Although President Trump claimed in his address to the
American public after the killing of al-Baghdadi that he was a “bigger
terrorist” than Osama bin Laden, fact of the matter is the Islamic State’s
self-styled caliph was simply a nobody compared to Bin Laden.
As a Saudi citizen and belonging to the powerful
Saudi-Yemeni clan of Bin Ladens, which has business interests all over the
Middle East, Osama bin Laden was almost a royalty. He had so much clout even in
the governments of Middle Eastern countries that he was treated like a “royal
guest” by Pakistan’s military at the behest of the Saudi royal family for five
years from 2006 right up to his death in 2011.
By comparison, even though he assumed the nom de guerre Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi, in fact Ibrahim Awad was simply a rural cleric in a mosque in
Iraq’s Samarra before he assumed the title of the caliph of the Islamic State. As
far as the impact of al-Baghdadi’s death is concerned, the real strength of the
Islamic State lies in its professionally organized and decentralized Baathist
command structure and superior weaponry provided to Syrian militants by the
Western powers and the Gulf states during Syria’s proxy war.
Therefore, as far as the Islamic State militancy in Syria
and Iraq is concerned, al-Baghdadi’s death will have no effect because he was simply
a figurehead, though the Islamic State affiliates in the Middle East, North
Africa and Af-Pak regions might be tempted to repudiate their nominal
allegiance to the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State.
By contrast, the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011 had such
an impact on the global terrorist movement that his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri,
an Egyptian cleric lacking the resources, charisma and lineage of his
predecessor, couldn’t even mediate a leadership dispute between al-Baghdadi and
al-Nusra Front’s leader al-Jolani.
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the chief of al-Nusra Front, emerged
as one of the most influential militant leaders during the eight-year proxy war
in Syria. In fact, since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to
April 2013, the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front were a single organization that
chose the banner of al-Nusra Front.
Although the current al-Nusra Front has been led by Abu
Mohammad al-Jolani, he was appointed
[1] as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of
Islamic State, in January 2012. Thus, al-Jolani’s Nusra Front is only a
splinter group of the Islamic State, which split from its parent organization
in April 2013 over a leadership dispute between the two organizations.
In August 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was based in Iraq,
began sending Syrian and Iraqi jihadists experienced in guerrilla warfare
across the border into Syria to establish an organization inside the country.
Led by a Syrian known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the group began to recruit
fighters and establish cells throughout the country. On 23 January 2012, the
group announced its formation as Jabhat al-Nusra.
In April 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released an audio
statement in which he announced that al-Nusra Front had been established,
financed and supported by the Islamic State of Iraq. Al-Baghdadi declared that
the two groups were merging under the name the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
(ISIS). The leader of al-Nusra Front, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, issued a
statement denying the merger and complaining that neither he nor anyone else in
al-Nusra's leadership had been consulted about it.
Al-Qaeda Central’s leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, tried to
mediate the dispute between al-Baghdadi and al-Jolani but eventually, in
October 2013, he endorsed al-Nusra Front as the official franchise of al-Qaeda
Central in Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, however, defied the nominal authority
of al-Qaeda Central and declared himself as the caliph of the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria.
Keeping this background in mind, it becomes abundantly clear
that a single militant organization operated in Syria and Iraq under the
leadership of al-Baghdadi until April 2013, which chose the banner of al-Nusra
Front, and that the current emir of the subsequent breakaway faction of
al-Nusra Front, al-Jolani, was actually al-Baghdadi’s deputy in Syria.
Thus, the Islamic State operated in Syria since August 2011
under the designation of al-Nusra Front and it subsequently changed its name to
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April 2013, after which it
overran Raqqa and parts of Deir al-Zor in the summer of 2013. And in January
2014, it overran Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in Iraq and reached the zenith of
its power when it captured Mosul in June 2014.
Excluding al-Baghdadi and a handful of his hardline Islamist
aides, the rest of Islamic State’s top leadership was comprised of Saddam-era
military and intelligence officials. According to a Washington
Post report [2], hundreds of ex-Baathists constituted the top and mid-tier
command structure of the Islamic State who planned all the operations and
directed its military strategy.
Regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011,
despite a few minor discrepancies, Seymour Hersh has published the most
credible account to-date of the execution of Bin Laden in his book and article
titled: The
Killing of Osama Bin Laden [3], which was published in the London Review of
Books in May 2015.
According to Hersh, the initial, tentative plan of the Obama
administration regarding the disclosure of the execution of Bin Laden to the
press was that he had been killed in a drone strike in the Hindu Kush Mountains
on the Afghan side of the border. But the operation didn’t go as planned
because a Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and
the whole town now knew that an operation is underway and several social media
users based in Abbottabad live-tweeted the whole incident on Twitter.
Therefore, the initial plan was abandoned and the Obama administration
had to go public within hours of the operation with a hurriedly cooked-up
story. This fact explains so many contradictions and discrepancies in the
official account of the story, the biggest being that the United States Navy
Seals conducted a raid deep inside Pakistan’s territory on a garrison town
without the permission of Pakistani authorities.
According to a May 2015 AFP
report [4], Pakistan’s military sources had confirmed Hersh’s account that
there was a Pakistani defector who had met several times with Jonathan Bank,
the CIA’s then-station chief in Islamabad, as a consequence of which Pakistan’s
intelligence disclosed Bank’s name to local newspapers and he had to leave
Pakistan in a hurry in December 2010 because his cover was blown.
According to the inside sources of Pakistan’s military,
after the 9/11 terror attack, the Saudi royal family had asked Pakistan’s
military authorities as a favor to keep Bin Laden under protective custody,
because he was a scion of a powerful Saudi-Yemeni Bin Laden family and it was
simply inconceivable for the Saudis to hand him over to the US. That’s why he
was found hiding in a spacious compound right next to Pakistan Military Academy
in Abbottabad.
But once the Pakistani walk-in colonel, as stated in Seymour
Hersh’s book and corroborated by the aforementioned AFP report, told then-CIA
station chief in Islamabad, Jonathan Bank, that a high-value al-Qaeda leader
had been hiding in a safe house in Abbottabad under the protective custody of
Pakistan’s military intelligence, and after that when the CIA obtained further
proof in the form of Bin Laden’s DNA through the fake vaccination program
conducted by Dr. Shakil Afridi, then it was no longer possible for Pakistan’s
military authorities to deny the whereabouts of Bin Laden.
In his book, Seymour Hersh has already postulated various
theories that why it was not possible for Pakistan’s military authorities to
simply hand Bin Laden over to the US, one being that the Americans wanted to
catch Bin Laden themselves in order to gain maximum political mileage for
then-President Obama’s presidential campaign slated for November 2012.
Here, let me only add that in May 2011, Pakistan had a pro-American
People’s Party government in power. And since Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, Pakistan’s
military’s then army chief, and the former head of Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI), Shuja Pasha, were complicit in harboring Bin Laden, thus it cannot be
ruled out that Pakistan’s military authorities might still had strong
objections to the US Navy Seals conducting a raid deep inside Pakistan’s
territory on a garrison town.
But Pakistan’s civilian administration under then-President
Asif Ali Zardari persuaded the military authorities to order the Pakistan Air
Force and air defense systems to stand down during the operation. Pakistan’s
then-ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani’s role in this saga ruffled the
feathers of Pakistan’s military’s top brass to the extent that Husain Haqqani
was later implicated in a criminal case regarding his memo to Admiral Mike
Mullen and eventually Ambassador Haqqani had to resign in November 2011, just
six months after the Operation Neptune Spear.
Finally, although Seymour Hersh claimed in his account of
the story that Pakistan’s military authorities were also on board months before
the operation, let me clarify, however, that according to the inside sources of
Pakistan’s military, only Pakistan’s civilian administration under the pro-American
People’s Party government was on board, and military authorities, who were
instrumental in harboring Bin Laden and his family for five years, were
intimated only at the eleventh hour in order to preempt the likelihood of Bin
Laden’s “escape” from the custody of his facilitators in Pakistan’s military
intelligence apparatus.
Footnotes:
[1] Al-Jolani was appointed as the emir of al-Nusra Front by
al-Baghdadi:
[2] Islamic State’s top command dominated by ex-officers in
Saddam’s army:
[3] Seymour Hersh: The Killing of Osama bin Laden:
[4] Pakistan military officials admit defector's key role in
Bin Laden operation:
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