Terrorist Movements and the Recruitment of Arab Foreign Fighters

A History from 1980s Afghanistan to ISIS

Roger Warren

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786726155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book offers the first detailed, in-depth account of how and why some Arab foreign fighters subsequently became involved in Islamist terrorism. Drawing on a personal dataset of 3, 010 Arab foreign fighters compiled using biographies, martyrdom eulogies, and postings on 'jihadi' websites, Terrorist Movements and the Recruitment of Arab Foreign Fighters suggests that the subsequent involvement in Islamist terrorism by some Arab foreign fighters is primarily forged in the crucible of defensive jihad.

1

Is One Man’s Foreign Fighter Another Man’s Terrorist?

Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.

US Department of State, ‘The wandering mujahidin: Armed and dangerous’, 1993.¹

The majority of the leaders and planners behind the 9/11 attacks in America were veteran Arab foreign fighters from the 1980s Afghan jihad against the Soviet invaders. These Arab foreign fighters had arrived in Afghanistan with no known prior terrorist links, yet as a result of their participation in the Afghan jihad, they subsequently became involved in Islamist terrorist-related activities, that included the 9/11 attacks. In effect, their trajectory to involvement in terrorism was via participation in defensive jihad, as opposed to the direct ‘fast track’ route taken by the majority of 9/11 hijackers. The veteran Arab foreign fighters who became the leaders and planners behind the 9/11 attacks included Osama bin Laden, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Faraj al-Libi, Abdul Rahman al-Nashiri and a rather less well-known Syrian called Muhammad Haydar Zammar, who was considered a key recruiter for three of the 9/11 pilots.² Zammar was born in 1961 in Aleppo, Syria and moved to Germany as a child before becoming a German citizen in 1982. In 1991, he travelled to Afghanistan to train and subsequently fight in a defensive jihad against Afghan communists after the Soviets had departed. Later in 1995, he then travelled to Bosnia to fight in another defensive jihad, this time against Serbian forces who were attacking Bosnian Muslims. He later returned to Afghanistan and became involved with, and was influenced by Al Qaeda, before returning to Hamburg, Germany where the 9/11 pilots were university students. His story is that of an ordinary young Syrian man who was raised in Germany, who fought to defend fellow Muslims from persecution, yet subsequently became a key terrorist operative. Muhammad Haydar Zammar’s story is not unique; indeed it appears to follow a well-worn trajectory that is punctuated by involvement in defensive jihad.

Ahmad Abdullah al-Shaya was an ordinary twenty-year-old single man from the religiously conservative town of Buraidah in Saudi Arabia. He had no Islamist (violent or non-violent) links, but was motivated to travel to Iraq in 2004 to protect fellow Muslims and ‘to fight the Americans on Noble Jihad’.³ His self-confessed objective was ‘to kill the Americans, policemen, national guards and the American collaborators’.⁴ However, two months after his arrival, having undergone training and indoctrination in Iraq, he executed a self-sacrificial ‘martyrdom/suicide’ attack killing twelve civilians and non-combatants. His story is also not unique, whereby an individual initially becomes a foreign fighter, but subsequently becomes involved in Islamist terrorism. His complete biography is covered in Chapter 3. Finally, to reinforce this phenomenon, Ahmad al-Darawi was a thirty-eight-year-old Egyptian man who was married with two children. A former police officer until 2007, he then became a sports marketer for a telecommunications firm. By all accounts from family and friends he was a mature, normal and ordinary man. During the Egyptian 2011 revolution as part of the Arab Spring, he became a prominent rights activist who decided to run (unsuccessfully) for parliament. Two years later (in June 2013) he travelled to Syria’s Latakia province, and subsequently became the commander of foreign fighters in the Lions of the Caliphate Brigade. Al-Darawi’s brigade pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) in November 2013. In a (24 February 2014) Twitter post, he posted ‘how sweet life is between the Quran and my Kalashnikov [rifle]’.⁵ A few months later, in May 2014, he reportedly conducted a self-sacrificial (‘martyrdom/suicide’) attack against a Syrian military outpost.

