Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-138-Caliphate-The State of al-Qaida-57-Comeback-7

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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-138-Caliphate-The State of al-Qaida-57-Comeback-7

A durable threat

“It’s like a Game of Thrones with its shifting alliances,” Joscelyn said. “But who is benefiting from Saudi intervention in Yemen? AQAP.” “People think, ‘Oh, it’s not an AQAP administration, so [al Qaeda] doesn’t control the city,’ ” Zimmerman said. But in reality, this is part of a longer-term strategy where AQAP has “established governance through proxy forces and [controlling] the goods and supplies that flow through.”

“The absence of an AQAP attack does not mean that the group cannot conduct attacks, nor that it has abandoned the idea of attacking the U.S.,” Zimmerman said. “It means only that al Qaeda’s leaders are smart enough to take advantage of American distraction to prepare themselves for future struggles.” AQAP’s bomb-making capabilities and its ability to carry out large-scale and sophisticated attacks have not lessened. But as a global terrorist movement, al Qaeda has shifted its priorities.

"Al-Qaeda is much stronger than people realise. "Al-Qaeda doesn't control the population. It has the support of it. That's much, much more difficult to counter."

"We are in danger of underestimating and frankly missing the threat. The real risk we face is fighting Isis and ignoring the presence of al-Qaeda. The Islamic State has seized control of vast swathes of land but it controls the population through coercion

The Americans did not defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq: it was the Sunnis who revolted against him. Many fighters went underground, were killed.

"But a core of al-Qaeda in Iraq survived, and bade its time waiting for the right opportunity to strike back. This came in 2010.

"In his guidelines for jihad, Zawahiri was extremely keen to send a message that instead of [killing civilians], we should fight the fight that the civilians themselves want to fight. That means military targets, security targets, not public markets or mosques, which al-Qaeda's affiliates in Iraq had previously been doing.

"My fear is in the long term, al-Qaeda is going to be that much more durable, and the threat that they will pose will be the same as they posed in the period immediately prior to 9/11."

"Al-Zawahiri certainly doesn't have the charisma that Osama Bin Laden had and that has been the main critique against him. But we've seen al-Qaeda start to shape and build up new leadership, and these include leaders in Yemen and in Syria in particular.

Al Qaeda Winning Hearts And Minds Over ISIS In Yemen With Social Services“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of WarCdW Intelligence to Rent Page 1 of 11 02/05/2023

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BY ALESSANDRIA MASI @ALESSANDRIAMASI ON 04/07/16 BEIRUT— Half of Yemen’s 24.4 million people don’t have access to clean

water — the most basic of human needs. This stark statistic is in clearest evidence in the country’s Hadramaut region, where oil flows freely but water taps run dry and tribal councils are powerless to improve people’s lives. But there’s a group working to change that. A group that, last week — much to the delight of its parched residents — unveiled a freshly dug well in the country’s arid southern territory. The group’s name? Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. AQAP is one of the U.S.-designated terror organization’s most powerful divisions and since the beginning of 2016, the group has quietly seized vast swaths of Yemen, undercutting its rival, the Islamic State group, which has been the main focus of the West’s counterterrorism strategy for the last year. ISIS may have dominated international media coverage, but in Yemen, AQAP has overshadowed its younger sibling with its grassroots approach, providing essential public services to gain the trust of the local population. The group has also been willing to share power with local governing institutions before it establishes its own so-called caliphate. “ISIS and al Qaeda [have] different [approaches]. ISIS thinks that [it] will brutalize [a population] into submission. Al Qaeda knows that some people are turned off by this brutality,” Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and senior editor of the Long War Journal, told International Business Times. “The entire al Qaeda model is to get as local as possible and embed with the local population.”In a letter sent from Yemen in 2012, the late leader of al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, Abu Basir al-Wuhayshi, passed on a piece of acquired jihadi wisdom to his Algerian counterpart: “You have to be kind to [the population under occupation] and make room for compassion and for leniency.”It was a strikingly pragmatic suggestion from the leader of a group considered to be the greatest threat to the United States and the strongest branch of al Qaeda. However, al Qaeda’s strategy has since evolved from that initial suggestion and adapted to the new geopolitical landscape in the region. The group’s strategy has been particularly successful among its affiliates in Libya, Yemen and Syria.The Yemen war began a year ago, when Saudi Arabia launched a nine-country coalition to eradicate the Houthi rebels, a Shiite armed political group that took over the country’s capital, Sanaa, from the internationally recognized government in 2014. Since then, the conflict in Yemen, much like the ones in Syria, Iraq and Libya, has drawn in various international powers and the political chaos has left civilians without any form of support from the state. “It’s like a Game of Thrones with its shifting alliances,” Joscelyn said. “But who is benefiting from Saudi intervention in Yemen? AQAP.”Under the cover of Yemen’s complex civil war, AQAP, locally referred to as Ansar al-Sharia, has made major gains against the Houthis, the group’s common enemy with the Saudi coalition and forces loyal to Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi. AQAP has expanded its hold across four of Yemen’s 21 provinces and now controls the country’s third-largest port city, al Mukalla. And their expansion has been rapidly increasing: Since December, militants affiliated with AQAP seized five cities and two provincial capitals in Yemen’s southern provinces.“They are filling the [political] vacuum. They’re not calling themselves a state but consistently promoting their public services,” Katherine Zimmerman, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and expert on al Qaeda, told IBT. “Basically, they’re buying goodwill.”Yemenis are not in a position to reject what AQAP is offering. More than half of Yemen’s

