By Matthew Schofield - McClatchy
Newspapers
April 27, 2012
WASHINGTON -- A year ago, U.S.
Navy SEALs slipped into a heavily fortified compound in Pakistan and killed the
face of international terrorism. There is a growing fear, however, that Osama
bin Laden’s death didn’t even seriously wound the international terror threat.
This past decade — as al Qaida’s
core leadership was hunted, scattered and disrupted in Afghanistan and Pakistan
— a number of sympathetic groups and individuals sprang up around the world. In
the year since his death, their importance in this shadow world has grown.
Richard Fadden, the head of the
Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said that this many-headed beast is
expected to strike more and more frequently in coming years, and he cited the
difficulty of identifying “lone wolf” terrorists — small groups or individuals
who self-radicalize.
“It’s not easy,” he told a
Canadian Senate committee this week. “These individuals seem to be a mix of
terrorists and people who simply have very big personal problems.”
An unexpected example emerged in a
Norwegian courtroom last week: Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-immigration
nationalist on trial for the murders of 77 people, admitted that he closely
studied al Qaida’s methods. He called the group “the most successful revolutionary
movement in the world.”
Anti-terror experts see the al
Qaida influence extending even as the core of the organization is thought to be
down to an estimated 100 or fewer followers in its traditional home of
Afghanistan and Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas. A Pentagon spokesman said
that even that estimate could overshoot the total number who sleep in
Afghanistan on any given night, which might be no more than a few dozen.
Throughout the world, offshoot
groups have adopted the al Qaida label. They’ve pledged cooperation, shared
money and weapons, often trained together or advised each other on al Qaida
methods, and shared both strict Islamist roots and a fervent hatred for the
West.
Rather than waiting for orders
from above, these groups act first, then give credit to the mother
organization, which in turn often offers praise that bolsters the affiliate
group’s standing. U.S. and international forces have battled al Qaida in Iraq
for years, and AQI is thought to be trying to make inroads in the uprising
against President Bashir Assad in neighboring Syria.
Experts said that five other such
groups are considered the most dangerous, or the most capable: al Qaida in the
Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen; al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, based in Algeria
and Mali; Lashkar-e-Taiba of Pakistan; al Shabaab of Somalia; and Boko Haram, a
relatively young Nigerian militancy.
They organize on the Web and use
social media to communicate and recruit. They’re in contact with each other,
offering advice, money, weapons and planning. They’ve been involved in
attempted attacks in New York’s Times Square and aboard a Detroit-bound jetliner,
as well as assaults in London, Mumbai and Fort Hood, Texas.
The groups appear to have direct
ties to al Qaida’s central organization. One AQAP founder was close to bin
Laden. President Barack Obama called them “al Qaida’s most active operational
affiliate.”
As such, they are hunted. A week
ago, an airstrike in northeastern Yemen killed Mohammed Saeed al-Umda,
considered an original member and leader of AQAP. The source of the strike was
unclear, but U.S. and Yemeni forces cooperate closely on counterterrorism.
“What we’re facing today is a much, much larger
global threat,” said Seth Jones, an expert at the RAND Corp. who’s advised the
Pentagon on Afghanistan and Pakistan. “It’s a more dispersed threat. The threat
is decentralizing to a broad network of groups. Al Qaida inspires, but doesn’t
control, and they work with locals.”
The meaning of that threat:
Massive attacks such as those on 9/11 are unlikely to be repeated. But expect
smaller-scale attacks — the “strategy of a thousand cuts,” it was called in
AQAP’s slick online propaganda magazine Inspire.
A deadly example came in 2009 with
the rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, where Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik
Hasan, allegedly radicalized online by AQAP, is accused of shooting dead 13
soldiers. His trial is scheduled to begin in August.
Experts note that these groups
have largely localized agendas. Generally, they’re looking to impose Islamic
Sharia law and, if not overthrow a local government, carve out a space in which
to operate in their home country.
But the al Qaida model encourages
ideological hybridization: think locally, act globally
As Jones pointed out, attacks that
shake the United States can actually help further local goals. An attack that
causes the United States to look inward can allow a terror group more room to
operate elsewhere. And, problematically, even their failed attacks can turn out
to be seen as successes: The Christmas day 2009 attempt to blow up a commercial
jet as it neared Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Faisal Shahzad’s
alleged 2010 attempt to set off a car bomb in Times Square, both attracted
international attention.
Al Shabaab, which began in 2006 as
the militant wing of a group of Islamist courts that briefly ruled southern
Somalia, has also shown global ambitions — recruiting dozens of youths, mostly
from Minnesota but also from Alabama, California and Ohio, to fight an
insurgency against Somalia’s weak government and an African Union peacekeeping
force.
But Tom Sanderson, co-director of
the Transnational Threat Project at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington, says that one of the most puzzling questions for those
who track international terrorism is why al Shabaab — so far — hasn’t lashed
out at the United States.
“The Shabaab network inside the United States
is tailor-made for what al Qaida wants to accomplish in this country,”
Sanderson said. “They have ties to al Qaida, they have the rhetoric. It’s not a
very big stretch to turn that into attacks in the United States.”
To date, a Shabaab’s efforts have
mainly focused in Somalia. In Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba — the Army of the Pure
— has been around since 1993 and has been focused for most of that time on
India. Its biggest attack _—a November 2008 assault on a hotel and other sites
frequented by tourists in India’s commercial capital Mumbai — killed 164
people, including six Americans.
The group’s strongly anti-Western
rhetoric and alleged ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate
spy agency have fueled fears that it’ll soon look to strike farther afield —
perhaps to the United Kingdom, where Sanderson noted there is “a ready-made
diaspora, including youths who’ve become disenchanted with the West.”
Similar reasoning applies to al
Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which is thought to want to strike outside Africa
and particularly in France, the former colonial master in the region. The
Algeria-based group has been using money from kidnapping and smuggling to buy
up weapons from the caches of former Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi. Military
and counterterrorism experts believe AQIM played a role in the success of the
Tuareg rebellion in Mali, which touched off a military coup in the West African
nation this spring.
The group has also thought to have
gotten some help from Nigeria’s Boko Haram, a worrying addition to
international terrorism whose 115 attacks killed 550 people in Nigeria last
year alone. The name — which translates to “Western education is forbidden” —
tells of the group’s disdain for the West. Experts fear that its participation
in Mali shows it’s willing to operate outside its national borders.
“What is happening in Mali started as a
nationalist, separatist movement, but has it been co-opted by a collection of
Islamists?” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S.
Ansari Africa Center. “It’s a propaganda victory, certainly. But more than
that, consider that Boko Haram’s activities have forced Nigeria into inactivity
in its own neighborhood. That’s an ally we can no longer call on. A local
group, now pushing outside its traditional borders, has already hurt our
national interests.”
Experts agree that the main
emerging danger is these localized groups expanding their ambitions outside
their homelands. One year after bin Laden, international terror may no longer
have a face, but its teeth are still sharp.
Posts
