The Briefing Room
General Category => National/Breaking News => Topic started by: mystery-ak on January 09, 2014, 04:42:09 pm
-
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/opinion/bergen-al-qaeda-terrority-gains/ (http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/opinion/bergen-al-qaeda-terrority-gains/)
Al Qaeda controls more territory than ever in Middle East
By Peter Bergen and Jennifer Rowland
updated 7:01 PM EST, Tue January 7, 2014
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad." Jennifer Rowland is a graduate student at Harvard University's Kennedy School.
(CNN) -- From around Aleppo in western Syria to small areas of Falluja in central Iraq, al Qaeda now controls territory that stretches more than 400 miles across the heart of the Middle East, according to English and Arab language news accounts as well as accounts on jihadist websites.
Indeed, al Qaeda appears to control more territory in the Arab world than it has done at any time in its history.
The focus of al Qaeda's leaders has always been regime change in the Arab world in order to install Taliban-style regimes. Al Qaeda's leader Ayman al-Zawahiri acknowledged as much in his 2001 autobiography, "Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet," when he explained that the most important strategic goal of al Qaeda was to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world, explaining that, "without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing."
continued...
-
White House is pleased at this news :smokin:
-
White House is pleased at this news :smokin:
Yep.