Arab response to bin Laden’s death muted

Al-Qaeda’s fading allure was a trend discernible long before the protests began sweeping through the region at the beginning of the year. It was perhaps most noticeable in Iraq, where Sunnis turned against the al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgents holding sway in their neighborhoods in 2006 and formed the Awakening movement, joining U.S. troops to almost, but not quite, defeat the extremists.

In Baghdad, government spokesman Ali Musawi welcomed the news. “The Iraqi people are among the most happy people, because we are the ones who suffered most from al-Qaeda,” he said.

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 The long-hunted al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces.

Map: Bin Laden killed at compound in Pakistan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/bin-laden-killed/

Opinion polls have detected a steady decline in positive perceptions of al-Qaeda across the Arab world since the middle of the last decade, when the grisly, wall-to-wall satellite television coverage of beheadings and suicide bombings broadcast across the region from Iraq began to give Arabs pause for thought.

In 2004, 67 percent of Jordanians regarded al-Qaeda as “a legitimate resistance movement,” said Fares Braizat, who is in charge of polling at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in the Qatari capital, Doha. After al-Qaeda carried out suicide bombings against Jordanian hotels in 2005, that number fell to 20 percent, he said.

In the Palestinian territories, confidence in al-Qaeda fell from 72 percent in 2003 to 34 percent in 2011, according to polling conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. In Lebanon it fell from 19 percent to 1 percent.

The youth-led revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia crystallized the irrelevance of al-Qaeda and its extremist aspirations “because they achieved so much more than al-Qaeda ever achieved,” said Kamal Habib, a former member of the extremist Islamic Jihad movement in Egypt who now researches Islamist politics.

“Al-Qaeda’s peak was in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq,” he said. “There was an absolute panic that the West would somehow invade the Arab world. All this created a lot of fear and made al-Qaeda’s rhetoric more acceptable.”

“But now groups like al-Qaeda are facing a real crisis. People are saying, ‘If I can achieve change peacefully, why should I follow al-Qaeda?’ ’’

Yet al-Qaeda still is active in some of the most troubled areas of the region, including Yemen, North Africa and Iraq, and it cannot be counted out altogether, Braizat said.

“Al-Qaeda is going to lose rather than gain only if the revolutions succeed in producing proper democratic governments,” he warned. “It still has franchises out there, and wherever there are injustices, it will have appeal.”

Correspondents Michael Birnbaum in Cairo and Thomas Erdbrink in Dubai and special correspondents Asaad Alazawi in Baghdad, Sherine Bayoumi in Cairo and Islam Abdel Kareem in Gaza contributed to this report.