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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population lives below the poverty line. Today, 20 million people — 80 percent of the population — are in need of humanitarian assistance.

Photographs and news articles circulated on AQAP’s social media accounts, and in its propaganda newspaper al-Masra, emphasize how the group has built bridges, dug water wells, repaired roads and distributed humanitarian assistance throughout the areas it controls. The photographs also show militants carrying out punishments according to their version of Sharia law, but the group omits the most brutal scenes from its propaganda.ISIS has no such qualms: Two weeks ago, the extremist Sunni group claimed a triple suicide bombing in the Yemeni city of Aden, which left 22 people dead. This type of attack is ISIS’ only significant move in Yemen now as the group does not hold territory and isn’t likely to gain any in the future. When the group sent militants from Iraq and Syria to establish a presence in the southwestern peninsula, the majority of the leaders were Saudi Arabian nationals. But Sunnis in Yemen, a deeply tribal population, are “looking for a local face” to fight alongside, Zimmerman said. This is something al Qaeda has accounted for: The militants have almost imperceptibly embedded with local, pre-existing governing institutions, taking advantage of the Sunni population’s fear of persecution from Shiite Houthi rebels. The group has entered into several contractual partnerships and alliances with Sunni tribal communities, with some members marrying into prominent families in the area to ease relations. The type of contract, and the degree to which AQAP is involved in governance, varies from city to city. AQAP’s proxy forces have, on occasion, offered to provide security against the Houthis for a local Sunni tribe until the area is under their control and stability has been established. Al Qaeda has the weapons and training to prepare local tribal fighters to battle the Houthis. In return, the militants request that the tribes no longer allow AQAP’s enemies to enter the area. Power is then, in theory, returned to the tribes.“People think, ‘Oh, it’s not an AQAP administration, so [al Qaeda] doesn’t control the city,’ ” Zimmerman said. But in reality, this is part of a longer-term strategy where AQAP has “established governance through proxy forces and [controlling] the goods and supplies that flow through.” The idea of power-sharing may contradict the Islamist doctrine of complete allegiance, but that’s not to say AQAP has given up on its future goal of establishing an emirate. The group is constantly recruiting and training Yemenis who want to fight the Houthis. Last month, the U.S. carried out a drone strike on a training camp in the AQAP-controlled city of al Mukalla, killing roughly 50 militants.Since the start of the war in Yemen, AQAP has not focused on teaching its new recruits very much about al Qaeda’s ideology, but on providing the weapons and physical training local Sunni populations need to protect their land. But most recruits come round to al Qaeda’s way of thinking. “After being in the trenches, [recruits] change their minds. It’s a longer-term indoctrination of ideology,” Zimmerman said. “Some al Qaeda fighters are not identifying themselves as al Qaeda. AQAP is not asking for ideological allegiance, that’s why it’s been able to grow its ranks.”Despite its recent focus on Yemen, AQAP is still considered one of the biggest threats to the United States. The group has some of the most skilled bomb makers in its ranks and has carried out several attacks in the West since 9/11. AQAP’s bomb makers were responsible for the explosive worn in 2009 by the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. A year later, the group claimed responsibility for a printer-cartridge bomb sent to the U.S. via postal mail.AQAP’s bomb-making capabilities and its ability to carry out large-scale and sophisticated attacks have not lessened. But as a global terrorist movement, al Qaeda has shifted its priorities. A large-scale attack in the U.S. or Europe would draw the





