Showing posts with label QATAR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label QATAR. Show all posts

Thursday, October 2, 2014

QATAR, SAUDI FUNDS TERRORISTS.

The tiny, gas-rich emirate has pumped tens of millions of dollars through obscure funding networks to hard-line Syrian rebels and extremist Salafists, building a foreign policy that punches above its weight. 

ABU DHABI and DOHA — Behind a glittering mall near Doha's city center sits the quiet restaurant where Hossam used to run his Syrian rebel brigade. At the battalion's peak in 2012 and 2013, he had 13,000 men under his control near the eastern city of Deir Ezzor. "Part of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), they are loyal to me," he said over sweet tea and sugary pastries this spring. "I had a good team to fight
His brigade's funds came, at least in part, from Qatar, he says, under the discretion of then Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Khalid bin Mohammed Al Attiyah. But the injection of cash was ad hoc: Dozens of other brigades like his received initial start-up funding,

Muslim brotherhood is a terrorist organization.Qatar backed the upstart plans of expats and businessmen who promised they could rally fighters and guns. Hossam, like many initial rebel backers, had planned to devote his own savings to supporting the opposition. Qatar's donations made it possible to think bigger.
Doha was already becoming an extremist hub by the early 2000s, as government-funded think tanks and universities popped upfilled with Islamist-minded thinkers. The government-funded Al Jazeerawas growing across the region, offering positive media attention to Brotherhood figures across the Middle East, and many of the ruling family's top advisors were Brotherhood-linked expatriates -- men like the controversial Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who heads the International Union of Muslim Scholars from Doha.

As early as 2003, the U.S. Congress was made aware that Qatari-based charities were helping move and launder money linked to al Qaeda, providing employment and documentation for key figures in the operation. At the same time, Qatar's global influence was growing: State-backed Qatar Airways began an aircraft-buying spree in 2007 to fuel its vast expansion, linking the once far-flung emirate to every corner of the world. And by 2010, Al Jazeera had evolved into the Arab world's most influential media operation, supported by a massive annual budget of $650 million.
Read more -HERE.

Friday, June 13, 2014

GOD'S TERRORIST- AN ISLAMIC WAHABI,SAUDI ARABIC TERRORISM

(Book Review)
I read the book about 1.5 years back. Its a rather engaging history of the Wahabis-Deobandis-Salafi Movements. One of the few honest books on the topic.
Allen traces the issue back to 1761, the third battle of Panipat when Islam was conclusively defeated in India (although the battle itself was a stalemate). Also an excellent coverage of what the Wahabis did in 1857 and later. Particularly, how the NWFP / Afghan tribes have been progressively radicalised by thi...s bunch.
Early on in a nut-shell: Wahhabism spread in the 19th century, first throughout the Arabian penninsula and then to the Indian subcontinent including what are now India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Wahabbism is both a fundamentalist ideology that wins over deep converts, and a form of mercenary religion, buying its way into susceptible corners.

The most important point stressed throughout the book is that Wahhabism is outside the mainstream of Muslim society.

The big surprise for me, and one reason I am distressed at how badly we prepare people for service in this area, is the deep history of Wahhabism among the Pashtun. Today Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Qatar and the United Arab Republic seem bent on funding a religious war in Central and South Asia, and no one seems to be paying attention to this emergent threat. I would go so far as to say we are now, in this region, where we were in 1988-1989 when the Saudis first began funding the global Islamic outreach program led by Sheikh Binbaz and represented in part by young Bin Laden.

Being terribly limited on time, I have not been able to read this book word for word. I have focused on the last two chapters after skimming the rest. Partly my interest is in the period, the last 25 years from 1875 to 1900, during which time the British invaded Afghanistan twice, thinking they were pre-empting the Russians. The Treaty of Gandamak has always been "the most humiliating treaty ever signed" by an Afghan Emir, until the Bi-Lateral Security Agreement (according the most critical commentary, this one in open source literature by a Hezb-i Islami leader).

