Al-Qaeda's 4GW Guru

Kafr al-Hanadwa, an excellent Egyptian blog, recently excerpted an article from the London Review of Books. I had never heard of Abu Musab al-Suri before, but after reading the full review I was floored by the description of Al-Qaeda's best strategic thinker:

"Abu Musab al-Suri is the nom de guerre of the Syrian jihadi Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar, al-Qaida’s most formidable and far-sighted military strategist. Al-Suri played a key role in the 1990s in establishing al-Qaida’s presence in Europe and forging its links to radical jihadis in North Africa and the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, South and East Asia. He was a spokesman for the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé, a press attaché for Osama bin Laden in London and an adviser to Mullah Omar in Kabul, and he appears under a variety of aliases in books by foreign correspondents he escorted to meet the man in Tora Bora. Until he was captured in Quetta by Pakistani intelligence agents in October 2005 and handed over to the CIA, he went wherever the jihad travelled. Indeed, it was al-Suri who first argued that in order to survive, al-Qaida had to become a kind of travelling army based on mobile, nomadic, flexible cells operating independently of one another, unified by little more than a common ideology – and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention.

Considering his belief in leaderless jihad, it’s remarkable that al-Suri continued to have the ear of some of al-Qaida’s highest-ranking leaders. He wasn’t one to show deference towards his superiors, let alone express himself tactfully: he’s usually described as gruff and sarcastic, and that’s certainly true of his writing. According to one Islamist interviewed by al-Suri’s biographer, Brynjar Lia, ‘his sharp tongue spared nobody,’ not even bin Laden, whose hunger for fame he mocked (‘our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause’). He was also provocatively at ease with ‘infidel’ sources, more likely to cite Mao than Muhammad: in Afghanistan he was known for giving lectures on Robert Taber’s 1965 study of guerrilla movements, The War of the Flea, once a favourite of the IRA. Al-Suri, Lia writes, was ‘a dissident, a critic and an intellectual in an ideological current in which one would expect to find obedience rather than dissent, conformity rather than self-criticism, doctrinaire ideologues rather than introspective individuals’. But his story suggests that it is our expectations about that ‘current’ which need to be adjusted.

If al-Suri remained in the good graces of al-Qaida, it’s probably because his devotion to the cause was never in doubt, and because like all political movements al-Qaida needed an in-house critic. In his books on Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria and Pakistan, and in his last published work, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, al-Suri rigorously anatomised the jihadi movement’s failures – stodgy, hierarchical forms of political organisation, carelessness about security and indifference to long-term strategy – and tried to explain how the movement could learn from them. The jihadi movement, he argues in The Call, needs a new fighting strategy based on ‘unconnected cells’, operating out of safe houses and ‘camps of nomadic mujahedin’. In order to resist penetration by intelligence services, the movement should be decentralised, almost anarchist. It would be the sum of its actions, from ‘individual operations’ like the murder of tourists and ‘democratic dissidents’ in Muslim countries to ‘deterrence’ operations in Europe like the 2004 bombings in Madrid, which led to the defeat of Aznar and to the withdrawal of Spanish soldiers from Iraq."

This is riveting stuff. At a minimum, it seems that al-Suri functioned as the Al-Qaeda counterpart to Bill Lind (with the added parallel that al-Suri's ideas faced an uphill struggle). In the long term, al-Suri could become second only to bin Laden himself as the most important figure for future students of the GWOT. al-Suri assimilated the best of Western and Eastern insurgency tradition and gradually synthesized his own doctrine of decentralised resistance. It was a remarkable achievement and may well have saved Al-Qaeda in the wake of the US invasion of Afghanistan. TSK fully understands why the CIA doesn't want to talk about its custody of al-Suri; in the meantime, it cannot wait to get its hands on this biography.