Is Bin Laden Worried About his Relevance?

By Douglas Farah

The two most recent statements by Osama bin Laden, after a long silence, seem to me to indicate he is worried about how relevant he remains in the global jihadist movement. They also make clear that the core al Qaeda leaders still want nothing less than a global revolution and uprising.

The NEFA Foundation's recent translations of bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri show the two leaders, whose most notable achievement in recent years has been to survive (and that is no small achievement, but stops making headlines after a while) are trying desperately to interject their thoughts and leadership over conflicts and groups that are out of their orbit of direct influence.

The most recent one, "Fight on, Champions of Somalia," is, in effect, a lambasting of the current Somali leadership of Sheikh Shareef as too moderate, and a hand-wringing over how any serious Islamist could engage in negotiations with non-Islamists.

How can intelligent people believe that yesterday’s enemies on the basis of religion can become today’s friends? This can only happen if one of the two parties abandons his religion. So look and see which one of them is the one who has abandoned it: Shaykh Shareef or America? ...These sorts of presidents are the surrogates of our enemies and their authority is null and void in the first place, and as Shaykh Shareef is one of them, he must be dethroned and fought."

This clearly someone who has no real influence on the ground and is reduced to watching from the sidelines, shouting instructions that no one feels obligated to listen to.

This is not to imply there is not a strong ideological/theological affinity among these groups, only to point out that bin Laden and Zawahiri are trying to become relevant in theaters of operations where they are no longer the guiding lights, and least in an operational sense.

Just a few days earlier, bin Laden had released a statement called "Practical Steps to Liberate Palestine," which of course are not practical at all, and regard a conflict in which al Qaeda has been notably absent (and has lost out to the Muslim Brotherhood).

Like Zawahiri's statements a few days before that, it consisted largely of lamenting the state of Palestine while trying to place that conflict in the context of global jihadist movements. My full blog is here.