February 10, 2014 | Quote
Q&A: Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Digs into Al Qaeda in Tunisia
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has written extensively about Al Qaeda and its affiliates (and misconceptions about the movement) and contributed to our 2013 Blouin Beat primer on Salafi jihadism in Tunisia, where an Al Qaeda-linked group, Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia (AST), has intensified its anti-government crusade following the 2011 ouster of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. Here, Gartenstein-Ross talks about AST’s post-Arab Spring evolution in Tunisia – and the group’s possible future.
Q. In a recent article, you mention Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia (AST) to refute the widely held assumption that some Al Qaeda affiliates have few or zero links to Al Qaeda’s senior leadership (besides the Al Qaeda label). Building on that, how is Al Qaeda’s alleged support of AST emblematic of the group’s policy vis-a-vis to local insurgencies?
My point was slightly different. Many analysts assume that al-Qaeda can be considered, at most, the core leadership and affiliates that have openly declared their allegiance and had it accepted by the senior leadership. But in AST’s case, the group openly subscribed to al-Qaeda’s ideology, but never publicly took an oath of allegiance — and, indeed, AST’s leadership has time and again declared itself to be organizationally independent. But as the Tunisian government has released more evidence about AST, it seems that the group may in fact have been an affiliate that wasn’t publicly recognized — whose allegiance to the organization has been kept largely covert. This suggests that al-Qaeda may in fact be more expansive than many analysts believe.
As to what the senior leadership’s policy is to local insurgencies, its past pattern has been to insert itself into local forces to attempt to co-opt their agendas. As Bruce Hoffman told NPR in August 2012 about al-Qaeda’s role in the Syria conflict, “The key here is that al-Qaeda is not waging these struggles as independent units, rather they are presenting themselves or offering fighters as force multipliers . . . In the past, they have been very effective at co-opting the local agenda of these groups.” Hoffman’s analysis has proved correct, as the Syria-based jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra subsequently declared its allegiance to al-Qaeda, and now senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Khalid al-Suri is playing an important role in Ahrar al-Sham. However, much remains unclear about al-Qaeda’s precise relationship with local insurgencies, and the degree of control that it wields.