Who is grinning "Bin Laden's skull"?
A decade since the attacks in the US 11 September 2001, a good reason to think about the lessons and consequences of those events for America itself, and for the whole world. The “war on terrorism” declared by George W. Bush in recent years has not only not ended, but has acquired a qualitatively new character. If the military operation against the Taliban in Afghanistan, launched by the US and NATO in 2001, could still be considered a response to the forces of terrorism, then the subsequent actions of the West, having nothing to do with the pursuit of terrorists or retaliation, acquired the clear outlines of the struggle for repartition of the world - the struggle in which terrorist structures turned from the enemies of the North Atlantic West into its main allies.Exactly on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the United States and NATO reported on another military victory - the capture of Tripoli by the Libyan opposition. A NATO spokesman, Colonel Roland Lavoie, welcomed the decision of the National Transitional Council of Libya to “move decision centers to the capital.” And in Washington, they did not forget to make demonstrative overtures to the neighbors of Libya. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland emphasized: Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria worked to resolve problems related to the Libyan conflict "for many months, and we worked closely with them, and they continue to work with the UN on border control and refugees."
However, both Mr. Lavoie and Mrs. Nuland were clearly shy of welcoming the main ally of the West in the Libyan campaign, al-Qaida. Meanwhile, it was this organization that became its true triumph in the face of the "Libyan Islamic Fighting Group" and "Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb" united in 2007. The representative of this united group, Abdel Hakim Belhadj, commanded the rebel detachments that had stormed the capital, and then was appointed head of the Military Council of Tripoli. As acknowledged by the activists of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group themselves, in recent years they have worked closely with Al Qaeda, although they considered the ideas of Osama bin Laden not quite realistic, more to the Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
According to the UN, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group is associated with Algerian and Moroccan Islamists, including the organizers of the 2003 terrorist attacks of the year in Casablanca, directed against citizens of Western states. This organization poses a direct threat to the countries of Western and Southern Europe. It has an extensive network of cells in Spain, Italy, France. And the actual coming of its people to power in Libya will allow terrorists to dictate their terms to international organizations intending to engage in the post-war reconstruction of the country. In addition, secret joint operations carried out earlier by the CIA and Al Qaeda suggest that the US will try to use Belhadj and his associates in new subversive operations in the Greater Middle East, including in Syria and Iran.
Bitter irony of fate: while Belhadj’s militants, acting on behalf of the National Transitional Council of Libya, “transferred decision-making centers to the capital,” in nearby Algeria, politicians and diplomats sounded the alarm over the growing terrorist threat. Gathered at the conference, representatives of the countries of the North African region, as well as the UN and other international organizations, noted the presence of “new security threats in the Sahel and Sahara zone, resulting from the armed conflict in Libya, which led to the intensification of weapons and movements of human flows in the region. ” According to experts, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb countries is currently operating in vast areas of 8 million square kilometers covering not only Algeria and Morocco, but also Niger, Mali and Mauritania. According to Foreign Minister Mali Sumeylu Bubeya, there is a real threat that the entire Sahel zone, covering such states as Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan and Eritrea, “will become a military zone”. A similar warning was issued by his colleague from Niger, Mohamed Bazum. He said that "the consequences of the crisis in Libya for the African zone of the Sahel and Sahara are beginning to become noticeable as armed people, weapons and vehicles that were involved in the Libyan conflict arrive in the region." “The presence of these people in the African Sahel and Sahara region can seriously worsen the security situation,” the Nigerian minister warned.
Even Gilles de Kerchow, who coordinated counter-terrorism efforts within the European Union, was forced to admit that the chaos in Libya provided Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb with access to new weapons, including ground-to-air missiles, extreme danger.
With such a “fight against terrorism”, Europeans need to wait for new terrorist attacks. But at the same time - to clear up one more mess, brewed by the American "fighters against terrorism" - in Kosovo. After all, at the beginning of 1998, when the Kosovo conflict only flared up and there was no consensus about US priorities in this Serbian region in Washington, then special envoy of President Bill Clinton in the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, publicly stated that the Kosovo Liberation Army "without any questions is terrorist group. " However, later that year, a few months before the start of NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, the State Department removed the KLA from the list of terrorist groups, and American intelligence agencies established close cooperation with it. France, under pressure from the United States and Great Britain, also deleted the KLA from its terrorist lists by the end of 1998 [. As the Washington Times wrote in May 1999, despite the fact that AOK “finances the war by selling heroin,” and its members “were terrorists in 1998”, “now, for political reasons, they are fighters for freedom.
«History about how the al-Qaeda fighter became the main Libyan commander in Tripoli destroyed by the war will surely shock (once again) this kingdom of crooked mirrors, called the “war on terror”, and will also compromise the carefully designed propaganda of NATO about “humanitarian” intervention in Libya, ”writes the Hong Kong edition of AsiaTimes. - After 11 September 10 years passed. And now it is not difficult to imagine how a certain semi-decomposed skull grins from the bottom of the Arabian Sea, peering into the future. ” Still would.
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