Libya Feeding the Jihadi Circuit

This Newsweek article says as much about Khadafi's government, failed economics, and the Islamists exploitation of disaffected youth as foot soldiers, as it does about the global jihadi movement. One town in particular, Darnah, seems to have produced an abundance of jihadis - suicide bombers in particular - that is out of proportion to anything seen elsewhere:

Then one day in late September 2006, Abd al-Salam simply disappeared. "Where is he?" his anxious mother asked when he didn't show up for dinner. His brother reassured her that Abd al-Salam had gone to Benghazi, perhaps to buy perfumes, but Abd al-Hamid didn't believe his own story. The younger boy had probably hitched a ride to Cairo, and then flown on to Damascus. He later crossed the border into Iraq with $100 cash in his pocket, and joined a cadre of insurgents led by a coordinator he knew as "Hamad." Shortly after Abd al-Salam disappeared, the telephone rang in Darnah. "I'm in Ramadi," the voice on the other end said. "I'm in Iraq."

Late last year American soldiers raided an insurgent headquarters in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar. Inside they found a document—perhaps an application form that Abd al-Salam had filled out on his way into the country—on the letterhead of the "Mujahedin Shura Council." The document listed little beyond Abd al-Salam's birthday, his brother's phone number and his hometown. Yet as they analyzed the papers, American investigators were struck by one thing. Of the 606 militants cataloged in the Sinjar records, almost 19 percent had come to Iraq from Libya. Previous intelligence estimates had always held that the bulk of Iraq's foreign fighters come from Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the largest number of militants in the Sinjar records—244 of them—were Saudi nationals. But in per capita terms, Libyans represented a much higher percentage. Perhaps the most startling detail: of 112 Libyan fighters named in the papers, an astoundingly large number—52—had come from a single town of 50,000 people along the Mediterranean coast, called Darnah.

Earlier this month I traveled to Darnah to try to figure out why it was contributing such a large portion of its young men to fight the Americans in Iraq. A stunning natural landscape surrounds the town, nestled in the shadow of rust-colored limestone bluffs that overlook the sparkling Mediterranean. Yet the city's corniche is lined with a dreary procession of crumbling concrete tenements coated in a patina of chipped pastel paint. Libya's economy is dominated by the oil and gas sector, which accounts for 90 percent of the country's revenues, but little of that wealth has ever trickled down to Libya's eastern province. Government officials in Tripoli acknowledge in private conversations that the east has long been neglected. The discrepancy is a truth too obvious for Darnah residents to deny, even given the hazards of speaking openly in Muammar Kaddafi's police state. "What have we gotten from this government?" asks Abd al-Hamid bin-Ali. One telling detail in the Sinjar documents: of the Libyans who listed their "work" in Iraq, more than 85 percent volunteered for suicide missions—a significantly larger fraction than any other country but Morocco.

Darnah was also the site where the US Marines landed to fight the Barbary Pirates (and where the Marine Corps Hymn gets its opening stanza).

However, it wasn't the US Marines fighting to keep the sea lanes open for commerce that put this region into a perpetual sneer; the Italian colonial failures did that along with an ongoing Islamist presence that has seen the Khadafi regime crack down from time to time (and which would explain why the region gets no revenues from the oil profits). But the things that got the proto-jihadis to act was witnessing the ongoing imagery from Iraq courtesy of al Jazeera and CNN, who broadcast Abu Ghraib imagery 24/7 along with a consistent stream of anti-war and anti-US sentiment.