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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2017 Part 19-142-Caliphate-ISIS-53-Coming Defeat-12b

“If you fight us,” ISIS proclaimed in 2014, “we become stronger and tougher. If you leave us alone, we grow and expand.”

The Taliban said that the ultimate goal of its jihad is “to establish an Islamic state on earth.”

"Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States," "Events may require the use of military force. But it's also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War." he championed a "new approach" and a "long-term plan" to fight what he branded an "ideology of death."

- Trump said

Afghan Taliban seek ‘to establish an Islamic state on earth’BY BILL ROGGIO | January 20, 2017 | [email protected] | @billroggioIn a propaganda video that promoted its Al Farouq Training Camp, the Taliban said that the ultimate goal of its jihad is “to establish an Islamic state on earth.” The Al Farouq camp is the latest training site publicized by the Taliban.

The video, entitled Ribat 1 and released on Voice of Jihad on Jan. 20, was produced by Tora Bora Jihadi Studio and the Multimedia Branch of the Cultural Commission of the Islamic Emirate. “Ribat” is defined as a base or fortress used to defend Islam.The location of the Al Farouq camp was not disclosed by the Taliban; it could be located in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The makeshift camp (there are no permanent structures seen in the video) is situated on a wooded hillside. An improvised range and obstacle course are shown during the course of the video.The first half of the video is standard fare for Taliban training camp videos: an estimated 20 recruits are shown exercising and practicing with various weapons, including handguns, assault rifles, and machine guns. A group of 12 fighters are in what appears to be the camp uniform: a red keffiyeh, woodland camouflage uniforms, and new white high top sneakers.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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The Taliban fighters are operating in the open in broad daylight, without fear of reprisal from US, Afghan, or Pakistani forces.

Taliban calls for a global Islamic stateThe video is clearly geared toward a Western audience. Clips of the fighters training are subtitled with English-language captions such as The Training Madresa, The Center of Understanding Jihad, The School of Developing Minds, The Training Center of Mujahid Nation, Defending the Divine Way, and The Address of Jihadic Thinking.The second half of the video features an unknown speaker who provides religious justification for jihad, which he calls a “holy obligation,” based on readings from the Koran. His entire speech is subtitled in English. The speaker then reaches out to “other Muslim brothers,” a clear reference to non-Afghans, to take part in jihad.“We also have a responsibility to invite other Muslim brothers to take part in waging jihad with their blood and souls,” the Taliban speaker implores.The Ribat 1 video, like a previous video entitled Real Men that also promoted a Taliban camp, contradicts many of the group’s public statements and claims that it only seeks to liberate Afghanistan from Western occupation. In Real Men, the Taliban’s message clearly indicated that it is a fervent defender of Islam and part of the global jihad.In Ribat 1, the Taliban could not be more explicit about its support of the global jihad. At one point, the speaker said the Taliban’s ultimate goal is the establishment of a global Islamic state.“Our aim of all these struggles and effort is to establish an Islamic state on earth,” the speaker said.This should come as no surprise as the Taliban has often revealed its close relation to global jihadist groups, such as when it publicly accepted a pledge of allegiance from al Qaeda’s emir, Ayman al Zawahiri.

Jihadist training camps in AfghanistanThe Taliban has publicized at least 10 of its training camps since the end of 2014 (see list below). Other jihadist groups, including al Qaeda, are known to operate camps inside Afghanistan. In 2015, the US raided an al Qaeda camp in Bermal district in Paktika, and two others in the Shorabak district in Kandahar province. The outgoing commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General John Campbell, said that one of the camps in Shorabak was the largest in Afghanistan since the US invaded in 2001. Al Qaeda has also operated camps in Kunar and Nuristan.Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistani jihadist group that is closely allied with al Qaeda,“operates terrorist training camps in eastern Afghanistan,” the US government stated in 2014. The Turkistan Islamic Party, the Islamic Jihad Union, and the Imam Bukhari Jamaat, an Uzbek jihadist group that operates in both Syria and Afghanistan, have all claimed to operate camps inside Afghanistan. Coalition forces have also raided Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan suicide training camps in Samagan and Sar-i-Pul.

