The Arab Ninjas.#mission #bournesupremacy

The Arab Ninjas. kcatfish Civilian Military Intelligence Group kcatfish · Follow Published in Civilian Military Intelligence Group 6 min read · Feb 26, 2010 Listen #DATAFOXXRAY Share Hasan-i-Sabah, Leader Of The Assassins Today we often hear the word Fedayeen bandied about as just another face of the jihadist insurgency. The actual source of the name came from a cadre of secret assassins. Fed’i means “loyal one” and refers to a society of extreme special operations killers known as the Order of the Assassins. When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 AD, Islam suffered its first internal split. The Shiites believed that only a divinely inspired imam could properly interpret the oracle of Muhammad. They further believed that one of Muhammad’s relatives best served to fill this role. The Sunnis felt that lineage had little to do with Islamic scholarship and Godly forbearance. Indeed, they felt that insight and study brought divine inspiration regarding the Koran, and they were willing to accept and following the Caliphs who were in power administering the Islamic faithful. Prior to Muhammad’s death, a group of faithful zealots formed within Islam that followed an Imam known as Ismail Bin Jafar, the seventh in line of succession. These Muslims were called “Seveners”. The man who most Muslims follow was the 12thImam. The “Twelvers” considered the Ismails’ faith to be blasphemous. The tension did not end of the Imailis. It sent them underground where they formed secret alliances across the Muslim kingdom that ruled most of the Mideast and Central Asia from 1090 until 1273. They militarized, organized, and made themselves powerful and feared by virtue of their secrecy. They proselytized successfully for two centuries and became perhaps the world’s first official religious power whose modus operandi was a combination of Special Operations and a Ninja like force. This Order of the Assassins had fortress strongholds across the Arab world, many of them won with no bloodshed whatsoever. Rather, they were taken by trickery, deception, assassination. Today they may be called terrorists. But the assassins were different from today’s terrorists. The terror created by the Ismaili Feda’i existed in the hearts of the chief Imams and Caliphs and generals, not innocent people. Also the Ismaili Feda’i did not murder innocent people unless you call a random Caliph with a beef someone who is innocent. They did not slaughter. They used fear of assassination as a weapon and sharpened it with some of the most spectacularly staged operations ever seen. That said, their operatives/evangelicals were called “Da’i”. The Da’i were successful evangelicals as well. They converted enough people to make the Ismaili Da’i a powerful force for a long time, one that was perhaps more powerful and influential than we will ever know because their secrecy may have buried some operations forever. Secrecy as a weapon. This is probably the most underrated military tactic and most misunderstood political strategy. Secrecy means much more than keeping the battleplan itself from falling into the hands of the enemy general. If Clausewitz calls use of armed force an extension of political will, then moving your agenda along is not limited to a battlefield. It is accomplished in the legislatures and kingdoms and Caliphs who rule from grandiose fortresses and in plentitude, and at a comfortable distance from enemies. War is one thing. Winning in the end is another. The assassins were political chess players that applied pinpoint killings and fear to move their agenda along, to protect their assets and to prosper. The most powerful organizations in the world are the least known, and the Ismaili Da’Ii knew this. By now the Arab world was a split between the governance of the Fatimid Caliphate occupying mostly Egypt and Eastern North Africa, and the Byzantines, who were the remnants of the Romans and Christians, and the massive Seljuk Empire that stretched from modern day Western Turkey to Iraq. So along comes a figure, a fervent Ismaili Da’i named Hasan-i-Sabah, a Twelver born in Rayy near Tehran in 1050. After having scrapes with the law because of his secret conversion to Ismaili doctrine, he created a movement and took on Seluk strongholds by deploying missionaries who converted over time enough powerful people to simply allow Hasan to slip into a castle on November 10 1090 and take over. A bloodless palace coup. The Seljuk caliph sent troops that burned crops, destroyed Ismaili sympathizer property and murdered followers. But Hasan kept the castle. Hasan spread strongholds out all over the Seljuk empire and each one was done in this way: missionaries convert masses inside the townships, convert followers in power and overnight there is a new ruler and the core populations are followers. There is perhaps no precedent or antecedent to this form of empire building. The Assassins did use blunt military force at times when the Seljuk Empire was embroiled in a civil war after the death of Malik Shah. The Assassins took Lamassar castle in a night raid in a Palace Coup that surprised its inhabitants the next morning. The Seljuks did counter attack. The Sultan Malik Shah and his advisor Nizam al-Mulk both sent forces to Kuhistan and to Rudbar and other Assassin strongholds. While the fighting was brutal at Lamssar, a handful of Ismailis held off much superior force. Later during the siege a surprise night attack by the Ismailis on the Emir’s encampment routed the Emir’s forces. Nizam and Shah retreated and regrouped and planned the next move. But Hasan had planted a man named Bu-Tahir inside Mulk’s residence, a Da’i and Ismaili assassin who single handedly walked from Isfahan to the Seljuk capital and the Abbasid Caliph’s home. He disguised himself as a Vizier and approached Mulk on the way to his harem carried in a litter. Tahir approached and said he had a petition to review with the Vizier. Mulk leaned over and Tahir stabbed him to death and than waited to be killed by guards. In another example of Feda’i warfare we look to 1126 when a Seljuk leader sent forces over a few months time to besiege Assassin strongholds. The Assassins planted two operatives in the Seljuk leader’s fortress who posed as stablemen who cared for horses. The leader was stabbed one morning on the way to get his ride. In 1192, Conrad of Monteferrat, the Crusader ruler of Acre was killed by two Feda’i who had taken the time to learn enough about Christianity to appear as trusted Christian monks that eventually encroached upon his private residence and killed him. The history of the Assassins is not a black and white affair either. There were instances after Hasan-i-Sabah’s death when Assassin strongholds realized that they didn’t have the numbers to fight wars of attrition, and so had to make room for themselves by hook or crook. In 1152 Assassins paid an annual tribute to the Knights Templar in exchange for a truce. The Assassins outlasted the Fatimid and Seljuk Empires, but were ultimately destroyed by the one incursive force that for 400 years no one could resist: The Mongols. The fact that I reference the Ninjas is because Ninjitsu is still around because the methods by which they operated became a popular martial art. The Feda’i are hardly known because once the Mongols dispatched them, they virtually disappeared, but their feats were no less impressive or creative.

By the early 13thcentury Ghengis Khan literally rode into central Asia and conquered. In 1253, Khan’s grandchild Mongke dispatched forces that attacked mercilessly and decimated the Assassins for good. Lamssar Castle and Girdukh Castle held off the Mongols for a decade. But no political power was forthcoming from the besieged Assassins cornered in these two last remaining strongholds. In typical Mongol fashion, any living Assassin was enslaved, and then executed. Source: Holy Terror, Jefferson Gray, Military History Quarterly Review, Spring 2010. Related Posts: Tagged as: Seljuks, Feda’i, Assassins, Hasan-i-Sabah, Abbasids, Fatimids