See my latest diary – American Citizens Ordered Out of Tunisia and Sudan; Benghazi Security Questioned.
Saudi Arabia’s Medieval Wahhabism vs. Moderate Sufi
(Asia Times) – Libya is now militia hell – from neighborhood-watch outfits to mini-armies. They won’t disarm. They refuse to be part of government security forces because their logic is tribal. They’re fighting one another. No weak central government in car-bomb-infested Tripoli will rein them in.
Another way to put it is that “liberated” Libya is now warlord country. Home of vendettas in the desert and tribal pogroms against other tribes – and even whole towns.
The Salafi-jihadis – with whom Washington, London and Paris were unashamedly in bed during their humanitarian bombing campaign – are based in Cyrenaica, eastern Libya. Some have come from Iraq. Some are shuttling back and forth to and from Syria, aiming to destroy yet one more secular Arab republic.
They include the heavily armed gang that attacked the US consulate – the self-described Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades, which surfaced only four months ago. Three months ago, hundreds of AK-47-equipped Salafi-jihadis held Benghazi hostage demanding sharia law.
The (disintegrated) police and army of “liberated” Libya could not possibly face them down. Local tribes don’t care. Salafi-jihadis have been attacking Sufi mosques and tombs; Sufi Islam is infinitely more moderate – and intellectually sophisticated – compared with medieval Wahhabism.
The training camps are near Derna – which has a history of being a top source of al-Qaeda-style jihadis, especially active in occupied Iraq. This does not mean all the Salafi-jihadis are affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM); it’s a much more local Libyan affair.
Romney Poses, as Militants Burn Benghazi Consulate, killing Ambassador, 3 staffers, & Demonstrate in Cairo, over Islamophobic Film
The Wrath of Libya’s Salafis
(Carnegie Endowmwnt) – The tragic assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was the latest in a series of attacks by the country’s increasingly active Salafis. In late August, armed Salafi groups demolished Sufi shrines, mosques, and mausoleums in Tripoli, Misrata, and Zliten. Earlier this year, Salafis desecrated British World War II graves, attacked the Tunisian consulate over an art exhibit in Tunis they deemed offensive, bombed the offices of the International Red Cross, and detonated an improvised explosive device at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. But such attacks are hardly proof of Salafism’s growing influence over the country. Rather, they are symptoms of an intense re-composition and fractionalization of the movement, between quietist, “politico,” and militant strands. More importantly, they reveal the Salafis’ anguished search for relevance in a country that is already socially conservative, but that has soundly rejected dogmatic political actors in favor of technocratic ones.
In the July 7 elections for the General National Congress (GNC), Libyan voters effectively shunned the “politico” current of Libyan Salafism represented by the al-Watan party–which counted former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) emir Abd al-Hakim Bilhaj as its most prominent luminary–and Umma al-Wasat, whose candidates included LIFG figures such as Sami al-Saadi and Abd al-Wahhab al-Ghayid, the brother of slain al-Qaeda deputy Abu Yahya al-Libi. Tellingly, Umma al-Wasat secured only one seat; al-Watan, zero. Bereft of the political platform of Egypt’s al-Nour party and lacking the stark secular-Islamist social divide that has enabled Tunisian Salafis to play the role of provocateur, militant Salafis in Libya are trying to muscle their way to prominence using violence. The country’s rich Sufi heritage (regarded by Salafis as anathema and idolatrous) has been the most recent object of their wrath. But the history of Salafi militancy extends farther back and encompasses a broad array of causes and targets.
By many accounts, Salafis’ most visible entrée into the public sphere occurred on June 7, when the militia Ansar al-Sharia (based in Darnah and Benghazi) led a rally of armed vehicles along Benghazi’s own Tahrir Square and demanded the imposition of Islamic law. Its leader, Sheikh Muhammad al-Zahawi later gave an interview on a local TV station forbidding participation in the July 7 GNC elections on the grounds that they were un-Islamic.
Libya’s Big Step Forward… Then What?
More below the fold -BLOWBACK- …
Blowback of the ugliest kind
(Al-Jazeera) – Now that the violence has been turned against their representatives, will Americans respond as expected, with prejudice and ignorance? Or, during this crucial election season, will they ask hard questions of their leaders about the wisdom of violent interventions in the context of a larger regional system which the United States administers that remains largely driven by violence?
As I flew home yesterday from Europe, unaware of what had transpired in Libya, I read through the 2008 report by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, titled “From Exporting Terrorism to Exporting Oppression: Human Rights in the Arab Region”.
The report described the often unbearable levels of abuse suffered by citizens across the region is one of the most depressing reads imaginable. Every single government, from Morocco to Iraq, was defined by the systematic abuse of its citizens, denial of their most basic rights, and rampant corruption and violence. And in every case, such abuses and violence have been enabled by Western, Russian and other foreign interests.
Simply put, each and all the policies and actions described in the report – and 2008 was no better or worse than the years that proceeded or followed it – are as much forms of terror as the destruction of the World Trade Centre, invasion of Iraq, or attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi.
In fact, the Middle East and North Africa have for over half a century constituted one of the largest and most pernicious terror systems of the modern era. And the US, Europe, Russia, and now increasingly China have been accessories, co-conspirators, and often initiators of this terror throughout the period, working hand-in-hand with local governments to repress their peoples and ensure that wealth and power remain arrogated by a trusted few.