Training camps promoted by the Taliban since Dec. 2014Dec. 2014: The Taliban announced the existence of a training camp in Faryab province.Dec. 2014:The Khalid bin Waleed camp in Kunar province.June 2015: The Taliban touted its “special forces” training camp; the location was not disclosed.Aug. 2015: Training Camp Shaheed Ustaz Aasim in the Lions Den, in Paktia province.Sept. 2015 The Salahadin Ayyubi camp; the location was not disclosed.





July 2016: The Omar bin Khattab training camp in Kunduz.Oct. 2016: Abdullah bin Mubarak Jihad Training Camp; the location was not disclosed.Nov. 2015: The Khalid bin Walid Camp; the location was not disclosed. According to the Taliban, it has 12 “branches.”Nov. 2015: The Abu Dujana Camp, in Sar-i-Pul province. It is one of 12 branch camps of the Khalid bin Walid Camp.Jan. 2017: Al Farouq Training Camp; the location was not disclosed.Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

Trump Pledges War on Radical Islamic Terrorismby Voice of AmericaSWJ Blog Post | January 18, 2017 Masood Farivar, Voice of America

President-elect Donald Trump's campaign pledge to wage war on "radical Islamic terrorism" is about to become U.S. policy.In its emphasis on ideology, it is a war that puts him at odds with his two immediate predecessors. While both former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama have avoided casting the war on terror in ideological terms for fear of alienating Muslim allies, Trump has stressed that very dimension and the need to counter it ideologically."Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States," Trump said in April in the first of two major foreign policy speeches he delivered during the campaign. "Events may require the use of military force. But it's also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War."More than campaign rhetoric, it seems to be a deeply held view. In the weeks since his Nov. 8 election, Trump has steadfastly stuck to his hardline position on terror even as he's softened his views on other hot-button issues.After a Tunisian man drove a truck through a crowded Christmas market in Berlin last month, killing 12 people, Trump tweeted: "This is a purely religious threat, which turned into reality. Such hatred! When will the U.S., and all countries, fight back?"And when he was asked about his controversial campaign call to bar Muslims from entering the country, he replied: "You know my plans all along — I've been proven to be right."Blaise Misztal, director of the national security program at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, said Trump sees radical Islam as an ideological threat to his nationalistic vision of "making America great again." "I think by seeing the threat as an ideological one, President Trump will see the problem as not just stopping attacks but stopping the spread of that ideology and stopping the potential for further radicalization," Misztal said.

Evolving View Trump wasn't always so hawkish on fighting terror. Nor was he the first to warn about radical Islam.The credit for popularizing the phrase goes to his Republican rivals — and some of his subsequent advisers, such as incoming chief strategist Stephen Bannon — who repeatedly chastised Obama for refusing to utter the words. Indeed, in his June 2015 presidential announcement, Trump made no mention of radical Islam and called China a "bigger problem" than Islamic State.But Trump's rhetoric grew increasingly bellicose as the campaign wore on and a rash of terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States unnerved voters, leading him to make





some of his campaign's most incendiary comments and proposals.After a terror attack in Paris in November 2015 and a deadly shooting by a Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California, the following month, Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S.In March 2015, he told CNN that "Islam hates us" and later defended his comment, saying "large portions of Muslims" have "tremendous hatred" for the West. And two months later when a Muslim-American gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Trump blamed the violence on radical Islam and said he favored a suspension of immigration from countries with "a proven history of terrorism."

'Ideological Warfare' In August, with Americans still jittery over terrorism, Trump delivered what some experts saw as his most coherent policy statement on national security. Comparing radical Islam to fascism and communism, he championed a "new approach" and a "long-term plan" to fight what he branded an "ideology of death." "All actions should be oriented around this goal, and any country which shares this goal will be our ally," he told supporters at Youngstown University in Ohio, echoing Bush's post-9/11 rhetoric.He advocated "ideological warfare" against Islamic State and vowed to work with NATO and "our friends in the Middle East" and to find "common ground" with Russia to defeat the group."My administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS, international cooperation to cut off their funding, expanded intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting," he said. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State.Trump said the common thread among terrorist attacks since 9/11 was the involvement of immigrants or the children of immigrants, and he called for an ideological test for immigrants to screen out those who do not "share our values and respect our people.”The policy implications of Trump's call to arms remain to be seen. Colin Clarke, a political scientist at RAND, said it is too early to tell how the rhetoric of Trump and his advisers translates into policy. "That still doesn't tell you what he'll do differently in terms of combating the threat," Clarke said. "It doesn't tell you how he's going to allocate resources any differently than the Obama administration."

Homeland Secure Critics of Obama's refusal to acknowledge a link between terrorism and Islam hailed Trump's drive to highlight the issue, but they cautioned against painting the world's 1.5 billion Muslims with a broad ideological brush."Actually it does have something to do with Islam," said former CIA Director Michael Hayden. "A lot of it is about Islam. But I quickly add, it's not all about Islam, and for God's sake, it's not about all Muslims."Apart from his controversial Muslim ban and proposal to work with Russia, nearly everything Trump has proposed to fight terror — bombing IS, working with Middle Eastern allies, and using drones and special forces — are policies that have been carried out by the Obama administration. "I haven't seen anything [new]," Clarke said. "I've been looking. Trust me. I think a lot of people have."In securing the American homeland against terrorist attacks since 9/11, the U.S. may have exhausted nearly all the law enforcement, investigative and intelligence tools at its disposal, Hayden said. While mass-casualty attacks like 9/11 have grown highly improbable, he warned that so-called lone wolf attacks by homegrown extremists will be hard to prevent.

New Strategy? According to Pentagon data, in the two years since the U.S. launched a bombing campaign to roll back IS, coalition aircraft have carried out nearly





17,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, damaging or destroying nearly 32,000 targets."Getting tough" has its limits, Hayden cautioned. "I'm fond of saying, if being tough is all you needed, if you could kill your way out of this, we'd have been done a decade ago," Hayden said.But Trump advisers say the threat of international terrorism has grown over the last eight years and requires a new strategy.

"I do think there are, there are clear and broad distinctions between the past administration and the future administration," said James Carafano, director of foreign policy studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation who advises the Trump transition team on foreign policy. "And it's logical that there ought to be big changes because by almost every observable measure, the problem of transnational terrorism is worse than it was eight years ago."

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Why No One Remembers the Arab Spring of 2010Ehsan M. AhariThe sixth anniversary of The Arab Spring (aka Arab Awakening) has come and gone, but not many people noticed. One of the main reasons underlying this was its utter failure to create either a stable, democratic, or secular Arab world. However, that was not the intent of that movement. In fact, no one really knew what the young Arab protestors wanted when they overthrew President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, except that they wanted to replace those autocratic rulers. So, it is hard to pinpoint why the Arab Spring failed. However, because it generally failed to change the quality of at least two countries—Egypt and Libya—an informed discussion about its failure may help us get ready for such future turbulent developments in the Arab world.In the West, the Arab Awakening was expected to spawn an era of liberal democracy (something that was alien to the Arab world). However, there were no established political parties in the Arab world to shape the modalities of future change. There were a few Islamist parties; even they were banned or had an underground existence. Thus, about the only known political group (if it were to be loosely labelled that) were the Islamists. Even they were shocked by the intensity of demands for political change in those three countries, but they had no plan to establish an alternative government. The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and the Ennahda Party of Tunisia were two Islamist parties; yet, each produced starkly different results.Democracy did come to Egypt; however, it was headed by the Muslim Brotherhood, a party that had only known how to act as an underground protest movement, but had no experience in the realm of governance. President Mohammad Morsi acted like an elected autocrat. But even during the short period of his time in office, he appeared to have threatened the privileged status of the Egyptian army. The Egyptian military, aside from being a long-time ruler of that country, had also created an economic empire; and those interests were too precious to be sacrificed on the altar of democracy, especially an Islamic version of it. The army acted with intense brutality in July 2013, ousting democracy and arresting the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, including its democratically elected president. No tears were shed in Washington over the death of Egyptian democracy, and only