international community’s counterterrorism focus away from ISIS, potentially jeopardizing the mobility al Qaeda has recently gained from the

current round of regional conflicts.“The absence of an AQAP attack does not mean that the group cannot conduct attacks, nor that it has abandoned the idea of attacking the U.S.,” Zimmerman said. “It means only that al Qaeda’s leaders are smart enough to take advantage of American distraction to prepare themselves for future struggles.”

Islamic Extremism Not Only Protean But Potentially SynergisticThe Islamic State and Al Qaeda could combine and form an entity more dangerous than the sum of its parts. We recently ran a post titled Islamic Extremism Is Nothing if Not Protean. i“Whack the mole of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda will pop up,” we remarked. That was based on the concept of one or the other. But what if, instead of one replacing the other, as the Islamic State seemed to do with Al Qaeda, a new organism formed which was a consolidation of the two?In the latest Foreign Affairs counterterrorism expert Bruce Hoffman writes:

Only five years ago, al Qaeda’s downfall appeared … imminent. Its founder and leader was dead. A succession of key lieutenants had been eliminated. And the region was transformed by the Arab Spring. Civil protest, it seemed, had achieved what terrorism had manifestly failed to deliver — and Al Qaeda was the biggest loser. In 2012, he continues, President Obama “proudly proclaimed that, ‘The goal that I set — to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild — is now within our reach.’” Hoffman’s next sentence: “How completely different it all looks today.” Recently:Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper painted a singularly bleak picture of a newly resurgent al Qaeda alongside an ambitiously expansionist Islamic State (ISIS).Hoffman writes that “by 2021 al Qaeda and ISIS might reunite — or at least have entered into some form of alliance or tactical cooperation.” Among the reasons:

One: the ideological similarities. To wit: “an aggressive, predatory war is being waged against Islam by its enemies.” This includes Western control of oul.

Two: Their differences are due less to substance than clashing ego, i.e., Zawahiri v. Baghdadi. The death of one of the other might pave the way to reconciliation.

Three: strategic similarities. The main difference is tactically, i.e., that is, the degree of brutality and indifference to citizens’ lives, Muslim or not.He quotes an unnamed U.S. intelligence analyst he finds especially credible who says that “would be an absolute and unprecedented disaster for the [U.S. government] and our allies.” In other words, Hoffman writes: “Any kind of coordination of terrorist operations, much less a more formal modus vivendi, would have profound and far-reaching consequences for international security.” That’s an understatement.

A deadly al-Qaeda attack on an Ivory Coast resort town in March reminded the world that the terror network once led by Osama Bin Laden has not gone away.But in recent years it has been eclipsed and diminished by the so-called Islamic State group which has attracted global attention, fighters and funds.So how depleted is the group which in 2001 triggered America's "global war on terror"? Four experts talk to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme.

Rahimullah Yusufzai: Rise and fallRahimullah Yusufzai is the editor of an English daily in Peshawar."Because of his education, his travels, his access to modern education and media, Osama





Bin Laden knew about the world, about politics, and that's why he was a very charismatic leader for al-Qaeda. Before him, the others were fighting