The accounts of Muhammed Zammar, Abdullah al-Shaya and Ahmad al-Darawi are emblematic of many of the trajectories of Arab foreign fighters in 1980s Afghanistan, Iraq (post-2003) and Syria (post-2011), and raise a series of broad conundrums that require investigation. Specifically, to what extent did their geographic origin affect their initial involvement in defensive jihad? Did being an expatriate Arab living in Germany affect Zammar? Did living in a conservatively religious town affect al-Shaya? Prior to their respective involvements in defensive jihad, they all appeared ordinary men, yet what motivated their departures to a foreign battlefield? Were they radicalised prior to their involvement in defensive jihad or did that happen as a result of participation on the battlefield? Indeed, were they ever actually radicalised? Why were Arabs motivated to defend their co-religionists in other countries as foreign fighters? Although al-Shaya targeted civilians and non-combatants, and al-Darawi a Syrian military outpost, can one disaggregate self-sacrificial (‘martyrdom/suicide’) attacks based on targeting? Is there a difference between targeting civilians and targeting soldiers (foreign occupation and/or oppressive regime forces)? Are self-sacrificial (‘martyrdom/suicide’) attacks conducted by non-state combatants comparable with those conducted by more conventional combatants (Vietnamese Viet Cong, German Hitler Youth, Japanese Kamikazes and Russian Shtraf companies)? To what extent did the situational context of defensive jihad (including indoctrination, the brutalisation of combat and obedience to authority) affect Zammar’s, al-Shaya’s and al-Darawi’s subsequent behaviour? Was al-Shaya an Arab foreign fighter involved in a defensive jihad, or an Islamist terrorist involved in a terrorism against civilians? Are these two categories (Arab foreign fighters and Islamist terrorists) one and the same, or can boundaries be identified and drawn between them? Is it a case of one man’s foreign fighter being another man’s terrorist? Are there metrics that can be employed to distinguish between the two cohorts?

Then again, why does attempting to disaggregate the two cohorts really matter? The answer lies in the fact that by drawing distinctions between Arab foreign fighters and Islamist terrorists, it allows academics and policy makers to better understand the phenomena. There are clear policy implications of branding an individual a foreign fighter or an Islamist terrorist. This conundrum and matter of distinctions are not about mere semantics or intended to be some theoretical debate about various transnational cohorts and mobilisations. The need to distinguish between Arab foreign fighters and Islamist terrorists will facilitate, overlaps notwithstanding, a greater understanding of their respective initial mobilisations, and the situational factors (amongst others) that subsequently influenced and informed their respective decisions, behaviour and actions. It does not appear correct to simply assume that at the individual level, an Arab national who mobilises to fight abroad in a defensive jihad against a foreign army of occupation (or a despotic Arab regime), has the same motivation as an Arab national who conducts a self-sacrificial (‘martyrdom/suicide’) attack in a Baghdad market targeting civilians and non-combatants. In addition, by acknowledging important subtleties and nuances, individualised rehabilitation and reintegration programmes can be established to better reflect these subtleties.

However, the current conflation of these two cohorts is perhaps understandable given that some Arab foreign fighters do subsequently become involved in Islamist terrorist-related activities.⁶ Indeed, a widely misunderstood reality is that whilst not all Arab foreign fighters embrace Islamist terrorism, many individuals in Al Qaeda and ISIS started their ‘careers’ as Arab foreign fighters. As Chapter 2 will demonstrate, there were veteran Arab foreign fighters involved in the 1993 World Trade Centre (WTC) attack, the 1995 Riyadh attacks, the 1998 East Africa bombings, the 2000 USS Cole attack, and finally the 9/11 attacks where four of the hijackers had previously participated in a defensive jihad in either Bosnia or Chechnya.⁷ Moreover, this apparent conflation (between Arab foreign fighters and Islamist terrorists) is not just an issue in academia, inasmuch as the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2178 (in September 2014) that introduced another term – ‘foreign terrorist fighters’.⁸ In July 2015 at a meeting in Madrid, a United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee (UNSC CTC) discussed the threat from ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ including, inter alia, those ‘who travelled to Afghanistan during the 1980s … and to Iraq … during the 2000s’.⁹ Yet those Arabs who travelled to Afghanistan during the 1980s were helping those labelled by former President Ronald Reagan (in 1982) as ‘freedom fighters of Afghanistan’.¹⁰ In effect, President Reagan was implicitly encouraging ‘freedom fighters’ to go to Afghanistan, only to be rebranded subsequently as ‘foreign terrorist fighters’, ‘foreign fighters’, or ‘Islamist terrorists’. The irony of such rebranding was also recognised by the Arab foreign fighters themselves, as Anne Speckhard and Mubin Shaikh noted:

those who opposed the Soviets were supported and called ‘freedom fighters’ and many were encouraged to go and fight to throw the Soviets out. So for many, it was hypocritical to now call those who resisted the United States invasion of Iraq, terrorists – rather than freedom fighters.¹¹

Finally, it is instructive that the passing of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2178 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Is One Man’s Foreign Fighter Another Man’s Terrorist?
• 2 Afghan Arabs in the Afghan Jihad: The Incubation of Modern Terrorism
• 3 Iraq: The Unintended Cultivation of a New Generation of Terrorists
• 4 Arab Foreign Fighters and Islamist Terrorists in Syria
• 5 Analysis and Reflection
• 6 Implications and Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright