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Transcripts E-Notes Understanding Terror Networks by Marc Sageman November 1, 2004 Marc Sageman, a newly appointed FPRI Senior Fellow, was a CIA case office r in Afghanistan between 198789 and is now a forensic psychiatrist. Thi s essay is based on his FPRI BookTalk on October 6, 2004, which doubled as one of our regular Situation Reports on the War on Terrorism, held ev ery two months. His book, Understanding Terror Networks, was published b y the University of Pennsylvania Press earlier this year. After leaving the CIA, I was happy in my naive belief that I had left all that behind me. But after 9-11, like everyone, I wanted to do something . What people were saying about the perpetrators shortly after the attac ks was simply not consistent with my own experience. I began to apply th e principles of evidence-based medicine to terrorism research, because t here really was no data on the perpetrators. There were theories, opinio ns, and anecdotal evidence, but there was no systematic gathering of dat a I started gathering terrorist biographies from various sources, mostly fr om the records of trials. The trial that took place in New York in 2001 in connection with the 1998 embassy bombing, for instance, was 72 days l ong and had a wealth of information, 9,000 pages of it. I wanted to coll ect this information to test the conventional wisdom about terrorism. Wi th some 400 biographies, all in a matrix, I began social-network analysi s of this group. Background We all know that Al Qaeda is a violent, Islamist, revivalist social movem ent, held together by a common vision of a Salafi state. Al Qaeda proper is just a small organization within this larger social movement. We oft en mistake the social movement for Al Qaeda and vice versa because for a bout five years, Al Qaeda had more or less control of the social movemen t The segment that poses a threat to the United States came out of Egypt. M ost of the leadership and the whole ideology of Al Qaeda derives from Eg yptian writer Sayyid Qutb (190666) and his progeny, who killed Anwar Sa dat and were arrested in October 1981. President Mubarak generously allo wed them to be released in 1984. Many of the released men, harassed by the Egyptian police, migrated to Af ghanistan. With the end of the Soviet-Afghan War, they continued on to j ihad. These Arab outsiders actually did not fight in the Soviet-Afghan W ar except for one small battle at Jaji/Ali Kheyl, which was really defen sive: the Arabs had put their camp on the main logistic supply line, and in the spring of 1987 the Soviets tried to destroy it. So they were rea lly more the recipient of a Soviet offensive, but they really did not fi ght in that war and thus the US had absolutely no contact with them. I heard about the battle of Jaji at the time, and it never dawned on me t o ask the Afghans I debriefed who the Arabs were. They turned out to be bin Laden and his men at the Al-Masada (Lions Den) camp. After the war, a lot of these foreigners returned to their countries. Tho se who could not return because they were terrorists remained in Afghani stan. In 1991, Algeria and Egypt complained to Pakistan that it was harb oring terrorists, so Pakistan expelled them. Thus the most militant of t hese terrorists made their way to Khartoum, where they were invited by H assan al-Turabi of the National Islamic Front in Khartoum. The Khartoum period is critical, because what these violent Salafists bas ically want to do is to create a Salafi state in a core Arab country. Sa lafi (from Salaf, ancient ones or predecessors in Arabic) is an emul ation, an imitation of the mythical Muslim community that existed at the time of Mohammed and his companion, which Salafists believe was the onl y fair and just society that ever existed. A very small subset of Salafi s, the disciples of Qutb, believe they cannot create this state peaceful ly through the ballot-box but have to use violence. The utopia they stri ve for is similar to most utopias in European thought of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, such as the communist classless society. In Khartoum, the Salafists theorized that the reason they had been unable to overthrow their own government (the near enemy) was because it was propped up by the far enemy the United States. So they decided to re direct their efforts and, instead of going after their own government, t o attack the far-enemy. In 1996, for many reasons, Hassan al- Bashir, the President of Sudan, had to expel Al Qaeda after the imposition of in ternational sanctions, because the Sudanese Government was implicated in the attempt to assassinate Egyptian President Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995. In August 1996, within two months of returning to Afghanistan, bi n Laden issued a fatwa declaring war on the United States. The fatwa clearly articulated the new goals of this movement, which were to get the US out of the Middle East so they would be free to overthro w the Saudi monarchy or the Egyptian regime and establish a Salafi state . Its really not so much to destroy the United Stat es, something they know they cannot do right now. This is all why I put the start of the threat against us at 1996. I wanted to limit myself for analytical purity to that group, to see i f I could identify anything different from other terrorist movements, wh ich were far more nationalistic. Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ign orance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, wea k minds susceptible to brainwashing - the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe theyre just plain evil. Taking these perceived root causes in turn, three quarters of my sample c ame from the upper or middle class. The vast majority90 percentcame fr om caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent thats usual for the third world. These ar e the best and brightest of their societies in many ways. Al Qaedas members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters we re professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represe nted, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Z awahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supp osedly the head of the military committee. Far from having no family or job responsibilities, 73 percent were marrie d and the vast majority had children. Those who were not married were us ually too young to be married. Only 13 percent were madrassa-trained and most of them come from what I call the Southeast Asian sample, the Jema ah Islamiyya (JI). His successor, Bashir, is the cleric who is being tried for the Jakarta Marriott bombing of Augus t 2003; he is also suspected of planning the October 2002 Bali bombing. As a psychiatrist, originally I was looking for any characteristic common to these men. But only four of the 400 men had any hint of a disorder. This is below the worldwide base rate for thought disorders. I didnt find many personality di sorders, which makes sense in that people who are antisocial usually don t cooperate well enough with others to join groups. This is a well-orga nized type of terrorism: these men are not like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, loners off planning in the woods. Of th e nineteen 9-11 terrorists, none had a criminal record. You could almost say that those least likely to cause harm individually are most likely to do so collectively. At the time they joined jihad, the terrorists were not very religious. Seventy percent of my sample joined the jihad while they were living in another country fro m where they grew up. So someone from country A is living in country B a nd going after country Cthe United States. This is very different from the usual terrorist of the past, someone from country A, living in count ry A, going after country As government. France happened to ...
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