Abu Musab al-Suri (Arabic: أبو مصعب السوري), born Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar (Arabic: مصطفى بن عبد القادر ست مريم نصار; 26 October 1958), is a suspected Al-Qaeda member and writer best known for his 1,600-page book The Global Islamic Resistance Call (Da'wat al-muqawamah al-islamiyyah al-'alamiyyah).
In 1980, he joined the Fighting Vanguard organisation, a radical offshoot of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which was at the forefront in the Islamist uprising in Syria against Hafez al-Assad's government.
[8] In Peshawar, Nasar became well known under his pen name Umar Abd al-Hakim after he published a 900-page treatise in May 1991, entitled 'The Islamic jihadi revolution in Syria', also known as 'the Syrian Experience' (al-tajrubah al-suriyyah).
Among his associates was Imad Eddin Yarkas alias Abu Dahdah, head of al-Qaeda's Madrid cell, who was arrested in November 2001 on suspicion of membership in al-Qaida and of involvement in the 11 September 2001 attacks.
In a seven-page letter from mid-1998, Nasar launched scathing criticism of bin Laden for the disdain al-Qaeda had shown towards the Taliban leadership of Afghanistan, including Mullah Omar.
The Spanish newspaper El País attributed Garzon's query to United States President Barack Obama's announcement that the Guantanamo detention camp and the CIA's black sites would be closed.
[19] Due to his prolific writings on strategic and political issues, and his guerrilla warfare experience, Nasar is a popular lecturer and to a certain degree an unofficial adviser for a wide range of jihadi groups in Afghanistan.
While some reports have linked him to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who later led al-Qaeda's component of the insurgency in Iraq, his network of contacts was much wider, and included jihadis from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere.
Media reports have also alleged that one of his associates, the Moroccan Amer Azizi (Uthman al-Andalusi), had met 11 September organizers Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Tarragona, Spain, weeks before the attacks, but this seems to be incorrect.
"[21] Nasar's best known work is the 1,600-page book The Global Islamic Resistance Call (Da'wat al-muqawamah al-islamiyyah al-'alamiyyah), which appeared on the Internet in December 2004 or January 2005.
[7][10] In an article in the September 2006 edition of The New Yorker magazine, author Lawrence Wright wrote that in this book, Nasar: proposes that the next stage of jihad will be characterized by terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (what he terms 'leaderless resistance') which will wear down the enemy and prepare the ground for the far more ambitious aim of waging war on 'open fronts' ... 'without confrontation in the field and seizing control of the land, we cannot establish a state, which is the strategic goal of the resistance.
[8] According to Boaz Ganor, in this book, Nasar posits that there's an inevitable clash between capitalist economics, secular philosophy, and democracy within Muslim culture.
Despite this, he acknowledges that Islamists may exploit democracy to achieve their objectives, emphasizing the role of missionary activities conducted by jihadist organizations, leveraging democratic institutions to sway Muslim sentiments.
[10] Brynjar Lia of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment portrays him as the most brilliant and dangerous ideologue of his cohort of radicals, "a dissident, a critic and an intellectual", who puts "hard-nosed realism before religious wish-fulfillment and pragmatic long-term strategies before utopianism.
"[10] Scholars Brian A. Jackson and Bryce Loidolt argue that Mohammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim's Management of Savagery and al-Suri's Call to Global Islamic Resistance led al-Qaida to innovate and shift practices.
[32] In June 2010, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was reported to have published Inspire magazine – its first English-language publication,[33] sprung from the imagination of Anwar al-Awlaki.
[10][35] French Islamic eschatology scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu notes that another departure Nasar makes from the ideology of Al-Qaeda is his interest in eschatology—including the coming of the Mahdi, the Antichrist, the mountain of gold to be found in the Euphrates river, the Sufyani, Gog and Magog, and the proper chronology and location of related battles and other activities.
[39] His interest extended to the "central role" that the hadith about end times outlined for his homeland of as-Shām (modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine) and the need for Al-Qaeda to reorient its strategy to "take into account this final clash"[40] with the enemies of Islam.