Sleeping cell or tiny army?

Accord­ing to Al Sharq Al Awsat, one of the books that inspired the so called 700 mem­ber Al-Qaeda’s “sleep­ing cell” in Saudi Ara­bia is “Idarat Al Tawahush” or “Sav­agery Man­age­ment” [the book in Ara­bic, the news­pa­per says that there is an Eng­lish trans­la­tion].

Con­trary to the Saudi pro­pa­ganda, the best “inter­pre­ta­tion” I found for this Saudi plot is on the Jor­dan­ian news­pa­per Addus­tour by Arib Al Rantawui, with doubts in the Saudi story, he asks “Is this a sleep­ing cell or a tiny army?”

I am one of Al-Qaeda observers and I do not think that Al-Qaeda orga­ni­za­tion in any State uses a “Three Dig­its num­ber” sys­tem for one cell,” This is unaf­ford­able to any orga­ni­za­tion to work in dis­guise and cam­ou­flage and avoid pros­e­cu­tion, let alone when it comes to an orga­ni­za­tions with the mil­i­tary, secu­rity, ter­ror­ism such as Al-Qaeda.

The writer says that there are two rea­sons for the Saudis to come with such story

We have doubts about the authen­tic­ity of the Saudi story…I think that the Saudi state­ment have one of the fol­low­ing two explanations:

- The cam­paign tar­geted activists “Wahadis” who opposed the Saudi ini­tia­tive “reli­gions dia­logue ” and the “reform” poli­cies announced by King Abdul­lah bin Abdul Aziz recently. There are many ideology-born Wahabis in Saudi Ara­bia, arose with such ideas. Their “sleep­ing cells” can wake at any time.

- The Saudi announce­ment related to pres­sures against the King­dom in sev­eral issues, specif­i­cally the Amer­i­can pres­sure on issues such as oil prices, and to sup­port the Maliki’s gov­ern­ment. The Saudi King­dom needed to warn to Wash­ing­ton against the “increas­ing pressure”.

Ali­waa arti­cle “West­ern­ers and polit­i­cal Islam” pub­lished today is just to com­plete the pre­vi­ous arti­cle. The arti­cle explains how the west­ern schol­ars are reform­ing their analy­sis about polit­i­cal Islam after they dis­cov­ered that many of these so called “ter­ror­ism reports” are com­mit­ted by secu­rity appa­ra­tus of the Arab coun­tries to obtain mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence support:

The West dis­cov­ered that many of the actions attrib­uted to the Islamists in more than one Arab and Mus­lim coun­try are actu­ally the work car­ried out by the secu­rity ser­vices to access to west­ern finan­cial, logis­ti­cal and polit­i­cal support.