Book Review: "Inside Al Qaeda" by Rohan Gunaratna
Part I
Rohan Gunaratna: Inside Al Qaeda. Global Network of Terror. Berkley Books, New York, 2003.

Reviewed by: Anssi Kullberg, 23 Oct. 2003

Since the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September, 2001, bookstores have been filled with various books on international terrorism, radical Islamist terror and particularly on Al Qaida or its leader Usama bin Ladin. Many books on the issue were published in the years before the 9/11 already. In the last years, I have read more of these books than I can remember, and because of that, I can with certain delight praise Rohan Gunaratna's "Inside Al Qaeda" as the undoubtedly best popular book on Al Qaida, which I have read so far.

A majority of the recent popularly sold terrorism books seem to fall to three categories:

The first is constituted by alarmist accounts with strong religious and rightist political bias, which typically repeat Islamophobic narratives, try to paint a picture of a "clash of civilizations", and attempt to explain the threat of terrorism by interpreting terrorism and violence as something inherent in Islam, or at least in the cultures of the regions that happen to coincide with the range of Islam. They like to pay attention on simplistic interpretations of the conceptions like jihad, kafirs and dhimms, recall the Assassins, and remind us of the Arab, Moor and Turkish "hordes" and conquests of "Christian lands". And of course they fiercely defend Israel's struggle for survival, forgetting that the Zionists, too, originally employed terror just like their later Arab counterparts in Palestine.

The second category is even less comprehensive to anyone with some grass-root knowledge of countries outside of the postmodern West, and with even a stronger political bias than the first category, though this time either leftist or far-rightist. It is constituted by the fashionable conspiracy theories with the single goal of blaming the United States of America for all the problems of the world. They harshly exploit their mighty position in the leftist-dominated media of Western Europe and American East Coast, and greatly contribute to the equally anti-American political discourse in the Islamic countries, where the "critical" views of European and American leftist media are faithfully reprinted with short delay.

The more moderate views of this tradition simply suggest that the US should stay at home while more money should be used on development aid, especially on "progressive" (socialist) regimes and parties in the "South". Their academic expertise is, however, limited to ironical and parodical mocking at Western rhetorics, while their case knowledge is based on repeating selective leftist myths of world politics, often starting with age-old Soviet disinformation and ending up in the urban legends of present anti-American discourse.

According to them, terrorism is caused by the fact that the US assisted Afghan mujahidin to fight the cruel Soviet occupation of their land in the 1980s. Generally this genre insists on the West giving aid to any poor country, but obviously this should not be done against the interests of the Soviet Union or Russia. The discourse goes on blaming any pro-Western Muslim government for "fascism" or "dictatorship", especially those, which are in fact democratic and moderate, like Turkey. Yet according to the anti-American genre, Turkey is guilty to the genocide of Armenians and Kurds (how many have actually been massacred?) while socialist dictatorships like Iraq and Syria (from where Kurds have been fleeing to Turkey for decades) are considered "progressive" and at least worthy of guaranteed sovereignty which Americans should respect, though Russians need not. As India is allied with Russia, they also share general hostility against Pakistan (even for periods when Pakistan has not been as pro-Western as during Musharraf's regime).

The third category of mainstream terrorism books is constituted mainly by accounts written by experienced journalists. Although there are many quite good books in this genre - for example the ones by John K. Cooley and Peter Bergen - the journalistic approach creates certain level of populism and superficiality, and the authors of this genre easily repeat erroneous information or myths derived from their media sources.

There is also an inherent weakness in the Western point of view of the authors, which overemphasizes the "exotic" features, especially when speaking of Islam, and seldom finds very novel approach to the conventions of speaking about certain nations, regions or countries. Even those "non-Western" authors, who have been successful in selling their books in the West, have adopted an approach that is even more Western than that of the Westerners themselves. A good example is the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a Lahore intellectual, who has unfortunately only contributed to the Western distortions in regard to Islam, South and Central Asia, when adopting a bias designed to please the expected Western readers. Besides of echoing Pakistani inner politics, Rashid leaning to the left, he has practically mixed up radical Islamism and Islamic conservatism with each other. This only confuses the picture of the region's politics and weakens the author's otherwise skilful works.

Against the background of these bulks of terrorism literature, Gunaratna's book is both outstanding in its expertise and overwhelming in the unbiased, analytical and sensible moderation it has adopted. Gunaratna is Sri Lankan, although he has later worked in several Asian and Western countries, and probably his background a South Asian cosmopolitan from a small country has greatly contributed to his capability of taking distance to the myth-making prevailing in media. Sri Lanka has for long suffered from very cruel terrorism by the Tamil Tigers, but Gunaratna does not fall to the trap of exploiting the "war on terrorism" to spread propaganda against the Tamils. Quite the contrary, he mostly avoids creating linkages to this issue, except of a couple of remarks connected with weapons trade, which are justified. This deserves special thanks: I have yet never read a book written by a Russian analyst without attempts to demonize Chechens; by an Indian analyst without attempts to demonize the Kashmiri separatists or Pakistan; and very seldom by a Pakistani analyst without attempts to demonize Indian secret services.

Gunaratna has also avoided most of the popular urban legends wide-spread in the Western media, beginning with the fantastic claims of Usama bin Ladin's connections with the CIA. Another special thanks, therefore, must be addressed to Gunaratna for his several remarks where he consciously (but modestly and elegantly) tries to refute some common media-generated myths.