lukewarm protests were made toward the military. The most noticeable aspect of the US response was the spineless decision not to call the Egyptian army’s ouster of democracy a “coup,” because, by US law, such a declaration would have resulted in the termination of all military assistance to the brutal regime of the new dictator, General Fattah el-Sisi. Besides, the Obama administration also was confused about what conclusions to draw regarding the Arab Awakening in general. So, the safe bet was not to indulge in legalism and let the realpolitik become the overriding force. Keeping Egypt as a friend of the United States and a major Arab player in the implementation of the Camp David Agreement was deemed the best option.Libya was a country where the US, along with France and the United Kingdom, took military action to oust Muammar Qaddafi, only to find out that there would be nothing but the proverbial deluge (chaos) after the death of the Libyan tyrant.Tunisia was the rare and yet the most precious exception—a successful outcome of the Arab Spring—because its democratic government has prevailed there. The chief responsibility for that outcome rests with the remarkably rare willingness of the Ennahda Party (an Islamist party) to politically compromise with the Nidaa Tounes (a secular party). Despite its sustenance, democracy in Tunisia has remained fragile. The chief reason for this fragility is that North Africa is a region where political instability and cataclysmic change are expected to happen within a matter of a few years or even less because of ISIS’ presence in Libya and in neighboring Egypt. Even though the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, with the establishment of a so-called Caliphate in both countries, was not a direct outcome of the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war itself was. However, the widening of that war in Iraq and Syria transformed the entire Levant into a highly volatile region.The United States was expected to respond to these developments by taking military action. However, since President Barack Obama came to power by decrying George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was not about to repeat the mistake of attempting to stabilize Iraq or Syria with another massive US military deployment. He did respond in the form of using America’s air power and its Special Forces to back up the Kurdish forces in both of those countries. But Russia decided to respond to Obama’s palpably reluctant vision of fixing the unfixable Middle East by taking decisive military action in Syria, thereby transforming that country into a part of Russia’s sphere of influence in that region.One can indefinitely debate the wisdom underlying President Obama’s decision not to initiate a large-scale military response in the Levant; however, the Arab states have learned a bitter lesson about not taking the US military invasion of another Arab country for granted, even though the brutal and highly destabilizing nature of ISIS in Iraq and Syria warranted such a response.In the context of the long-range implications of the Arab Spring, the entire Arab world became extremely volatile and unstable, especially in the Levant and in West Asia. Iran emerged as the most significant beneficiary of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Since then, it has maintained a high-profile presence and influence there. When the regime of Bashara Assad was threatened by its escalating civil war, Iran decided to come to the rescue. Iran concluded that America’s bitter experience related to its Iraqi invasion made it an exceedingly reluctant about entering future quagmires of the Middle East. However, Iran would take full advantage of it.It so happened that the circumstances leading to Russia’s military involvement in Syria also worked in Iran’s favor. The Islamic Republic was fully determined to remain the sole supporter of Assad, knowing that, if the United States sat on the fence, there was not going





to be an “Arab military response.”The post-Arab Spring Arab world remained perplexed about how to respond to Iran’s daring foreign policy maneuvers in West Asia, which were put in place as a countermeasure to Saudi Arabia’s hapless war in Yemen, and have become a blackhole for the Saudi economy with no hope of victory. Regarding Syria, in the absence of American leadership, the Sunni Arab states were flummoxed about how to defeat ISIS. They were hoping that the so-called “moderate” Islamist group would get strong American backing in the form of state-of-the-art military weapons so that they at least could seriously weaken the Assad regime. But that did not happen. Then, they watched helplessly from the sidelines as Russia and Iran (along with its proxy, Hezbollah fighters, and other Shia militias) pounded the moderate Islamists into a paltry fighting entity. The Arab states know that the incoming Trump administration will rely on Russia to destroy ISIS. But Russia will only do what is best for Russia. In all likelihood, Putin is done with his nefarious bombing campaign in Syria. As long as the Assad regime is not threatened, Russia’s military operations may also be over. However, the Sunni Arab desire to oust the murderous Assad regime has remained unfulfilled. But that is not the end of the Arab discontent. The most significant Arab challenge in the coming years stems from its steadily rising population of unemployed, disgruntled youth, which are already embittered by the failure of the Arab Spring to materialize a qualitative change in Arab politics. The Arab Human Development Report of 2016 grimly makes the following observations, which are noteworthy:The report warns that increasing levels of armed conflict are destroying the social fabric of the Arab region, causing massive loss of life not only among combatants, but also among civilians. Conflicts also are also reversing hard-won economic development gains by destroying productive resources, capital and labour, within a larger territory neighbouring countries where they are fought. Between 2000–2003 and 2010–2015, the number of armed conflicts and violent crises in the region have risen from 4 to 11, and many of them are becoming protracted in nature.Home to only 5 percent of the world’s population, the Arab region has witnessed 17 percent of the world’s conflicts between 1948 and 2014, and 45 percent of the world’s terrorist attacks in 2014. In that same year, the region was home to 47 percent of the world’s internally displaced people and 57.5 percent of all world refugees including Palestinian refugees displaced by one of the longest lasting territorial occupations in modern history.However, since the Arab youth don’t really know the specifics of qualitative change (democracy, Islamic democracy, or secular democracy) that they want to see in their respective countries, they will continue (misguidedly) to respond to the call for jihadi violence from the remnants of ISIS as a viable one. In the West, one dominant mindset is that some sort of a highly effective de-radicalization program for the Arab youth or young Western youngsters should be developed to counter ISIS’ reckless jihadi call. What very few of us understand and promote is that no such de-radicalization program “silver bullet” to eradicate and/or defeat ISIS will ever be developed. If there is a silver bullet, it should be about developing systematic programs of good governance and institution building throughout the entire Arab world to create rational policies of economic development, modernization of education, and eradication of institutionalized discrimination against the female population in Arab societies. These steps would eventually result in the evolution of modern polities, which would be better





