3. HOW TO TURN A LOCAL WAR INTO PART OF THE INTERNATIONAL JIHAD By Patrick Armstrong (Ottawa)
Chechens have been fighting Russians for their independence for a long time. In 1996 they won that independence, de facto if not de jure. But the present war is something else. As one Chechen mujahaddin put it on their website: "In the first war, we fought under the banner of 'freedom or death.' In this war we are fighting under the banner of 'Islam.'" The "freedom" war has been turned into an "Islamic" war.
Chechnya, in fact, may have been the first war to be turned into part of the Wahhabi Islamist jihad that we see in Afghanistan, Central Asia and Kashmir. The way in which this transformation was effected is worth describing because it reveals the "playbook" of the international jihadists. An understanding of how the Arab Khattab took over the war in Chechnya shows that the "root causes argument" is not sufficient to explain jihadism. The miserable conditions of life in Chechnya (and Afghanistan and Kashmir) provided the soil in which the plant of jihadism took root, but Khattab brought the seed from elsewhere.
Khattab arrived in Chechnya during the first war. Influenced by Osama bin Laden among others, and adhering to the extremist version of Wahhabism that calls for everlasting war against "false Islam" and the "enemies of Islam," he had fought in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and moved to Chechnya in 1995. He soon made his mark as a fighter by ambushing a Russian column in October. He set up a number of training camps from which he launched an attack on the Russian brigade in Dagestan in December 1997. He attracted to his cause the Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev, whom he may have met when Basayev was in Afghanistan at one of bin Laden's training camps.
To Basayev and Khattab independence was not the end of the struggle: as Basayev has said: "Jihad will continue until Muslims liberate their land and re-establish the Khilafah (Caliphate Islamic state)" -- something that goes far beyond Chechnya or the Caucasus. They tried to overthrow President Maskhadov's government by taking over the city of Gudermes in July 1998 but the government forces drove them out. Maskhadov was emboldened to ban Wahhabism and expel Khattab but backed off after several assassination attempts. Khattab's fighters then attacked Dagestan in August 1999 and this led to the present war.
It appears that Chechen independence fighters did most of the fighting until their defeat in Grozny in January 2000. The foreign mujahaddin were assigned the job of securing the mountains for fallback positions, but many Chechen fighters bitterly complain that once they had fought their way out of the nightmare of Grozny (taking tremendous casualties) the "Arabs" betrayed them: they had prepared nothing for them and given them no equipment. It appears that since then most of the fighting has been done by the Khattab/Basayev Wahhabi jihadists while many of the principal Chechen fighters, such as Ruslan Gilayev, have been sitting out the war.
Whether it is bin Laden in Afghanistan, Namangani in Central Asia or Khattab in Chechnya, there are four ways in which local wars are transformed into a component of the international jihad that "will continue until Moslems liberate their land and re-establish the Khilafah." The foreign jihadists provide money, leadership, and an ideology that both justifies "martyrdom" and promises a better life.
MONEY. The Chechens financed the 1994-96 war with the proceeds of rackets and illicit oil wells. But Khattab has access to a reliable supply of millions of dollars from donors. In a place as destitute as Chechnya, money has been an indispensable weapon in his arsenal. Attracting the money requires continual propaganda: the making and distribution of videos (Khattab's first ambush was filmed and used to be available on the Internet) is an important element of the money-raising effort.
LEADERSHIP. Khattab is an exceptionally charismatic fighter who leads from the front. He has been fighting the international jihad for ten years and he is a good organiser as well. Basayev, another leader from the front, is one of the great heroes of the first war.
RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY. We see in Khattab's rhetoric exactly the same restriction of the meaning of "jihad" to "war" and death as the gateway to paradise that bin Laden has made us familiar with. This is something new in Chechnya: in the first war, the Chechens fought bravely but they weren't suicide fighters. The video now being publicized by "Newsday" shows one of these suicide attacks.
CIVIL IDEOLOGY. The jihadists in Chechnya promise that after victory they know exactly what sort of state to erect. They present a clear objective and methodology of life and religion that gives purpose and justification to desperate people. In areas where everything has broken down, the confident Wahhabi version of the rule of Islamic law is very attractive.
The war in Chechnya is a case study of the way in which the Wahhabi jihadist network infiltrates an existing struggle and twists it to its purpose using the four pillars of money, leadership and religious and civil ideology. Similar techniques have been used by bin Laden in Afghanistan and Central Asia. The jihadists are quite uninterested in local aims, subordinating everything to their eternal war -- a war that they believe is against the rest of the world.
If this analysis is accurate, what can we conclude? It shows the absolute importance of money: even the most charismatic leader with the most appealing ideology needs money to hire fighters and to acquire the publicity to attract more money. Cutting off the flow of money is therefore one of the most effective means of weakening the jihadists.
The analysis also suggests that ideology is very important. In the discussion of "root causes," it is easy to forget that there must be an organizing idea to direct all the anger and desperation. Peasants overwhelmed by misery can produce a desperate jacquerie but not an organized campaign. Finally, this analysis suggests that the jihadists can only succeed in a condition of war because only under wartime conditions can their provision of money, leadership, and ideology become so necessary and attractive that they take over the whole struggle.
This analysis therefore suggests that one of the most important weapons in the present "war on terrorism" is blocking the money flows, that ideology cannot be ignored, and that the jihadists need a pre-existing war.