The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades are at it again.
CAIRO (Reuters) - A group that said it had links to Al Qaeda said it was calling a truce in its Spanish operations to see if the new government would withdraw its troops from Iraq, a pan-Arab newspaper said.
(link via LGF)
Who are these guys? And why do they talk so much? It's not that I'm doubting the mounting evidence that Al Qaeda was at the very least involved in last week's terrorist bombings in Madrid. It's just that I'm skeptical as to the connection between Al Qaeda and this Abu Hafs al-Masri bunch.
Abu Hafs issued a quick statement taking "credit" for the Madrid attack. They also issued a not-so-quick statement taking credit for last year's major power blackout in North America. That claim was laughed out of the park. Now they're back and sounding more plausible, so people are paying attention. But maybe they've just learned how to sound that way as a result of past mistakes.
Last Friday, MEMRI published a preliminary analysis of Abu Hafs' statement on the Madrid bombings. He concluded that the statement just didn't reflect either the philosophy or the usual mode of expression of Al Qaeda or its leading luminaries.
Questions about the murky connections between Al Hafs and Al Qaeda have been raised before. This article in last November's Guardian does quite a thorough job, given the information available, of dissecting Al Hafs' background.
This is not the first time the name of Abu Hafs has surfaced in recent months. The same group claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on the UN headquarters in Iraq in August. Yet despite its sudden rise as a self-proclaimed perpetrator of terrorist outrages, the context of the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades is murky at best. The only certainty is that someone wants the world to associate these latest attacks with an individual once at the heart of Osama bin Laden's operations.
And there was this from CNN last week.
Intelligence sources have consistently told CNN that the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade does not speak for al Qaeda, and there is question as to whether it exists at all beyond one person with a computer and a fax machine.
The speculation's been going on for a while. I took a trip through Google to see just how many terrorist attacks Abu Hafs has claimed in the past few years. Just a few. The November, 2003, synagogue bombing in Istanbul, the August, 2003, attack on the Baghdad U.N. headquarters and, that same month, the car bombing of the Marriot Hotel in Jakarta, and, of course, the blackout.
Misinformation is a powerful tool. So, you know, proceed with caution.
