A must read article by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in The New Republic:Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard, 17 hours in a Toyota pickup truck bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since Al Qaeda had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalized by Qaddafi, had known bin Laden from their days fighting the Afghan communist government in the early '90s, a period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
Read more ....
My Comment: We in the West see groups like Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups as one central and unified group. The reality is different. They are separated by cultural, religious, and ethnic differences. Their ultimate goals may be the same .... a world ruled by Islam .... but their means to get to their ultimate goal are different, and one can speculate that how each envisions such a "World Government" is also probably very different.
The breakdown of the World's Jihad movement is a study that deserves more attention and reporting .... this article is a good start.
Update: Al-Qaeda: the cracks begin to show -- Sunday Times
Update #2: How Muslim extremists are turning on Osama Bin Laden -- New York Daily News
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