For those who believed that al-Qaida is dead, the group has demonstrated that it can strike and its associated organizations will pose, a significant threat in the coming months, if not years.
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Rohan Gunaratna is the author of "Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror" (Columbia University Press). He is currently a visiting senior fellow at Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies. | | |
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The recent attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco bear the hallmarks of al-Qaida. Al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia and its associated group Assirat al-Moustaquim (The Straight Path) in Morocco conducted the coordinated simultaneous suicide attacks against Western and Jewish targets with the aim of inflicting maximum fatalities. At least 25 died in the Riyadh attacks, and the death toll in Casablanca is nearly 30.
The operations were executed by the recently appointed al-Qaida military commander, Seif Al-'Adel, who is formerly a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He was joined by another senior member, Abu Khaled, and Osama bin Laden's son Sa'ad bin Laden. Due to the loss of a large number of al-Qaida leaders and operatives in Pakistan, the group has opened a new front -- Iran -- to conduct offensive operations. The Iraqi Islamist group Ansar al-Islami, an al-Qaida associate group located on the Iran-Iraq border, provided protection to the operational leadership cell that coordinated the Riyadh bombing and sent experts to Casablanca, Morocco, to advise Assirat al-Moustaquim.
Despite being hunted by the Saudi intelligence and its law enforcement agencies, al-Qaida was able to plan, prepare and execute an operation in the heart of the kingdom. Amid domestic and foreign intelligence, both technical and human, that al-Qaida was in the final phases of an operation, Saudi authorities failed to detect and disrupt the operation that destroyed three poorly protected foreign residential complexes.
The operation demonstrated both the staying power of al-Qaida, the most hunted terrorist group in history, and its cellular organization, the rigid compartmentalization that made the group resilient to destruction. Although the attack will spur widespread Saudi suppression and repression of the Islamists of the al-Qaida brand, it will not diminish their secret admiration for Osama bin Laden, the popular hero of all the Saudis who oppose the House of Saud. As the attack was intended against the Westerners, and the first attack against a Western target after United States intervened and occupied Iraq, the attack will generate a fresh wave of recruits and support for al-Qaida and its associated and affiliated groups in the Gulf.
With sustained U.S. action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaida will fragment, decentralize, regroup in five zones of the world, work with like-minded groups, select a wider range of targets, focus on economic targets and population centers and conduct most attacks in the Southern Hemisphere.
Although the group will be constrained from conducting coordinated simultaneous attacks against high-profile symbolic or strategic targets in the West, al-Qaida -- together with its regional counterparts -- will conduct similar attacks in Asia, Africa, Middle East and even in Latin America. Despite heavy losses, including the likely capture or death of its core and penultimate leaders, al-Qaida's anti-Western universal jihad ideology inculcated among the politicized and radicalized Muslims will sustain support for al-Qaida.
Both in the West and outside the West, countermeasures, especially target hardening, by law enforcement and protective services of vulnerable government personnel and infrastructure, have forced al-Qaida to focus on economic targets and population centers.
Hardening of government targets will transfer the threat to softer targets, making civilians prone to terrorist attack. Similarly, hardening of land and aviation targets will shift the threat to sea targets, particularly to commercial maritime targets.
Due to the difficulty of hijacking aircraft to ram them against targets that are difficult to acquire in surface attacks, al-Qaida will acquire and employ handheld surface-to-air missiles. In mid-2001, a Sudanese al-Qaida member was arrested in Khartoum after unsuccessfully firing an SA7 missile at a U.S. transport aircraft taking off from the Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia. The arrest led the Saudi authorities to recover another complete missile system buried in the Riyadh desert in December 2001.
If appropriate and immediate countermeasures are not taken to target the al-Qaida shipping network, surface-to-air missiles under al-Qaida control held in the Pakistan-Kashmir-Afghanistan theater, the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa will find their way to the Far East and to Europe, and possibly even to North America.
