Thursday, July 5, 2007

Yemen: Car Bombing Hits Tourist Convoy

from Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor)

A bomb attack against a tourist convoy in Yemen killed at least eight Spanish tourists and wounded several others July 2 ... Yemen's intelligence services have in the past had a significant radical Salafi/Wahhabi and jihadist presence. In the 2006 presidential elections, major radical Salafi religious scholar Abdel-Majeed al-Zindani issued a fatwa obligating voters to cast their ballots in favor of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. While these linkages between Salafist and jihadist elements and the state remain, Saleh's regime has also supported the war against militant Islamists, which led to the weakening of the jihadist presence in the country. However, there are reasonable suspicions that a fair share of Yemen's security apparatus sympathizes with and supports jihadist operations in the country. Furthermore, Yemen sits on a major jihadist thoroughfare connecting four different Islamist militant arenas -- Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan/Pakistan. This will ensure that Yemen remains a hotbed of jihadist action for the foreseeable future.

Cleric: Cryptic Threat Preceded Attacks

by Paisely Dodds from Associated Press

"Those who cure you are going to kill you." Andrew White, a British priest said Wednesday, was the cryptic warning made to him in Jordan by a purported al-Qaida chief months before the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow that have been linked to a group of foreign Muslims working as doctors in Britain. British authorities have said the attacks bore the hallmarks of an al-Qaida operation, but security officials say investigators are still trying to determine whether there was any direct link between the alleged plotters and an outside mastermind.

Al-Qaeda deputy calls for more attacks

from Agence France-Presse (AFP)

Osama bin Laden's right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri has issued a vehement video calling for attacks on Western interests worldwide and regime change in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. "The struggle against the corrupt regimes and the corruptors is in two phases ... In the short term, one must take aim at the interests of the Crusaders and Jews,'' Zawahiri said in the 95-minute video from Al-Qaeda's As-Sahab Media. "All those who have attacked the (Islamic) nation must pay the price, in our countries and theirs, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine and in Somalia, but above all where one can strike a blow against their interests,'' he said.

Earth to Bush: Iraq isn’t South Korea

by Anne Miller and Kevin Martin from Foreign Policy in Focus

Any enduring U.S. military presence in Iraq, indeed any military occupation in the region, will generate fierce resistance. Anger over the presence of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia was clearly a significant factor in radicalizing and empowering al-Qaeda and the radical Wahabi Sunni sect. Most of the September 11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, and the presence of U.S. military power in the holy land of Islam was and is an understandable grievance shared by millions of Muslims worldwide.

British suspect's beliefs drove him, friends say

by Marjorie Miller and Sebastian Rotella from The LA Times

A doctor who works in the Baghdad hospital compound known as Medical City and knows both Abdullah and his father said that by the time Abdullah was a medical student at Baghdad University, he was known as an adherent of Wahhabism, a radical form of Islam also known as Salafism ... Abdullah reportedly received his medical degree from Baghdad University in 2004 and moved to Cambridge to study for his qualifying test to practice in England. That is when he met Maher, who said he tried to recruit Abdullah into Hizb ut-Tahrir, which calls for the reestablishment of a Muslim caliphate. Abdullah apparently found the group too moderate.

For the Islamist doctor, terror is healing

by Stephen Schwartz from The Spectator

The car bombs in London and Glasgow show that a global counter-offensive against the war on terror is well underway. Although Iraq is the main zone of conflict, Saudi-financed Wahhabi radicals — known to polite Western journalists as ‘Sunni insurgents’ — seek to export ‘al-Qa’eda in Iraq’ everywhere throughout the world ... The arrested doctors in the latest bombing outrages may turn out to be in the same class as the al-Zawahiri medical clan, as was another Palestinian physician, Abdullah Azzam. This was the man who was the mentor of bin Laden in the creation of the Pakistan-based Maktab al-Khidamat, or Services Institute, which co-ordinated extremist ideological indoctrination among Muslim volunteers in the Afghan struggle against the Russian invasion. Azzam was supported by the supreme Wahhabi clerical class in Saudi Arabia, and the Maktab al-Khidamat was turned into al-Qa’eda in 1988 by bin Laden, who had arrived in Afghanistan three years earlier.

Islam's Global War against Christianity

By Patrick Poole from American Thinker

An extensive search this past weekend of the websites of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Student Association, the Fiqh Council of North America, and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee - the most visible institutional representatives of Islam in America - found not a single mention or reference of the religious persecution of Christians by their Islamic co-religionists, thereby making them tacit co-conspirators in the Final Solution to the Christian problem in the Muslim world. The global war on Christianity by Islam is so massive in size and scope that it is virtually impossible to describe without trivializing it. Inspired by Muslim Brotherhood ideology and fueled by billions of Wahhabi petrodollars, the religious cleansing of Christians from the Muslim world is continuing at a break-neck pace, as the following recent examples demonstrate.