Qaeda Affiliates Gain Regional Influence as Central Leadership Fades
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Version 0 of 1. WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Somalia, Syria, Yemen and West Africa are exerting increasing influence in their regions, posing new challenges for American counterterrorism officials even after a decade of allied attacks that have weakened the group’s leadership in Pakistan, according to a State Department report released Wednesday. The findings in the department’s annual country report on terrorism underscore Al Qaeda’s decentralization and the shifting threat against the United States and American interests abroad, themes that President Obama and top counterterrorism officials have noted over the past year. “2013 saw the rise of increasingly aggressive and autonomous AQ affiliates and like-minded groups in the Middle East and Africa who took advantage of the weak governance and instability in the region to broaden and deepen their operations,” the report said. As a result, the report said, affiliates in Al Qaeda’s network, while occasionally receiving ideological guidance from the group’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, are increasingly focused on local and regional objectives. “They make their judgments about what makes sense for them locally,” Tina S. Kaidanow, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, told reporters. “What that does for us is, again, pose a challenge, because we have to understand the dynamics not just of what core Al Qaeda is directing, but what the local situation may portend. And that’s what makes it so important for us to have as much good information as we can get on these groups.” Some affiliates — particularly Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen — have still sought to attack the United States directly, most notably in the failed plot on Christmas Day 2009 to blow up an airliner over Detroit. But Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan has had difficulty in keeping the network together and in communicating the group’s global priorities to its far-flung franchises, the report said. Mr. Zawahri was rebuffed this year in his attempts to mediate a dispute between two Qaeda affiliates in Syria — the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS — which led to the expulsion of ISIS from the Qaeda network in February. In addition, the report said, Mr. Zawahri’s recommendation last year that affiliates avoid collateral damage has been routinely disobeyed in attacks by Qaeda assailants against civilian religious pilgrims in Iraq, hospital staff members and patients in Yemen, and families at a shopping mall in Kenya. “There’s still a core Al Qaeda element that we need to watch out for,” Ms. Kaidanow said. “They still issue directives from time to time. Those directives are differentially taken into account by these groups overseas — some more, some less. And we have to be cognizant of the fact that they still remain a threat, but we believe less of a threat.” The report amounted to a scorecard of terrorist triumphs and setbacks last year. It noted that the Syrian civil war was attracting thousands of fighters who travel from around the world to join the fight against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, with some joining violent Islamist extremist groups. Yet, a French offensive in Mali has largely routed the Qaeda-backed militants there, and an African-led campaign in Somalia drove the Shabab group out of its city strongholds. With the decline of Al Qaeda’s leadership, the report found, affiliates have increased their financial independence through kidnapping-for-ransom operations and other criminal activities, like extortion and credit card fraud. The affiliate in Yemen and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in West Africa, have carried out this strategy with particular effectiveness, the report said, usually targeting Westerners whose governments — or third parties — have established a pattern of paying for their release. Extremists also increased their use of new platforms and social media in 2013, with mixed results, the report found. “Social media platforms allowed violent extremist groups to circulate messages more quickly, but confusion and contradictions among the various voices within the movement are growing more common,” it said. “Increasingly, current and former violent extremists are engaging online with a variety of views on tactics and strategy, including admitting wrongdoing or recanting former beliefs and actions.” |