October 16, 2014 | Quote
Who Benefits From U.S. War on Islamic State? Maybe Al Qaida
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“Their preferred outcome is that it chews up the leadership (of the Islamic State), leaves the foot soldiers and they can get the foot soldiers to come back,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who researches al Qaida as a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Gartenstein-Ross warned in a Foreign Policy article last month that the U.S.-led bombing campaign risks giving al Qaida “a new lease on life.”
Counterterrorism specialists note that al Qaida leader Ayman al Zawahiri, the Egyptian-born doctor who succeeded Osama bin Laden, has issued no public remarks on the U.S.-led campaign to dismantle the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
“He’s been neutral and above the fray,” Gartenstein-Ross said.
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Gartenstein-Ross and other extremist watchers say it’s still too early to gauge the overall impact of the Islamic State on militant Islamists across the Muslim world. The picture is clouded by a jumble of contradictory statements and postings on social media, which, analysts complained, are sometimes translated hastily and without the nuance that better explains a group’s position.
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And for all the recent tumult in Yemen, where an Iranian-aligned insurgent group now controls the capital, al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s command structure remains intact, with only a couple of senior operatives drifting to the Islamic State, Gartenstein-Ross said. The commander of Nigeria’s Boko Haram extremist group seems to be hedging, praising the leaders of both al Qaida and the Islamic State in a recent address. And rumors that the Pakistani Taliban had joined the Islamic State turned out to be greatly exaggerated; analysts say the group’s Islamic State crossovers are few.
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