The Asia Times excellent correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad, who recently had a face-to-face interview with Ilyas Kashmiri proving that he was still alive after the Americans announced him dead in a drone attack, has another good feature article with a lot of new information about Al Qaeda and its plans to expand in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
Remember when Lashkar e Taiba was primarily a Kashmiri independence group before being transformed into a global jihad group? Al Qaeda wants to effect the same transformation elsewhere with local resistance movements – that is, colonize indigenous movements with local nationalist grievances and transform them into global jihad/global caliphate fighters.
…al-Qaeda sources have told Asia Times Online, al-Qaeda has re-established itself in Somalia and Yemen. From Somalia, the sources say, al-Qaeda plans to further disrupt trade routes around the Horn of Africa, while from Yemen, al-Qaeda aims to make a comeback in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia and beyond. The overall goal is to take control of all Muslim resistance movements in the region, very much on the lines of al-Qaeda’s South Asian pattern.
There’s also new information about the extent to which Ilyas Kashmiri is now an al Qaeda military leader.
In South Asia, al-Qaeda’s chief of the Lashkar al-Zil (Shadow Army), Ilyas Kashmiri, sits in Afghanistan orchestrating targets, including in India. (Lashkar al-Zil is an alliance of several Pakistani, Afghan, Uzbek, Iraqi and al-Qaeda groups that carry out operations under the al-Qaeda banner.)
Kashmiri is also cited as one of two al Qaeda leaders who worked on the ground in Somalia establishing the al Shabaab militia.
