Al-Qaeda by Jason Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

actions.
    The situation is far worse than when bin Laden began to come to prominence. This legitimizing discourse, the critical element that converts an angry young man into a human bomb, is now everywhere. You will hear it in a mosque, on the internet, from your friends, in a newspaper. You do not have to travel to Afghanistan to complete the radicalizing process, you can do it in your front room, in an Islamic centre, in a park. British secret services have arrested 16-year-olds leaving school exams for whom 11 September is a childhood memory. The spread of suicide bombings to places such as Kashmir, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan where, only a few years ago, such tactics would have been alien and incomprehensible shows how pervasive the jihadi Salafist ‘al-Qaeda-ist’ worldview and the style of activism it inspireshas now become. For an increasing number of people it explains everything. It works.
    In the West we often ask ‘What do they want?’ The question itself implies a number of things: our own willingness to understand legitimate grievances as well as a hope that, by addressing them, a resolution of the current situation can be found. Both are laudable aims.
    The question also implies a ‘they’. This book has been largely devoted to showing why this may be a mistake. Modern Islamic militancy is a diverse and complex phenomenon. The values and ideas, the ‘wants’, of militants are very varied. There is no single ‘they’.
    Algerian bombers have motives that are very different from Chechens. The Uzbeks who blew themselves up in March 2004 in Tashkent in an unprecedented wave of violence are not acting for the same reasons that inspired a dozen Turks to attack British-linked targets in Istanbul five months previously. Ramzi Yousef, who tried to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, was driven more by an egotistical lust for notoriety than religious fervour. Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 11 September hijackers who succeeded where Yousef failed, acted because he felt, with absolute certainty, that he had no other option but to wage a violent jihad. One of the men who organized the bombing of a nightclub in Bali in October 2002, Imam Samudra, said that he had been disgusted by the ‘dirty adulterous behaviour of the [whites]’ he saw there. Another said he was angered by the US-led war in Afghanistan. The Madrid bombers chose not to kill themselves in their attacks, unlike previous militants more closely linked to the al-Qaeda hardcore who see the deaths of bombers as an integral part of the message sent by attacks. Recent strikes by Islamic militants in Iraq, whether by suicide bombers or not, are different again. So were those in London in 2005.
    To understand this seemingly endless variety we have first to redraft our question. ‘What do they want?’ implies a very Western concept of acting to achieve specific goals. Instead we should be asking ‘Why do they feel that they have to act in the way that they do?’ The answer is that all the militants are acting because, from their twisted standpoint, they believe they have no choice.
    All the militants explain their own personal, local experiences byreference to one greater truth – that Islam is under attack. In every statement they make one can see this mix of the general and the specific. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, a Saudi and an Egyptian respectively, blame the problems of their native countries on the kufr powers who back the local regimes. Imam Samudra, the Bali bomber, saw the nightclubs of Bali from which as a local he was banned, as part of a cultural assault mounted by the West against the Islamic world. In Kashmir, locals speak of their repression as part of a global campaign against Muslims. In Chechnya, they see the war with Russia as a manifestation of the same push to eliminate Islam. In March 2004 a threat from a previously unknown militant group promised violence in France and listed the banning of the veil from schools in