Al Qaeda's Egyptian-Saudi divide

Bill Gertz, Washington Times:

Internal divisions between Saudi and Egyptian leaders of al Qaeda are producing "fissures" within the terrorist group and a possible battle over who will succeed Osama bin Laden, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

Mr. Hayden, an Air Force general, also said that al Qaeda regrouped in the past two years inside tribal areas of Pakistan and linked up with Pashtun regional extremists in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

Bin Laden is now an "iconic" figure hiding in the remote border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Mr. Hayden said in a wide-ranging interview with editors and reporters of The Washington Times.

"And frankly, then, we think there has been an awful lot of jockeying" among possible successors, Mr. Hayden said.

"Keep in mind, he's a Saudi. An awful lot of that leadership is Egyptian. If the Saudi dies, who becomes the next guy may be quite a contentious matter," he said.

"And there are fissures in al Qaeda because of this dominance of Egyptians inside the senior leadership, where you have a Saudi at the top," Mr. Hayden said during a meeting at CIA headquarters in McLean. "You can only imagine what then happens if he goes and then who comes in."

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Bin Laden got his status as the head of al Qaeda more from his wealth than any expertise in running a terrorist organization. The Egyptians are the ones who are the ideological leaders and the real impetus for terror attacks. Zawahiri threw in with bin Laden, because Zawahiri's organization was always running out of money for conducting terror operations against its main target the Egyptian government.

They began their collaboration in Sudan and fled to Afghanistan together. There have also been bound by Zawahiri's medical attention to a frail bin Laden. With bin Laden's money playing out the Egyptians will probably be more assertive. They are an out growth of the Egyptian Brotherhood whose guiding principal is that things are bad for Muslims because they are not Islamic enough. The Taliban also had this philosophy.

The current war is showing the bankruptcy of that philosophy but many of these guys are so delusional they do not comprehend how forcing their weird religious beliefs on others has made their situation worse. Their mass murder of non combatants has led many to reject the al Qaeda way and has put them into survival mode in Iraq and is now doing the same in Pakistan.