Dan's Winds of War: 2003-07-17

Welcome! Our goal is to give you one power-packed briefing of insights, news and trends from the global War on Terror that leaves you stimulated, informed, and occasionally amused every Monday & Thursday. Today's "Winds of War" is brought to you by Dan Darling of Regnum Crucis.

TOP TOPICS

• Earlier this week, Reuters ran a story that was apparently designed to debunk an audiotape claiming to be from al-Qaeda's Fallujah branch. Their experts were less than satisfactory in my own opinion, so I set about analyzing their claims myself.

• As other bloggers have noted, Cuba is jamming the US-based Iranian satellite TV stations, but there also appears to be a possibility that the jamming is also being orchestrated by Hezbollah operatives in Latin America, who have a substantial presence, along with al-Qaeda, in the Triple Border area. This also brings to mind Fidel Castro's remarks in 2001 that by working together Cuba and Iran can bring America to its knees.

Other Topics Today Include: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea updates; a coup in Sao Tome; killings in Liberia; a bin Laden aide turned over to the US; al-Ghozi's great escape; thwarted attacks in Indonesia; a Chechnya update; Graham's numbers; a claim of responsibility in the Quetta attack; and a killer kangaroo.

IRAN REPORTS

• The Iranian government has admitted killing that Canadian journalist.

• Amir Taheri says that Iran and the United States have been fighting a miniature version of the Cold War in the Middle East.

• Hossain Shariatmadari, the editor of the Iranian newspaper Kayhan and a top advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei, is calling for Iran to pull out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The rationale? The IAEA is an obvious front for the US. Wheels within wheels, no doubt...

• Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the head of Pakistan's pro-Taliban Jamaat-e-Islami party, is calling on Pakistan to back Iran against the US, apparently quite oblivious to Iran's growing ties with India. Qazi is a key ideologue within the Pakistani Islamist movement (type his name into Google or Rantburg's search engine and see what comes up) and is about as fundamental as an Islamic fundamentalist gets. Just remember this the next time you hear that Shi'ite and Sunni terrorists would never cooperate because of ideological differences.

IRAQ BRIEFING

• Porphyrogenitus has his own list of Ten Lies We Were Told About Iraq, though I doubt you'll see this one printed in the UK Independent.

• Robert over at Alphabet City notes that yet another Iraqi resistance group has emerged (guess we'll have to add that one to the pile), and correctly notes that the Democrats' criticism of the Bush administration over the Niger flap has likely emboldened the Iraqi insurgents and their foreign backers.

• Ali Bapir, the leader of the Kurdish Komala Islamiyyah group, is now in US custody in northern Iraq. Prior to the war in Iraq, Komala Islamiyyah controlled the city of Khurmal, which Collin Powell stated before the UN as housing a ricin lab in addition to an al-Qaeda training camp. Komala sided with Ansar al-Islam at the beginning of the war but was eventually paid off by the PUK, who allowed most its members to escape. Bapir's capture is an important blow to al-Qaeda's operations in northern Iraq, as it stops him from being able to reconstitute his organization to fight against the US.

• The Kurdish terrorist group KADEK, also known as the PKK, may be planning to attack Turkey in the near future. KADEK fighters recently killed four in the Turkish village of Yenikoy in addition to launching an attempted assassination against Turkish governor Ali Cafer Akyuz that left two Turkish soldiers dead.

• There's an interesting article in the Kurdistan Observer noting the spread of Saudi missionary programs in Iraq and why the US isn't happy with it.

• Vincent Cannistraro, a counter-terrorism expert who has been quoted in both ABC News and Washington Post as being somewhat reserved about the possibility of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, apparently had no such questions after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

• The head of the US team charged with finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction seems to be making quite a bit of progress in the hunt for WMDs. This is actually an area of concern for me, as the question has never been whether they were there or not as it is where are now.

• You'd never know it from watching most news reports, but US troops seem to be doing rather well among Iraqi Kurds and Christians in terms of public relations.

NORTH KOREA UPDATE

• The latest round of "elections" are in up in North Korea and here are the results: one hundred percent for all candidates, per the KCNA. Oddly though, no description of the opposition.

• Here's an extremely freaky look at North Korean society which looks to me like a combination of 1984 and Solaris from Xenogears. It might help to supplement this piece with an earlier story that ran in the Washington Post on Kim Jong Il's warped personality.

THE WIDER WAR

• Alphabet City also has a nice analysis of the Virginia-based Lashkar-e-Taiba cell here and here. I would add that among the Lashkar-e-Taiba's various antics in Indian Kashmir, they also hosted Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan after the Taliban's defeat in Afghanistan.

• There was a military coup in Sao Tome and have dissolved the state bodies, all this while President Menezes was visiting Nigeria. Despite its size, Sao Tome has access to significant oil reserves and is in a region of the world that could easily be used as a base for al-Qaeda, especially given the increasingly radicalized Muslim population in northern Nigeria.

• Charles Taylor has killed two cabinet officials who plotted to depose him while his minions prepare to launch one last looting spree.

• Adil al-Jazeeri has been transferred to US custody from Pakistan. Adil has appeared on radar once before, delivering a bin Laden audiotape in April in which the terrorist leader ranted against the US-led war against Iraq.

• Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi has escaped from Filippino national police headquarters with two associates, apparently while the guard was asleep. Al-Ghozi is a key operations chief in Jemaah Islamiyyah and was involved in planning the plot against US interests in Singapore in January 2002. So was his escape the result of complete incompetence or an inside job? You be the judge ...

• Indonesia has thwarted a second major attack by Jemaah Islamiyyah and captured Pranata Yuda, a key leader within the organization who, according to the Jakarta Post via Rantburg, ran a terrorist training camp in the southern Philippines. Also captured was Ichwanudin, who apparently "committed suicide" while in police custody.

• Chechnya hasn't been very kind to its homegrown Islamist rebels terrorists lately. The Russian military has overrun a terrorist base in Tsa-Vedeno as well as killing Aslan Gasayev, a key deputy of Abu al-Walid and the orchestrator of the recent suicide bombings in Moscow. The Chechens have recently fought back, killing nine Russians in the southern part of the country. Per Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, there are between 1,200 and 1,300 terrorists still in Chechnya.

• Speaking of numbers, Florida Senator Bob Graham recently let it slip that there are between 70,000 and 120,000 al-Qaeda operatives which, while it sounds hopelessly large to most individuals, is actually pretty consistent with what Rohan Gunaratna wrote in Inside Al-Qaeda (though Gunaratna has evidently refuted one of the key points of his own book, namely that the 9/11 attacks were originally planned for September 9). Unfortunately, Graham neglected to mention the important clarification that an awful lot of these terrorists are now dead on the battlefields of Somalia, Algeria, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, the southern Philippines, etc.

• The Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a Shi'ite mosque in Quetta that killed fifty.

• We try to close on a lighter note if possible. And it would seem that contrary to anything you may have heard, Australians do indeed lead very interesting and eventful lives. Crikey! 'Ware those killer 'roos!

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