separately, but he brought them together, and then tried to build a coalition against the US and the Western world."Al-Qaeda used to say it was the first real jihad - or holy war - after decades, and that's why people flocked to [its training camps in Afghanistan]."They thought this is the best opportunity to fight jihad and to get trained in modern warfare. They trained thousands. These people eventually became the torch-bearers of jihad in the rest of the world."In August 1998, the US attacked the same camp where I had met Osama Bin Laden in May 1998 because the US embassies [in Tanzania and Kenya] had been attacked. So the Americans were already trying to kill or capture him."Then after the 9/11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan, with the idea of destroying al-Qaeda, and removing the Taliban from power, because the Taliban had harboured Bin Laden. The Taliban were defeated in a few weeks - they had no answer to the American air power - but did not suffer many casualties. They just retreated, and melted away in the villages."When the Americans invaded, al-Qaeda decided to go to Tora Bora on the border with Pakistan. The Americans came to know Bin Laden was there in December 2001, and bombed heavily. I was told it was the heaviest bombing since World War Two on one target."Bin Laden was able to escape with the help of local Afghans, and came to Pakistan. When they attacked Tora Bora, the Americans were pushing Pakistan to block the border, to deploy a force. Pakistan actually co-operated, for the first time deployed its troops on the borders."Then they launched bigger military action, because the militants were then everywhere. One of the biggest achievements is that the militants lost their strongholds. They were in control of many areas - Swat, Bajaur, Momon, South Waziristan, North Waziristan. They lost almost all these areas. "But I think the death of Osama Bin Laden was the biggest setback, because he was the founder, the financier, the inspiration. It has never really recovered from that loss, because the new leader Dr Zawahiri is not as important, and does not have that status or authority which Bin Laden had."

Professor Fawaz Gerges: The splinteringProfessor Fawaz Gerges teaches at the London School of Economics and is a prolific writer about Jihadi groups."Al-Qaeda has always been a top-down elitist movement. Decisions were made from the top and everyone followed. But once al-Qaeda dispersed after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, al-Qaeda fractured, decentralised. The various elements spread near and far into Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran and then Northern Iraq."[In Iraq] Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was obsessed with the Shi'ites as a dagger in the heart of Iraq and the Muslim world, plunging Iraq into all-out civil war between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites, carrying out thousands of suicide bombings against the Shi'ites.





"Bin Laden and his second-in-command Zawahiri tried to rein Zarqawi in many times. We have several letters of Bin Laden urging him to stop the bloodshed against the Shi'ites, to keep the focus on the far enemy, the Americans: 'don't lose the fight in Iraq'."Zarqawi ignored their pleas. He became the central focus of the young men and women who wanted to join al-Qaeda. In many ways, al-Qaeda in Iraq overshadowed al-Qaeda central. He became the real action man who could deliver death and vengeance against the enemies."Many Sunnis realised - belatedly - that Zarqawi was not their friend. He was their enemy because he had his own agenda. The Americans did not defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq: it was the Sunnis who revolted against him. Many fighters went underground, were killed."But a core of al-Qaeda in Iraq survived, and bade its time waiting for the right opportunity to strike back. This came in 2010."2010 was a very critical period because of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He reconstructed both the military and the operational structure of al-Qaeda in Iraq to bring in hundreds of skilled officers of the former army and police of Saddam Hussein. It became the Islamic State of Iraq."[When Islamic State captured Mosul in 2014 and declared a Caliphate] it was a shattering blow to al-Qaeda central. In many ways the Isis (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) takeover of Mosul was really the takeover of the global jihadist movement. Isis was not just going for the Islamic state. It was also making a bid for the leadership of the global jihadist movement. They have stolen the show."

Charles Lister: Under the skinCharles Lister is a fellow at the Middle East Institute, a US think tank, and over the past two years has had regular meetings with the leaders of over 100 Syrian armed opposition groups."Al-Qaeda has adapted to playing a long game strategy in which the focus has become more on building alliances and socialising local communities into being a long-term and durable base from which it can eventually launch its more trans-national objectives."It was a reassessment of al-Qaeda's PR strategy, the way it seeks to present itself to local populations from within which it operates, and a lot of lessons were learned from Iraq."In his guidelines for jihad, Zawahiri was extremely keen to send a message that instead of [killing civilians], we should fight the fight that the civilians themselves want to fight. That means military targets, security targets, not public markets or mosques, which al-Qaeda's affiliates in Iraq had previously been doing."In the winter of 2012/2013, [al-Qaeda's Syrian branch] Jabhat al-Nusra began to present itself not just as an armed movement, but also a social one."It took over the management of bakeries, and forced their owners to charge a lower price. Jabhat al-Nusra was directly involved in trucking and delivering gas, bread, water and other staple food supplies to the civilian population at a far cheaper price than had been available before, and it was at that period that we started to see Jabhat al-Nusra actually gain support.





