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Chapter 1

Introduction: Changing Sides in the War on Terror

Once upon a time, there was a “war on terror.” The term was highly contested, because it focused on a tactic and left unspecified the practitioners of that tactic with whom the United States and some relatively few allies were at war for the greater part of the first decade of the 21st century. The war on terror was in fact, more precisely, a war on al-Qaeda and affiliated Islamic terror groups, which share al-Qaeda’s ideology and methods. But for all its problems, at least the term had the advantage of making clear that the US and its allies abhorred the tactic in question.

They do not anymore. A remarkable development took place in the midst of the 2011 conflict in Libya: the United States and its allies changed sides in the war on terror. From virtually the very start of the unrest in Libya in mid-February 2011, there were troubling signs that the insurgents, whom the Western media insisted on presenting as peaceful “protestors,” were in fact violent Islamic extremists whose methods bore a clear resemblance to those of al-Qaeda. Indeed, the methods of the rebels—including beheadings and summary group executions by shots to the back of the head—clearly resembled not merely those of al-Qaeda, but of that branch of al-Qaeda that was most notorious for its brutality: namely, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The resemblance, as it turns out, was not accidental. Famous for its religious fanaticism, the eastern Libyan heartland of the Libyan rebellion was in fact well-known in counter-terrorism circles as a hotbed of support for al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq. Within weeks of the outbreak of the rebellion, moreover, a leading rebel commander—probably the leading rebel commander of the first phase of the rebellion—was openly admitting his al-Qaeda ties to European journalists and casually noting that his troops included veterans of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi jihad. This is to say that by mid-March 2011 some of the same forces that only a few years earlier were executing and mutilating American servicemen and civilians in Iraq were now reaping the benefit of crushing American air support in their jihad against Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya.

Like all the signs of the rebels’ radical Islamic inspiration and terrorist methods, such admissions were simply ignored by the traditional American media. Indeed, as will be seen in chapter 6, the very same rebel commander could even appear in the pages of America’s supposed newspaper of record as a picture of Islamic moderation.

Some five months later, massive NATO bombing of Tripoli would bring about the collapse of the ancien régime, allowing the rebels to walk in and seize control of the Libyan capital. It was only then that the traditional news media could no longer shield their eyes—and those of their publics—from the leading role being played by Islamic radicals in the anti-Qaddafi rebellion. The new military governor of rebel-controlled Tripoli was, after all, none other than the historical leader of Libya’s own al-Qaeda affiliate, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). To sweeten the pill, the news media engaged in a furious process of historical revisionism: virtually overnight they transformed the hitherto notorious Libyan terror group into a patriotic organization that was merely dedicated—just like America and its allies—to freeing Libya from tyranny.

Two months after that, NATO airstrikes would drive Muammar al-Qaddafi into the hands of the rebel forces that abused and murdered him outside of Sirte. Thereupon, the internationally-recognized political chief of the rebellion, National Transitional Council Chair Mustapha Abdul Jalil, announced the official “liberation” of Libya—and, at the same time, the immediate abrogation of all Libyan laws that conflict with the sharia. Merely days after that, the black flag of al-Qaeda was spotted flying over the courthouse in Benghazi, the original headquarters and symbolic cradle of the Libyan rebellion.

The flag-sighting was largely dismissed in the West as an aberration. But, ever so briefly, some Western commentators now ventured to express hesitant concerns about the role that Islamic extremism might play in post-Qaddafi Libya. The prospect of fundamentalists gaining the upper-hand was depicted as an unintended consequence of a democratic uprising—a matter of Islamists rushing to fill the “vacuum” left by the toppling of the tyrant.

But there was no vacuum to be filled. The streets of Benghazi were in fact awash with al-Qaeda flags in the days following Libya’s “liberation.” As will be seen in chapter 3, they have been raised in Benghazi and elsewhere in post-Qaddafi Libya by the very forces with which NATO partnered to bring about the demise of Qaddafi and his Arab Socialist Jamahiriya or “state of the masses.”

There is nothing surprising about this. Pace the mythology created by Western governments and Western media, the Libyan uprising was not the product of the spontaneous democratic aspirations of the Libyan people. It was the product rather of the aspirations of al-Qaeda-linked Islamic extremists who had long been plotting to overturn Qaddafi’s “apostate” regime by using precisely the terrorist methods that would be brought to bear against it in February 2011.

The existence and contours of this plot will be documented in chapter 9. As will likewise be shown, moreover, the Libyan Islamists’ longstanding obsession with their “near enemy,” Muammar al-Qaddafi, by no means prevented them not only from fighting against America and its allies on the frontlines of jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from contributing to al-Qaeda’s grand strategy of striking America and its allies at home in the West.

The Jihadist Plot tells the real story of the Libyan rebellion and the Islamic extremists who made it: men like Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, the most prominent commander of the rebellion on the Eastern front; Abdul-Hakim Belhadj, the supreme military commander of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group; Abu al-Munthir al-Saadi, the LIFG’s chief religious authority and strategist; and the hitherto little known Wisam bin Hamid, the youthful rebel field commander who directed the siege of Sirte from the ground while NATO forces pounded Qaddafi’s last refuge from the air.

A Note on Sources and Translations

While it was still being seriously pursued, the war on terror left behind traces in the form of court records from terror trials in the United States and allied countries, published United Nations and US government decisions proscribing terror suspects, and classified State Department and Department of Defense reports, many of which have since been leaked. The evidence assembled here is drawn largely from such residual traces of the war on terror, crucially including Spanish, Italian and British court records and police reports.

The evidence also crucially includes video and text from local pro-rebellion Libyan sources and Islamist websites. These Arabic sources provide the most striking confirmation of the religious fervor that was the driving force of the rebellion. They have hitherto gone virtually entirely ignored in the West. All links to the video evidence cited here were working at the time the book went to press. There is, of course, no guarantee that the videos will continue to be available online at the given URLs or at all. The author is in possession of copies of the clips in question.

All translations from French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch are by the author. Where another source is not given, translations from Arabic are by Maureen Millington-Brodie. Ms. Millington-Brodie’s contributions are especially important in chapters 3 and 6.