As one of the earliest Arabs to join the Afghan Jihad, the Algerian Islamist Abdullah Anas counted as brothers-in-arms the future icons of al-Qaeda’s global war, from Abdullah Azzam to Osama bin Laden, and befriended key Afghan resistance leaders such as Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Brushing shoulders with everyone from Zarqawi to Haqqani, Anas distanced himself from their movements, disagreeing with their narrow interpretations of political Islam. While he remains committed to Jihad, to this day Anas takes issue with the extremist trajectories of his one-time companions.

Using Anas’ memoirs, To The Mountains: My Life in Jihad, From Algeria to Afghanistan, and his intimate knowledge of the networks that formed during the Soviet-Afghan war as a springboard, this panel will be tracing the journey of  ‘Jihad’ – and what it means for our societies today.

Speakers:

Abdullah Anas is an Algerian politician-in-exile and former member of the mujahideen who fought alongside bin Laden before falling out with the al-Qaeda leader over his plans for a global Jihad. He lives in London, having gained political asylum.

Tam Hussein is an award-winning investigative journalist and writer who has reported on UK Jihadist networks and British foreign fighters in Syria.

Photograph courtesy of Dawei Ding via Creative Commons

  Watch the video stream of The Meaning of Jihad

Patrick Cockburn, Middle East Correspondent for The Independent, has been reporting on the region for over 25 years and has published four books on the recent history of Iraq. His forthcoming book, The Age of Jihad: The Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East, presents a compelling new analysis of the dominant conflict of our time; the Sunni – Shia war and the subsequent origins of Daesh.

Cockburn argues that the rise of Daesh did not explode suddenly in Syria after the Arab Spring as the conventional view holds, but over several years in occupied Iraq. It is in the sectarian conflict that engulfed Iraq following the war of 2003 that patterns were established that would later spill over into Syria with such devastating results.

Patrick Cockburn will join us in conversation with Azadeh Moaveni to discuss in depth the current turmoil in the Middle East and the fraught role the West has played in the region from 2001 to present.

Azadeh Moaveni is a former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine. She reported from throughout the region for much of the past decade, and speaks Persian and Arabic. Her books include Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and she is co-author, with Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening.

Set in Pakistan, the documentary follows enigmatic cleric Maulana Aziz, also known as Abdul Aziz Ghazi, who is waging jihad against the Pakistani state and based at the controversial Red Mosque in Islamabad. Alongside Aziz, the film follows two 12-year-old students who have attended the madrassas – Islamic seminaries that teach Sharia law as the only law and at which students learn to recite the Quran – run by the Red Mosque network. Zarina escapes from her local madrassa to join a regular school; while Talha disengages from his moderate Muslim family and decides to become a jihadi preacher whilst studying at a madrassa.

The documentary explores the proliferation of Islamic fundamentalism in the context of a state that is trying to combat the indoctrination of children at madrassas.

The directors began the discussion by explaining how they had gained access to Aziz. Naqvi described how initially the film was about the two young teens, but as the story developed it became obvious that the team “needed to dig much more deeper than just following the other characters… We needed an anchor point, to follow someone who actually used a lot of these other characters, perpetuating their own rhetoric. And for us that happened to be Maulana Aziz,” said Naqvi.

Naqvi subsequently followed Aziz on and off for two years, but admitted the real access did not come until 2013. “I definitely came with my own baggage and my own prejudices,” said Naqvi. He was confronted by a man “affiliated with an institution that perpetuated militancy and intolerance in Pakistan, so I hated him definitely,” said Naqvi.

However, in 2013 “there was a major shift” in how Naqvi worked with Aziz.

Naqvi described how he had come to meet Aziz “on a common ground… on questions of my own faith and own spirituality.”

Goodman Levitt attributed much of the film’s success to the relationship Naqvi was able to build with Aziz, and commented that a combination of “good fortune and great work” had led to the film being made.

Saw @manaqvi‘s insightful and powerful documentary #AmongtheBelievers at the @frontlineclub last night.Most important film of the year.

— Maha Khan Phillips (@MahaKhanPhillip) March 12, 2016

Naqvi described how gaining access to and working with Zarina was a “real privilege” for the team. Despite pressure from her community not to become involved with the film, Zarina’s parents “really supported their daughter in wanting to bring this story forwards.” Zarina “really wanted to share her story, she was really open to it,” said Naqvi.

