Although
President Trump claimed in his address to the American public after the
killing of al-Baghdadi that he was a “bigger terrorist” than Osama bin Laden, fact of the matter is the Islamic State’s self-styled caliph was simply a nobody compared to Bin Laden.
As a Saudi
citizen and belonging to the powerful Saudi-Yemeni clan of the Bin
Ladens, which has business interests all over the Middle East, Osama bin
Laden was almost a royalty. He had so much clout even in the
governments of Middle Eastern countries that he was treated like a
“royal guest” by Pakistan’s military at the behest of the Saudi royal
family for five years from 2006 right up to his death in 2011.
By comparison,
even though he assumed the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in fact
Ibrahim Awad was simply a rural cleric in a mosque in Iraq’s Samarra
before he assumed the title of the caliph of the Islamic State. As far
as the impact of al-Baghdadi’s death is concerned, the real strength of
the Islamic State lies in its professionally organized and decentralized
Baathist command structure and superior weaponry provided to Syrian
militants by the Western powers and the Gulf states during Syria’s proxy
war.
Therefore, as
far as the Islamic State militancy in Syria and Iraq is concerned,
al-Baghdadi’s death will have no effect because he was simply a
figurehead, though the Islamic State affiliates in the Middle East,
North Africa and Af-Pak regions might be tempted to repudiate their
nominal allegiance to the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State.
By contrast,
the [alleged] death of Osama bin Laden in 2011 had such an impact on the
global terrorist movement that his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri,
an Egyptian cleric lacking the resources, charisma and lineage of his
predecessor, couldn’t even mediate a leadership dispute between
al-Baghdadi and al-Nusra Front’s leader al-Jolani.
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani,
the chief of al-Nusra Front, emerged as one of the most influential
militant leaders during the eight-year proxy war in Syria. In fact,
since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to April 2013,
the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front were a single organization that
chose the banner of al-Nusra Front.
Although the current al-Nusra Front has been led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, he was appointed[1]
as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of
Islamic State, in January 2012. Thus, al-Jolani’s Nusra Front is only a
splinter group of the Islamic State, which split from its parent
organization in April 2013 over a leadership dispute between the two
organizations.
In August
2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was based in Iraq, began sending Syrian
and Iraqi jihadists experienced in guerrilla warfare across the border
into Syria to establish an organization inside the country. Led by a
Syrian known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the group began to recruit
fighters and establish cells throughout the country. On 23 January 2012,
the group announced its formation as Jabhat al-Nusra.
In April 2013,
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released an audio statement in which he announced
that al-Nusra Front had been established, financed and supported by the
Islamic State of Iraq. Al-Baghdadi declared that the two groups were
merging under the name the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The
leader of al-Nusra Front, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, issued a statement
denying the merger and complaining that neither he nor anyone else in
al-Nusra’s leadership had been consulted about it.
Al-Qaeda Central’s leader, Ayman al Zawahiri,
tried to mediate the dispute between al-Baghdadi and al-Jolani but
eventually, in October 2013, he endorsed al-Nusra Front as the official
franchise of al-Qaeda Central in Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, however,
defied the nominal authority of al-Qaeda Central and declared himself as
the caliph of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Keeping this
background in mind, it becomes abundantly clear that a single militant
organization operated in Syria and Iraq under the leadership of
al-Baghdadi until April 2013, which chose the banner of al-Nusra Front,
and that the current emir of the subsequent breakaway faction of
al-Nusra Front, al-Jolani, was actually al-Baghdadi’s deputy in Syria.
Thus, the
Islamic State operated in Syria since August 2011 under the designation
of al-Nusra Front and it subsequently changed its name to the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April 2013, after which it overran
Raqqa and parts of Deir al-Zor in the summer of 2013. And in January
2014, it overran Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in Iraq and reached the
zenith of its power when it captured Mosul in June 2014.
Excluding
al-Baghdadi and a handful of his hardline Islamist aides, the rest of
Islamic State’s top leadership was comprised of Saddam-era military and
intelligence officials. According to a Washington Post report
[2], hundreds of ex-Baathists constituted the top and mid-tier command
structure of the Islamic State who planned all the operations and
directed its military strategy.
