INKSTER: Al-Qaeda in Iraq overplayed their hand; behaved in an arrogant, brutal fashion which alienated their potential allies, which I think is an important vulnerability.
GARDNER: Nigel Inkster, the Director of Transnational Threats at the International Institute of Strategic Studies and, until recently, a senior government official in Whitehall. He thinks Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command and chief spokesman, Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, is uncomfortably aware of just how unpopular the group’s tactics have become with most Muslims. Last December, he took the unprecedented step of initiating a public debate, inviting questions via email. As Nigel Inkster says, many were from disapproving Muslims.
07 August 2008: Analysis
INKSTER: Al-Qaeda in Iraq overplayed their hand; behaved in an arrogant, brutal fashion which alienated their potential allies, which I think is an important vulnerability.
GARDNER: Nigel Inkster, the Director of Transnational Threats at the International Institute of Strategic Studies and, until recently, a senior government official in Whitehall. He thinks Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command and chief spokesman, Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, is uncomfortably aware of just how unpopular the group’s tactics have become with most Muslims. Last December, he took the unprecedented step of initiating a public debate, inviting questions via email. As Nigel Inkster says, many were from disapproving Muslims.
INKSTER: One of the questions that was most asked and which clearly caused him a lot of difficulty was the issue of why so many Muslims had been killed by Al-Qaeda and related groups. Zawahiri didn’t I think come up with a very convincing answer on this, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of debate going on in jihadist circles.
GARDNER: Do these vulnerabilities present opportunities, do you think, for Western intelligence agencies and are they being taken advantage of?
INKSTER: Well I think the answer to the first question is yes they obviously do. To the second, I think the answer is probably not sufficiently. If we had known in 1998, 1999 what we know now about
what had been happening in Afghanistan, the relationships between the jihadi groups and the relationship between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, I’m sure that it would have been possible to do more to foment dissent between them. And governments are now I think starting to focus on some of the inherent contradictions in the single narrative, you know the jihadi message, but this is going to be slow progress and it requires levels of expertise which are not readily available to governments, at
least not Western governments.
GARDNER: Government involvement in matters like these carries the risk of backfiring because nobody likes to feel that they’re being manipulated. But even without it, some of the opposition to Al-Qaeda from the jihadi elite is filtering through to Western based Muslims.
Read a transcript of the whole documentary on the BBC News website