In addition to Aziz, Talha and Zarina, the film follows Dr Prevez Hoodbhoy, a doctor of nuclear physics and activist protesting the activities of the Red Mosque. Hoodbhoy was Aziz’s foil throughout the documentary and Naqvi described him as a useful ally of the production from the outset.

Much of the discussion focused on the future of Pakistan, and what changes will develop in the near future.

Among the Believers also explores the National Action Plan, instigated by the Pakistani government to push curriculum reform in the madrassas and to combat the culture of militancy. “The fact that they came up with the National Action Plan… The fact that there are some small disparate groups coming out on the streets and condemning this culture of intolerance, that’s something. All we can hope is that it grows from there,” said Naqvi. 

The response to the movie from within Pakistan was mixed. Some of Naqvi’s biggest and most loyal supporters are from Pakistan. However, some reacted “very viscerally… [they] said you’re just perpetuating a very singular stereotype and orientalist spectacle for western media.”

Naqvi concluded: “I’m still affecting change and if I can be part of the dialogue in change, that’s great.”

Among the Believers is being screened twice daily at the Curzon Bloomsbury, London until March 17 2016.

Belgian journalist Rudi Vranckx joined an audience at the Frontline Club on Monday 1 February 2016 to discuss his documentary My Jihad, in which he explores how a small Belgian community is confronting extremism.

Loving the q&a @frontlineclub with @RudiVranckx after the screening of #myjihad pic.twitter.com/5PuJfdspiv

— Albany (@albanyassociate) February 1, 2016

Following a screening of the powerful film, which reveals how a town in a country that saw 400 young people travel to Syria last year is tackling the problem, Vranckx admitted that Belgian society – and the rest of Europe – has a lot of work to do.

“This film was made before the attacks in Paris and I’m afraid the situation is getting worse,” Vranckx said. “Even today a popular paper had the headline that read: ‘Our people are tired of foreigners’.”

Vranckx went on to explain that it is currently the symptoms of the issue – rather than the root causes – that are being dealt with. In My Jihad he meets Imad, a local youth councillor who has responded to cases of radicalisation by engaging with young Muslims on the subject of extremism.

“The issue is fear,” said Vranckx. “Fear of losing identity, fear of being isolated by one’s religion. The basic fight is a fight within Islam.”

This divide manifests itself in the film through Vranckx’s interviews with the mothers of the young Belgians who have fled to Syria.

“I spoke to one woman whose son was declared dead several times after fleeing. The news was on the front page of two newspapers, but it was not him,” Vranckx said.

“In the end he was one of the Paris killers. Before returning to Europe to commit the attack he didn’t even say hello to his mother. He didn’t say anything before blowing himself up.”

Vranckx commented on his respect for Saliah, who featured significantly in the film, and spoke in depth about her son leaving for Syria unannounced and his subsequent death.

“Saliah is very brave to have spoken about it,” said Vranckx. “She opened the door to other mothers in a similar situation.”

What role could the #media play in addressing the #identity #politics that are impacting today’s #youth? – @frontlineclub #MyJihad Q&A

— Alexandra Simmons (@arlsimmons) February 1, 2016

When questioned by a member of the audience on why there were no fathers interviewed in the film, Vranckx responded that the women tended to be more open.

“I spoke to some men whose sons had gone to Syria, but in the end they decided against being interviewed on film. They were too ashamed.

“The women were more willing to speak about the issue. Plus, in many cases the fathers were absent from the household.”

He said he has “never come across a parent who justified the fighting.”

Another audience member questioned the relationship between the young people who leave Europe to fight in Syria and the local fighters in the country, to which Vranckx responded that they had little in common.

“The locals often view Muslims who travel from Europe in a negative light,” he said. “Many local fighters believe they are not helping.

“They do not speak the language; they do not know the country. They come with a ‘Visit Syria’ travel book in their pocket. They rarely connect with the local people.”

Despite receiving threats over My Jihad from both sides of the debate on Islamic extremism, Vranckx explained that it is crucial to broach the subject, describing it as a “blind spot.”

“I don’t make the programme for an elitist group who know their own views,” he said. “I want to reach ordinary people, the people at risk.”

by DAVID AXE and JOHN MASATO ULMER

Somali-American terror recruits have common roots in an impoverished, neglected and sometime oppressed immigrant community. Their feelings of impotence and isolation — and their desperate searches for structure — are not new. But for the most part, any violent impulses simmered under the surface until late 2006, when the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia gave American Somalis — and their kinsmen all over the world — a cause on which to hang their dissatisfaction.