However, having now praised Gunaratna, I also have to address some serious criticism towards his book. The most serious flaw is his obvious lack of insight in regard to certain regions, most of all to the Caucasus, and to lesser extent to the examples of Central Asia and the Balkans. This is probably mostly due to the fact that these regions are not part of the main domain of Gunaratna's interests and expertise. His book is strongest in regard to Southeast and South Asia. Especially in regard to Southeast Asia, Gunaratna's book is the best in this genre that I have read, and I learned a lot of new details from it. Also the background of Al Qaida and many of its key operatives is here given in a more specific and detailed as well as more reliable package than in any other recent terrorism book in popular distribution.

The Caucasus: Gunaratna's failures
But then to the weaknesses: It is easy to identify Gunaratna's worst choice of revealed source, since it seems to me that at least half of the errors and pieces of disinformation in Gunaratna's book are taken out of a single source, a publication named "The Jihad Fixation", for which Gunaratna also does not give an author, publisher or any of the information needed to identify the source. This rises suspicion.

It is also easy to identify the single weakest-quality chapter in Gunaratna's book. It is the chapter dealing with the Caucasus (pp. 179-180). Unfortunately this two-page chapter is not only totally inadequate and superficial; it is also full of factual errors, contradictions, and the author has failed to give references to his sources, with the exception of the above-mentioned dubious source and some use of John Cooley's book, where the Chechen remarks are among the weakest of Cooley's account, too. Part of the "information" seem to originate in an oral source, maybe an intelligence official (Russian?), who has wished to remove references. In this chapter, there is a reference (105), which cannot be found in the endnotes (perhaps removed), which has resulted that all the forthcoming references of the part "Al Qaeda's Global Network" refer to wrong endnotes, one too early, starting with the endnote number 105 about Islambuli, which clearly should be the reference number 106.

Gunaratna (p. 179) cites John Cooley in telling that soon after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Al Qaida founded an office in Baku, and "supported" the Azerbaijanis in the Karabagh War in 1988-1994 - meaning Al Qaida exploited this conflict in trying to get foothold in the region, typically for Al Qaida strategy. Yet Gunaratna fails to tell us that Al Qaida entirely failed in Azerbaijan. He tells that "according to Russian intelligence", in September 1993, about 1500 Afghans came to Azerbaijan, but he does not give us the proper context, since the participation of these Afghans in the conflict in Azerbaijan was coordinated by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from Iran, which supported the Armenians, not the Azerbaijanis, in the Karabagh War, and moreover, continued to serve Russian interests in Azerbaijan by helping the KGB general Heydar Aliyev to overthrow the pro-Turkish (and anti-Iranian) President Ebülfez Elchibey.

Moreover, Hekmatyar's agents were reported to train the Russian-backed Lezgin terrorists destabilizing Azerbaijan at the Dagestani border area. Gunaratna touches this issue, although it seems to remain unclear to him, what the actual context was: "After suffering heavy casualties in battle with the Armenians, the Azeri Afghan brigade was dissolved in 1994, but many of its remaining troops participated in other regional conflicts. A few disgruntled and disbanded members of the brigade resorted to terrorism in Baku, mostly bombings of public places and transport infrastructure." (p. 179) Although the first Chechen War was launched by Russia late in the same year, the "other regional conflicts" refers to the Lezgin Sadval campaigns, and the terrorist strikes to the bombing campaign against Azerbaijan in 1994-1995. In March 1996, three Armenians were convicted in a Russian court for the bombs in the Rostov-Baku trains - two of them (Djahan Hovanissian and Ashot Galoyan) were senior officers of the Armenian secret service, while one (Boris Simonian) was an officer of the Russian FSB.

Gunaratna goes on in a section lacking all reference notes, informing us of the participation of some Chechen commanders in the Karabagh War, and arms provided by Chechens to the Azerbaijanis from the stockpiles of weapons that President Djokhar Dudayev inherited from removed Russian troops in 1991. According to Gunaratna, by summer 1994, there were 2500 Chechens fighting in Karabagh. However, Gunaratna's account on the development of the situation in Chechnya is based on poor quality of information. He writes: "Al Qaeda's major involvement in Russia began when Jokar [sic] Dudayev, a Soviet Air Force general, initiated a campaign for an independent Chechnya. Dudayev was supported by the Chechen branch of the Muslim Brotherhood [sic], the Islamic Path Party". (p. 179)

Gunaratna has failed to understand that Djokhar Dudayev was a secular nationalists, and the Islamists - including the Islamic Path Party - were both Dudayev's opponents and also against the idea of an independent national state. The Soviet Islamist party, Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP), founded in Astrakhan in 1989 under KGB surveillance, advocated Islamism, but also the unity of the Soviet Union first, and later of the Russian Federation, or a wider North Caucasian entity. From the beginning, the IRP Islamists were set against the national independence movements, and they had solid links with the Soviet and later Russian secret services. In fact, the Islamist parties were used to undermine the reviving nationalist movements (separatists), while they were at the same time used to construct the foundation of pro-Moscow Islamic movement aligned with the pro-Moscow Islamic states such as Syria, Iraq and Iran. It is hardly a coincidence that the IRP was named in accordance with the Ba'ath (Renaissance) of Syria and Iraq. The strategy became most apparent when the Russian secret services armed and raised Chechen Islamists into rebellion against Dudayev and later against Aslan Maskhadov. Many of the Islamist leaders later got key positions in the pro-Russian puppet governments, including the leader of the Islamic Path, Bislan Gantemirov. Meanwhile, the actual independence movement maintained nationally inspired secular or Sufi character, with open pro-Western orientation.

