reflectivepundit

From the Munich Olympics 1972 to Terrorist Threats against the Sochi Games

By Brigitte L. Nacos

When members of the Palestinian Black September group forced their way into the living quarters of Israel’s Olympic team during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, killed two athletes and took nine others hostage, Germany’s security forces were utterly unprepared to deal with the crisis. As a result the hostage holders managed to kill those nine Israelis and one German policeman before they themselves were either killed or captured.

For four decades the official version had it that the attack was a complete surprise for the German authorities. But in July 2012, the news magazine DER SPIEGEL revealed in a cover story that the German government and the intelligence community had been warned by an informant weeks in advance of a Palestinian plan for “an incident” during the Olympics.

This is the cover of the Spiegel issue announcing the explosive revelations.

Informed by its embassy in Beirut about this informer’s message the foreign ministry in Bonn was alarmed enough to alert the German Secret Service and ask for all possible security measures. But neither the specific tip from Beirut nor a total of seventeen warnings from foreign intelligence agencies about the threat of a “Palestinian incident” at the Munich Games convinced German intelligence and police agencies to intensify their investigations and preparations. Tragically, forensic psychologist Georg Sieber had provided security agencies with several likely attack scenarios, among them, one that saw terrorists climbing over a fence to get access to the Olympic Village and take athletes hostage! Obviously, there were no specific preparations. And the result was catastrophic.

One important issue was not resolved by the belatedly released documents, namely, whether Gold Meir’s government offered to send a specially trained Israeli commando to assist in efforts to free the hostages. At the time, Israel had highly trained commandos that would not have botched rescue efforts as did the German police. But reports that the Israelis made such an offer were vehemently denied by highly placed German government officials and the Munich police chief.

All of this is interesting in advance of the Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

To begin with, Islamic militants fighting for independence of several republics in the North Caucasus region of Russia have posted videos on Internet sites threatening Russians and foreign visitors to Sochi with attacks in revenge for “all the Muslim blood that is shed every day around the world, be it in Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, all around the world.”  In a particularly bold move, one recent video shows two male jihadis without their faces covered threatens violence at the Winter Games as long as Russian forces occupy the Northern Caucasus. They also claimed responsibility for two recent, deadly suicide bombings in the city of Volgograd.

 

 

Bin Laden is Dead, but Bin Ladenism Is Alive and Well

By Brigitte L. Nacos

(Updated Post)

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, the founder and head of Al Qaeda, was killed in a daring commando raid by the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six in his hide-out in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reveals in his just released book that President Obama’s green light for the SEAL mission was “one of the most courageous I had ever witnessed in the White House.”

When President Obama announced the result of the Special Operation Forces’ mission, many Americans hoped that the death of bin Laden would be the final nail in the coffin of an Al Qaeda organization already hard hit by relentless American counterterrorism efforts.

That was a rather reasonable expectation since one result of a terrorist organization’s decapitation can be its disintegration.

But what has happened in the nearly three years since bin Laden’s demise?

The President himself said during the 2012 campaign, including in one of the debates with Republican candidate Mitt Romney, that Al Qaeda in Pakistan had been decimated.

At the time, most of Al Qaeda Central’s leadership cast had been captured, killed, or was in hiding.

But bin Ladenism (or Al Qaedaism) has not lost its attraction. 

Whether formally endorsed by the original Al Qaeda leadership or not, larger organizations, cells, and lone wolves with the same extremist ideology have grown in numbers and carried out lethal terrorist attacks in many parts of the world.

While it was hard enough to fight Al Qaeda Central, it is even more difficult to deal with a growing number of potent Al Qaeda affiliates or groups expressing allegiance to the original bin Laden organization.

Typically, these groups operate in failing states where governments do not control all regions. And while most of these jihadist groups fight first of all local or regional battles against governments and/or “infidel” fellow-Muslims and against Christians, the most extreme ones also embrace bin Laden’s declarations of war against the West and especially the United States.

Among the most threatening of these groups is Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a member of Al Qaeda's global network of affiliates.

Bin Laden followers in Yemen made their mark in 2002, when they attacked and greatly damaged the U.S. Navy’s guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in the Yemini port of Aden.

Eventually, with the charismatic preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. and Yemeni citizen, in their midst, AQAP planned terrorist attacks against Western interests inside and outside their region.

The Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan who killed 13 persons and injured dozens more, and the would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who failed to down a Northwest Airlines flight from London to Detroit in 2009, were motivated by AQAP propaganda. 

Whether declaring their allegiance to bin Laden like al-Shabaab in Somalia or loosely following Al Qaeda’s ideology like Boko Haram in Nigeria, many of these extremist groups march to their own drummer.

When Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) attracted jihadists from many parts of the world to fight the American-led invasion forces in 2003 and thereafter, the group and its leaders were followers of Al Qaeda Central. But more recently, during the Syrian rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad and his regime, the original AQ lost its grip over its Iraqi affiliate.

Against the expressed will and order of bin Laden’s successor Ayman al-Zawahiri, AQI leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi vied for influence beyond Iraq by taking over the Syrian Al Qaeda branch Jabbat al-Nusra and push aside al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Golani.

To emphasize AQI’s leading role in the Al Qaeda movement and his declaration of independence Abu Bakr adopted first the name “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” and later Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) for his organization in defiance of al-Zawahiri’s order not to merge local AQ affiliates.

We will never know whether Abu Bakr would have ignored Al Qaeda Central’s orders if they had been issued by Osama bin Laden rather than his successor.

What we do know is this: Today Al Qaeda Central’s self-proclaimed affiliates and, more importantly, independent groups with bin Ladenism as their guiding ideology are stronger  and control more real estate in the Middle East and parts of Africa than ever before.

Nothing is more indicative of the strength of Al Qaeda types of groups and their mujahideen than the return of AQI, now ISIS, to Anbar Province and their full or partial control of Ramadi and Fallujah, the very places, where U.S. troops along with Sunni fighters defeated and drove out Al Qaeda jihadists.

Right now, these fanatical, sectarian groups are fully engaged in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. And whereas the immediate targets are the Assad government in Syria and Maliki government in Baghdad in the larger context of a power struggle between Sunnis, led by Saudi Arabia, and Shiites, led by Iran, all of these organizations consider Israel and the United States as their arch enemies.     

In all of these respects, the growing network of Al Qaeda-like groups reflect Osama bin Laden’s so-called fatawa of 1996 and the follow-up in 1998, both declarations of war against infidel regimes in the Arab world and against western Christians and Jews.

As The New York Times reported the other day, Islamists fighting in Syria train and recruit Americans and other Westerners in their midst to carry out terrorist attacks once they return to their respective homelands.

Bin Laden is dead for almost three years. Al Qaeda Central is decimated.

But bin Ladenism is alive and well—and a growing threat.