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BROTHERHOOD CRIES
FOUL IN UPCOMING ELECTION
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has accused the country’s ruling party of a
widespread crackdown designed to stifle the Islamist group’s chances in an
upcoming vote for local election council seats. Only 60 of the Brotherhood’s
10,000 potential candidates have avoided incarceration or disqualification from
the poll. The election, originally scheduled for 2006, was delayed two years
after the Brotherhood – officially banned from political participation –
surprised the secular ruling party in 2005 by claiming nearly a fifth of seats
in the 454-member parliament. President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National
Democratic Party appears uneager to replicate the result: according to the
leader of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc, “700 of the group’s potential
candidates have been seized from their homes by police.” (Associated
Press, March 10, 2008)
THE SOFTER SIDE OF ERDOGAN
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has decided to employ a set of carrots to
accompany the flurry of sticks Turkey has deployed against its “Kurdish problem”
in recent months. On the one hand, Turkey recently responded to a wave of
terrorism from the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) – which is now partially
headquartered in northern Iraq – with a limited but aggressive military
incursion into Iraqi “Kurdistan.” On another front, however, Erdogan has laid
out a softer approach – in the form of a $12 billion, five-year aid package – as
a way of addressing tensions in Turkey’s own restive Kurdish regions. The funds
will go toward the construction of various irrigation and hydraulic projects, as
well as road construction and de-mining. Erdogan, seconded by Turkish generals,
admits that purely military responses are no longer sufficient: Kurdish
terrorism “has a socio-economic part, a psychological part, [and] a cultural
part.” (Reuters,
March 12, 2008).
A MONSTER IS FREED IN JORDAN
Abu-Mohammd al-Maqdisi, the notorious spiritual mentor for an entire generation
of jihadists, has been released from a Jordanian prison for “humanitarian and
health purposes.” Arrested in 2005 and accused of plotting to target three air
bases and collaborating with terrorists, Maqdisi spent the past few years
without trial in solitary confinement. The move by Jordanian authorities is an
ominous one; Maqdisi’s influence is said to eclipse even that of bin Laden in
some jihadist circles, and a 2006 study by the West Point Military Academy
fingered the firebrand cleric as the most influential Islamist scholar alive
today. (Reuters,
March 12, 2008)
[Editor's Note: Maqdisi’s notoriety is well-deserved: the tactics of his most
famous pupil, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were so brutal they even shocked al-Qaeda
ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri, who famously pleaded with Zarqawi to tone down the
bloodshed in Iraq. The Jordanians have apparently been seized with the regional
wave of enthusiasm for “re-educating” former jihadists, tempted by Maqdisi’s now
nuanced position on when it is acceptable to kill other Muslims with suicide
bombings. On the effectiveness of this approach, the jury is still out.]
THE PKK MAFIA
Turkey’s military has revealed that its arch-nemesis, the radical Kurdish
Workers Party (PKK), enjoys an annual income of up to $750 million from “drug
dealing, human trafficking, smuggling and donations.” According to Gen. Ergin
Saygun, Deputy Chief of the Turkish General Staff, the PKK, with its “mafia-like
structure,” has morphed from a Kurdish separatist movement into an
“international criminal organization” that kidnaps children, supplies arms to
other terrorist groups and “controls 80 percent of the drug dealing in Europe.”
(Istanbul
Zaman, March 12, 2008)
LIBERAL “APOSTATES” UNDER FIRE IN SAUDI ARABIA
Twenty of Saudi Arabia’s notoriously radical Wahhabi clerics have issued a
public decree supporting a fatwa against two Saudi reformists. Their crime:
suggesting in a news article the Kingdom should reconsider its policy of
labeling adherents of other faiths “unbelievers.” Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al Barrak,
a highly-respected Wahhabi preacher in Saudi Arabia and author of the fatwa,
targeted the two authors for the production of what he called “heretical
articles.” The group of twenty clerics are backing the sheikh’s call for a trial
to determine whether the two are truly apostates in what one Washington-based
Saudi opposition figure calls “the largest show of force in the Wahhabi movement
in a long time.” (Reuters,
March 19, 2008) |