Gunaratna continues with demonizing the Chechen radical Islamist leader Shamil Basayev, but here the chronology and logic of narrating the Chechen conflict get seriously confused. Gunaratna claims Shamil Basayev to have been "Afghan-trained" and having "a close relationship with Osama". While there is no evidence of any relationship between Usama bin Ladin and Basayev, the latter was certainly not Afghan-trained before 1994, although many Chechen commanders had participated in the Afghan War - on the Soviet side! Basayev, with some of his men, made a short visit to Afghanistan around mid-1990s, but this had not much importance. The radicalization of Basayev and his allies started only when the Russians assassinated the secular Chechen leader Dudayev with a missile in 1995. The vice president to take over for a short period, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, later turned a radical Islamist and visited Mullah Omar in Taliban's Afghanistan, but then he no longer had any official position in President Maskhadov's government. The Taliban recognition for Chechen independence, which Yandarbiyev managed to get from Mullah Omar, was rejected by Maskhadov, because the Chechens did not consider the Taliban to be the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

Basayev turned to radical and aggressive opposition against Maskhadov after having lost a democratic election to him in 1997. Basayev's Arab ally, the undoubtedly radical Islamist, Saudi extremist with the nom de guerre Khattab, is the only established link between Chechens and Al Qaeda, and he probably influenced strongly to Basayev's turning into radical anti-Western Islamism, while simultaneously clashing against the Chechen leadership. In 1999 it was (Russian-controlled) Dagestan that destabilized Chechnya, leading to the joint provocation by Dagestani and Basayev's Islamists, known as the Dagestan Incursion. More about the development of the situation in Chechnya and Dagestan, see:

http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2003/tsets-4

http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2003/tsets-5

Unfortunately, Gunaratna's narrative goes even wilder: "Experienced mujahidin from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Azerbaijan also joined them [the Chechens and the Afghani Arab volunteers in Chechnya], and gradually the conflict spilled over into neighboring Ingushetia, Daghestan and North Ossetia. [sic] The intelligence agencies of the governments of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon [sic] and Iran [sic] directly and indirectly supported the Chechen guerrillas. [sic] With this increased backing for the guerrillas, Russia proper was affected, and even Moscow witnessed a series of bombings. [sic]" Unfortunately this kind of vague and erroneous narrative weakens considerably Gunaratna's book, and it is surprising as well as even suspicious why he has decided to study the Chechen conflict with such ignorance and uncritical repetition of Russian propaganda, while he has studied so many other regions in such a detailed and pedantic way. However, the Chechen narrative of the book is entirely careless, vague and dilettantish.

First, the chronology seems totally confused, which is in sharp contrast with Gunaratna's careful chronological analysis on other regions. While the conflict of the Prigorodniye region (between North Ossetians and Ingush) took place before the Chechen War, the Moscow bombs took place only in September 1999. It was Dagestan that destabilized Chechnya, not vice versa, and radical Islamism first got foothold in Dagestan (Khattab included), and could gain foothold in Chechnya only after the death of President Dudayev. It is absurd to claim that the pro-Russian governments of Lebanon and Iran would have supported the Chechen guerrillas, especially as the Chechens are Sufi Sunna Muslims. Finally, the bomb blasts in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buinaksk in autumn 1999, as far as any evidence is concerned, had nothing to do with Chechens, although they were used to justify the launch of a devastating second invasion to Chechnya (against the secular government, not against the Islamists, who were provided safe return from Dagestan to the Serzhen-Yurt district).

On page 180, Gunaratna writes: "As mentioned in an earlier chapter, Al Qaeda's 055 Brigade had an unusually large percentage of Chechens and Central Asian Muslims, and over half of the fighters killed in combat against the Northern Alliance were foreign." However, not a single Chechen has been found dead, identified or captured in Afghanistan. Not a single one. An American researcher, Professor Brian Glyn Williams, even made field research for months in Northern Afghanistan, trying to find either a Chechen or at least one witness who would have seen or met a Chechen fighting on the Taliban or Al Qaeda side. Finally he managed to find one single Chechen: this man, however, had been fighting first in the rows of the Uzbek government against the IMU, and later as General Dostum's bodyguard against the Taliban.

It is of course not surprising that there are no Chechens in the Al Qaeda or Taliban troops, and there never were. The idea of an "exchange program" between the Taliban and the Chechen guerrillas is absurd. When the Chechens are heavily outnumbered and outgunned, why would they leave their own war theater to fight in Afghanistan, where they don't have any relations, no common language, and neither a religious kinship, except perhaps with the Sufi Tajiks of the Panjshir Valley, who used to fight against the Taliban.

Therefore it is obvious that all the "Chechen tales" of Afghanistan seem to refer to the Uzbeks, who were many in the 055 Brigade, including Juma Namangani. All those "former Soviet" fighters who were later captured or killed in a couple of clashes with the Pakistani forces in the North-Western Frontier Province in 2002, proved to be Uzbeks. However, it must be also remembered that the Chechen tales, when traced, have always originated in Russian or Indian media, and this means that it has not only been the Western media's careless ignorance that causes this kind of myths to be born, but also purposeful and systematic disinformation, which is machined with massive repetition. It is very unfortunate that, besides of ignorant journalists, even serious and esteemed researchers like Gunaratna uncritically repeat this disinformation and therefore contribute to the distortion of our understanding of the Eurasian conflicts.