equipped (as opposed to the current obscurantist autocratic governance) to bring an end to terrorism.

But, largely because of the mundane nature of such suggestions, no one is paying attention to it. Thus, another major wave of violence and political unrest is likely to emerge in the Arab world/Middle East in the not-too-distant future; and it is likely to be bloodier than the Arab Spring that started in December 2010. However, if stable regimes do not develop in the aftermath of violent protests, then that part of the world will continue its watch-and-wait process for yet another wave of turbulence. The Arab Spring of 2010 had a promising start, but it quickly degenerated into a failed revolution. And it is part of human nature to treat all human failures as orphans.

Don’t close the book on the Osama bin Laden’s documentsBY BILL ROGGIO | January 20th, 2017 | [email protected] | @billroggioFor years, Thomas Joscelyn and I have argued for the intelligence community to declassify nearly all of Osama bin Laden’s files that were seized when the al Qaeda emir was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011. Yesterday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence patted itself on the back as it released 98 additional documents and declared it was “Closing the Book on bin Laden.”At The Weekly Standard, Tom argues that the book should remain open, as the release of 620 items in a cache of more than one million documents and files is merely a drop in the bucket. Tom’s article is excerpted below, but please take a minute to read the whole thing:The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released 98 additional items from Osama bin Laden’s compound today. If the ODNI has its way, then these files will be the last the American people see for some time. The accompanying announcement is titled, “Closing the Book on bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final Abbottabad Documents.” The ODNI says today’s release “marks the end of a two-and-a-half-year effort to declassify several hundred documents recovered” during the Abbottabad raid.But the total number of files released thus far, including today’s document dump, is just a drop in the bucket compared to what was found in the al Qaeda master’s compound. And if the public and the media care about transparency, then they should push to see more.As THE WEEKLY STANDARD has reported in the past, more than 1 million documents and files were recovered in Abbottabad. Some of the documents (e.g. blanks, duplicates, scans of publicly available media, etc.) are basically worthless. But many thousands more illuminate how al Qaeda has operated.On May 8, 2011, Tom Donilon, who was then President Obama’s National Security Adviser, explained that bin Laden’s documents and files would fill a “small college library.” Donilon elaborated further that the recovered intelligence demonstrated Osama bin Laden’s active role. At the time of his death, the al Qaeda founder oversaw a cohesive international network, receiving updates from around the globe on a regular basis.In 2012, the Washington Post reported that U.S. officials “described the complete collection of bin Laden material as the largest cache of terrorism files ever obtained, with about 100 flash drives and DVDs as well as five computer hard drives, piles of paper and a handwritten journal kept by the al-Qaeda chief.” To date, the ODNI has released or listed just 620 “items” found in bin Laden’s home. Only 314 of these are “declassified material.”That is an insignificant fraction of the total collection.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.


