Last week, sixteen Egyptian soldiers were killed at a Rafah border checkpoint in a cowardly attack by militants reportedly belonging to Geishul-e-Islam and Al-Jihad (holy war) donning the mantle of al-Qaeda. The treacherous attack occurred after Egypt elected a new president loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian army received firm instructions from President Morsi and is now launching an all-out counterattack on these terrorists, who are reportedly hiding in the mountainous Sinai.
Concurrently, the Yemeni army has been tasked to 'fight' militant groups after a series of attacks on civilians and army garrisons. In Yemen al-Qaeda unleashed a war when the country's uprising against president Ali Abdulla Saleh subsided and a new president was elected. Hundreds of Yemeni officers and soldiers were killed when confronting al-Qaeda.
The Syrian army, in the meantime, is allegedly reversing the formula by seeking the help of al-Qaeda in its deadly attacks on insurgents calling themselves 'demonstrators opposing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad'. Libya is orchestrating its efforts with Egypt to protect its borders and thwart al-Qaeda's attempts to break into late Muammar Gaddafi's weapon stores and smuggle the contents to militants in the Sinai and to Hamas-led radical extremists in Gaza.
Nonetheless, Arab nations far and wide see Israel as their number one enemy. Al-Qaeda and its sympathisers (whether Hamas or Hizbolla in Lebanon) would not dare kill Israeli soldiers, otherwise Israel's response would be more lethal than 2006 in Lebanon and 2008 in Gaza. The weather vane of the global anti-terror war is obviously pointing in a new direction.
The US-led war on al-Qaeda appears to have been shifted from central Asia to the Arab countries that are the global heartland of Islam, desperately trying to extinguish the raging flames of the so-called Arab Spring. Paradoxically, the rise of Islamists to power in several Arab countries has not diminished the potential of al-Qaeda's new regional threat.
It is all the more curious that al-Qaeda's growing threat to Arab countries coincides with US and British troops pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Different militant groups loyal to this terrorist organisation and tagged as Geishul-Islam (Army of Islam, Ansarul-e-Islam (Supporters of Islam), Geish Mohamed (Army of Prophet Mohamed) are boldly emerging from their hiding places. It could be that Osama bin Laden's successors were provoked into action when Islamists in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia didn't immediately fulfil the old dream of establishing a global Muslim Caliphate in northern Africa before extending it northward beyond the Mediterranean and southward into Africa and reviving Muslim caliphs' triumphant past. Al-Qaeda's guerrilla war tactics against US and British troops in Afghanistan are now the same in the Arab region. Armies in Syria, Egypt, Libya and Yemen are forced to drag their feet in a real war to 'thwart' the terrorist organisation's regional threat.
This should persuade us to debate suggestions that al-Qaeda's attacks on Arab armies are masterminded and led by the organisation's leaders, who moved their headquarters from Afghanistan to the new battlefield. al-Qaeda fighters, who are deceptively donning the mantle of Muslim fundamentalism, have established a stronghold in the south of Yemen, in Egypt's Sinai, in Libya's towns bordering poor African countries, in Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Tunisia. Algeria closely monitors the still smouldering fire of terror, which hit the nation in the late 1980s and 1990s. Algeria is the neighbour of Mali, where highly equipped training camps sponsored by al-Qaeda are springing up in the north.
The representatives of African countries flocked to Addis Ababa last month to take part in the 19th session of the African Union summit. They voiced their deep concern that al-Qaeda had gained a strong foothold in African countries hit by abject poverty such as Mali, Chad and Niger. Countries like Nigeria are mostly Muslim-dominated and have a populous Christian community. They are also not immune to the terrorist organisation's new threat.
