Al Qaeda leadership is taking some hits from the home team on the topic of all that intra-mural slaughter:
Al Qaeda increasingly faces sharp criticism from once-loyal sympathizers who openly question its ideology and tactics, including attacks that kill innocent Muslims, according to U.S. intelligence officials, counter-terrorism experts and the group’s own communications.
A litany of complaints target Osama bin Laden’s network and its affiliates for their actions in Iraq and North Africa, emphasis on suicide bombings instead of political action and tepid support for, or outright antagonism toward, militant groups pressing the Palestinian cause.
In response to the criticism, AQ #2 Ayman Zawahiri is forced to use some pretty twisted logic in defense of his Baghdad butchers:
“Excuse me, Mr. Zawahiri, but who is it who is killing with Your Excellency’s blessing the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria? Do you consider the killing of women and children to be jihad?” asked one questioner whom Zawahiri identified as a geography teacher.
“Were we insane killers of innocents as the questioner claims, it would be possible for us to kill thousands of them in the crowded markets,” Zawahiri responded. The deaths of any innocents were the result of “unintentional error or out of necessity. . . . The enemy intentionally takes up positions in the midst of the Muslims for them to be human shields for him.”
The fact that his killers have in fact killed thousands of them in crowded markets, while coalition and Iraqi security forces try to protect those same thousands cannot be lost on the regional audience, so the “human shield” argument falls dreadfully flat.
However welcome all of this disputation is only slightly gratifying since the objections of Osama’s extremist allies center more around the issue of collateral damage and less around that whole “terrorism is fundamentally bad” concept. Perhaps they’ll come ’round to it in time.
Until that happens though, this does put the concept of fighting the GWOT overseas rather than a home game in a somewhat different light.
That bit about the “human shield”?
Pot? Meet kettle.
I was wondering when they’d get around to that point. The fact they have the temerity to ask “His Excellency” the question at all is proof that the Muslim on the street is starting to get the message: peaceful Muslims get to live in peace, non-peaceful Muslims get to see if that stuff about the virgins is for real.
Gotta love Darwin, works every time.
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the – Web Reconnaissance for 04/25/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.