The exile of the members of the Fighting Vanguard who had managed to survive the Ba’athist repression of the late 1970s and early 1980s only heightened their radicalism and bitterness at the regime. After a failed attempt at reviving jihad against the Ba’ath, they concentrated all their resources on bringing in the ideological, material and organizational acquis of the Syrian Islamic struggle to the more global jihadist movement—while keeping in sight the changes in the situation at home and preparing to return when the time was right.2 By doing so, they would participate in the rise of a particularly violent form of political Islam most explicitly expressed through the birth of al-Qaeda a decade after the Hama massacre. “There is an organic connection between the Syrian jihad and the birth of al-Qaeda,”3 confirmed a former senior British intelligence official with deep knowledge of such matters. How could that possibly be explained?
Al-Qaeda: the Syrian connection
Although the battle of Hama did not crush the totality of the forces loyal to the Fighting Vanguard and the Brotherhood—many of whom were already in exile in neighbouring Iraq and Jordan—it nonetheless seriously weakened the Islamic movement, leaving it with virtually no base inside Syria. In this desperate situation, the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood decided to join as early as March 1982 the National Alliance for the Liberation of Syria, a Baghdad-based group already comprising dissident Ba’athist figures such as Amin al-Hafiz and other secular left-wing groups opposed to the Syrian regime, most notably Akram al-Hawrani’s Arab Socialist Party.4 The Ikhwan’s move, however, infuriated Adnan Uqlah’s Fighting Vanguard, which found it outrageous that the Muslim Brotherhood teamed up with secular parties not sharing its goal of ultimately establishing an Islamic state in Syria.
Relations between the Fighting Vanguard’s jihadists and the Ikhwan’s political leadership had already been damaged in December 1981—following Adnan Uqlah’s visit to Hama—and had further deteriorated after the massacre of February 1982, blamed on the activism of the Fighting Vanguard. Relations between the two groups were definitely broken off when the Ikhwan entered into a coalition with secular forces in March 1982. Expressing the bitterness which came to characterize the Fighting Vanguard perception of the Ikhwan, Adnan Uqlah was then reported to have declared that “the Muslim Brotherhood and anyone who agrees with or supports the alliance [with secular parties], or anyone who is aware of this alliance yet remains loyal to those leaders and organizations, is a heretic, blasphemer and infidel!”5 Besides denouncing the “religious illegitimacy” of the alliance, the members of the Fighting Vanguard criticized the Brothers for having turned their backs on the “Caliph” and his organization. “The Muslim Brotherhood traded a good son for someone pretending to be friendly,”6 one member commented.
At the time, the Ikhwani leadership was also fiercely criticized by some of its more hardline militants for having abandoned the military struggle against the Ba’ath too soon after the Hama massacre—thereby playing into Hafiz al-Assad’s argument that any attempt to resist his rule would be crushed and silenced for ever. In fact, a source close to the Islamic movement reported that the Syrian Brotherhood’s leadership had called for a nafeer (general mobilization) in mid-February 1982 and had managed, as a result, to gather a few thousand Syrian fighters who had left their jobs in Europe or in the Gulf to join a military training camp in Baghdad, from where they would prepare to join for the last battle in Syria. On 16 February, Said Hawwa, a Syrian Brother from Hama who was the head of the organization’s “military branch”, called on Islamist militants scattered throughout the world to join the Brotherhood and the Fighting Vanguard in Iraq and carry out their religious duty against the regime in Damascus. “The Jihad in confronting the tyrant is now a duty of all those capable of carrying arms,”7 he declared on Baghdad’s Voice of Arab Syria radio channel. But, once thousands of militants were gathered in military camps surrounding Baghdad, the Ikhwani leadership’s call for a military march towards Hama never came. Owing to the sensitive nature of this episode, seemingly haunting the Brotherhood’s leaders until today and still plaguing their relations with other groups inside the Islamic movement, the reason which led the Brotherhood to hold back from sending this fighting force to Hama to help the local population fighting the Ba’ath regime remains obscure at the very least.
