A shadowy chieftain exposed
Peaceful academic, defender of human rights … but there’s much, much more to Dr Nasser bin Ghaith
March 2013 was the bloodiest month thus far in Syria’s accelerating descent into fullscale civil war.
Some of the worst fighting was around Raqqa, as units of Bashar Al Assad’s army dug in for a final, doomed attempt to prevent the northern city from becoming the first provincial capital to fall to opposition forces.
Joining the assault on Raqqa was one of the most powerful militias to emerge from the groups seeking to overthrow Mr Al Assad: Ahrar Al Sham, an extremist organisation whose aim was to create a hardline Islamic state in Syria and which, a year later, was shown to have close links to Al Qaeda and acquired a reputation for executions and torture of civilians.
It was on the outskirts of Raqqa on March 3 that a sniper with the Syrian army trained his scope on a man who was clearly a senior commander in the Ahrar Al Sham brigade – and cut him down.
His target was indeed significant. The dead fighter was Mohammed Al Abduli, a former colonel in the UAE Armed Forces and long known as a committed supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, the group whose intolerance towards other faiths, and frequent calls to overthrow the UAE’s rulers, have led to it being banned as a terrorist group in the UAE.
As he grew older, Al Abduli’s views and actions had become ever more extreme, leading him to Syria and a place in the ranks of jihadist groups who saw their fight as part of a wider movement to establish a global caliphate by force.
So revered was Al Abduli among his fellow jihadists that weeks after his death a training camp for foreign fighters in Syria was named in his honour.
Al Abduli had previously been convicted by a UAE court for attempting to turn some of his military colleagues towards the Brotherhood.
Less known was another aspect of his activities: Al Abduli was one of the leading lights of the Ummah Conference, a global alliance of jihadist, Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathisers established in Turkey in 2008, and which now operates in 12 countries across North Africa and the Middle East. The ideology of the Ummah Conference seeks the overthrow of numerous legitimate Middle East and Arabian Gulf governments and the imposition of a brutal interpretation of Sharia familiar from Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Indeed, they have done precisely that in areas of Syria and Iraq that have fallen into their grip. Several Ummah leaders have been designated as international terrorists.
Al Abduli was inevitably drawn to such a movement. In early 2012, he travelled from Syria to Turkey especially to meet Hakim Al Mutairi, a Kuwaiti Salafist with a degree in religious studies from Birmingham University in the UK, and now the accepted leader of the worldwide Ummah movement. Among those involved in the foundation of Ummah was Abu Abdalaziz Al Qatari, notorious for providing financial and logistical support to Al Qaeda in Iraq, including the bombing of hotels and alcohol shops, and later to jihadist groups in Syria.
Al Qatari’s terrorist credentials included fighting with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he was a mentor to Osama bin Laden, and the creation of the Jund Al Aqsa Brigade, part of Al Nusra Front, itself designated as a terrorist group around the world for executions and war crimes. He was killed in Syria in 2014. Al Mutairi’s world view was equally clear. In 2011, the death of bin Laden at the hands of American special forces moved him to poetry. Titled Farewell Oh Victor of Islam, his verse eulogised “the lion of Islam and the martyr of ummah”. It was at one of his meetings with Al Mutairi that Al Abduli agreed to become president of a new branch of the organisation, the Emirates Ummah Party, pledged, in line with the ideology of the global ummah, to overthrow the rulers of the UAE, purge the country of supposed foreign influences and join a violent jihad that would rage throughout the entire Muslim world.
As Al Mutairi later wrote in a book published in 2015: “A dialogue took place between us on the ummah project and importance for jihad at this stage to be a jihad of the ummah and not of factions. He [Al Abduli] agreed with me and confessed of the crisis and its consequences.”
Al Abduli agreed with Al Mutairi to keep his presidency of the Emirates Ummah Party concealed until his return from the fighting in Syria. The bullet fired by a Syrian army sniper near Raqqa a year later put an end to those plans. It also created a vacancy. Another two years were to pass before the Emirates Ummah Party found a new president. When the announcement came in May last year, accompanied by a video on YouTube, it came as a surprise in many quarters.
In the first place, Dr Nasser bin Ghaith was already in a UAE prison, awaiting trial for the second time on charges that included using social media to damage the country’s relations with Egypt and foment dissent at home.
Secondly, bin Gaith had been regarded, at least among a number of western human rights organisations, as a distinguished academic and a lone defender of human rights abuses in his home country, and hailed as a prisoner of conscience.
On the surface then, a 47-yearold academic from Par i s Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi seemed an improbable successor to a soldier of jihad killed in the heat of battle in war-torn Syria.
The connection, and with it the key to understanding bin Gaith’s true political agenda, comes when a fourth man enters the picture. Hassan Al Diqqi, another UAE national and self- styled secretary general of the Emirates Ummah Party.
Now around 60, Al Diqqi is the eldest of the three Emiratis, with links to the Muslim Brotherhood in the UAE that go back as far as the 1970s. Since then his views have become more extreme. With Al Abduli, he was one of the founders of the Emirates Ummah Party.
The closeness of Al Diqqi and Al Abduli was demonstrated after the latter’s death in 2013, when Al Diqqi travelled to Syria to attend the ceremony that named the training camp for foreign fighters, among whom included those from Ahrar Al Sham, in Al Abduli’s honour.
Around this time, a Twitter post by Al Mutairi, the leader of the global Ummah movement, included a rarely seen photograph of Al Diqqi, his arm draped affectionately around the shoulders of a smiling Al Abduli.
