By Conor Godfrey on May 3, 2011
Osama Bin Laden affected almost everyone’s life in some way over the last twenty years.
Maybe you lost a family member in 9/11, or maybe the 1998 bombing in Tanzania drove your tourism company out of business, or perhaps you lost a friend when U.S. troops raided your house in the middle an Iraqi night.
The death of Osama Bin Laden is both momentous and meaningless depending on how Osama touched your life.
For the families of his victims, his death might bring some satisfaction.
If you are a mid-level Al-Qaeda operative in Yemen, his death means very little in practice, seeing as Osama Bin Laden has not been operationally involved in al-Qaeda activities for years.
What about for Africans in Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, Mali or Morocco, where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) continues to launch deadly attacks?
Well, I would guess that the death of their figurehead sheik will cause very few ripples for two reasons: one, all politics are local, and two, the Arab spring has smashed the ideological foundation for violent extremism in the Maghreb.
AQIM is a hodge-podge of local players who imported the Qaeda brand name.
I don’t doubt that some of these fighters are committed to the global jihad, but I think the grievances that radicalized them have more to do with their own government’s failings and foreign influence in their home region than the international jihadist agenda.
In this light, the fact that ordinary Arab youths can topple governments where radical fringes have repeatedly failed should also deal a death blow to the notion that blowing up cafés filled with foreigners is the best way to affect change.
In the short term, the turmoil of North African politics will open up space for radical groups to use violence.
However, Osama’s ideology in the Maghreb was mortally wounded before he took a bullet in the head.
He lost the battle for hearts and minds the moment Ben Ali flew out of Tunisia.
The die-hards will fight on: kidnapping tourists, moving drugs from Guinea-Bissau to North Africa, and detonating the odd bomb in touristy cafes.
But without the passive support of those Arab youths that have now found their voice another way, the radical moment will fizzle.
National armies will kill more and more mid-level al-Qaeda commanders, the more moderate Islamist movements will form parties and contest elections, and, one hopes, rising prosperity will help entrench these new political norms.
In Somalia, or on the Arab peninsula, the Qaeda brand still has real traction.
In the Maghreb, Osama was already on his way to irrelevance.
I am going to disagree with myself to get another viewpoint of there….I heard something the other day that both scared and surprised me– Eastern Libya (the part the US is theoretically supporting) sent the highest number of fighters per capita to go fight in Iraq compared to any other country.
Rolling Stone……”That’s the background. Flash forward to 2008: A West Point analysis of a cache of al Qaeda records discovered that nearly 20 percent of foreign fighters in Iraq were Libyans, and that on a per-capita basis Libya nearly doubled Saudi Arabia as the top source of foreign fighters.”
So obviously some N. African radicals care about the global Jihad…
Still, I think they would have been radicalized by local conditions and then moved to action abroad by the war in Iraq.
Does make you wonder about arming the Libyan rebels though
I had also read about many men in Iraq coming from Eastern Libya … it must have been in 2008, because we were still getting Newsweek sent to us 🙂
Anyway, from what I remember from the article, it had said that a majority of the suicide bombers in Iraq were Libyan. The article cited mass poverty and unemployment in Eastern Libya as a fertile recruiting ground for “martyrs.” The way they described it, it very much reminded me to how people recruit women as sex slaves in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. They play on their insecurities and emphasize that their life were go no where, so they might as well be a part of something. Of course the women think that they’re going to clean people’s houses. We assume that the Libyans are fully aware of what they’re signing up for before they leave home.
Anyway. I agree with you that it’s an interesting point, but I don’t think the Libyan migration to Iraq is rooted in hatred or radicalism, but more so in desperation. And if that’s true, then giving the people the tools to take back their own lives may actually be winning two sides of the same battle.
(Of course, I don’t personally agree with supplying weapons to anyone, but that’s a different story.)
I agree with a lot of what you say re AQIM but wonder about the “foreign influence” as cause for “grievances that radicalized”. If anyone is foreign to where they operate it is AQIM. And if you mean “foreign presence” then interestingly it and AQIM arrived together. I’m not so sure that they oppose each other, rather they legitimize each other’s presence. I’d say that more than “foreign influence” being something AQIM is fighting, it is “foreign influence” that sustains AQIM – and could so easily destroy it if it wanted. Trouble is no one really wants to destroy it… yet.
Much is made of the rebels in Libya getting arms to AQIM. I doubt it. They need all the arms they can get. If anyone is arming AQIM from Libya it’s probably Gaddafi.