"There was a series of interesting letters found in Mali in a building that had been controlled by al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). One was

from AQIM overall leader Abou Mossab Abdelwadoud in which he instructed his fighters to pull back from the extreme measures they had been trying to impose on the people."He was essentially describing Mali to his fighters as a baby, saying 'Your focus right now should be on teaching it the basics, raising it to be a true Muslim, and only years from now will you then be able to introduce the more harsh norms because the people will understand what is expected of them.'"We are seeing that replication of the long game model in Yemen with extraordinarily successful consequences so far. It's no surprise that we don't hear about this very much in the news anymore: it has become almost impossible to differentiate who is al-Qaeda and who is a tribal fighter in southern Yemen."This new strategy makes al-Qaeda more dangerous. It shows that al-Qaeda is willing to be pragmatic, to cut back some of its religious expectations for the sake of building popular support that will gain it strength in the long term. That is something that Isis has essentially refused to do, and that means that we face that much more of a challenge of rooting it out of these societies."My fear is in the long term, al-Qaeda is going to be that much more durable, and the threat that they will pose will be the same as they posed in the period immediately prior to 9/11."

Katherine Zimmerman: A durable threatKatherine Zimmerman is a research fellow at the conservative US think tank the American Enterprise Institute."Al-Qaeda is much stronger than people realise."The al-Qaeda donors haven't changed that much over the years - very conservative sheiks, particularly in the Gulf - but when you look at how al-Qaeda makes money and runs day to day as an organisation, it's less based on donations and more based on the fact that it controls terrain on the ground and taxes directly the population or benefits from trade imports, exports, etc."So it's very hard to isolate al-Qaeda's finances and prevent it from funding itself as long as it controls terrain."The hierarchy is no longer contained in a single geographical space but dispersed throughout the affiliated groups. The al-Qaeda affiliates are really no less dangerous than the al-Qaeda core group that we think about. They all have that same capability to conduct an attack."Al-Zawahiri certainly doesn't have the charisma that Osama Bin Laden had and that has been the main critique against him. But we've seen al-Qaeda start to shape and build up new leadership, and these include leaders in Yemen and in Syria in particular."[Yemen-based Saudi militant Ibrahim al-Asiri] is a bomb expert and he has an incredibly innovative mind. The man has trained other individuals and he's the mind behind the underwear bomb, the bombs disguised as printer cartridges and various other plots where they escaped intelligence agency's detection because of how well these bombs were designed. He's certainly a threat in terms of being able to bring a capability to the table for al-Qaeda."We are in danger of underestimating and frankly missing the threat. The real risk we face is fighting Isis and ignoring the presence of al-Qaeda. The Islamic State has seized control of vast swathes of land but it controls the population through coercion."Al-Qaeda doesn't control the population. It has the support of it. That's much, much more





difficult to counter."The Inquiry is broadcast on the BBC World Service on Tuesdays from 12:05

GMT

Cees Remember Oct 2015, "You spill blood and attack the Muslim people in order to rule," Zawihiri said in his fourth recorded lecture released as part of his "Islamic Spring" lessons. He added that, "Baghdadi's Caliphate is a Caliphate of explosions, damage and destruction. A month after the leader of al-Qaida said that the Islamic State and its leader are illegitimate, a recording of Ayman Zawihri was released Monday, documenting an even harsher tirade against ISIS and the man who refers to himself as the Caliph of Islam, ISIS. Despite the reports of ISIS gains made against other rebel groups in Syria, including the al-Qaida affiliated Nusra Front, Zawihiri claimed that "Baghdadi doesn't not rule over us. There are Mujahadin that control wider territories than ISIS," he said.The al-Qaida chief said that "the choosing of a Caliph can be done solely with the agreement of the Muslim people. Expropriating power forcefully and by the sword is a crime against Islamic doctrine." According to Zawahiri, Baghdadi, like he himself, swore allegiance to former Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Afghanistan - which he then violated. "The true Caliphate of Islam is in Afghanistan, under the leadership of Mullah Muhammad Omar." He added that "ISIS has violated the rules of jihad and has turned its fighters from people who want to get to heaven to people who go to hell." A month earlier Zawihiri declared that he "does not recognize Baghdadi's claim to be Caliph," and said that the organizations attempts to define itself as the Caliphate are illegitimate, and do not have the loyalty of al-Qaida, "even though some spiritual leaders have allowed it." On September 9, Zawahiri rejected the legitimacy of the Islamic State caliphate, but he expressed a willingness to cooperate with ISIS forces in fighting in Iraq and Syria.Remember Late Aug Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s emir, offers a brief introduction for Hamzah, describing him as “a lion from the den of [al Qaeda].” al Qaeda released a lengthy audio message by Hamzah. Hamzah praises Taliban emir Mullah Omar, saying he is the “hidden, pious sheikh” and “the firm mountain of jihad.” Hamzah asks Allah to “preserve” Omar, indicating that he thought the Taliban chieftain was alive when his audio was recorded.Hamzah also renews his bayat (oath of allegiance) to Omar. “From here, in following my father, may Allah have mercy on him, I renew my pledge of allegiance to Emir of the Believers Mullah Muhammad Omar, and I say to him: I pledge to you to listen and obey, in promoting virtue and waging jihad in the cause of Allah the Great and Almighty,” Hamzah says, according to SITE’s translation.

