Writing in New Statesman, Shiraz Maher of King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, discusses the ‘decentralization’ philosophy of Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian strategist within al-Qaeda who has had a profound effect upon the decentralized terrorist attacks plaguing Europe:
According to the Norwegian scholar Brynjar Lia, who has written an authoritative biography of Suri, he opposed the 9/11 attacks precisely because he feared al-Qaeda would be unable to withstand the ferocity of the US response. When it eventually came, Suri felt vindicated.
It reaffirmed a long-standing view of his that the global jihad movement could succeed only if it was decentralised. Suri had begun to advocate decentralisation in the early 1990s, arguing that formal hierarchies did not well serve the jihadist cause. At the time, militant groups were being rounded up in Egypt, Libya and Algeria because their members congregated in large structures.
The most formative influence on Suri’s views, however, was the uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He wrote about the experience in a 900-page book, The Islamic Jihadi Revolution in Syria. The uprising was brutally repressed by President Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar al-Assad. Too much centralisation and formal structuring had caused the revolution to be lost, Suri reasoned. What the movement needed was smaller and more autonomous cells, which could wage a form of low-intensity guerrilla warfare, grinding down the local populations.
Although Suri had been formulating his ideas since the early 1990s, it was only after 9/11 that they coalesced into a coherent theory. Towards the end of 2004, he published his seminal work, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which outlined his vision for the future of the global jihad movement.
Of the theological justification for such attacks:
“The jihad of individual or cell terrorism, using the methods of urban or rural guerrilla warfare, is fundamental for exhausting the enemy and causing him to collapse and withdraw,” Suri wrote in The Global Islamic Resistance Call.
To justify indiscriminate attacks on civilians, he invoked verse 8:60 of the Quran, which states: “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides them.” The passage is often invoked by jihadi theorists to rationalise acts of mass and indiscriminate terror. “This generous verse has ordered preparation for the purpose of terrorising the assailants’ and God’s enemies among the infidels and their servants,” Suri wrote.
He interpreted its invocation to “terrify the enemy” broadly, arguing that “terrorism is a religious duty, and assassination is a Prophetic tradition”.
Europe now had tens of thousands of followers of this theology in its midst.
