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Senior al-Qaida leaders have welcomed the uprisings in the Arab world in their first comprehensive statement on recent events, published in an internet magazine earlier this week.
Anwar al-Awlaki – the radical preacher who grew up in America but is now a fugitive in Yemen – used a lengthy article in an English-language magazine called Inspire to explain why the revolts sweeping the Middle East were not a setback for al-Qaida.
"Our mujahideen brothers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and the rest of the Muslim world will get a chance to breathe again after three decades of suffocation," Awlaki wrote in an article entitled The Tsunami of Change.
The magazine also featured translated excerpts of earlier statements by senior figures in al-Qaida, such as deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, which had previously only been posted in obscure extremist forums.
Zawahiri calls on the "people of freedom and honour in Tunisia, Egypt and in each of the Islamic lands" not to let their recent efforts go to waste. His statement appears to have been written before the fall of President Hosni Mubarak nearly two months ago.
Experts say the fact that no more recent statement is available indicates how isolated the al-Qaida No 2, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan's rugged western border areas, currently is.
The fifth issue of Inspire, which is thought to be produced by the al-Qaida affiliate, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, is slickly produced with colour graphics, pages of selected quotes from western analysts and several pages of illustrated instruction on how to strip and clean an AK47 rifle.
"It is our opinion that the revolutions that are shaking the thrones of dictators are good for the Muslims, good for the mujahideen and bad for the imperialists of the west and their henchmen in the Muslim world," reads an opening editorial.
The magazine is clearly designed to counter claims that the mass, largely secular, pro-democracy movements of recent months in the Middle East show the marginalisation of radical violent Islam within the Muslim world.
Although James Stavridis, Nato's supreme allied commander for Europe and commander of US European Command, said earlier this week that intelligence had revealed "flickers" of al-Qaida presence among rebels fighting Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, most analysts agree that the organisation has played no role at all in recent events in the Arab world.
Noman Benotman, a former member of the Libyan Fighting Group – the Islamist group once affiliated with al-Qaida – told the Guardian that Gaddafi had effectively eliminated radical Islamism in Libya although "there may be a very few unorganised individuals, very young on the whole, now active".
Efforts by al-Qaida to rebuild networks in Egypt in recent years have failed while their local affiliate in north Africa, Al-Qaida in the Maghreb, has been largely forced to retreat to isolated desert zones in the south.
Awlaki, who is believed to be behind several recent attempts to launch terrorist attacks in America, quotes Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, claiming that the "success of peaceful protests discredited the extremists and exposed their bankrupt arguments".
"The outcome doesn't have to be an Islamic government for us to consider what is occurring to be a step in the right direction," the 39-year-old cleric writes. The magazine invited questions for Awlaki or contributions to be sent to email addresses, one each from Yahoo, Google and Hotmail.
GUARDIAN
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