Osama bin Laden had al-Qaida money invested in goldOriginally published April 5, 2016 at 5:04 pmA letter instructing al-Qaida’s general manager to buy gold written by bin Laden that was seized by Navy SEALs from his Pakistan compound offers a glimpse into how al-Qaida sought to manage its finances and what militant groups have tried to do with the money they raised.By Matthew Rosenberg The New York TimesWASHINGTON —Osama bin Laden, gold bug?It appears so. At the end of 2010, al-Qaida found itself suddenly flush after securing a $5 million ransom, and the group had to decide what to do with its windfall. At a time when the financial uncertainty of the Great Recession made gold a hot investment, bin Laden





turns out to have been as bullish about the precious metal as any Ron Paul devotee, tea party patriot or Wall Street financier.

In a letter he wrote in December 2010, bin Laden instructed al-Qaida’s general manager to set aside a third of the ransom — nearly $1.7 million — to buy gold bars and coins. The letter was part of the trove of intelligence seized by Navy SEALs in the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 that was declassified last month by the Central Intelligence Agency.It offers a glimpse into how al-Qaida sought to manage its finances and what militant groups have tried to do with the money they raised. “The overall price trend is upward,” bin Laden wrote to Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the al-Qaida general manager. “Even with occasional drops, in the next few years the price of gold will reach $3,000 an ounce.”Bin Laden may have lacked investing acumen — gold peaked at $1,900 an ounce five months after his death in 2011 — but he seems to have had a keen sense of the financial zeitgeist. His belief in gold’s bright future was shared at the time by many Americans and a number of financial luminaries, including George Soros and John Paulson, both whom were investing heavily in the precious metal. Demand was so high that in 2010, JPMorgan Chase reopened a long-closed vault used to store gold under the streets of downtown Manhattan.It is probably safe to assume that if al-Qaida bought gold — U.S. officials could not say whether bin Laden’s instructions were followed in this case — the militants did not hand it over to JPMorgan for safekeeping. But U.S. officials believe that the group had previously relied on gold as a safe haven and an alternative currency to the dollar. Al-Qaida would also have had access to gold brokers in Pakistan’s tribal areas and the loosely regulated gold market in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at the time bin Laden wrote his letter.“There was always speculation about how al-Qaida kept excess capital,” said Juan C. Zarate, a deputy national security adviser during the George W. Bush administration who led U.S. efforts to track the militants’ assets after 2001. “They grew worried that we were able to do things with the dollar that influenced their ability to access it, to demand things of financial institutions.”Like al-Qaida, other Islamist militant groups have wrestled with how to avoid the reach of the Treasury and international blacklists. Their wealth-management strategies have varied, and some have proved more adept at making money than investing it.The Islamic State group, for instance, has become perhaps the wealthiest militant group in history by wringing cash from the people it rules, looting bank vaults and smuggling oil. Yet its success appears to have left it vulnerable: It has taken in so much money that it has had to resort to physically stockpiling cash in warehouses, 10 of which have been struck by U.S. warplanes since the summer.The Haqqani network, a Taliban faction especially close to al-Qaida, is believed to have poured money into real estate in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. A European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Haqqanis are believed to have been hit hard by the real-estate crash in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a few years ago.Still, despite the occasional bursting bubble, real estate appears to have been a relatively safe investment, particularly in South Asia, where there is little regulation.“You can show up with a suitcase full of cash and buy a house,” said Gretchen Peters, who runs the Satao Project, a consulting firm that focuses on organized crime and terrorism. “It’s not like there is an IRS money-laundering unit that’s going to come for you.”At the time bin Laden wrote the letter to his general manager, the two had been discussing the $5 million ransom, which was paid by the office of then-President Hamid Karzai of