Regarding the
killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, despite a few minor
discrepancies, Seymour Hersh has published the most credible account
to-date of the execution of Bin Laden in his book and article titled: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden [3], which was published in the London Review of Books in May 2015.
According to
Hersh, the initial, tentative plan of the Obama administration regarding
the disclosure of the execution of Bin Laden to the press was that he
had been killed in a drone strike in the Hindu Kush Mountains on the
Afghan side of the border. But the operation didn’t go as planned
because a Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Bin Laden’s Abbottabad
compound and the whole town now knew that an operation is underway and
several social media users based in Abbottabad live-tweeted the whole
incident on Twitter.
Therefore, the
initial plan was abandoned and the Obama administration had to go
public within hours of the operation with a hurriedly cooked-up story.
This fact explains so many contradictions and discrepancies in the
official account of the story, the biggest being that the United States
Navy Seals conducted a raid deep inside Pakistan’s territory on a
garrison town without the permission of Pakistani authorities.
According to a May 2015 AFP report
[4], Pakistan’s military sources had confirmed Hersh’s account that
there was a Pakistani defector who had met several times with Jonathan
Bank, the CIA’s then-station chief in Islamabad, as a consequence of
which Pakistan’s intelligence disclosed Bank’s name to local newspapers
and he had to leave Pakistan in a hurry in December 2010 because his
cover was blown.
According to
the inside sources of Pakistan’s military, after the 9/11 terror attack,
the Saudi royal family had asked Pakistan’s military authorities as a
favor to keep Bin Laden under protective custody, because he was a scion
of a powerful Saudi-Yemeni Bin Laden family and it was simply
inconceivable for the Saudis to hand him over to the US. That’s why he
was found hiding in a spacious compound right next to Pakistan Military
Academy in Abbottabad.
But once the
Pakistani walk-in colonel, as stated in Seymour Hersh’s book and
corroborated by the aforementioned AFP report, told then-CIA station
chief in Islamabad, Jonathan Bank, that a high-value al-Qaeda leader had
been hiding in a safe house in Abbottabad under the protective custody
of Pakistan’s military intelligence, and after that when the CIA
obtained further proof in the form of Bin Laden’s DNA through the fake
vaccination program conducted by Dr. Shakil Afridi, then it was no
longer possible for Pakistan’s military authorities to deny the
whereabouts of Bin Laden.
In his book,
Seymour Hersh has already postulated various theories that why it was
not possible for Pakistan’s military authorities to simply hand Bin
Laden over to the US, one being that the Americans wanted to catch Bin
Laden themselves in order to gain maximum political mileage for
then-President Obama’s presidential campaign slated for November 2012.
Here, let me
only add that in May 2011, Pakistan had a pro-American People’s Party
government in power. And since Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, Pakistan’s
military’s then army chief, and the former head of Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), Shuja Pasha, were complicit in harboring Bin Laden,
thus it cannot be ruled out that Pakistan’s military authorities might
still had strong objections to the US Navy Seals conducting a raid deep
inside Pakistan’s territory on a garrison town.
But Pakistan’s
civilian administration under then-President Asif Ali Zardari persuaded
the military authorities to order the Pakistan Air Force and air
defense systems to stand down during the operation. Pakistan’s
then-ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani’s role in this saga ruffled
the feathers of Pakistan’s military’s top brass to the extent that
Husain Haqqani was later implicated in a criminal case regarding his
memo to Admiral Mike Mullen and eventually Ambassador Haqqani had to
resign in November 2011, just six months after the Operation Neptune
Spear.
Finally,
although Seymour Hersh claimed in his account of the story that
Pakistan’s military authorities were also on board months before the
operation, let me clarify, however, that according to the inside sources
of Pakistan’s military, only Pakistan’s civilian administration under
the pro-American People’s Party government was on board, and military
authorities, who were instrumental in harboring Bin Laden and his family
for five years, were intimated only at the eleventh hour in order to
preempt the likelihood of Bin Laden’s “escape” from the custody of his
facilitators in Pakistan’s military intelligence apparatus.
*
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Nauman Sadiq is an
Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on
the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and
petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Nauman Sadiq, Global Research, 2019