Moreover, on page 180, Gunaratna writes on Khattab in Afghanistan: "In some battles - such as the Lion's Den Operation in 1987 - Osama and Khattab fought side by side under the leadership of Khattab's teacher and mentor, Hassan as-Sarehi. In 1995, as-Sarehi, according to the Saudi government, played a role in the bin-Laden-inspired Riyadh bombing, after which he was extradited to Saudi Arabia from Pakistan. After the civil war in Tajikistan ended, Khattab moved to Chechnya, where as head of foreign mujahidin, he was appointed military commander of the operations under the overall commander, Shamil Basayev. [sic] To fight the Russians in Chechnya and Daghestan, Khattab mobilized mujahidin from Ingushetia, Ossetia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, with the finances provided by Al Qaeda. Russian officials state that Osama provided $25 million to the Chechen mujahidin, but this cannot be independently verified."

This piece has no reference note, but apparently the original source is Russian. A hint towards this is for example the transliteration of the article al in as-Sarehi's name in the way preferred in Russia, instead of the Anglo-Saxon way, which Gunaratna uses in other names - for example al Zawahiri, not az-Zawahiri.

In case of some of the "Chechen tales" Gunaratna refers to an unnamed "European intelligence agency", but the poor quality of some of these pieces of disinformation (pp. 180, 210, 228) strongly hints that the original source is Russian like in the above piece. The weapons trade and mafia myths connected with Chechens - especially in relation to "Ukrainian mafia" providing (Russian) arms to Al Qaeda - are unfortunately typical for some of the circles in German intelligence community today. This information, however, usually shows heavy marks of Russian disinformation. Whether "European intelligence agencies" reproduce it unconsciously or in the name of political interest is secondary compared with the devastating effect that this kind of myth-making has on true understanding of radical Islamist threat and terrorism - also in the Chechen context.

End of first part

Rohan Gunaratna: Inside Al Qaeda. Global Network of Terror. Berkley Books, New York, 2003.

Reviewed by: Anssi Kullberg, 23 Oct. 2003

One of the best and most insightful analysis is offered by Gunaratna's detailed and carefully compiled biographic sections on the key terrorists and ideologues of Al Qaida. Here Gunaratna has not only paid attention on giving a very deep and balanced picture of the ideological backgrounds and motivations of Al Qaida's leaders, but also he has taken up the trouble of refuting some of the most persistent journalistic myths and disinformation that so abundantly occurs in the world media. For example, Gunaratna refutes the myth of Abdullah Azzam having served the CIA, let alone Usama bin Ladin himself.

Besides bin Ladin's background, Gunaratna's book offers especially good information on the crucial roles played by two of the most influential terrorist leaders behind bin Ladin: the Baluchi-Kuwaiti operational mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and the Egyptian ideological strategist and "political officer" Ayman al Zawahiri.

Khalid Sheikh Muhammad
One of the key biographies, that of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, has been added to the introduction of the 2003 edition, which is a very important addition, as soon after the publication of Gunaratna's book, Khalid was arrested in a US-Pakistani joint operation in Rawalpindi, February 2003. It is not exaggerated to estimate that his arrest might have been the so far most important single victory of the war against terrorism. [Read in The Eurasian Politician about Khalid's arrest: http://users.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2003/muhammed.htm ]

Gunaratna begins by considering Khalid to belong to the same top elite of terrorist leaders with Imad Mughniyeh of the Hizbollah and Illich Ramírez Sánchez, alias Carlos the Jackal. Khalid was an ethnic Baluchi, whose family was from the area of Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan. Also from there was Mir Aimal Kansi, who committed the attack against the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in January 1993, and was executed in the US in November 2002. However, Khalid was born and raised in Kuwait, in a rich Gulf Arab milieu where the Indian, Pakistani and African guest workers are considered second-class people, without most citizen rights. In spite of Khalid's Baluchi background, most of the people closest to him in his terrorist career, however, were Arabs. (pp. xxviii-xxix)

After returning from North Carolina, where Khalid was studying, to Pakistan, he joined the jihad coordination organization Ittihad-i Islami, where there were already hundreds of Arabs involved. (xxix) According to Gunaratna, Khalid was the true mastermind and operational planner of the 9/11 terrorist attack, and already before that, he masterminded the WTC bombing of 1993, which his nephew and protégé Ramzi Yousef led on the field. Khalid also planned a murder plot against the Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1993, attacks against the US in Karachi, and led the grandiose "Oplan Bojinka" plan, in which Al Qaida failed. Khalid belonged to the supreme leading circle of Al Qaida, the Military Council. Moreover, Khalid served as a main link of Al Qaida to the Kashmiri radical jihadist organization Jaish-e Mohammed.

