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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/19/extremists-among-libya-rebels_n_837894.html
Anti-American Extremists Among Libyan Rebels U.S. Has Vowed To Protect
by David Wood
WASHINGTON -- In 2007, when American combat casualties were
spiking in the bloodbath of the Iraq War, an 18-year-old laborer
traveled from his home in eastern Libya through Egypt and Syria to
join an al Qaeda terrorist cell in Iraq. He gave his name to al
Qaeda operatives as Ashraf Ahmad Abu-Bakr al-Hasri. Occupation, he
wrote: “Martyr.’’
Abu-Bakr was one of hundreds of foreign fighters who flocked into
the killing zones of Iraq to wage war against the “infidels." They
came from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Oman, Algeria and other Islamic
states. But on a per capita basis, no country sent more young
fighters into Iraq to kill Americans than Libya -- and almost all
of them came from eastern Libya, the center of the anti-Gaddafi
rebellion that the United States and others now have vowed to
protect, according to internal al Qaeda documents uncovered by
U.S. intelligence.
The informal alliance with violent Islamist extremist elements is
a coming-home of sorts for the United States, which initially
fought on the same side as the Libyan fighters in Afghanistan in
the 1980s, battling the Soviet Union.
According to a cache of al Qaeda documents captured in 2007 by
U.S. special operations commandos in Sinjar, Iraq, hundreds of
foreign fighters, many of them untrained young Islamic volunteers,
poured into Iraq in 2006 and 2007. The documents, called the
Sinjar documents, were collected, translated and analyzed at the
West Point Counter Terrorism Center. Almost one in five foreign
fighters arriving in Iraq came from eastern Libya, from the towns
of Surt, Misurata and Darnah.
On a per capita basis, that’s more than twice as many than came
from any other Arabic-speaking country, amounting to what the
counter terrorism center called a Libyan “surge" of young men
eager to kill Americans.
During 2006 and 2007, a total of 1,468 Americans were killed in
combat and 12,524 were badly wounded, according to Pentagon records.
Today, there is little doubt that eastern Libya, like other parts
of the Arab world, is experiencing a genuine burst of
anti-totalitarian fervor, expressed in demands for political
freedom and economic reforms. But there also is a dark history to
eastern Libya, which is the home of the Islamic Libyan Fighting
Group, an anti-Gaddafi organization officially designated by the
State Department as a terrorist organization.
The group was founded by Libyan mujahideen returning in the
mid-1990s from Afghanistan, where they had gone to fight the
Soviets’ Red Army. Building on a radical Islamist credo, they
organized to fight the secular corruption of the Gaddafi regime.
In 1996 they nearly succeeded in assassinating Gaddafi by
attacking his motorcade with either a bomb or a rocket-propelled
grenade which missed its target. The attack led to a severe
crackdown by the regime. Many were imprisoned or disappeared, but
the CIA still regards the group as one of the many franchises of
al Qaeda, including al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which
operates in Yemen, and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which is
active in Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa.
Eastern Libya has been described by U.S. diplomats as a breeding
ground for Islamist extremism. In diplomatic cables released by
Wikileaks, the region’s young men were said to have “nothing to
lose" by resorting to violence. Sermons in the local mosques are
“laced with phraseology urging worshippers to support jihad," one
diplomat reported.
U.S. officials declined to discuss the make-up of the anti-Gaddafi
forces in eastern Libya, and U.S. intelligence agencies declined
to comment publicly. To be sure, extremist elements make up only a
portion of the resistance to Gaddafi and have been present in
every popular uprising in the region stretching from the Iranian
revolution to the Egyptian people’s overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.
But others caution that in the chaotic jockeying for power that
will ensue, whether or not Gaddafi is forced from power, eastern
Libya’s extremist groups will emerge.
“Lingering civil conflict in Libya (certain to happen if Gaddafi
clings to power) would create ample ground for radicalization and
extremist recruitment," Yasser al-Shimy, an Egyptian diplomat who
defected during the last days of the Mubarak regime, wrote
recently. Protracted civil conflict “usually induces
radicalization and chaos. In other words, Libya might turn into a
giant Somalia: a failed state on Egypt's borders with radical
groups taking advantage of the mayhem," al-Shimy wrote in the
blog, Best Defense. Or as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said
Friday about the immediate future of Libya: “We don’t know what
the outcome will be."
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