The destabilization of the region is explained by the author as being made possible by the coincidence of the death in 1877 of Abdul Ghaffur and the subsequent destabilization of Swat, and the peak of the British "forward" policy of encroaching on Afghanistan to preempt the Russians from doing the same.

QUOTE (214): "The real victor of the second Afghan war was the new Amir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman." The author credits Rahman with forging the nation via ruthless focused cruelty. In passing he treated the Hazaras as kaffirs subject to jihad, and also relocated many of them with impunity.

The author suggests that Pan-Islamism was inspired by a combination of push-back against the British imperialists, and the need recognized by intelligent Muslim leaders for a modernization of Islamic regions.

From page 272 onwards I learn that the combination of General Muhammad Zio-ul-Haq as military dictator of Pakistan (determined to radically Islamicize Pakistan's government) with the Soviet invasion of Afganistan, led to the perfect storm -- Saudi and CIA money, Pakistan as the enabler, Soviets as the antagonist, and generally, no understanding at all within the west that we were feeding a monster. This was also the period in which Saudi Arabia, playing the US for fools, began exporting virulent Wahabbism toward Indonesia, and also the time when the first cracks appeared for the House of Saud.

According to the author Bin Laden was radicalized by three coincident events:

01 The revolution of the ayatollahs in Iran
02 Violent seizure of the Grand Mosque
03 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

This book covers ground that was missed in Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

The author discusses the one million man gathering of the Assembly of Islamic Scholars (Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam) in April 2001, five months prior to 9/11. This was a culminating point going back to the 1996 election of Mullah Omar of Afghanistan as "Commander of the Faithful." The author makes the point that the Pashtun embraced that election, but not the rest of the tribes of Afghanistan (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara, others).

On page 292 the author credits the key switch of sides by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a switch that helped pave the way for the Taliban to take Kabul, to Saudi money. He paints a picture of a triad among Mullah Omar, Bin Laden, and Al-Zawarhri. At this point I cannot help but observe, once again (I began making this point in 2002) that the US still does not "do" intelligence at the individual and sub-state actor level, our track and whack programs being the exception but not the rule.

QUOTE (295): "History teaches that fundamentalist theocracy does not work, because people will simply not put p with it. It may secure a foothold in societies that are isolated and ignorant, but rarely does it outlast its main propagator. It's usual course is to fragment into splinter groups, each accusing the others of heresy."

QUOTE (295): "History also demonstrates that fundamentalists will always be listened to whenever and wherever people believe themselves or their religion or their co-religionists to be threatened. That does not mean the fundamentalists will be followed, but it does mean that they will find popular support."

The author goes on to emphasize on page 296 that the rise and spread of the madrasses in the 1970's was not a bursting of religious zeal, but rather a "direct consequence of political intervention only made possible by Saudi funding."

The book ends on a stellar note that the West -- other than the Nordics -- does not get:

QUOTE (297): "The same lesson applies: remove the grievances and mainstream moderate Islam stands a better change of reasserting itself."

Malaysia and Indonesia stand today as bastions of moderate intelligent Islam. Turkey remains a bit confused but rising fast to its earlier heights -- I look for a fascinating competition among Iran, Turkey, and India for the soul of South and Central Asia.

Summing up: an extraordinary book that is not written for the lay person, that needs to be updated, and that in its next iteration could go beyond classic status to become a MAJOR reference for how we understand the Sunni - Shi'ite fight for the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of South and Central Asia. This is the religious war of the century, and the West seems to be oblivious to the fact that Saudi Arabia has declared that war rather blatantly in recent months.

Other books I have reviewed that bear on this theme (with the observation that we are not at war with Islam, we are at war with Zionism and Wahhabism, two perversions far removed from mainstream constructive religion):

The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam
Winning the Long War: Retaking the Offensive against Radical Islam
Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization
Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft
Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West
Surrender to Kindness: One Man's Epic Journey for Love and Peace
Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Religion and Global Politics)
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within