BAHRAIN - The Salafi Militancy.

The Salafis are extremely fanatic militants motivated by neo-Islamic belief propagated by Sayyid Qutub, a radical Muslim Brotherhood militant in Egypt executed in 1966 by the then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qutub remains enomously influential in the Muslim world and is largely responsible for the rise of Osama Bin Laden and the latter's Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden's No. 2 in Al-Qaeda, Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri who is an Egyptian medical doctor having emerged from MB ranks, is a staunch Qutubist.

Jihad (Islamic holy war), Qutub taught, could bring about the circumstances that would allow the restoration of the universal Caliphate (hence Nasser's hostility) and the "subordination of the infidels" (non-Muslims) to a new Sunni empire. Salafis, mainly including Wahhabis, learn extremely strict but strangely applied piety and self-sacrifice, including if necessary self-sacrifice for suicidal combat.

These beliefs - effectively more sectarian than religious - make the anti-Western forces in Iraq so difficult for the US to deal with. Placing no value on their own lives, or the lives of those they revile, they are not susceptible to methods of military control used by Westerners, who presume that survival in combat is as important to their enemies as it is to themselves (see news4bbGCCsalafiJan24-05 and news7bbGCCterrorFeb14-05).

Last June Bahraini authorities arrested at least six people suspected of being Salafi militants and planning to carry out terrorist acts in the kingdom. The tough Minister of Interior, Shaikh Rashid Bin Abdullah Al-Khalifa, then said the arrest followed intelligence reports that they were planning "dangerous acts targeting citizens and properties by using dangerous materials".

The minister added, in a statement carried by the Bahrain News Agency: "The public security forces have taken a wide precautionary intelligence action whereby a number of sites have been inspected, followed by the detaining of six people". He said the case was to be referred to the General Prosecutor on completion of the investigation. Earlier, human rights activists and associates of the detained men told Gulf News that the six suspects were arrested late at night on June 21 and early in the morning of June 22.

The detainees were identified as Bassam Bu Khuwa, Bassam Al Ali, Omar Kamal and his brother Yasser, Mohieddine Khan and his brother Ali. Gulf New on June 23 said the six were known to be members of the Salafi movement in Bahrain. Some of them were known to have travelled to Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia in the past. Three of the six suspects - Bu Khuwa, Al Ali and Mohieddine Khan - were arrested in February 2003, after they were suspected of being members of an alleged terror cell which had planned to target Bahraini and foreign interests in the kingdom, according to a police statement. They were released later for lack of evidence. But one member of the alleged group, Jamal Hilal Al Balushi, a soldier in the National Guard, was convicted by a military court for importing and possessing illegal weapons. He was sentenced for three years in prison and dismissed from the service.

Salman Kamaluddine, vice president of the Bahraini Human Rights Society, told Gulf News his group was in contact with officials at the Ministry of Interior in an attempt to get a "specific explanation" for the June 21-22 arrests. Kamaluddine revealed that the home of another Salafi activist, Shaikh Mohammed Saleh, was raided at night on June 22, saying: "His house was searched and he was interrogated for a couple of hours but they didn't arrest him". Saleh had just been released by Saudi authorities after almost a year in detention for suspected links with Saudi extremists. His release came after the intervention of the Bahraini government. Saleh had been taken in after receiving a telephone call from one of 26 men named on a list of Wahhabi militants in Saudi Arabia.

Iraq now is the main hub of the Salafi jihad, be that against US forces or US-backed local authorities in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc. A high level of suicide terrorism indicates there has been no weakening in the morale and motivation of these jihadists, despite the recent arrest of many aides to Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi the Jordanian who heads Al-Qaeda's Iraq branch. Links between Bahrain's Salafis and those active in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are still not clear.

Nor has there been any noticeable improvement in the intelligence-collection capabilities of the US-led coalition in Iraq, despite periodic claims of the capture of terrorists of various Salafi groups. In an insurgency-affected situation, captured suspects are an important source of preventive intelligence; but apparently, despite such captures, the US intelligence continues to grope in the dark about the plans and preparations of the jihadists.

There are two striking aspects of the situation in Iraq. On the one hand, there has been a steady flow of Salafi volunteers from inside Iraq as well as from other countries - mainly Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan and Pakistan - for suicide missions. On the other hand, despite repeated suicide attacks against newly-raised Iraqi police and other security forces as well as Shiites, resulting in a very large number of casualties, there does not seem to be any shortage of volunteers joining the US-backed Iraqi forces either. Even assuming that the majority of the volunteers on the Iraqi government side are Shiite Arabs or Kurdish Sunnis, the fact that they have not let themselves be intimidated by the suicide attacks is a positive factor in an otherwise bleak situation.