Yet Khalid's name has remained relatively unknown to the mass media, mainly due to the fact that Al Qaida managed to keep his crucial role in secrecy, and only in 2002 the intelligence agencies started to follow his tracks. Khalid's name was kept in secrecy even during Yousef's interrogations after the latter's arrest and hand-over from Pakistan to the US, to be convicted for the 1993 WTC bombing. Actually the US intelligence refused from believing in the references to Khalid, although such hints were gained from the interrogations of the Al Qaida pilot Abdul Hakim Murad and from Abu Zubaydah. It was only after the arrest of Ramzi bin al Shaibh that the CIA started to believe that Khalid was a key player. (pp. xxvii-xxviii)

Gunaratna believes that the murder of the Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Daniel Pearl was ordered by Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, although one of his protégés, the Jaish-e Mohammed operative Ahmed Said Omar Sheikh alias Sheikh Omar, notorious for the Kashmir kidnappings, carried out the murder. Omar Sheikh was arrested in Pakistan and in 2002, sentenced to death for Pearl's murder. Gunaratna believes, referring to ISI sources, that while investigating the background of the British Al Qaida terrorist, Richard Reid the "Shoe Bomber", Pearl ended up in Karachi and on the tracks of Omar Sheikh and Khalid. Khalid ordered his murder, because Pearl was getting too close to his identity. (pp. xx-xxi)

According to Gunaratna, Khalid not only consulted bin Ladin and Zawahiri (being the practical terrorist mastermind of the organization), but made great influence to the younger generation of Al Qaida key operatives, such as the head of the external operations Abu Zubaydah (31), the logistics officer Ramzi bin al Shaibh (30), and the Southeast Asian terrorists Muhammad Mansur Jabara (21) and Hambali (36). Khalid's closest protégés were his nephew Ramzi Ahmed Yousef (leader of the WTC bombing of 1993) and Abu Muhammad al Masri. (pp. xxii-xxiii) Gunaratna tells that even the "dirty bomber" applicant José Padilla, who was arrested on Chicago's O'Hara airfield on a hint from the ISI, had been sent for his mission by Khalid. (p. xxiii) Together with the Richard Reid incident, this indicates that Khalid, a key agent handler of Al Qaida, was effective in recruiting Westerners, who were recent converts to Islam.

Khalid's recruits included also Ramzi bin al Shaibh, the logistical chief of the September 11th strikes; Ahmed Said Omar Sheikh; and the Iraqi Zayn al Abidin Abu Zubaydah, who was Al Qaida's number three leader and head of external operations. Yousef was arrested in Pakistan when he had fled there from the Philippines in autumn 1996. Pakistani special troops in joint operation with the Americans arrested Abu Zubaydah in March 2002 in Faisalabad, and bin al Shaibh in Karachi in September 2002. (pp. xxii-xxiv, xxvii-xxxi). The career of Abu Zubaydah is still covered by mist. According to Gunaratna, he was a Saudi citizen with Palestinian origin, born in Gaza in 1971. According to Leitzinger, however, it was later found out that Abu Zubaydah was Iraqi, by his correct name Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, and his political background was in the ruling Baath party. (The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2002; Der Spiegel, 8, 18 Feb. 2002).

Khalid's own career in Al Qaida is said to have begun as one of bin Ladin's first bodyguards. He was first acting with bin Ladin and others in Peshawar, but in 1991, when bin Ladin started to disperse the terrorists away from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Khalid left for the Philippines, where he was training the fighters of the Abu Sayyaf Group and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), turning them to radical Islamist terrorism. (p. xxiv) He was accompanied by bin Ladin's brother-in-law, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa. (xxix) In 1995, Khalid's right hand Ramzi Yousef was planning to assassinate Pope John Paul II, but the plot failed, as it did in 1999, when Khalid was planning to assassinate him in the Philippines. (p. xxv)

In the Philippines both Khalid and Yousef are known to have spent playboy life which was quite far away from the image generally held on Al Qaida's puritan principles. (xxiv-xxv) However, when visiting Pakistan, he was involved in the sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi'a extremists. He returned to the Philippines for the period from August 1994 until September 1996. The Philippine activities of Khalid's operatives were interrupted when, in 1996, Yousef accidentally blew up one of their apartments. He fled to Pakistan, where he was arrested and handed over to the US. Khalid slipped through, was hiding from the FBI first in Manila, then in Qatar, in Brazil in autumn 1996, and in the Middle East and Europe in 1997-1998.

In 1999 he ended up in Hamburg, where he met Ramzi bin al Shaibh and Muhammad Atta. The same men assembled for several times in Kandahar and Hamburg for further planning of the 9/11 attacks. The planning council was chaired by Khalid, the other members including the 9/11 pilots Muhammad Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, Hani Hanjour and Ziad Jarrah, Atta's assistant Khalid al Mihdar, as well as Nawaf al Hazemi, Said Bahaji and Ramzi bin al Shaibh. A final planning assembly was held in Malaysia in 2000, hosted by Hambali. The Egyptian intelligence Mukhabarat had got information from their agent in Afghanistan that Al Qaida had sent 20 members, including four pilots, to the US. They passed the information on to the CIA, which, however, did not react with the appropriate measures. (xxix-xxxi)

The Capture of MAK
A most important case study that would reveal a lot about the character of Al Qaida should be made on the capturing of the MAK (Maktab al Khidamat lil Mujahidin al Arab), the coordination and support office of the Afghan jihad, located in Peshawar, and founded and originally led by bin Ladin's mentor, the Palestinian professor Abdullah Azzam.

When in the early 1980s there were about 400 Arab volunteers on the Afghan resistance front, General Zia ul Haq's Pakistan asked Saudi Arabia to send someone to coordinate the Arab contingent. The Saudi intelligence chief Turki bin Faisal chose his acquaintance Usama bin Ladin to this task. Bin Ladin indeed proved capable of getting heavy artillery as well as constructing tunnels and roads in the Zazi mountains of Paktia. (p. 26.)

Gunaratna gives a more flattering picture of bin Ladin's achievements on the actual warfield than some other reports, including Leitzinger's account published in The Eurasian Politician earlier. Gunaratna writes: "Although Osama played a support, rather than a combat, role, he participated in battles in the later stages of the campaign, especially in the 1989 attack on Jalalabad." (p. 27.)

