Mosque in Samaria
Mosque in SamariaIsrael news photo: Regavim

Al-Qaeda watchers have been keeping their eye on its “master plan for world domination,” first revealed in 2005.

The plan was revealed by Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein when he interviewed top Al Qaeda leaders, including the mastermind of many terror attacks in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The plan is described as a seven-stage, long-term war, ending with the world coming under control of the Islamic Caliphate.

Phase III, which was to follow the 9/11 attacks and subsequent preparations for Islamic battle against the West, was expected to last from 2007 to 2010. It was to have included “increasingly frequent attacks against secular Turkey and arch-enemy Israel.”

In actuality, Al-Qaeda terrorists have been linked to exactly one attack in Turkey during that period; it took place outside the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul and left three attackers and three policemen dead. In recent weeks, Turkish police have arrested nearly 40 Al-Qaeda suspects. Closer to home, Al-Qaeda has been implicated in attempting to recruit terrorists in Gaza and Samaria, but has not been implicated in any major attacks.

Phase Four, scheduled for between 2010 and 2013, foresees the “downfall of hated Arab regimes, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Oil suppliers will be attacked and the U.S. economy will be targeted using cyber terrorism.” Threats to carry out such attacks have often been sounded, but have generally not been followed through.  On the other hand, the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt have been felled or are in danger, and observers have suggested that Saudi Arabia and Jordan could be in danger as well.

Phase Five, between 2013 and 2016, has been designated as the period of the formation of a world-wide Islamic state, or caliphate. Immediately afterwards, the "Islamic army" will instigate the "fight between the believers and the non-believers" that has so often been predicted by al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda expects that war to take up to two years, ending by 2020 with “definitive victory.”

Ironically, many in the West play down Islamic threats to take over the world. Dr. Lawrence Davidson of West Chester University wrote last month, in an article reprinted on many internet sites, that precautions against the Islamic threat are merely the latest instance of the “paranoid style of thinking in American politics from colonial times right into the modern period.”