“The call for nafeer aimed to prepare for a general confrontation in order to face the consequences of the events at Hama and its developments, if chance permitted,” explained Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni, who held important responsibilities in the Brotherhood’s leadership at the time. “But, in the end, it proved that there would have been no use for such an intervention. As a result, it was cancelled and members of the Brotherhood returned to their places of residence.”8 But did the Brotherhood’s inaction really reflect its leaders’ strong political sense that the battle for Hama would have been a vain gesture which would only have led to more human casualties without a chance of success? Or was the organization’s leadership temporarily paralyzed by the aforementioned tensions between its “Hama clan” and its “Aleppo faction”? Or, after all, were the Syrian Brotherhood’s plans for the attack on Hama suddenly shut down by its Iraqi patron whose leader, Saddam Hussein, had an interest in weakening Syria by supporting the Ikhwan without provoking an all-out war between Damascus and Baghdad? “The thousands of fighters gathered in Baghdad by the Brotherhood’s leadership expected to go and fight for the liberation of Syria,” the source close to the Islamic movement remembered with still apparent bitterness, “but instead the nafeer came to nothing, Hama was destroyed and the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership lost credibility with its own members.”9 At the time, some inside the organization who were disappointed by the leadership’s handling of the situation left the Ikhwan for good and joined the remnants of the Fighting Vanguard.
Despite the heavy losses suffered at Hama in February 1982, Adnan Uqlah had indeed decided, for his part, to not give up the military struggle against the Syrian Ba’ath. From Amman, he had managed to gather several groups of jihadists who had fled Syria and were preparing for the right time to go back inside the country to resort to arms again. A source close to the “Caliph” remembered the tragic way in which Adnan Uqlah’s jihad against the regime ultimately ended. In late 1982, he fell prey to a Syrian mukhabarat sting operation:
An agent posing as someone from Jisr al-Shughur, in Idlib, who was known by his nom de guerre as Abu Abdallah al-Jisri had arrived in Jordan [where Adnan Uqlah resided] claiming to have escaped for his life. The irony was that the Muslim Brotherhood suspected that he was an agent and kept well away from him, but Uqlah did not suspect him. Through an elaborate scheme he was able to lure Uqlah into Syria where he was arrested and believed to have been executed.10
Adnan Uqlah’s disappearance would have disastrous consequences for the jihadist struggle against the Ba’ath. A group gathering fighters scattered between Baghdad and Amman was organized in 1984 as there were still men who wanted to take revenge for the Hama massacre. Their attempt, however, failed utterly as it became clear that, without its “Caliph”, the Fighting Vanguard had lost all sense of direction and zeal to fight the powerful Ba’ath regime. “When [Adnan Uqlah] was captured and imprisoned, the entire organization collapsed and seized to exist,”11 a former member of the Fighting Vanguard confirmed.
As hopes soon withered of raising the banner of jihad again in Syria, the fate of many members of the Fighting Vanguard fighters diverged. After a “special pardon” granted to them by Hafiz al-Assad through the intermediary of Ali Duba, head of Syria’s Military Intelligence, a few leading jihadists surrendered and simply returned home. A former fighter of thus recalled: “When the majority of al-Tali’a’s forces were defeated and after Adnan Uqlah was arrested, few members of the leadership decided on their own to pursue a peace treaty with the Syrian regime; this caused a lot of division and friction among the remaining members—who were still shocked and had not gotten over the arrest of their leader.”12
Other Fighting Vanguard members, for their part, decided to temporarily give up their fight against the Ba’ath and leave for Afghanistan where, in the early 1980s, their skills were prized by the “Arab Afghans” striving to fight the Soviet occupation. Their decision did not mean that they suddenly had a change of heart. Rather, it was the result of a strategic calculation. By continuing their fight in Afghanistan, they would maintain networks and skills which could well be used when the opportunity of turning the jihad against the Syrian regime would rise again. It was precisely this generation of experienced Syrian jihadists that would bring the skills and learned lessons needed to build a more global jihadist movement giving rise, a few years later, to the birth of al-Qaeda.
