Tag Archives: Intelligence

The First Speech of Abu Hamza al-Muhajir

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 15 March 2021

Destruction at the Sadeer Hotel in Baghdad, 9 March 2005

The Islamic State movement, then-known as Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM), used a suicide truck bomb to blow up the Sadeer Hotel, where many foreign contractors were staying, and the next-door Agriculture Ministry, on 9 March 2005, murdering three people and wounding forty, thirty of them Americans. Reporting at the time noted that “insurgents wearing police uniforms first shot to death a guard at the Agriculture Ministry’s gate, allowing the truck to enter a compound the ministry shares with the adjacent Sadeer hotel”, and these details were confirmed in a two-minute audio message released later in the day by Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the veteran Egyptian jihadist who would take over AQM when its founder was killed in 2006.[1] A transcript of the brief speech is reproduced below. Continue reading →

Russia’s View of the Endgame in Afghanistan

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 23 February 2021

Russia’s presidential envoy for Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov

Russian ruler Vladimir Putin’s current special envoy for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, spoke to Sputnik’s Tajik service on 17 February, and a translation of the interview is published below with some interesting sections highlighted in bold. Kabulov was the KGB resident in Kabul in the 1980s and early 1990s, and later in the 1990s, during the Taliban’s reign over Kabul and much of the rest of the country, he was an adviser to the United Nations peace envoy. Continue reading →

Bosnian General Convicted for Jihadist Crimes

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 January 2021

Sakib Mahmuljin [image source]

This week, Bosnia’s war crimes court convicted Sakib Mahmuljin, the General in charge of the state military unit that organised and controlled the foreign jihadi-Salafists, many connected to Al-Qaeda, who came to fight for the Bosnian government during the war in the early 1990s. Mahmuljin’s conviction for overseeing torture and murder by the jihadists highlights an aspect of the Bosnian war that is often left out of accounts. Continue reading →

The Jihad Factor in Bosnia

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 January 2021

Last week, as one of his last acts in office, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech about Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda. It was unfortunate that Pompeo did this at this time and in this way, with such blatant political intent, because the factual content of Pompeo’s speech was unassailable: the Islamic Republic’s long relationship with Al-Qaeda does stretch back about three decades, the killing of Al-Qaeda’s deputy Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah (Abu Muhammad al-Masri) in Tehran in August 2020 is demonstrative of a shift in the strategic positioning of the organisation away from Pakistan to Iran, and even the part of Pompeo’s speech that got the most pushback—about Tehran’s contact with the 9/11 killers—is not controversial and is not new.

Unmentioned in Pompeo’s speech was one of the crucibles that forged this relationship, and forged Al-Qaeda into something more than a regional menace, namely the Bosnian war of 1992-5. Continue reading →

Women and Terrorism: The Case of the May 19th Communist Organization

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 January 2021

This article was originally published at European Eye on Radicalization

The world has been captivated this week by the scenes of an insurrectionary mob overrunning the United States Capitol at the behest of President Donald Trump. It is unlikely that many people remember or even know that nearly forty years ago, this building—the meeting place of the U.S. Congress, the place where laws are made—was bombed by a Communist terrorist group, a group remarkable for its all-female membership. A new book, Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America’s First Female Terrorist Group, by William Rosenau, a senior policy historian at CNA and a fellow in the International Security program at New America, examines this forgotten episode. Continue reading →

Islamism in Syria

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 23, 2020

A chapter about Islamism in Syria I wrote for the American Foreign Policy Council’s (AFPC) ‘World Almanac of Islamism’ was published today. Do check it out, and the broader site, which is a great, accessible resource. The format of the website necessitated that the chapter as I submitted it was edited, condensed, and split up to fill out the various categories. In case it is of any interest, the original version of the chapter is reproduced below.

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Al-Qaeda Has Never Been More Dominated by States

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 11, 2020

In writing a chapter earlier this year about the current status of Al-Qaeda, part of the process was reviewing the organisation’s history since its formation in the late 1980s. What really struck me was how extensively Al-Qaeda is now manipulated, under the influence of, and in places even controlled by state powers. To mark the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11, I thought I could give a brief sketch of this development.

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France Kills Al-Qaeda’s Man in North Africa

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 11 June 2020

France announced last Friday that its forces in Mali had killed Abd al-Malek Drukdel (Abu Musab Abd al-Wadud), the emir of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which covers the North Africa and Sahel areas. Paris has sometimes been unreliable on these matters, but the United States independently confirmed Drukdel was gone, as have sources within AQIM. The French also announced that on 19 May they had arrested Mohamed Mrabat, a veteran jihadist and member of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS). Continue reading →

Iran Admits Collaborating with Al-Qaeda in Bosnia

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 February 2020

The Mujahideen Battalion (El-Mudžahid) in Bosnia in the early 1990s [image source]

The clerical regime in Iran established a relationship with Al-Qaeda shortly after its foundation thirty years ago. One of Tehran’s and Al-Qaeda’s first joint projects was in Bosnia during the war (1992-5), where Iran helped to make Al-Qaeda a truly global phenomenon—with a foothold in Europe. For various reasons—some well-intended, some not—this fact has been either unknown or (shall we say) “controversial” in the West in the decades since. It is, therefore, important to note that there have been several recent revelations from in and around the Iranian regime itself that confirm the Islamic Republic’s involvement in the Balkans in the early 1990s. Continue reading →

The CIA and Iraq: Intelligence Failures, Media Successes

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 December 2019

In a long article last week, I looked at why the U.S. ran a formal occupation of Iraq for fourteen months after the fall of Saddam Husayn in April 2003, given that there had been an explicit pre-invasion decision not to have an occupation government. The short answer is that the occupation was installed through deception by the State Department, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). State and CIA had argued for a protracted occupation in the Situation Room debates in 2002, but President George W. Bush had sided with the Pentagon, which advocated a rapid transfer of power to Iraqis. Having lost in the formal inter-agency process, the State Department succeeded by subversion in getting its way on the ground in Iraq. The disaster this caused in the mismanagement of post-Saddam Iraq was, as the article explained in detail, only the most serious impact of the toxic schism between State/CIA and the Pentagon, a factor whose import is difficult to overstate when examining how the Bush administration functioned. (This feud also at times drew in the Vice President’s Office, which tended to support the Pentagon.)

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