Monday 30 December 2024

From the archive of Abdelrahim Ali

Paris and the Age of Terror (Part 2)

Published
Abdelrehim Aly

In the first part of this article, we talked about the ability of terrorist organizations to expand and reach their operations in many parts of the world by having the ability to withstand and absorb blows and exploit and manipulate international, regional and local contradictions.

In this last part of the article, we continue with what the United States and its allies are doing, which helps spread the phenomenon of terrorism and gives terrorists cards to play every day.

1- The US policy is subjective and far from fair and impartial from the perspective of broad sectors in the circles of Arab and Islamic public opinion in dealing with Arab and Islamic issues. Those who are angry at the American policy and those who object to it say that the beginning was its position on the Palestinian issue and its absolute bias towards Israel, and those policies have not ended, until now, through the Brotherhood's support to reach power in Egypt.

2- The American focus on addressing the issue of terrorism from a unilateral perspective that depends on military power in the first place, while ignoring other equally important elements such as media, educational, cultural, political and psychological aspects, is a policy that objectively leads to the mobilization of angry armies qualified for fanaticism and extremism on the ideological level as a prelude to joining the ranks of the global terrorist movement.

3- The privatization of the American and European counterterrorism agencies has meant the emergence of inevitable loopholes that can be exploited and benefited from, which was monitored in part by Richard Labévière in his book “Dollars for Terror”, when he spoke about what he called “the privatization of American foreign policy.” The United States, in order to avoid a recurrence of a crisis like the Iran jet crisis, entrusted a large part of its foreign activities that were carried out by the CIA or the Pentagon to private companies so that they would not fall under the oversight of Congress. These private companies mostly include veterans of the CIA, retired officers, and former Pentagon employees, and they behave as if they were an offshoot of the CIA and the Pentagon, even if not from them.

In this context, Labévière monitors a number of companies, including Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which is in charge of defense, surveillance and cooperation. It is a special US military unit that includes about a thousand people who are called “diplomatic warriors” and they are charged with peacekeeping operations and the protection of American economic interests around the world.

Labévière states that SOCOM intervened in about 140 countries in one year, 1996, and at the same time participated in missions in Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it carried out mine clearance in a number of African countries after the end of their civil wars, such as Angola and Mozambique. It also had a prominent role in the events of the Great Lakes region, and in Liberia it deported about 2,300 people to escape the civil war.

He adds, “It has been revealed that such companies that pretend to do humanitarian work are carrying out military actions under this cover.”

Another company that Labévière talks about in his book is the company Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), which was established in 1987 and headed by a retired American general, Vernon Lewis, and included about two thousand former soldiers among the most important war experts in the world. It provided great assistance to the ranks of the Croatian forces in the war of the former Yugoslavia, and this aid had a positive effect, as it enabled Croatia, with its disorganized army, to achieve unprecedented strikes and victories, which prompted the Bosnian government to ask the same company to provide its services and aid to it. It is noteworthy that the company's forces program amounts to about $400 million, paid by several other countries, in addition to two other companies that handle some hot files for the Pentagon and the CIA. Al-Qaeda was able to infiltrate some units of the American intelligence services by working with these companies, whose leaders were known by the organization’s leaders at the beginning of their relationship with the Afghan file in 1984.

The third factor is related to the international arena, especially in the Middle East, as the political, economic and social climate prepares thousands of angry youth in distress to accept the ideas promoted by these organizations.

In light of all the previous elements, it can be said that these organizations have turned into a “state” that goes beyond what is common and known about ideological organizations. Some of these organizations fell and their leaders and symbols evaporated, by arrest or assassination, such as al-Qaeda, for example. The objective climate and the actions of the Zionist-American alliance were preparing for the emergence of new organizations, with the same name or through alternative names, as happened with ISIS. During recent years, it became clear that a large number of terrorist cells that were formed were through like-minded strangers who met on the internet, and there are many cases that formed their connections in the real world and then deepened through the internet.

For example, a team of Canadian police forcibly entered the home of computer programmer Mohammad Momin Khawaja, 24, on March 29, 2004, where he was arrested on charges of complicity in what Canadian and British authorities described as a plan involving countries on both sides of the Atlantic to bomb targets in London and Canada. Khawaja, a contractor with the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, met with a number of his suspected British counterparts over the internet and did not raise the attention of the authorities until he traveled to Britain and was part of a surveillance operation carried out by a special police force, according to Western sources familiar with the case.

It requires a strategic vision that goes beyond reaction. These organizations that we are talking about have nothing to do with those familiar among who study political science or the history of well-known political or terrorist organizations.

Paul L. Williams, author of the book “Al-Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror”, said that al-Qaeda is unlike any other terrorist organization, as “it consists of hundreds of cells that operate independently of each other and collectively serve the goals of the organization. It is like a “Hydra”; if one of its heads is cut off, a second, third and fourth head will grow. It has been designed in a way that ensures that no country, including the coalition (the United States and Europe) would be able to finish it off.”

High-level international and regional cooperation is the duty of the moment in the face of this strange and most important phenomenon in human history, which represents a major test for the United States and its allies. It is unreasonable for us to wage a seemingly ferocious war against certain organizations, while secretly supporting other organizations.