More interesting, however, is the dispute between Azzam and Usama, or more precisely, between Azzam and Ayman al Zawahiri's Egyptian terrorists, where Usama took Zawahiri's side. Describing the dispute finally leading to Azzam's assassination with a car bomb on 24 Nov. 1989 in Peshawar, belongs to the most interesting and important contributions of Gunaratna's book. While Leitzinger's interpretation stressed the role of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the dispute between Azzam and Usama about which Afghan section to primarily support, Gunaratna's account leaves Hekmatyar to just a couple of remarks, and concentrates in the political difference between the jihadists in Peshawar. While Azzam wanted to concentrate in the jihad in Afghanistan, Usama and especially his Egyptian allies wanted to prefer an internationalist jihad primarily targeting the US and Israel. A methodological dispute was connected with this: Azzam's organization was a support organization of guerrilla warfare, while Usama's Egyptian comrades wanted to develop it into an ideological terrorist organization without any national connotation. (pp. 29-30.)

However, Gunaratna (perhaps purposefully, fearing political sensitivities) leaves out the obvious ideological background and loyalty question, connected with the Cold War: It did not please the leftist radical Islamist terrorists, led by the Egyptian ideologue Ayman al Zawahiri, that the Afghan jihad was fought against the Soviet Union and not against the US. This character is not so clearly visible if we concentrate in studying the person of Usama bin Ladin, but becomes clearer when studying the political background and ideological development of Ayman al Zawahiri. An excellent short biography of him has been offered, for example, by Nimrod Raphaeli of the MEMRI. However, Gunaratna, too, admits that Zawahiri enjoys crucial ideological influence on Usama bin Ladin, and thus, all Al Qaida. "He [Usama] is not an original thinker but an opportunist, a businessman at heart, who surrounds himself with a good team, manages it well but borrows heavily from others." (p. 31.)

Usama had met Zawahiri first time as late as in 1986, when Azzam's organization in Afghanistan was still a guerrilla support organization and not a terrorist one. Zawahiri had been among those accused for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, but was released by the court. He left Egypt at least as much fearing the retaliation of his own supposed folks, whom he had betrayed, as the Egyptian law enforcement bodies. (Raphaeli has well described Zawahiri's ideological dispute with the "rightist" radical Islamists, and the consequent split of the radical Islamist field.) Immediately when Zawahiri entered bin Ladin's inner circle, he started having strong influence on all Al Qaida. Their goals were primarily internationalist and supportive for a wide network of "leftist" radical Islamist terrorist organizations, where sectarian or national separate agendas could not hurt their international anti-American jihad. Usama managed to mediate a truce between Egypt's two main extremist radical Islamist organizations, Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Al Jihad al Islamiyya al Misr), and Rifai Taha Ali's Islamic Group of Egypt (Al Gama'a al Islamiyya al Misr). (p. 34.)

It was the Egyptians who finally murdered Azzam and his sons Ibrahim and Muhammad in autumn 1989. Muhammad Sadiq Odeh, alias Muhammad the Fisherman, who led Al Qaida cell and weapons smuggling organization in East Africa and coordinated the US embassy bombings of 1997, claimed in interrogations that Usama had ordered Azzam's murder, because he claimed or suspected that Azzam had contacts with the CIA. According to Gunaratna (p. 32), Azzam did not have any connections with the CIA, but only with the ISI. (Let alone that bin Ladin himself would have had CIA connections, like commonly distributed media myths often claim.)

When Azzam had been wiped out from Zawahiri's way, Zawahiri became the main spiritual leader of Al Qaida, replacing Azzam as Usama's mentor, too. Another Egyptian, whom Usama recognized as Al Qaida's spiritual authority, was the "Blind Sheikh" Umar Abd al Rahman, who was arrested in 1993 in the US and convicted for the 1993 WTC bombing. When Umar Abd al Rahman visited Pakistan, he was assisted by Muhammed Shawki al Islambuli, an Al Qaida member and later head of one of its terrorist camps in Afghanistan. His brother Khaled al Islambuli had been the assassin of President Sadat. (pp. 32-33.)

I agree with Gunaratna that Zawahiri had a decisive role in transforming the jihad support office MAK into an international terrorist organization. Zawahiri's Egyptian disciples quickly occupied most of the key positions within the Al Qaida, as well as secured Usama bin Ladin's back, thus gaining strong influence in him, too. All those who did not suit their plans, were wiped out as ruthlessly as Azzam. For example, the Palestinian head of the US office of the MAK was murdered. His body was later found in the apartment of Mahmud Abu-Halima, Umar Abd al Rahman's driver, when he was arrested for the 1993 WTC bombing. (pp. 32, 34-35.)

Zawahiri's close protégé, a former Egyptian police officer Ali al Rashidi, who had been sacked for his Islamist connections, joined the others on the Afghan front and became the first military commander of Al Qaida. In Afghanistan, he adopted the name Abu Ubadiah al Banshiri, where "Banshiri" referred to the Panjshir valley. He was drowned in a great boat accident in Lake Victoria, Kenya, on 21 May 1996, while running Al Qaida's weapons trade and planning for the US embassy bombings that took place the next year. (pp. 34-35.)

