Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Al Qaeda Taking Deadly New Role in Syria Conflict

Al Qaeda Taking Deadly New Role in Syria Conflict
By ROD NORDLAND
Published: July 24, 2012
 
CAIRO — It is the sort of image that has become a staple of the Syrian 
revolution, a video of masked men calling themselves the Free Syrian 
Army and brandishing AK-47s — with one unsettling difference. In the 
background hang two flags of Al Qaeda, white Arabic writing on a black 
field.
“We are now forming suicide cells to make jihad in the name of God,” 
said a speaker in the video using the classical Arabic favored by Al Qaeda.
 
The video, posted on YouTube, is one more bit of evidence that Al Qaeda 
and other Islamic extremists are doing their best to hijack the Syrian 
revolution, with a growing although still limited success that has 
American intelligence officials publicly concerned, and Iraqi officials 
next door openly alarmed.
 
While leaders of the Syrian political and military opposition continue 
to deny any role for the extremists, Al Qaeda has helped to change the 
nature of the conflict, injecting the weapon it perfected in Iraq — 
suicide bombings — into the battle against President Bashar al-Assad 
with growing frequency.
 
The evidence is mounting that Syria has become a magnet for Sunni 
extremists, including those operating under the banner of Al Qaeda. An 
important border crossing with Turkey that fell into Syrian rebels’ 
hands last week, Bab al-Hawa, has quickly become a jihadist congregating 
point.
 
The presence of jihadists in Syria has accelerated in recent days in 
part because of a convergence with the sectarian tensions across the 
country’s long border in Iraq. Al Qaeda, through an audio statement, has 
just made an undisguised bid to link its insurgency in Iraq with the 
revolution in Syria, depicting both as sectarian conflicts — Sunnis 
versus Shiites.
 
Iraqi officials said the extremists operating in Syria are in many cases 
the very same militants striking across their country. “We are 100 
percent sure from security coordination with Syrian authorities that the 
wanted names that we have are the same wanted names that the Syrian 
authorities have, especially within the last three months,” Izzat 
al-Shahbandar — a close aide to the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal 
al-Maliki — said in an interview on Tuesday. “Al Qaeda that is operating 
in Iraq is the same as that which is operating in Syria,” he said.
 
One Qaeda operative, a 56-year-old known as Abu Thuha who lives in the 
Hawija district near Kirkuk in Iraq, spoke to an Iraqi reporter for The 
New York Times on Tuesday. “We have experience now fighting the 
Americans, and more experience now with the Syrian revolution,” he said. 
“Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic state for all Muslims, 
and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”
 
Although he is a low-level operative, his grandiose plans have been 
echoed by Al Nusra Front for the People of the Levant, which military 
and intelligence analysts say is the major Qaeda affiliate operating in 
Syria, with two other Qaeda-linked groups also claiming to be active 
there, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and Al Baraa ibn Malik Martyrdom Brigade.
 
Since the start of the uprising, the Syrian government has sought to 
depict the opposition as dominated by Al Qaeda and jihadist allies, 
something the opposition has denied and independent observers said just 
was not true at the time. The uprising began as a peaceful protest 
movement and slowly turned into an armed battle in response to the 
government’s use of overwhelming lethal force.
 
Syrian state media routinely described every explosion as a suicide 
bombing — as they did with a bombing on July 18 that killed at least 
four high-ranking government officials.
 
Over time, though, Syria did become a draw for jihadists as the battle 
evolved into a sectarian war between a Sunni-dominated opposition and 
government and security forces dominated by the Alawite sect. Beginning 
in December, analysts began seeing what many thought really were suicide 
bombings.
 
Since then, there have been at least 35 car bombings and 10 confirmed 
suicide bombings, 4 of which have been claimed by Al Qaeda’s Nusra 
Front, according to data compiled by the Institute for the Study of War.
 
In some cases, such as on June 1, when a bomb struck at government 
security offices in Idlib, or on April 27, when a suicide bombing killed 
11 people in Damascus, Al Nusra claimed credit for the attacks in 
postings on a jihadist Web site, according to the SITE monitoring group. 
Al Nusra also claimed responsibility for a June 30 attack on Al 
Ikhbariya TV, a pro-government station, which it said “was glorifying 
the tyrant day and night.” Seven media workers were killed, to 
international condemnation. Syrian opposition spokesmen denied any role.
 
In February, the United States’ director of national intelligence, James 
Clapper, told a Congressional hearing that there were “all the earmarks 
of an Al Qaeda-like attack” in a series of bombings against security and 
intelligence targets in Damascus. He and other intelligence community 
witnesses attributed that to the spread into Syria of the Iraqi branch 
of Al Qaeda.
 