In December of that year, thousands of Ethiopian troops streamed into neighboring Somalia, supported by fighter jets and columns of tanks. The attack was aimed at preventing what Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called the “Talibanization” of Somalia by the Islamic Courts Union, at the time the umbrella group for Al Shabab and other Islamists.

Quietly assisting the Ethiopians was a handful of American Special Forces, aircraft and aerial drones. “Ethiopia’s interests at the moment fully coincide with America’s security interests in the region,” Zenawi said. But at the time, what amounted to the third front in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” received very little attention in most of the U.S.

Not so in Minnesota, as well as other states with large Somali immigrant communities. Here, the reaction to the Ethiopian invasion was powerful. Ramla Bile, a United Somali Movement member, recalls feeling “helpless.”

“We felt that if we didn’t do anything, there wouldn’t be any Somalia, just the Somali people,” says an acquaintance of one of the “travelers” who gave only her first name, Najma.

“The primary motivation for such travel was to defend their place of birth from the Ethiopian invasion,” FBI Associate Director Philip Mudd said, “although an appeal was also made based on their shared Islamic identity.”

Read the rest in World Politics Review.

(Photo: David Axe)

by DAVID AXE and JOHN MASATO ULMER

When 26-year-old Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali-born immigrant living in Minnesota, blew himself up in Puntland, Somalia, on Oct. 29 last year, he became the very first American suicide bomber, and a harbinger of a looming crisis. Ahmed sneaked into Somalia in late 2007, followed by potentially scores of other young Minnesotan Somali-Americans.

Since the first wave of “travelers,” as they are known, left America, Minnesota has become a quiet battleground. The miniature, homegrown war on terror has pitted government authorities and their allies in the Somali community against fiery youths, hardline mosques and angry, alienated Somali immigrants.

Both sides claim to represent the voice of Minnesota’s roughly 70,000 Somalis. All agree, however, that the issue has its roots in broken families, neglected kids, alleyway bullying, and many Americans’ all-too-casual racism and xenophobia. In our post-9/11 world, Somali immigrants’ race and faith “pushed those buttons of fear,” says Dr. Peter Rachleff, a professor specializing in immigration, labor and African-American history at Macalester College, in St. Paul. And the backlash that fear created has contributed to a sense of alienation among many Somalis that sometimes results in desperate actions.

In America, Somali immigrants represent a minority within a minority within a minority. They’re black. They’re native Africans. And they’re Muslims. “Somalis face language and cultural barriers,” explains Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali community organizer and uncle of one of the travelers. Bihi’s 17-year-old nephew Burhan Hassan sneaked into Somalia in November, and reportedly died of a gunshot wound seven months later.

Many young Somali-Americans live in broken homes — their fathers either dead or working abroad. “We have the highest [number of] single-mom households in this community,” Bihi says. “It’s very bad, especially for the boys. They need a mentor.”

Read the rest at World Politics Review.

(Photo: Elliot Dodge deBruyn)

Last week Osama bin Laden exhorted Somalis to rise up in jihad against new president Shariff Sheikh Ahmed, a call that even Somali insurgent leaders rejected.

Earlier, as many as two dozen Somalis living in the U.S. sneaked into Somalia to join Islamic fighters combating the U.S.-, U.N.- and A.U.-backed government. One recruit (pictured) became the first American suicide bomber, when he blew himself up in northern Somalia in October.

Now one surviving recruit has had a “change of heart,” according to a diaspora leader. The 22-year-old has reportedly returned to the U.S. and is now in hiding.

In his step-by-step analysis of the West and Islam, Weigel  notes  that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are not three similar monotheistic belief structures as commonly described.  Weigel argues that Judaism and Christianity share many common characteristics, including the Old Testament, as the basis of faith. Although Islam acknowledges the prophets of Judaism and Christianity, Weigel notes that Muhammad believed that the revelation of Islam superseded these earlier religions. In the Qu’ran, Weigel maintains, Muhammad indicated that Judaism and Christianity were false or at least badly distorted faiths. Therefore, it should not be surprising that Islam found itself in conflict with Judaism and Christianity. Weigel believes the outlook is for a long battle between the West and the jihadis.

