Al Qaeda's kinder, gentler image makeover
Al Nusra fighters stand ready to fight Syrian regime forces near Aleppo in April. Al Nusra has pledged allegiance to al Qaeda
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad." Jennifer Rowland is a program associate at the New America Foundation.
The video seems
startlingly out of place on a website usually devoted to serious young
men learning to fire machine guns, bloodshed and graphic images of
civilian casualties purportedly caused by U.S. forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Instead, the video,
featured on a site aligned with al Qaeda, shows a Jordanian member of al
Qaeda's affiliate in Syria insisting that his group's poor image is
just a myth propagated by Western media. He says: "The international
channels try to twist the picture and portray the mujahedeen as
bloodthirsty, as distanced from the people -- that they reject the
people and don't love them." As the Jordanian militant speaks, young
Syrian boys crowd around him.
Peter Bergen
Al Qaeda-affiliated
fighters have set up "Advocacy Tents" in Syria's largest city, Aleppo,
where the jihadists can "educate the people on our point of view."
In another apparent
attempt to soften its image, al Qaeda members in Syria held something
akin to a town fair. Another al Qaeda video produced in Syria surfaced
online in July, this one showing an al Qaeda-organized ice cream-eating
contest in Aleppo.
Around the same time, an
Arabic-language news outlet, Aleppo News, published a video of a
tug-of-war between members of the two al Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups
fighting in Syria. In the video, crowds of young boys and older men
cheer on the members of al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda and its regional
franchises understand they need to try to win the "heart and minds" of
the local population; something they have generally failed to do in the
past and something that the leaders of these groups have come to
understand is a major problem.
Syrian photographer documents destruction
In documents recovered in
Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, bin Laden and his
top advisers privately criticized the brutal tactics of al Qaeda in
Iraq, which had provoked a tribal uprising known as "the Sunni
Awakening" that almost destroyed al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate in 2006 and
2007.
Now, al Qaeda in Iraq and
in neighboring Syria are experiencing a revival, a revival at least
somewhat fueled by al Qaeda learning from some of the mistakes it made
during the previous decade in Iraq.
This is significant
because al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, al Nusra, is widely considered to
be the most effective rebel force fighting the Assad regime, and the
group pledged allegiance to the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in April.
But videos of al Qaeda
militants playing tug-of-war or joking with members of the local
community are hardly signs of moderation.
Al Qaeda's Syrian branch
releases lengthy and passionate sermons dedicated to denouncing Shi'a
Muslims as apostates who should be killed.
And although some al
Qaeda fighters in Syria might be engaging the public with ice cream,
games and conversation, their colleagues in neighboring Iraq continue to
launch bloody attacks on civilians.
On Monday, at least 50 people were killed in 15 separate car bomb attacks in Baghdad. Many of those bombings are believed be the work of al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate.
In all likelihood, al
Qaeda and its allied groups are doing too little, too late, in their
quest to win the public's hearts and minds.
The group's senior leaders recognized the dangers of killing too many Muslim
civilians as far back as 2005, when Zawahiri reprimanded the founder of
al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for alienating the Iraqi people
with indiscriminate violence.
And the majority of Muslims around the world reject violence in
the name of Islam, particularly in the form of suicide bombings. This
is unsurprising, given that al Qaeda's violence has primarily claimed
Muslim lives.
It will take a lot more than ice cream socials to undo that damage.
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