Monday, April 21, 2008

Iraq Boom--Not Boon--To European Jihadists   [Steve Schippert]

The Iraq War has long been feared by Europeans as little more than a training ground for terrorists and potential terrorists in their midst, who will learn their deadly trade in Iraq and then bring it back home. Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way, and, as the International Herald Tribune reports, "Europe's Fears Subside."

The logistical challenges and expense of reaching Iraq have been one deterrent, they said, particularly since Syria has made episodic efforts to halt the use of its territory as a transit route. Compared with the thousands of European Muslims who joined the fight in Afghanistan in the 1990s through networks in Britain , the numbers of fighters going to Iraq has been extremely small, according to senior French intelligence officials.

Another factor, the officials say, is that European Muslims lacking military training and good Arabic-language skills are neither needed nor welcomed by Iraqi insurgents - unless they are willing to be involved in suicide missions.

And successful suicide bombers don't bring back much experience to Europe. To risk making light of a decidedly "un-light" subject, Iraq has proven more "boom" than boon for the Europeans who sought their jihad on Iraqi sand.

The "breeding ground" fears are proving—for Europe—to be less than once feared. But, as is typical, there are two sides to every coin, and the benefit of experience is not exclusively al-Qaeda's for the taking. I concluded this earlier at ThreatsWatch.

Insofar as the ‘breeding ground’ argument goes, it must also be considered that it is impossible to have a war zone where combatants do not gain experience. And within that equation, the calculus also applies to our own skillsets, abilities and experience levels. The mental and physical tasks of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism inherent within the Iraq war have made the forces involved - from American to British to Iraqi - incalculably more able to conduct operations. And the knowledge gained (about al-Qaeda in particular) is not locked in the mind of Corporal John Smith in Fallujah, but shared and valuable across the board throughout different agencies - at home and within Iraq.

The other side of the coin (pardoning the COIN pun) remains that Iraq has also become a counterterrorism and counterinsurgency proving ground for our own forces, services and agencies, with the experiences paying off in future theaters within this same conflict.

But if one reads, watches or listens to the dominant news outlets, all that can seemingly be heard is our own costs and the enemies' benefits and gains. Somehow, apparently out of a vacuum, al-Qaeda is cornered in Iraq.

Consider last week's al-Qaeda propaganda product that America (and of course, President Bush) has suffered defeat in Iraq. Anyone notice that in the days before the release of that message, al-Qaeda deployed a wave of suicide bombers for successful, high-body-count attacks at funerals of Iraqi members of the anti-al-Qaeda Iraqi Awakening movement? This was not an accident. Without the two to three days of high-body-count headlines throughout Western media, the "defeat" propaganda would have been received with some measure of incredulous ridicule. "Not so cornered" was the required international message before release (to say nothing of the more direct intimidation message delivered to the families and surviving members of the now-recalcitrant Awakening movements.)

But to date, I have yet to see anyone link the timing of the operations designed for body count with last week's al-Qaeda propaganda wave. I concede that I may have missed it somewhere. But to repeat one of my own favorite phrases, "It ain't rocket science." Taking context into account should be much more prevalent.

Perhaps last week's al-Qaeda bombers were holders of one-way tickets from Europe. Perhaps the intent was as much to grab headlines of carnage ahead of planned proclamations of American defeat in Iraq. Perhaps it is too difficult to find potential meanings in a media far more interested in speculating about matters of such import as Vice President Cheney and Haliburton than daring to speculate about the enemy's aims and actions.

Instead, they go "boom"—this much we hear about—and Western media then repeats al-Qaeda's claims of American defeat. Think the increasingly media-adept al-Qaeda leadership does not know this? Just asking...

04/21 02:42 PMShare