Will American Taxpayers Arm Libyan Islamists?
From CAN:
Sky News reports that the U.S. is considering selling arms to rebels in Libya fighting the anti-American dictatorship of Muammar Gadhafi, but it has been revealed that at least one rebel commander has sympathy for Al-Qaeda and his fighters include jihadists who fought in Iraq. The U.S. began participating in a military intervention in Libya on March 19 to stop the government from massacring the rebels and killing civilians.
Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, a rebel commander, told an Italian newspaper that around 25 of his fighters previously fought Coalition forces in Iraq, reports The Telegraph. He also said he was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 after fighting U.S. forces in Afghanistan as a member of the Libyan Fighting Group, which is tied to Al-Qaeda.
“…members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader,” al-Hasidi said.
The revelation comes as the Los Angeles Times reports that U.S. intelligence has concluded that there is no organized presence of Al-Qaeda or other Islamic extremists among the Libyan rebels.
“We’re keeping an eye out for extremist activity in Libya, but we haven’t seen much, if any, to date,” a counter-terrorism official told the newspaper.
CNN.com also reported that the Muslim Brotherhood is seeking to become active in Libya in an article titled, “Energized Muslim Brotherhood in Libya Eyes a Prize.” Brotherhood officials have met with the Libyan rebels and are returning to the country, the news network said, though “there is little or no overt presence” because of the dictator’s suppression of his opponents.
Ryan Mauro, the Christian Action Network’s National Security Advisor, says that the rebels should be armed because “It’s better to help them remove Gadhafi from power than stick around protecting the rebels for a prolonged period of time like happened in Iraq after the Gulf War,” Mauro said.
He added that he believes the rebels are mostly secular and cannot be characterized as Islamists as a whole.
“We have to make clear to the rebels that our support will only come if weapons are not given to radical Islamic militants and an accounting process must be in place to verify this.”
Caratacus10ad Says:
I would have thought the fact that Gadaffi has had an AQ (LIFG) presence within the very country (Libya) which until recently he (Gadaffi and henchmen) had full and brutal control of, would point towards the factual possibility that there would/could have been either deals cut or naked collaborations between those Islamic Jihadi’s present within the East and the Gadaffi’s regime…
The multitude of hard-core mercenary Jihadi’s surely must have often provided a fair degree of plausible denial-ability, for those regimes harbouring them, and to whom would want to appear of a non hard-core nature, but which have interests in meddling within other nations, without getting directly involved? For when and if (!) the mercenary Islamists are detained, it appears to be a truism that rather than facing imprisonment, that they are in-fact held within little more than a form of regime barracks, for the purposes of unleashing by those regimes holding them, in order to be directed to carry out regime foreign and domestic policy…
Posted on March 30th, 2011 at 3:44 pm