05/02/14 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And next up is Jonathan Landay.
He's doing the national security beat, of course, over there at McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
And welcome back to the show, Jonathan.
How are you doing?
I'm well, thank you.
Good, good.
Happy to have you back on the show here.
And now, so the piece is titled here, latest at McClatchyDC.com, U.S. Surge in Terror Attacks Driven by More Threatening Al-Qaeda Affiliates.
And now, it's hard, I think, a little bit to break down this data, but I'm sure you're up to it.
Do we count terrorist attacks the same way when it was the insurgency against the American occupation in Afghanistan, pardon me, in Iraq, where every attack counted as a terrorist attack or not?
Because sometimes that was just in the propaganda on TV, and sometimes it was in the actual numbers.
And then sometimes, you may have a real point.
If they did a suicide truck bomb that targeted a marketplace and some Americans, so it's kind of hard to differentiate all this sort of thing.
But certainly, there's been, since the civil war in Syria broke out, the war in Iraq has broken back out again as well.
And then you got jihadists spread all the way through North Africa and what have you.
But so this is then the new State Department report counting these.
Can you help us discriminate and differentiate between who all is core Al-Qaeda and who's a franchise and how many of them and are they coming for us and what the hell?
Well, I can try.
You know, there was a controversy during the Bush administration about the way they counted terrorist attacks.
That seems to have been all sorted out now.
And these attacks that are being charted now are not inclusive of insurgent attacks like the Taliban, as far as I can tell, on American troops who remain in Afghanistan.
For the most part, it's focused on terrorism around the world, terrorist attacks around the world.
The State Department has charted a more than 40% increase between 2012 and 2013.
And I have to say that involved in the numbers now, as opposed to several years ago, is a special program over at the University of Maryland.
So there are academics who are involved in developing the criteria and determining what attacks met or qualified as terrorist attacks, as opposed to years ago when it was simply the National Counterterrorism Center.
Anyway, so basically, yeah, when they talk about core al-Qaeda, I like to refer to it more as the central leadership of al-Qaeda that's been based ever since 2001 when the Americans invaded Afghanistan in the neighboring tribal areas of Pakistan.
And we're referring basically to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
He was the number two man to Osama bin Laden until bin Laden was taken out.
And then he succeeded bin Laden.
He's an ideologue.
He's an Egyptian, a former doctor.
And so he's basically, around him, his leadership, that's basically referred to by the government as core al-Qaeda.
And then you have what they call the affiliates or offshoots, which are these groups that adhere, for the most part, to al-Qaeda's bin Ladenism, bin Laden's tenets, his goal of creating some kind of unified Islamic emirate spanning the Muslim world, and that these members, they swear allegiance or bayat to al-Zawahiri now as the leader of or the emir of al-Qaeda.
These groups are generally, there's a whole bunch of them now, in part because of the aggressive American drone-backed anti-terrorism program that's been going on in Pakistan's tribal areas.
A lot of foreign fighters based there have left and dispersed from that area to other parts of the Islamic world to what are known as ungoverned spaces, places where they can base themselves and train and attract recruits and stage attacks, plan attacks.
So we're talking about beginning, let's say, in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
In fact, the Yemeni government, with the assistance of the United States, has now got a major offensive underway against AQAP, as it's known as.
AQAP does, in the vision, in the view of the United States government, pose a threat to Americans, to America.
I don't know how huge a threat in terms of its ability to stage a massive terror spectacular on the scale of 9-11, but we do know that in the past they have tried.
They were responsible for sending the guy wearing the explosive underwear on the plane over Detroit.
They've tried to send bombs on cargo planes disguised as toner cartridges for printers.
So that's kind of the scale that they've operated on.
They are very dangerous to the government of Yemen, however.
So from there we move up north, if you would, to Iraq, where you have the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams, or Syria, which was the al-Qaeda affiliate, the Iraqi affiliate of al-Qaeda, but has since been disowned by Mr. Zawahiri because of its refusal to adhere to his directive to get out of Syria, stop fighting in Syria, and confine itself to Iraq.
That former affiliate or current affiliate, I don't know how you want to put it, because they are in this terrorism report and they are still considered the Iraqi affiliate of al-Qaeda, has stepped up hugely its operations in Iraq and has been responsible for just a wave of violence that is consuming Iraq now, aimed at the Shiite-led government.
Then right across the border you have Syria, then you move across up into North Africa where you have al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb, the North African affiliate which is responsible for terrorist attacks in places like Mali and other North African states.
So those are sort of the core al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
All right, so let's say, I don't know, you can include Yemen if you wanted, but to maintain control over these areas.
Nevertheless, they have armor, they have tanks, APCs, armored personnel carriers that have been captured from the Iraqi and for the most part Syrian forces, artillery, they have a sophisticated use of social networks.
I subscribe to the Twitter accounts of both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.
They have English language tweets.
They put sophisticated videos up on YouTube, sort of trying to promote their prowess and thereby attract new recruits, but also to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, including the Assad regime.
So these are not the kind of groups that the United States has dealt with before and right after 9-11.
They have developed into much more threatening organizations.
And in fact, one of the main worries now that was pointed out in this report is in Afghanistan.
Let me back up these spaces.
Most of Afghanistan came under the thumb of the Taliban, which allowed al-Qaeda to come in, allowed bin Laden to come in and set up training camps and bring up the, you know, he had thousands of recruits come in there, 55,000 alone in his 055 brigade, which was his combat brigade there.
And that's what you're starting to see now in northern Syria.
And in addition, you know, in northern Syria, that Bashar al-Assad could have asked for because what they have actually done, their presence, in particular the presence of foreign Islamists in Syria, has helped him consolidate his support among secularists, among Christians, the Christian minority, his own Alawite minority, Shia, people who, you know, communities that don't want to live or hate the idea of living under the Sunni Islamists.
You know, they think that the other side, the rebels, for the most part, are all foreigners.
And so that has really worked for him.
Jonathan, when I talked with David Anderson, I know he hadn't been there for a little while now, a year or more.
David knows a lot more than most people.
Yeah, well, and he's brilliant.
He's an incredibly brave reporter, of course, kidnapped by al-Nusra and then survived.
And, of course, I've been talking to him about the Iraq War since 2005, you know, the work that he's done there.
And we talked about how in the Iraq War, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi's guys, the so-called Islamic State, they were really never more than a few percent of the Sunni-based insurgency, which is really the tribes, the Sunni tribal leaders, fighting against what they saw was the loss of Baghdad and their power over the country and that kind of thing and resisting the Shiite takeover.
But he said, you know, in Syria, it really is the al-Nusra front.
And then later came ISIS, that they really are the cutting edge of this thing.
They're not the small percent Syrian, whereas ISIS is led by Iraqis and has got a larger percentage of foreign fighters in it than other groups, which is one of the reasons why you have this internecine battle going on between them, because, you know, ISIS tends to be far more brutal than any of the other Islamic groups.
And again, that has been a huge boon to Assad, because it's helped, you know, his army suffers from serious person-to-man power shortages.
They've been fighting for three years.
They're tired of FSA units that do fight.
I spent time with FSA units in Jordan.
I didn't go across the border, but I spent time with FSA units in Jordan.
And they were fighting across the border against the regime.
But again, the strongest fighters, the strongest groups, by dint of their fervency, as well as the fact that they were getting the bulk of the supplies of the arms until Saudis switched, from Saudi, from Qatar, you know, are the Islamists.
More threatening al-Qaeda affiliates.
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