Afghanistan to free an Afghan diplomat al-Qaida had been holding. Unknown to the al-Qaida bosses, about a fifth of the ransom was

inadvertently provided by the CIA, which bankrolled a secret fund for the Afghan leader with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul.Al-Qaida had the money in hand by the time bin Laden sat down to write his general manager in December 2010. Bin Laden clearly wanted nothing to do with U.S. dollars, which many Islamist militants fear could expose them to the long reach of American justice.“As for the ransom money for the Afghan prisoner, I think you should use one-third of the money to buy gold and another third to buy euros,” he wrote.The remainder, bin Laden said, should be used to buy Kuwaiti dinars and Chinese renminbi, also known as yuan, with about a third kept in local currencies to cover day-to-day expenses. “When you do spend this money, use the euros first, then the dinars, the yuan, and then the gold,” he wrote.Bin Laden had specific instructions for how to acquire the gold. It should be bought in coins or bars, which he referred to as “10 tolas,” a common denomination for gold bars in South Asia. Coins “are minted in several countries,” he wrote, naming Switzerland, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.But bin Laden was nothing if not paranoid by then — at one point, he feared that an Iranian dentist had implanted a tracking device in one of his wife’s teeth — and he stressed in the letter that “the broker you deal with should be trustworthy.”He also suggested buying a small amount of gold and reselling it to make sure the broker was honest.Done right, though, bin Laden appears to have believed that investing gold was nearly a sure thing. “Right now it is $1,390 an ounce, but before the events in New York and Washington it was $280 an ounce,” he wrote.He added, “If the price of gold reaches $1,500 or a little over before you get this message, it’s still all right to buy it.” If al-Qaida bought gold when bin Laden advised, it was a bad bet. The day his letter was dated, Dec. 3, 2010, gold closed at $1,414.08 an ounce. Today, the price is hovering around $1,230 an ounce. Matthew Rosenberg




i The conventional wisdom seems to be that the tide has turned in the war against the Islamic State. In the New Yorker, Robin Wright reports:The Islamic State has recently lost ground—about forty per cent of the territory it seized in Iraq in 2014 and about ten per cent of its holdings in Syria. “Daesh is on the defensive. The Iraqis have gained momentum,” [Col. Scott] Naumann said.Though, Nauman adds, ““Daesh is still motivated. The enemy gets a vote. It always does.” But what if, a few years down the line, the Islamic State is reduced to a rump state (the remnant of a once-larger state with a reduced territory)? Probably the same thing as when the Islamic State rose to fill the vacuum left by a battered Al Qaeda. And what might be foremost among those replacing the Islamic State as the premier international jihadist group? None other than the group that has long demonstrated a talent for gestation: Al Qaeda.At the Daily Beast, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nathaniel Barr write:When 113 new documents recovered in 2011 during the fatal raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, became publicly available this month, perhaps the most noteworthy insight they offered was the extent of the strategic patience, to borrow a phrase from the Obama administration, possessed by al Qaeda.… The record shows that the United States often has overlooked the extent of al Qaeda’s patient approach, sometimes mistaking its relative quiet for inactivity or collapse, and our failure to understand the group has helped it to gain critical operating space, and even worse, has sometimes caused us to blunder into its traps.That stands in stark contrast to the Islamic State, which seems to have sealed its eventual fate by alienating the inhabitants of territories it captures with strict rule and heavy taxing, outraging the world with its torture-porn executions, and, most of all, incurring epic blowback in the form of massive airstrikes with its attacks in Europe and the United States that it plans or sanctions, or for which it accepts credit (blame to a saner group).

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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-138-Caliphate-The State of al-Qaida-57-Comeback-7