Shortly before Mr. Clapper’s testimony, Ayman al-Zawahri, the apparent 
leader of Al Qaeda since the killing of Osama bin Laden, released an 
audio recording in which he praised the Syrian revolutionaries lavishly, 
calling them “the lions of the Levant,” a theme that has since been 
taken up repeatedly in public pronouncements by the group.
 
Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert who is a professor at Georgetown 
University and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said it is clear 
that Al Qaeda is trying to become more active in Syria. As it has 
already done in Somalia and Mali, and before that in Chechnya and Yemen, 
the group is trying to turn a local conflict to its advantage. “There’s 
no question Al Qaeda wants to do that, and they are actually pretty good 
at this sort of thing,” he said. “They’ve done well at taking a local 
conflict” and taking it global.
 
They have done this by relying more on local fighters than on foreign 
ones, except at upper leadership levels — correcting a mistake that cost 
them credibility in the early years of the Iraqi conflict. “They learned 
a lot from Iraq,” Mr. Byman said. “They even write about this — they 
say, ‘We got on the wrong side of the locals.’ ” In Iraq, the government 
is led by the Shiite majority, while a Sunni minority has been Al 
Qaeda’s early breeding ground.
 
On Sunday, one day before a wave of 40 attacks across in Iraq, Abu Bakr 
al-Baghdadi, the pseudonymous leader of the group’s Iraqi affiliate, 
issued a rare audio statement, not only predicting the next day’s 
attacks, but also praising Syria’s revolutionaries. “You have taught the 
world lessons in courage, jihad and patience,” he said, according to a 
translation provided by the monitoring organization SITE.
 
Joseph Holliday, an analyst from the Institute for the Study of War who 
studies Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring, said, “The emergence of Al 
Qaeda-linked terrorist cells working against the regime poses risks to 
the United States and a challenge to those calling for material support 
of the armed opposition.”
 
He added: “It’s something to keep an eye out for, the convergence of 
Iraq and Syria. As the Syrian government loses the ability to project 
force on the periphery of its territory, what you’re going to see is an 
emboldened Sunni opposition emerging in Nineveh and Iraq.”
 
For the moment, though, the mainstream Syrian opposition is nearly 
uniform in its opposition to a role for Al Qaeda in its popular uprising.
 
“Every now and then, we hear about Al Qaeda in Syria, but there is so 
far no material evidence that they are here,” said Samir Nachar, a 
member of the executive bureau of the Syrian National Congress. “The 
regime has talked about it, and there were political statements from the 
Iraqi government that Al Qaeda has moved from Iraq to Syria, but on the 
ground there is no information on the presence of foreign fighters.”
 
In hard-pressed Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, not far from the Iraqi 
border, a Free Syrian Army brigade leader, identified only as Sayid, 
said in an interview by Skype that he had heard rumors about Qaeda 
fighters, but had never actually seen one. In Deir Ezzor earlier this 
year, a massive truck bomb exploded near a military base — which the 
resistance attributed to the Assad regime, claiming it had bombed itself.
 
“If Al Qaeda comes to get rid of him,” Sayid said, referring to Mr. 
Assad, “why not? But I personally have seen none of them.”
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/world/middleeast/al-qaeda-insinuating-its-way-into-syrias-conflict.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
 
-- 
Sostieni Rete ECO
 
http://rete-eco.it/it/sostienici.html
 
 

 Published: July 24, 2012
 
i'm shocked! I'm shocked!

 di AQ,
 
perchè parli male degli eroi della resistenza siriana?


Condivido il tuo stupore.


 questa la salviamo.
 
Minacciare di morte un pubblico ufficiale è una cosa molto brutta,
effettivamente.
 
Anche per un disastrato relitto psicotico alcolizzato
 
-- 
Io non gufo l'Inter. Le spacco le corna.

 Anche per un disastrato relitto psicotico alcolizzato
 
Quale cazzo di URP bisogna chiamare per ottenere informazioni in merito?
 
 
-- 
*opperso*
The word alcohol — al kohl — is Arabic in origin, like many other words 
that begin with ‘al’, like algebra, algorithm, alchemy. And Al Gore.
 

 Quale cazzo di URP bisogna chiamare per ottenere informazioni in merito?
 
Ti passo il centralino col quale ho parlato io.
È molto disponibile e collaborativo.



Grazie. Cercherò di chiamarlo quando mi trovo in qualche ingorgo. Così, 
tanto per portare un termine di paragone.


 tanto per portare un termine di paragone.
 
 
Il Centralino del tribunale è 0541 763111.
Devi parlare con un certo signor Giacomo, che ti saprà orientare nel 
dedalo di uffici e servizi, puntandoti a quello più adeguato.
 
Non hanno un vero URP, ma il tocco umano è molto apprezzabile. Direi 
preferibile.
 
 
-- 
"Quando ti incontro per la strada ti darei calci nei denti. Ma forse non 
li senti. E' meglio se ti rullo di kartoni (kartoni)"

 Non hanno un vero URP,
 
CVD