The author makes four main points. First, the West needs the equivalent of a plan similar to National Security Council Paper directive 68, the document that described the Soviet threat and prescribed policies to combat it. Weigel believes that two pillars of an anti-jihadist strategy should be decreasing the power of Iran and continuing support for the Iraqi government. He contends that even a perceived defeat in Iraq would embolden the jihadis. Second, the West should make religious freedom a priority throughout the world, arguing jihadis would not tolerate such tolerance. Third, the West, particularly the United States, must find alternative fuels for cars to reduce the flow of petro-dollars to the Middle East, some of which funds the jihadis. Lastly, the United States cannot shirk its leadership in the battle against the jihadis. Also, the non-jihadis of Islam, Weigel insists, must isolate the radicals before they take over as the mainstream.

Many people disagree with Weigel, but his manifesto defines his view of the religious differences among Judaism, Christianity and Islam to demonstrate his understanding of their cultural and political differences. That should make this book useful to those seeking to understand the contemporary relationship between the West and Islam.

Reviewer: Christopher Harper worked as a reporter for the AP, Newsweek, and ABC News  in Washington,  Beirut, Cairo, Rome, and New York.  He currently teaches journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Each of these young men has served prison time for terror-related crimes. Now, in a highly unusual social experiment, they are being groomed for a return to society by Dr Alyami, an art therapist. Dr Alyami’s therapy programme is taking place at a former desert resort half an hour’s drive north of the Saudi capital Riyadh.

A cluster of low-rise concrete buildings has been turned over to psychology counsellors and religious sheikhs to help try and set the former extremists on a more peaceful track. Only a curl of barbed wire along the top of the perimeter wall betrays the fact that this compound is no longer being used as a family getaway. 

The detainees are free to wander around inside where they enjoy activities such as swimming or a game of volleyball on a grassy courtyard. Their sleeping quarters are modest – the bedroom I saw was a tiny space with three mattresses on the floor.

The Saudi Ministry of the Interior launched the programme after homegrown jihadis began bombing government and foreign installations inside the Kingdom in 2003, but only recently have the authorities allowed outsiders a peak inside. During a recent visit Dr Alyami was leaning over a piece of paper vigorously drawing red lines to demonstrate to the class how he expresses his own negative feelings.

One of the detainees, Mohammed, held up his work showing me an abstract paper canvas smeared with intense red and purple tones. He smiled and said it represented his negative energy. The red, he explained, was Syria, from where he had planned to enter Iraq to join the insurgency. Mohammed never made it to Iraq but when he returned to Saudi Arabia he was arrested anyway. 

Not all the former jihadis’ art is easy to decipher or interpret. During a visit in November I watched as two of them drew lines, curves and dots in shades of pink and pale blue. Dr Alyami told me that when the request first came through that he work with these students, he was reluctant.

He said: “I had that idea that these are criminals. They blow up buildings and stuff and if I go there they might go after my kids one day…when I went there I saw how simple minded these kids are…they were just like tools being used.”

Work from earlier sessions was also on display. One depicted the outline of Saudi Arabia in bright green surrounded by blue as if the country was an island. The common notion that many young jihadis are naïve and easily-led has led to widespread report for this soft approach to curing extremism inside the Kingdom.

Part of the rehabilitation is religious in orientation. The authorities say that a misunderstanding of Islam is often at the heart of the extremists’ path towards violence. Art therapy is only one of several approaches to tackling terrorism inside the Kingdom. Abdulrahman Al-Hadlaq, advisor to the Minister of the Interior, told me he’s fighting a “war of ideas” and the only way to confront it is with ideology.

As a result, Saudi authorities say they are engaging with extremists at all levels: in schools, in mosques, even inside maximum security prisons. The most extreme of the terrorists are not eligible for rehabilitation but even they are invited to attend religious education sessions.  

I was given a tour of a new “more than maximum security” prison at Al Haer 25 miles south of Riyadh. There weren’t yet any occupants for its 1200 places. Saudi security forces are also busy rounding up suspected terrorists.  While I was in Riyadh the Saudis announced the arrest of 208 extremists. And the problem of extremism in the Kingdom appears far from over. US authorities claim 40 percent of the foreign fighters who have headed to Iraq to join the insurgency over the past year are from Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior claims an 80 percent success rate with its rehabilitation programme, a statistic which is impossible to verify. Dr Christopher Boucek, who lectures in politics at Princeton University, has been closely studying the Saudi programme for the past two years. Initially  a skeptic, he says he is impressed by what he’s seen in Saudi Arabia and told me rehabilitation is fast becoming the model for countries around the world trying to tackle Islamist terrorism.

Similar programmes are underway in Egypt, Singapore and even the Americans are trying this new soft approach at Camp Cropper in Iraq. 

Nancy Durham will be speaking to Nick Fielding at the Club on  4th of February.