity, coordination, and seriousness of purpose? It’s hard to quantify precisely. But anyone who’s ever toiled as a practitioner in the national security space knows, deep in their bones, that it matters — a lot. And it especially matters in the case of a U.S. president who has too often unfairly — and, to my mind, dangerously — discounted the value of Europe, the West, and the post-World War II system of institutions and alliances that his predecessors built. In that power and righteousness of the world’s leading liberal democracies acting in concert, there’s a significant value-added that no mere counting of ships, planes, and missiles can adequately capture. Kudos to the president and his team for their skill in mounting this posse. It’s an important framework that they hopefully will continue to invest in to confront the multitude of urgent international challenges now staring us in the face.
A few other related observations: Say what you will about the wisdom of some of the president’s public messaging last week, but once he made clear that he again would act to enforce his red line, U.S. adversaries took him deadly seriously. Russian ships dispersed from port. Syria abandoned its own air bases and rushed to co-locate its aircraft near Russian military assets. And Iranian-backed fighters, including Hezbollah forces, allegedly vacated certain positions and went to ground for fear of a possible U.S. strike. Again, the fact that the United States’ worst adversaries appear to take Trump’s threats with the seriousness they deserve is a very good thing, a genuine national security asset that needs to be husbanded, reinforced, and carefully but systematically exploited going forward. But hopefully last week’s experience also serves as a reminder to the president of the deep wisdom inherent in the criticism that he’s long leveled at his predecessors: Don’t telegraph your military punch.
Another observation: There was much nervous hand-wringing before the strike about a possible U.S.-Russia confrontation. Rightly so. No one wants World War III to break out over Syria. All prudent and appropriate measures should be taken to mitigate those risks. But in some circles, the hyping of the concern threatened to become absolutely paralyzing, a justification (or excuse) for doing nothing in the face of Assad’s abominable use of weapons of mass destruction.
In the end, of course, for all their chest thumping, the Russians did next to nothing as Western planes and missiles flew under their noses to strike a client that they’ve expended significant resources to save.
Just as the Israelis, for their part, have conducted nearly 100 strikes against Russia’s Iranian, Hezbollah, and Syrian allies with barely more than a clenched fist from Moscow. The fact is that for all the firepower they may have assembled in Syria, and for all the success they’ve enjoyed carpet-bombing defenseless civilian populations and poorly equipped Islamist radicals, Russian forces are severely overmatched — both in terms of quality and quantity — by what the United States and its allies can bring to bear in any head-to-head confrontation in the eastern Mediterranean. Putin knows it. So does his military. That reality of the actual balance of power — not only militarily, but economically and diplomatically as well — is always worth keeping in mind.
On their own, the Syrians and their Iranian allies were virtually defenseless against the U.S.-led strike. The best they had was a flurry of unguided missiles haphazardly fired after the mission’s designated targets had been turned to smoldering ruins. Of course, it was only a few years ago (well before the Russians intervened with their advanced S-400 surface-to-air batteries) that senior U.S. officials were pointing to the dangers of Assad’s air defenses as an excuse for not acting to protect Syrian civilians from being systematically terrorized by barrel bombs, indiscriminate artillery fire, and Scud missiles. Let’s hope that the overwhelming success of this attack puts the reality of that threat into somewhat better perspective for U.S. military planners — while also serving as a powerful reminder not just to Assad, but to Iran and other adversaries as well, of the extreme vulnerability they potentially face at the hands of U.S. air power and weaponry.
My criticisms of the U.S. strike? It was clearly at the lowest end of the options presented the president. As suggested by some of what I’ve said above, Trump was too risk-averse. Even with the president telegraphing that a strike was coming, the universe of targets that the United States could have attacked — while still minimizing collateral damage and the threat of great-power escalation — was far larger than what it ended up hitting. Trump could have done much more to degrade the Assad regime’s overall capability to wage war against its own people. The United States could have sent far more powerful messages to the Syrian government’s key military and intelligence power nodes of the risks they run to their own survival through mindless obedience to Assad’s genocidal criminality. Ditto the Russians and Iranians, and the realization that their failure to reign in the most psychotic tendencies of their client could substantially raise the costs and burdens of their Syrian venture if they’re not careful.
In short, everything the United States wanted to do with the strike — hold Assad accountable, re-establish deterrence against the use of chemical weapons, send a message to the Russians and Iranians about the price to be paid for failing to control their client, and move toward a credible political settlement — could have been done more effectively, at acceptable risk, with a significantly larger strike.
More fundamentally, I have deep concerns about what appears to be the president’s emerging strategy in Syria. It amounts to defeating the Islamic State, deterring the use of chemical weapons, and then withdrawing U.S. forces as quickly as possible from eastern Syria. As for the more strategically significant menace posed to vital U.S. interests by an aspiring Iranian hegemon seeking to dominate the Middle East’s northern tier, drive the United States out of the region, and destroy Israel, the administration’s strategy is not particularly compelling. As best as one can tell from the president’s recent statements — including the one he made on Friday night announcing the Syria strike — it amounts to encouraging some combination of regional allies (and perhaps Russia) to fill the vacuum the United States leaves behind.
That kind of abdication of U.S. leadership rarely works out well. Leveraging U.S. power to demand greater burden-sharing from partners who have even more at stake than the United States does? Definitely. Less effective: When the United States washes its hands of a problem with deep implications for U.S. national security in vague hope that other parties — smaller, weaker, more deeply conflicted and strategically myopic than the United States is — will organically rise to the occasion and mobilize a virtuous coalition that takes care of business and keeps at bay the country’s most vicious adversaries.
The president is right, of course: The Middle East is a deeply troubled place. There are no great victories to be won there. There is no glory to be gained. Just worst disasters to be avoided, threats contained, and important national interests preserved. Yes it is imperative that the United States does so smartly, prudently, by, with and, through local partners and multilateral coalitions, using all instruments of national power, and in a way that sustains the understanding and support of the American people. But do so the country must. Packing its bags and vacating the playing field to the likes of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah is escapism masquerading as strategy. Trump’s important response to the Syrian chemical weapons attack last week is evidence that he may still be capable of grasping that unforgiving reality. He should be encouraged to build on it.
John Hannah