TURKS TURN TO ISLAMIC EXTREMISM

/PanARMENIAN.Net/
29.06.2009 19:17 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Al Qaeda’s reliance on Arabs is altering as recruits
from Turkey and Turkic-speaking areas of Central Asia form a recent
wave of trainees, experts say.

In an audio message from a hide-out in South Asia this month, an Al
Qaeda chief did something new: He sang the praises of an ethnic group
that once barely registered in the network.

"We consider the Muslims in Turkey our brothers," said Mustafa Abu
Yazid, the network’s operations chief. Lauding Turkish suicide bombers
killed in recent attacks near the Afghan-Pakistani border, he declared,
"This is a pride and honor to the nation of Islam in Turkey, and we
ask Allah to accept them amongst the martyrs."

The message is the latest sign of the changing composition of Islamic
extremism, anti-terrorism officials and experts say. The number of
Turks in Al Qaeda, long dominated by Arabs, has increased notably,
officials say. And militant groups dominated by Turks and Central
Asians, many of whom share Turkic culture and speak a Turkic language,
have emerged as allies of and alternatives to Al Qaeda in northwestern
Pakistan.

"We are aware of an increasing number of Turks going to train in
Pakistan," said a senior European anti-terrorism official who asked
to remain anonymous because the subject is sensitive. "This increase
has taken place in the past couple of years."

Turkey’s secular tradition and official monitoring of religious
practice for years helped restrain extremism at home and in the
diaspora. But the newer movements churn out Internet propaganda
in Turkish as well as German, an effort to recruit among a Turkish
immigrant population in Germany that numbers close to 3 million.

"We are seeing almost as much propaganda material from these Turkic
groups as we are from Al Qaeda," said Evan Kohlmann, a U.S. private
consultant who works with anti-terrorism agencies around the
world. "Turks were perceived as moderate with few connections to Al
Qaeda central. Now Germany is dealing with this threat in a community
that could be a sleeping giant."

Germany is especially vulnerable because it has troops in
Afghanistan. The threat could also intensify in other countries with
Turkish populations, such as France, Belgium and the Netherlands,
whose anti-terrorism agencies focus on entrenched extremism in large
North African communities.

And the implications are serious for Turkey, a Muslim ally of the West
and a longtime gateway to battlegrounds in the Middle East and Asia.

As Al Qaeda’s multiethnic ranks burgeoned in the 1990s, Turks trained
in Afghanistan and fought in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Russian
republic of Chechnya. In 2003, Al Qaeda suicide bombers killed 70
people in attacks on synagogues and British targets in Istanbul,
Turkey’s largest city.

Despite Turkey’s population of more than 70 million, however, Turks
were once among the smallest contingents in the network.

"I used to tell the Germans they are very lucky because you
couldn’t find much radicalization among Turks," said Zeyno Baran,
a Turkish-born expert on Islam at the Hudson Institute, a think tank
in Washington. "No one was paying much attention to Turks because
they were considered the safe group."

Although Turkey works closely with Western anti-terrorism forces,
some officials say it devotes more energy to fighting Kurdish
separatists. Baran expressed concern that the moderate Islamist
government in power since 2002 has lowered its guard.

"With the government’s reluctance to talk about the problem of Islamist
ideology, Al Qaeda and groups like that seem to think there’s an
opening in Turkey and with Turks," said Baran, whose forthcoming book
is titled "The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular."

Combat-hardened Central Asians have adopted a global agenda and
tapped a new recruitment pool. Only five years ago, Kohlmann said,
there was little need for Turkic-language translators to monitor
extremist Internet traffic; now they are in demand.

"These groups are trying to establish their pedigree and catering
their propaganda to Turkic speakers who don’t speak Arabic or Pashto,"
the dominant language in the Afghan-Pakistani border region, he
said. "Their media organizations are saying: We are the equivalent
of Al Qaeda for Turks."

The Islamic Jihad Union, an Uzbek-led group, has alternately competed
and worked with Al Qaeda. The organization trained and directed two
Turks and two German converts who have agreed to plead guilty in a
2007 bomb plot against U.S. targets in Germany.

Last year, the group announced that another recruit, a 28-year-old
Turk born in Bavaria, killed two U.S. soldiers in a suicide bombing
in Afghanistan.

During the same period as the attack last year, half a dozen French
and Belgian militants were training in Al Qaeda compounds in the
Waziristan region of Pakistan. The subsequent description by a French
trainee of the nationalities of the fighters he encountered departs
from the commonly held image of an essentially Arab movement.

"It’s possible to join different groups: a big Turkish group, an
Arab group (the smallest of all the groups), a group of Uighurs from
. . . northwest China, the biggest group," the trainee, Walid Othmani,
said during an interrogation by French police after his arrest in
January of this year.

Othmani, who is of Tunisian descent, said he trained with a mixed
group of Arabs and North Africans that was led by an Egyptian and
numbered 300 to 500 fighters.

The Uzbeks, meanwhile, totaled about 3,000, according to Othmani’s
confession. He said a Turkish contingent of 1,000 to 2,000 was
commanded by a Turk.

It’s not clear how precise his estimates are, investigators
say. Some numbers seem accurate, others larger than expected based on
previous intelligence. Overall, his account is regarded as credible,
investigators say.

The mix of nationalities may reflect the future in the making. Yazid,
Al Qaeda’s veteran financial chief, runs the network’s day-to-day
operations while Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri,
devote themselves largely to avoiding capture, officials say. Yazid
used his recent audio message to make an urgent appeal for money.

"And here we, in the battlefield in Afghanistan, are lacking a lot of
money and a weakness in operations because of lack of money, and many
mujahedin are absent from jihad because of lack or absence of money,"
he said, according to a translation by Kohlmann’s organization,
the NEFA Foundation.

As Al Qaeda weathers hard times, the appeal geared to Turkic speakers
suggests that audience is seen as a source of rejuvenation, experts
said.

"They are attempting to broaden their appeal, and it certainly looks
like an instinctual competitive reaction to the sudden flourishing of
Turkic-speaking jihadi groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater,"
Kohlmann said. "It’s an evolving recruitment and financing market
for them, and they don’t want to be left out in the cold," he said,
The Los Angeles Times reported.