If CNN is telling the truth, Belgian investigators, who first arrested then set free Malika el-Aroud, described her as “an al-Qaida living legend”.
So el-Aroud slipped by justice yet again, this time with an ego boost that will manifest itself in loss of human life.
Complete with her own password-protected, al-Qaida recruiting website, el Aroud blogs in French under the name “Oum Obeyda”. With the help of radical Islamist supporters, bureaucratic-challenged Belgian investigators and left-wing journalists, el Aroud is now one of the most notorious Internet jihadists in all of Europe.
Oum Obeyda’s main claim to fame is being the widow of one of the men who assassinated Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Massoud for Osama bin Laden, with whom she professes to be in love.
Massoud, earned his nickname as “the lion of the Panjshir” from his days as a leader in the fight against the Soviet Union and later against the Taliban. Said to be number one on the hit list of bin Laden, he was assassinated two days before the terrorist attacks of 2001 by two men posing as journalists.
The signature of this 48-year-old woman credited as Mother of the Female Suicide Bomber is the Islamic black veil covering all but the two slits that are her eyes any time she’s out on the street. At home for a sympathetic New York Times interview, she sported a pair of powder-blue slippers monogrammed in gold with the letters SEXY.
Mainstream media praise has been heaped on el-Aroud for her “open support” of bin Laden and al-Qaida.
“Suicide bomber’s widow soldiers on” was the headline on an Aug. 15, 2006 CNN story, in which el-Aroud confirmed she “still loves Osama bin Laden and loves him even though he sent her husband, Abdessater Dahmane, to die.”
“Most Muslims love Osama,” el-Aroud told CNN. “It was he who helped the oppressed. It was he who stood up against the biggest enemy in the world, the United States. We love him for that”.
El-Aroud dons her self-proclaimed “martyrdom” as easily as her black veil, and uses martyr’s widow status as the lure to draw support to her presence in Internet chat-rooms. “It’s the pinnacle in Islam to be the widow of a martyr. For a woman it’s extraordinary,”
Tracking “The Black Widow of the Global Jihad” amid mainstream media hype is the dedicated [url=http://www.haganah.com]http://www.haganah.com[/url]. It is courtesy of the savvy website that we know the names of the websites el-Aroud uses to recruit for al-Qaida:
“On December 11, 2008, 14 people were arrested for their involvement in an al-Qaida plot that was unfolding in Belgium. Malika el Aroud was among those arrested. The leader of the cell has been identified as Moez Garsalloui, operating from somewhere in the vicinity of Afghanistan.
“Moez Garsalloui is/was Malika’s second husband, with whom she settled in Switzerland, where the two ran an Arabic-language jihadi forum under many names, including Islamic-minbar.com and sunna-minbar,com, referred to here as the Minbar Project. There was a time (in 2004) when their forum was a preferred place to release communiques after the carrying out of an attack. For example, in July of 2004, it was on islamic-minbar.com where the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in Tashkent, and in August of 2004, individuals calling themselves the “Islambouli Brigades” used the Minbar Project site to take credit for downing two Russian airliners.
(For full details on el-Aroud’s websites uncovered by [url=http://www.haganah.com]http://www.haganah.com[/url], go here).
On the front lines of the new movement by women to take a larger role in the male-dominated global jihad, el-Aroud boasts that her weapon is to write. “That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”
Collecting more than £500 a month in government unemployment benefits, she knows all about bending the rules in Western society. “I write in a legal way,” she says. “I know what I’m doing. I’m Belgian. I know the system.”
Born in Morocco and brought up in Belgium, in North American she’d be known as a calculating opportunist.
El-Aroud operates from her three-room apartment above a clothes shop in a working-class Brussels neighbourhood, where she spends her time communicating online with supporters, mainly on her own forum, Minbar-SOS.
Convicted last June of promoting violence and supporting a criminal organization, she received only a six-month suspended sentence. Husband Garsalloui, convicted on more serious charges, was released after 23 days.
Authorities lost track of him after he was released from jail last year in Switzerland.
Belgian authorities have proven they are no match for haganah.com’s “Black widow of the Global Jihad: Nabbed by Massoud’s followers in 2001, El-Aroud was allowed to contact Belgian authorities, who--incredibly--arranged for her safe passage home. “We got her out and thought she’d cooperate with us,” says one senior Belgian intelligence officer. “We were deceived.”
The Black Widow of Global Jihad is still out there spinning her evil web. God speed internet-haganah.com in 2009.
Judi McLeod——Bio and Archives
-- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
