AFGHANISTAN - The Role Of The Mosque & Radical Wahhabis.

A Beirut-based expert in Muslim religious affairs told APS on April 15 "the biggest challenge" now confronting the US-led powers involved in Iraq was a "secretly-brokered alliance" in the Sunni Triangle between leaders of the mainstream Sunni religious establishment and mosque leaders of the local Wahhabi communities. He said these two religious elements, rather than remnants of Saddam's Baathist regime, were leading the Sunni insurgency against US-led occupation in Iraq.

The alliance, according to this expert, dates back to mid-2002 when it had become obvious that the US was planning an invasion of Iraq. Based on a "strategy devised by (Al-Qaeda leader Osama) Bin Laden, the main mosque imams of the two Sunni communities decided that, rather than rely on Saddam's Baathist regime and its armed forces to defend Iraq, they should execute a four-phase plan to defeat any US-led alliance in the Iraq after they have invaded the country.

1. To prepare their congregations secretly to train in guerrilla warfare.

2. To persuade key commanders of Saddam's forces not to prevent the advance of the US-led forces towards Baghdad and the Tikrit-Mosul axis, i.e., the northern tip of the Sunni Triangle.

3. To begin the insurgency gradually, starting with spontaneous-looking riots, in order for ordinary male Sunnis of the Triangle - including male children to teenagers - to (a) learn, as well as gain experience from, the way US-led forces react to rioters and their military tactics, (b) get field training in both hit-and-run guerrilla warfare and suicide bombings and in sabotage; and then (c) wage an un-ending guerrilla war that should lead in the liberation of the Triangle.

4. To cause civil war, first between the Sunni and Shiite Arab communities, and later between the two groups and the Kurds of the north.

Work on these four sets of objectives was to begin as soon as Saddam's regime has fallen and was to continue for years. The first of the Sunni riots took place at Falluja on April 28, 2003. The ultimate objective, according to the expert, is to liberate the whole of Iraq and to install in it a Sunni Caliphate, i.e., a revival of "the Last Caliphate". He said a definition of this caliphate, however, was "left deliberately vague owing to deep religious and geo-political differences" between the mainstream Sunnis of the triangle in Iraq and the Wahhabis of Bin Laden's Qaeda, the latter being an offshoot of and still inspired by the Jihadists of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism. Iraq's Wahhabis, generally within the Sunni triangle but specifically in the Mosul region, were closer to the mainstream Sunnis. (See survey of Saudi Arabia in FAP 4 of the April 12 Diplomat Package).

For his part, meanwhile, Bin Laden was through agents based in Iraq's Sunni Triangle trying to establish there a Wahhabi version of Hassan-i-Sabbah's order of the Assassins which terrorised the Muslim world from 1090 to 1275 AD (see FAP 5 to be published on May 10). In the early phases, Bin Laden in Iraq was to be represented by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, a Jordanian operative of Al-Qaeda said to be based in or near Falluja, and a few other Wahhabi aides.