Libya attack graphically marks rise of fundamentalist Muslims
The new wild card in Arab and Muslim politics may be the hardline Salafi Muslim groups that have emerged from the Arab Spring.
Libyans walk on the grounds of the gutted US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, after an attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, on Sept. 12, 2012.
Ibrahim Alaguri/AP
Istanbul, Turkey
The deadly anti-US attack in Libya graphically marks the rise of fundamentalist Salafi Muslims in the aftermath of the Arab Spring – and the challenge it poses to US policy in the region.
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But the violence that tore through the US consulate in Benghazi, killing four Americans including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, has also served to show the limited appeal of those tactics by prompting widespread condemnation, analysts say. Protesters also breached the US embassy walls in Cairo, angered by a deliberately provocative, anti-Islam film that appears to have been made by a Steve Klein, an anti-Islam activist who lives in California. Smaller protests also broke out in Tunisia today.
"One of the major features of the Arab uprisings is the emergence of ultraconservative Salafi groups," says Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East specialist at the London School of Economics, contacted in Paris. "They are extremely hyper, extremely anti-American, extremely blinded by the sunshine of the open political atmosphere. The Salafis now are the wild card in Arab and Muslim politics, in Libya, in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia. In Syria, they are ... becoming a major factor in the [antiregime] equation."
Still, in Libya there appears to be have been a mix of motives driving the consulate attack.
Journalists who visited the scene during the attacks told the BBC they heard frequent angry reference to the film.
Yet just hours earlier, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video to mark the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. He confirmed the death of a senior Libyan member of Al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a US drone strike in Pakistan last June, and said: "His blood is calling, urging and inciting you to fight and kill the crusaders."
"I would argue that a great deal of planning went into the [Libya] attack, they fired multiple missiles into the consulate, they are well known for their anti-American views," says Mr. Gerges of the Salafist militant group that carried out the attack.
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