Also Banshiri's successor as Al Qaida's military commander was one of Zawahiri's men: Subhi Abdalaziz Abu-Sittah, who adopted the name Muhammad Atef. He was killed in the US bombings of Afghanistan in November 2001. (p. 35.)

East Africa
Throughout the 1990s, Al Qaida posited a lot of attention on East Africa, following the 1991 transfer of Al Qaida's infrastructure to Sudan, where radical Islamists had got power in a military coup in 1989. An additional boost for Al Qaida's activities was offered by the Somali conflict, the failed US intervention there, and the struggle of Muslim, especially Somali, populations in Ethiopia's Ogaden province (with Somali majority) and in Eritrea.

In the early 1990s Al Qaida was smuggling Russian SA 7 missiles away from Afghanistan to Sudan, and onwards to targets in Yemen and East Africa. Although the role of Russian weapons merchants was known in this regard by the publication of Gunaratna's book, he has chosen to make just a vague reference to "the mafia". (xxxix) A knot of Al Qaida's weapons trade was situated in Mombasa, Kenya, where the Al Qaida cell was led by Muhammad Sadiq Odeh alias Abu Yasser alias Muhammad the Fisherman, who got his nickname from smuggling weapons with fish cargo. He was also the coordinator of the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1997. (xxxvii)

In the coded messages, the terrorists of the embassy bombings actually called themselves "the fish people", and curiously, the same fish codes were used by the Russian (former KGB) weapons merchant Viktor But, who was smuggling weapons to Afghanistan's Al Qaida at the same time (1995-2001), using the code "fish from Tanzania". Gunaratna doesn't mention this, and also in general, has chosen to leave Al Qaida's weapon trade connections to few and vague remarks. Perhaps this has been a choice of avoiding political sensitivities, which is however unnecessary as the whole subject of international terrorism is in such politically most sensitive. [About Al Qaida and But's weapons trade, see: http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2003/mercdeat.htm ]

It is also remarkable that information on Al Qaida's activities in East Africa are heavily concentrated in Kenya, where the US intelligence has better network, while Tanzania - most probably an at least as important Al Qaida base as Kenya - has remained in shadows. Tanzania used to be more aligned to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and therefore it is not surprising that Russian weapons trade (including But's) kept Tanzania as a knot.

The Sudanese Years 1991-1996
Al Qaida's removal from Peshawar and moving the organization to Sudan was a result of multiple factors. On one hand the Islamist takeover of Sudan in 1989 had produced the first Sunni Islamist state in the world, and the religious ideologue of Sudan, Hassan al Turabi, had sent a three-men delegation to meet bin Ladin in Peshawar soon after the establishment of Islamist rule in Khartoum. In 1990-1991 Usama bin Ladin had fallen into disgrace in Saudi Arabia, and also Pakistan was hoping to get rid of him. Gunaratna also mentions US pressure on Pakistan after the 1993 WTC bombing, although by then the headquarters, main infrastructure, and leadership of Al Qaida had been in Sudan for two years already. (pp. 39-40, 47.)

The "ending" of the Afghan jihad, however, is left to little attention in Gunaratna's book. The Soviet removal in 1989 did not end communist rule in Afghanistan, or the massive Russian support for Najibullah's regime still in place in Kabul when Usama started leaving the whole Afghan theatre. When Kabul was finally liberated and Najibullah overthrown in 1992, this was done by the Tajiks of the Panjshir valley, led by Ahmad Shah Massoud. The new government of Afghanistan was hostile at bin Ladin's favorite, the Islamist leader Hekmatyar, and Hekmatyar continued fighting for three more years, until his domain and troops were inherited by the Taliban. Could it be that we should not look at the Soviet removal at all, but rather the completed capture of late Azzam's organization? For the political goals of Usama and his Egyptian allies, the Afghan jihad - especially it being directed against Russia - was not as important as the internationalist subversion against US interests around the world, for which purpose the former guerrilla organization had to be abandoned and dispersed to form terrorist cells elsewhere?

Nevertheless, it was after the takeover by Usama and the Egyptians over Azzam's organization in 1989, that Al Qaida as a terrorist organization was actually born. In fact, Al Qaida's movement to Sudan started as early as in 1989, and was completed in 1991. (p. 41.) This means that most of its life span should actually be traced back to Sudan, and not to the Afghanistan front. This, I think, is one of the failures of contemporary scholarship on terrorism, which still has to be studied more carefully (as well as the South Yemen and Tanzanian connections), in order to develop a more balanced picture of probably the most dangerous terrorist organization of the world. Gunaratna's detailed information on the Sudan years is a very good beginning - especially when accompanied by Nimrod Raphaeli's account on Zawahiri's mid-1990 endeavors. (More about that in a separate review later, inshallah.) Gunaratna himself admits that the global network was mainly created during the Sudanese period from December 1991 to May 1996, and he stresses the structural inheritance from the Muslim Brotherhood. (p. 128.)

In 1993, when the US put further pressure on Pakistan, the Pakistani authorities started to register, arrest and expel "Afghani Arabs", who still remained in Pakistan, although the bulk had been dispersed to their home countries or gathered to Sudan by Al Qaida. A Pakistani register of the time included more than 5000 foreign mujahidin, whose numbers might be indicative for analyzing the composition of radical jihadists in general and Al Qaida in particular (p. 47):

1142 Egyptians

981 Saudis

946 Algerians

792 Yemenis

771 Jordanians

326 Iraqis

292 Syrians

234 Sudanese

199 Libyans

117 Tunisians

102 Moroccans

[Note: Gunaratna lists "Algerians" twice, which is probably a typo. I have interpreted the latter number as Yemenis.]

