Taliban commander vows to avenge Bin Laden's death | World news

 

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  Monday 2 May 2011 12.27 BST

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Osama bin Laden's death 'will never stop the jihad', says the Taliban commander Qudos. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

A Taliban commander in Afghanistan has promised that his fighters would mount attacks to avenge the killing by US forces of Osama bin Laden.

The commander, who gave his name as Qudos and operates in the northern province of Baghlan, said: "The killing of Osama bin Laden will bring no change to jihad. Osama is the leader of al-Qaida and he is a powerful man in jihad. Losing him will be very painful for the mujahideen, but the shahadat [martyrdom] of Osama, will never stop the jihad. We will continue our fight until we liberate our lands from the Kafirs."

He said his fighters planned to launch an operation called Bader "to avenge the killing of Osama" and claimed many other similar operations would be launched.

A Taliban fighter — who had what seemed like a British accent but said he was Afghan — told the Guardian there was still a lot of suspicion among the Taliban about whether the news of Bin Laden's death was true. But he added: "Even if he is dead, I don't think it will make any difference to our fight. He is just one of thousands of fighters, and from a different organisation."

A Yemeni jihadi who goes by the name of Omar claimed the death of Bin Laden would not stop al-Qaida insurgents mounting attacks. "I am not fighting for Bin Laden to stop fighting if he is killed, we are not people who worship figures, he – may God have mercy on him – is a brave man who created and led the jihad but it will not stop here and now look what is happening with all the dictators, they are falling because we have been fighting them for so long and that's thanks to the ways of the Sheikh the shahid [the Sheikh the martyr]. Many brothers will I am sure be planning revenge attacks at the moment."

A war inspired by 'the Sheikh'

From the shrub-covered, bullet-riddled frontlines of Mogadishu, to the concrete slums in the outskirts of Amman and Damascus, from a camp in a pine forest in eastern Afghanistan to the sprawling deserts of southern Yemen, soft-spoken zealots with Kalashnikovs have told me about their aspirations to fight, kill and hopefully die in the war against the infidels and their agents. A holy war inspired by, led by and catalysed by, the Sheikh.

 

The Sheik, Osama bin Laden, created the model for that holy war: he articulated its objectives through his acts of violence, and his life became a manual of the jihadi fighter in the collective imagination of those young men - the learned ascetic and ferocious fighter.

 

His pictures and sermons, radio massages and TV appearances lived, flourished and sprung to life in these alleyways and faraway mountains, nourished and nurtured by poverty, perceived injustice and decades of oppressive rule.

 

Yet none of those men have ever met the Sheikh, none of them had any direct contact with him; only one had seen him twice when he was a teenager. They didn't receive their orders from the Sheikh, they didn't communicate with him, and they did not consult him before they went out to fight.

 

Bin Laden, the creator of modern-day terrorism and founder of al-Qaida, had become more of a spiritual father than field commander.

 

The dream of all those so-called jihadis and their local establishments was to be anointed by the father figure as a forbearer of his ideology, to be recognised as a "franchise" of the mother organisation to gain the respect and support, and a lot of money from wealthy Arabs, that would allow them to fight their own local wars and contribute to the jihad.

 

Many local franchises have sprung up: Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Somalia and others. Bombs are manufactured locally, knowledge is shared on internet forums, fighters don't need to head all the way to Pakistan or Afghanistan to get training; they can do that in their own home towns or villages in Britain, the Caucasus, Mogadishu, Iraq, Mali and Yemen. The effect is that al-Qaida has succeeded in separating ideology from leadership.

 

For many years, the Sheikh had been isolated, his organisation disrupted not only by US kill teams and lethal drone attacks but also by general Muslim apathy and outright hostility to the organisation. For most of the victims are Muslim: not only Shia Muslims and Sunni moderates and seculars, but also bystanders who have committed the deadly sin of buying vegetables while one of those holy warriors decides to fight his battle and start his ascendance to the hereafter.

 

The killing of Bin Laden will give a new impetus to the jihadi movement that has suffered in the past few months as the aspirations of these young men have been fulfilled, not by the jihad, but by the street demonstrations led by unarmed men and women secularists and religious calling for social justice.

 

Local jihadi wars will continue, al-Qaida in Yemen will continue to attempt to bomb targets in the west, and the Taliban will not stop fighting in Afghanistan.