The post read: “The Martyr Mohammed Al Abduli, president of the Emirates Ummah Party with Sheikh Hassan Al Diqqi, the secretary general of the party, before Al Abduli was martyred, months earlier”.
The photograph was almost certainly taken in Turkey, where Al Diqqi now lives in exile, in an attempt to evade prosecution by the UAE on charges that relate to his membership of the Ummah party, organising protests overseas with the intention of damaging the country’s reputation abroad, and stirring up instability at home. The charges date from August 2015, when bin Gaith was also arrested on similar charges. This was not bin Ghaith’s first brush with the law. In 2011, he was arrested with four others for publicly insulting the rulers of the UAE, and calling for anti-government demonstrations and a boycott of Federal National Council elections. Convicted in November 2011 by the state security division of the Federal Supreme Court, bin Ghaith and the four others were given prison sentences of between two and three years, but were all immediately pardoned by the President, Sheikh Khalifa, and set free.
The true extent of bin Ghaith’s involvement with the Emirates Ummah Party was confirmed last year, and in an unexpected fashion. On the eve of his appearance in court on May 2 last year, the Emirates Ummah Party released a statement announcing that bin Ghaith was its new president.
The party confirmed that it was “glad and honoured” by the appointment, and it “warns the Government of the Emirates, and places against it the legal and historic responsibility for any infringement or harm to the president of the party … and the remaining sons and daughters of the Emirates who are unjustly and unfairly detained”.
The statement was accompanied by the release of a video, recorded in Istanbul in 2013 at a conference organised by the worldwide Ummah party, and showing Al Diqqi introducing bin Ghaith as a speaker and “economic specialist and researcher”.
Held in custody, bin Ghaith has not responded to his elevation to the presidency of the Emirates Ummah Party, but his family in Dubai, including his wife, have angrily denounced it. They posted on Twitter that they “absolutely reject and dismiss this appointment”, and said it was “behaviour that seeks to harm the doctor in his imprisonment”.
But evidence since, provided by Al Diqqi himself, instead suggests a long and deepening association between bin Ghaith and the Emirates Ummah Party. Between December 2012 and March 2014 the party published three statements and recorded lectures by bin Ghaith “to educate the members of the Emirates Ummah Party”.
In a video published on YouTube in August last year, Al Diqqi also speaks of a “continuous communication” with bin Ghaith via email and Skype. Al Diqqi says he also warned bin Ghaith that his continuing activism would inev-
The Muslim Brotherhood‘s intolerance towards other faiths, and frequent calls to overthrow the UAE’s rulers, have led to it being banned as a terrorist group
itably lead to his arrest but that bin Ghaith refused to flee the UAE because of the failing health of his elderly parents.
In that case, Al Diqqi concluded, the best course of action was for bin Ghaith to be recognised not as a lone dissident but as the leader of an organisation with a recognised political agenda.
“So if you do go to prison,” Al Diqqi said he told bin Ghaith, “I will have no choice before me than to name you leader of the party.” He then said bin Ghaith “agreed to this arrangement, and it was clear that his acceptance had special meaning”.
For human rights organisations in the West, though, bin Ghaith’s role in the Ummah movement has become an inconvenience appar- ently best ignored. The charges brought by the UAE authorities against both him and Al Diqqi are consistently said to have been a consequence solely of their human rights activism.
Less than two weeks after it was announced that bin Ghaith had become president of the Emirates Ummah Party, Human Rights Watch in New York issued a press release calling for all charges against him to be dropped, and describing his activities as “peaceful criticism of Emirati and Egyptian authorities”.
Entirely absent was any reference to bin Ghaith’s new role in the Ummah movement or its association with extremist groups. The omission was pointed out by Michael Rubin, a former Penta- gon official, now resident scholar at the Washington think tank the American Enterprise Institute, after which Human Rights Watch included the missing information, describing its previous omission as “an error”. Much of the information used by Human Rights Watch involves the participation of the Alkarama Foundation in Geneva, which de- scribes itself as “combating injustice in the Arab World since 2004”. In 2013, Alkarama was described as part of “a coalition of human rights groups” including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that condemned the trial of 69 Emiratis convicted of sedition against the Government and who had links with the Muslim Brotherhood.
A closer look at Alkarama’s origins reveals that it is not as impartial as its public face suggests. As far back as 2008, it was lobbying the United Nations on behalf of Al Diqqi – using information provided by the Ummah movement’s Hakim Al Mutairi.
Others associated with the Alkarama Foundation include the organisation’s founder, Abdulrahman Al Nuaimi, a Qatari accused by the US government of sending millions of dollars to fund Al Qaeda operations in Iraq, and who in 2014 was labelled by the Daily
Telegraph newspaper in the UK as “one of the world’s most prolific terrorist financiers”.
It would be unfair, though, to accuse Human Rights Watch of directing their fire solely at sovereign nations. In a 2015 report, the group issued a detailed report on abuses and war crimes committed by militias fighting in Syria. Among those singled out was Ahrar Al Sham, accused of caging detained civilians and prisoners of war as human shields in way that “illegally puts them at grave risk of harm”. This was the same Ahrar Al Sham that two years earlier had mourned the loss of one of its most senior supporters, the “martyr” Mohammed Al Abduli – Nasser bin Ghaith’s predecessor as president of the Emirates Ummah Party.