February 18, 2014 | Quote
The Tangled Web of Words that ‘al Qaeda’ has Become
Was it al Qaeda “core,” al Qaeda “prime” or al Qaeda “central,” or was it an al Qaeda “affiliate” an al Qaeda “linked” or an al Qaeda “inspired” group? Or was it just al Qaeda?
In the years immediately after 9/11, the term al Qaeda, which means “the base” in Arabic, became synonymous with a secretive global network that supported 19 terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 people by slamming hijacked airplanes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
Today, the distinction is not so black and white.
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“The looseness with which al Qaeda has come to be described is intentional on the part of the Obama administration because what they’re trying portray is that there’s al Qaeda core, and then there’s all these affiliates and the affiliates don’t matter,” said Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal and a scholar focused on al Qaeda at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Administration officials, he said, consistently emphasize distinctions between the original al Qaeda founded by bin Laden and the myriad Salafist groups in North Africa and the Middle East, and often downplay the operational capability of affiliates that have pledged allegiance to the original group.
The goal, Mr. Roggio said, has been to justify Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign claims of victory over al Qaeda, as well as to put rhetorical heft behind the president’s policies of scaling back the global war on terrorism conceived by his predecessor, George W. Bush.
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The notion of flexible cohesion among groups appears to align with bin Laden’s vision of the movement. “We need to look at what al Qaeda actually is, and the best way to do that may be to examine bin Laden’s own statements on the matter,” said Mr. Roggio, who pointed to a 2010 letter in which bin Laden suggested that the whole concept of al Qaeda “central” was a construct of the Western media.