Ideologically, the Syrian jihadists’ flight to the Afghan theatre was deeply influenced by Abdullah Azzam, often mentioned as the “Godfather” of the jihad in Afghanistan. A Palestinian religious scholar long resident in Jordan, he had been crucial in the 1969 establishment of the “Sheikh’s Camp”, a military training centre aimed at gathering all jihadist fighters wishing to combat Israel without being associated with the “secular” PLO. In other words, the Camp was destined for “those who preferred to see Muhammed instead of Che Guevara as a reference for the Palestinian resistance,”13 a source close to Abdullah Azzam explained. Marwan Hadid and his Syrian followers, it was reported, spent some time training there before bringing their skills back to Syria where their jihadist enterprise was building up. Links between Abdullah Azzam and the Syrian jihadists became even clearer when, in the late 1970s, many of them found refuge at his home in Jordan.14 When the Palestinian sheikh left Jordan in the early 1980s for Peshawar in Pakistan, from where he aimed to organize the resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a few prominent figures in the Fighting Vanguard followed him. Abdullah Azzam is often credited by radical Islamists with having given the Afghan fight against the Soviet occupiers a transnational religious dimension which would fill the ranks of the resistance. He called on his fellow Muslims throughout the world to “join the caravan”15 and wage jihad against the atheist Communist occupiers.
Ideologically, Azzam’s thought became significant as it brought an international taste to jihad—a concept which had been revived only two decades earlier by Sayyid Qutb. Until then, the Islamic struggle against secular Arab governments had been limited to Egypt’s and Syria’s borders but, in the early 1980s, the fight against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan internationalized the notion of jihad. Abdullah Anas, an Algerian jihadist fighter who married Abdullah Azzam’s daughter, claimed that his father-in-law’s greatest merit was to have “brought the flag of jihad universal.”16 He held that Muslims worldwide should unite into a “pioneering vanguard” dedicated to fulfilling the “forgotten obligation” of Islam through waging jihad against the foreign occupation of Muslim lands. This found a practical application when, in the early 1980s, Abdullah Azzam set up the paramilitary structures which enabled thousands of “Arab Afghans” to travel to Pakistan to train and fight the Soviet occupation on the other side of the border. In 1984, he set up the “Services Bureau” (maktab al-khadamat) tasked with organizing the hosting of Arab volunteers into several “guesthouses” (madafat) and their training at the al-sada (“the echo”) paramilitary camp. Barely a year after its creation, the camp was reported to comprise over 400 Arab fighters prepared to cross the border at any time to fulfil their jihad obligation.17
The connection between Azzam’s legacy and the birth of al-Qaeda has long been debated. For Abdullah Anas, there are no generic links between the two: “For him, jihad was a worship and a journey bound by strict rules which he clearly set out, it had nothing to do with al-Qaeda’s killing of civilians […] The place to wage jihad, in Azzam’s view, was on the frontline and in the trenches, not in restaurants or in airports.” Yet Azzam’s “Services Bureau” was to be used as a base for the recruitment of future al-Qaeda leaders who would pride themselves on representing Abdullah Azzam’s legacy when the Palestinian sheikh was later murdered, in November 1989. In addition, there is no dispute about the fact that he did set out the ideological and semantical basis behind the birth of al-Qaeda when he stated that “the vanguard constitutes the solid base [qaeda in Arabic] for the hoped for society […]; we shall continue the jihad no matter how long the way until the last breath or the last beat of pulse.”18
Meanwhile, although the Syrian contingent in Afghanistan remained modest for some time, the situation experienced by Sunni Muslims at the hands of Hafiz al-Assad fuelled the rage of “Arab Afghans” whose desire to wage jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghan lands also turned to fighting regimes associated with the USSR such as the Syrian Ba’ath. In March 1982, the local branch in Peshawar of the Union of Muslim Students, closely associated with Abdullah Azzam, declared the Hama massacre the “tragedy of the century”.19 The Syrians Marwan Hadid and Adnan Uqlah—together with the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb—were the references of the Arab jihadists then arriving en masse in Peshawar. The number of Syrians who actually joined the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan seems to have been relatively small. Abdullah Anas, Azzam’s son-in-law and a prominent commander in the “Arab-Afghan” resistance, recalled that the Syrian contingent was originally small with only three nationals forming part of Abdullah Azzam’s first training camp in 1984. “Abu Talha, Abu Baker and Abu Hussain, all former members of al-Tali’a, joined ‘the caravan’ very early on but, eventually, the overall number of Syrian jihadists must not have exceeded twenty or thirty,”20 he remembered. According to Brynjar Lia, however, “even if they were numerically few, they still played an important role.”21 The military skills of the Syrian jihadists were indeed prized by the Arab resistance in Peshawar. Abdullah Azzam was even reported to have flattered former members of the Fighting Vanguard, such as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, with the ultimate goal of incorporating them into his nascent paramilitary body. “Azzam exhorted al-Suri and his friends to fight for the Afghan cause, flattering them about their possession of significant military skills, which, after all, were in great shortage in the Arab-Afghan movement at that point in time,”22 Lia wrote.
Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, who had joined the Fighting Vanguard in June 1980 and had participated into the few attempts to revive the jihad after Adnan Uqlah’s capture in late 1982, travelled to Afghanistan with some of his friends in the mid-1980s and joined the Arab camps in Peshawar. He later recalled that “we left the Syrian cause because there existed no opportunity to revive it and we turned to the Afghan cause instead […] We could not do anything [else] so we entered the framework of contributing to the international jihad.”23 According to his biographer, this period marked the time when “the global character of the duty of jihad and the global nature of the Muslim causes became apparent to him in earnest.”24 The former jihadist fighter of the Fighting Vanguard was to take part in the creation of al-Qaeda, later becoming one of its most efficient ideological advocates and propagandists.
In 1987, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri had been among the first to leave Abdullah Azzam’s “Services Bureau” to join Usama Bin Laden in the new guesthouse which the Saudi jihadist had just set up with the Wahhabi Afghan leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Upon Abdullah Azzam’s death in November 1989, many of the Palestinian sheikh’s Arab followers joined Bin Laden’s training camp networks. Whereas Azzam had tried to temper his followers’ tendency to “excommunicate” (takfir) non-Islamic Arab regimes, his death led to the growth of Salafi-jihadism. The emergence of this doctrine—whose insistence on implementing the absolute rule of God on earth boiled down to military combat against the non-Islamic Arab regimes and foreign powers such as the United States—would mark the ideological birth of al-Qaeda.
Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s contribution to the advent of al-Qaeda on the global stage was not limited to the military skills he crucially brought to the nascent organization in the training camps of the Afghan-Pakistan border zone. In the early 1990s he was a prominent lecturer on
politics, strategy and guerrilla warfare in the organization’s Pakistani camps, devoting much of his time to intellectual matters. He was particularly interested in further developing a jihadist theory building upon the ideological legacy of Abdullah Azzam and Sayyid Qutb, and drawing crucial lessons from the failed experience of the Syrian jihad. One of the things he had learned from his jihadist experience in Syria was that the forces of the Fighting Vanguard had not prepared well enough for the struggle against the Ba’ath on both strategic and ideological levels. The failure of the campaign against the Ba’ath was also due, in his eyes, to a lack of media efforts and thorough planning as well as a lack of unified ideology binding together the broad Islamic movement. The lessons he drew from his Syrian experience, laid out in a booklet he published in May 1991, would serve as one of the bases upon which al-Qaeda would build its organizational and doctrinal capacity. Abu Mus’ab al-Suri would, however, have to wait fifteen years to be celebrated as a true ideologue when he published a 1,600-page tome entitled “The Global Islamic Resistance Call”. In it, the jihadist ideologue called for a decentralized “global jihad” which would be carried out “without any tanzim [organization]”. His slogan, “nizam la tanzim [system, not organization],”25 was meant to encourage individual jihadist actions within the framework of a broader struggle, and would find its expression after the US intervention in Iraq in March 2003.
In the early 1990s, al-Suri travelled back to Europe where he had already spent some time directly after February 1982, and settled down in Spain for a few years. From there, he remained involved with the al-Qaeda network and convinced a few Syrian veterans of the jihad against Hafiz al-Assad to join his new global struggle. A cable from the US Embassy in Madrid recounted the significance which Syrian expatriates in Spain saw in the emergence of terror cells scattered inside the country and throughout Europe:
Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria Page 18
