Eli Lake:
Leaders from at least three of al Qaeda’s most virulent affiliates are now in Libya. What are they planning there?
In the nearly 20 months since the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks, al Qaeda operatives and allied terrorists have flocked to Libya, making the fragile North African country a hub for those seeking to wage jihad from north Africa, current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials tell The Daily Beast.
Not only does al Qaeda host Ansar al-Sharia, one of the militias responsible for the Benghazi attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But U.S. intelligence now assesses that leaders from at least three regional al Qaeda affiliates—al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and members of the organization of Al-Mulathameen Brigade loyal to Algerian terrorist, Mokhtar BelMokhtar—have all established havens in the lawless regions of Libya outside the control of the central government.
One U.S. military contractor working on counter-terrorism in Africa summed up the situation in Libya today as simply, “Scumbag Woodstock.” The country has attracted that star-studded roster of notorious terrorists and fanatics seeking to wage war on the West.
An American counter-terrorism official used a different metaphor to describe the situation. “Libya today plays host to members and associates of several AQ-allied groups, in some ways becoming a jihadist melting pot,” this official told The Daily Beast. “These groups haven’t united under the same banner, but the ad hoc links and intermittent cooperation among them are worrisome, especially as some of these groups have made no secret of their desire to conduct attacks beyond Libya’s borders.”
The collapse of security in Libya comes as the House of Representatives forms a special committee to investigate the 9/11 anniversary attacks in Benghazi. Those strikes, according to an investigation from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, were the work of individuals with clear links to al Qaeda (PDF). The report says that already in the summer before the Benghazi attacks the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had produced reports on how al Qaeda affiliates were establishing havens in Libya.
Libya does not pose as immediate a problem for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts as the threat posed from Syria’s civil war, where Islamic extremists are attracting recruits from around the globe. FBI Director James Comey told The Washington Post on Friday that he sees the threat of Westerners joining al Qaeda today in Syria coming home to wage attacks as a threat comparable to when jihadists joined the fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, setting the stage for 9/11.
But Libya is nonetheless intricately involved in funneling fighters into Syria, and its lawless regions provide an ideal haven for al Qaeda affiliates and fellow travelers.
“Al Qaeda and a number of other Salafi jihadist groups are increasingly using Libya as a sanctuary for training, cooperation, propaganda, fundraising and other activities,” said Seth Jones, the associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation. “To be blunt, they are taking advantage of a government that has very limited control of areas of some major cities.”
Gaddafi kept all these monsters suppressed. This disaster is another Obama achievement.
If you search for homegrown terrorist and training for jihad you mostly find out that European countries are catching their converts and grown children of immigrants going to or coming back from training on foreign soil.
We see little of that from the US Muslims.
In the press.
I hope the alphabet agencies are aware of each and every American based Muslim who has trained for jihad even if we are not seeing many arrests for it.
Follow these people to their domestic cells and bust the entire bunch of them!
Further proof Al Qaeda has been decimated and is on the path to defeat.
Ins’t the phrase “Scumbag Woodstock” redundant?