As of mid-2003, al-Qaida has re-invented itself in Afghanistan by working with Mullah Omar's Taliban and Gulbaddin Hekmatiyar's Hezbi-e-islami. Similarly, Al-Qaida continues to work with Lashkar-e-jenghvi, Lashmar-e-Toiba, Jayash-e-Mohommad, Harakart-ul-Mujahidin and a number of other Pakistani groups.
With U.S. security forces and the intelligence community targeting al-Qaida's nerve center in Afghanistan-Pakistan, al-Qaida will decentralize even further.
While its organizers of attacks will remain in Pakistan and its immediate neighborhood, its operatives will travel back and forth, coordinating with al-Qaida nodes in the south. To make its presence felt, al-Qaida will increasingly rely on its global terrorist network of like-minded groups in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Horn of Africa, Middle East and the Caucasus to strike its enemies.
Already attacks in Kenya, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Kuwait and Yemen seek to compensate for the loss and lack of space and opportunity to operate in Afghanistan. Its operatives will work together with Jemmah Islamiyah (Southeast Asia), Al Ithihad al Islami (Horn of Africa), Chechen Mujahidin (Khattab faction: Caucasus), Tunisian Combatants Group (Middle East), Jayash-e-Mohommad (South Asia) and other groups it trained and financed in the past decade.
In addition to its own members, al-Qaida will operate through the Salafi Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) and Takfir Wal Hijra -- two groups it had infiltrated in Europe and North America. With the transfer of terrorist technology and expertise from the center to the periphery, the attacks by the associated groups of al-Qaida will pose a threat as great as al-Qaida. For instance, the ricin network in Europe -- especially in London, Manchester, East Anglia and Edinburgh in Britain -- was fed by GSPC working together with al-Qaida experts in the Pankishi Gorge in Georgia, the border of Chechnya.
Although attacking inside North America, Europe, Australasia and Israel remains a priority, the measures and countermeasures taken by these governments will make it difficult for al-Qaida to mount an operation in the West. Al-Qaida finds it less costly to operate in parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where there is lack of security controls. Therefore, most attacks will be against Western targets in the global south, such as the attack in Saudi Arabia.
While focusing on Western targets will remain a priority, al-Qaida will continue to conduct operations against Muslim rulers and regimes supporting the U.S.-led "war on terror." The physical security of the Saudi royalty, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will remain particularly vulnerable. Their regimes will come under sustained political challenges.
Al-Qaida has suffered with the arrest of nearly 3,100 organizers, operatives and supporters in 102 countries from October 2001. Although al-Qaida can still mount operations, with the increase in pressure, it is increasingly depending on its associate groups to conduct attacks. Traditionally, al-Qaida, with better-trained, more experienced and highly committed operatives, wanted to attack more difficult targets, especially strategic targets, and leave the easier and tactical targets to its associated groups.
Today, with al-Qaida operatives working closely together, the lethality of the attacks conducted by the associate groups is increasing. As demonstrated by the Morocco attack and the October 2002 attack in Bali, which killed over 190 people, operations conducted by associate groups of al-Qaida can be as lethal as those conducted by al-Qaida itself.
The theater of war will widen. Although the United States is under severe pressure to withdraw from Saudi Arabia, it will prefer to remain in the kingdom because withdrawal after the recent attack will mean defeat in the eyes of its opponents. Nonetheless, U.S. visibility in the Middle East, dependence on U.S. assistance and continued U.S. presence in Iraq will generate wide-ranging reactions from the Islamists, both terrorist groups and political parties.
The Al-Jazeera TV network on May 21 broadcast part of an audiotape by al-Qaida's principal strategist, Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahir. He called on Muslims to attack Western interests: "Learn the lesson from your 19 brethren who attacked America with their planes, in New York and Washington, wreaking on it unprecedented havoc from which it is still reeling." His pronouncement indicates that al-Qaida's intention to strike has not diminished. Both Zawahari and Osama bin Laden's pronouncements are the best guide to future Al-Qaida actions.
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