Some features are obvious: All of them are Arabs from the Middle East and North Africa. Even though the media continues to repeat the myths of even "thousands" of Chechens, Central Asians and others, there are no traces of them in any official registers. In the 2000s, individual South East Asians and Uighurs as well as the well-known Uzbek contingent (partly consisting of Afghanistan's Uzbeks, but partly of Uzbeks from the IMU of Juma Namangani) have appeared in the Afghan theatre, but not a single Chechen has been captured or killed in the rows of the Taliban or Al Qaida. Although Al Qaida has gained foothold in South East Asia and tried to infiltrate the conflicts in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the organization remains strongly Arab-dominated, and therefore also dominated by the traditions and networks of Middle Eastern political extremist movements.

Return to Afghanistan
When Sudan came under heavy international pressure to expel Al Qaida, and Al Qaida's Sudanese protector Hassan al Turabi fell into disgrace of the "rightist" military circles of Sudanese Islamist government, and when simultaneously the radical Islamist movement Taliban had gained overhand in Afghanistan, Usama bin Ladin and Al Qaida's key leadership moved back to the Afghan theatre in 1996.

Although according to Leitzinger bin Ladin was invited to Afghanistan by Hekmatyar, Gunaratna points out that he first lived in Yunus Khalis' farm Hadda in Jalalabad. The farm had actually belonged to Khalis' protégé "Engineer Mahmud". For image-related reasons, however, Usama preferred to meet journalists in caves, and give an image of a puritan life. (p. 55.)

In Feb-Mar. 1997, Usama moved to Kandahar, following Mullah Omar's request. He also often stayed at Al Badr camp in Khost, and sometimes at Zhawar camp, which belonged to the Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani. The Saudi intelligence chief Turki bin Faisal is known to have visited Kandahar to offer funding for the Taliban. (p. 56.)

In the following years, 1997-1998, Usama's main goals in Afghanistan seemed to be mediating truces between radical Islamists worldwide, so that they would all concentrate in fighting the US and its interests, and put other goals aside for the time being. (p. 58.) This means Usama was mainly continuing on the very policy line that had dominated Al Qaida's efforts throughout the late Sudan years, 1995-1996, which witnessed for example the meetings in Cyprus, Iran and Sudan, founding of the "Terrorist International", which was chaired by Zawahiri and Hizbollah's Imad Mughniyeh, and in general Al Qaida contacts with Hizbollah and the Iranian intelligence.

Al Qaida's Functioning
Al Qaida has a unique structure combining highly centralized ideological indoctrination and coordination on one hand, but highly decentralized and self-sustaining practical activity on the other hand. This kind of structure makes if a Hydra like cancer, where everything is controlled by the "political officers" and agent handlers of the ideological center - just like in the Marxist predecessors of Al Qaida - but yet if the head of the monster is destroyed, the cells could carry on their terrorist activities and continue spreading hatred against the United States.

It is wrong to distinguish "religious terrorism" from "political terrorism", because the so-called religious terrorism is political terrorism, too. The artificial distinction has so far only blurred the understanding of the ideological roots of radical Islamist terrorism in the political radicalism of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Also Gunaratna recognizes that it is the very modern and political fashion of anti-Americanism that has made Al Qaida so uniquely flexible, variable, widely based and international organization. (pp. 115-116.) It is therefore that it is also most dangerous, and it feeds directly on the mainstreams of Western radical milieu itself: anti-Americanism being at the core of it.

However, it would be wrong to characterize Al Qaida as a "loose" organization, since from its communist predecessors it has inherited both the strict discipline, organization, and ideological control. (p. 296.) Al Qaida has an internal security service, led by Muhammad Mousa. (p. 78.) It also screens very carefully the actual membership selects from a great bulk of applicants, demanding systematically 14 personal characteristics as criteria for membership. (p. 98.)

All Al Qaida operatives are compelled to use pseudonyms to blur and hide their actual identities and political backgrounds. (p. 79.) Al Qaida's pseudonyms are often comprised with some common Muslim names plus a suffix indicating the person's home country - or alternatively a place he otherwise wanted to identify himself with, like in many cases a jihad front the person had fought in. For example:

Egyptian: al Masri

Yemeni: al Yemeni

Jordanian: al Urduni

Algerian: al Jazairi

Moroccan: al Maghribi

Sudanese: al Sudani

Tunisian: al Tunisi

Libyan: al Libi

Iraqi: al Iraqi

Saudi Arabian: al Makki (Meccan) etc., as Al Qaida refuses to refer to the name of the Saud dynasty.

Pseudonyms referring to places where the person has fought can be for example like al Banshiri (Panjshir Valley), al Kashmiri (Kashmir), al Shishani (Chechnya), al Bukhari (Bukhara) and so on. But such names also commonly occur as genuine family names among Muslim populations.

Gunaratna sums well the nature of Al Qaida under the title "Understanding the Threat" on page 296: "By adapting and seamlessly grafting preexisting models, Al Qaeda has built an Islamist organization full of vitality. Its politically clandestine structure is built on the idea of internationalism. Using techniques drawn from Leninism and operating on the Marxist militant model, it uses noms de guerre, adheres strictly to a cell structure, follows the idea of a cadre party, maintains tight discipline, promotes self-sacrifice and reverence for the leadership and is guided by a program of action. Al Qaeda is self-reproducing and therefore hard to defeat."