Intelligence

Recruits tied together only by ideas

TheStar.com - Recruits tied together only by ideas

Likely no single mastermind

behind terror attacks, experts say

DANICA KIRKA
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON—Car bombs at an Egyptian luxury hotel. Explosions in London subways. Suicide blasts in Baghdad.

With the frequency of terror attacks apparently mounting, experts searching for common threads behind the attacks suggest that the war on terror is being waged against an ever-increasing well of recruits, bound together by motives and cause — rather than a single Al Qaeda mastermind.

With havens in Afghanistan under pressure and their finances under scrutiny, militants may take philosophical guidance from the likes of Osama bin Laden but are largely relying on their own resources in carrying out operations, experts interviewed by The Associated Press said yesterday.

"They all want to be part of this phenomenon," said Loretta Napoleoni, author of Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks, as she explained the terror wave.

"It's not like someone is telling (the militants), `You bomb on the first of July.'"

Anger over the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also seems to be providing some inspiration, despite early arguments from Bush administration officials that fighting insurgents in Iraq would help prevent them from launching attacks on Western targets. The war has instead turned into a recruiting tool, experts said.

The images on Arab-language networks of dead and dying civilians, along with U.S. soldiers conducting operations, has only heightened sensitivities.

"Iraq has been an absolute gift to Al Qaeda," said Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at Bradford University in northern England. "(Al Qaeda) seems to have no difficulty in getting more and more recruits."

The attack yesterday in Egypt came only two days after four bombs partially detonated on three subway trains and a bus in London, causing no deaths but spreading panic two weeks after four suicide bombers hit similar targets, killing 52 people.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terror expert at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said few definitive links between the attacks in London and Egypt were likely.

However, the attackers may have taken note of the London attacks and opted to accelerate their plans — hoping to make people even more afraid and the terror more widespread.

"It's more about the timing — to overwhelm the West," Ranstorp said, adding the idea may have been to "overstretch the enemy." He also said Al Qaeda itself has long been divided into two camps — one that favours targets on secular regimes in the Middle East and another favouring targets among the "crusaders" of the West.

What's more, no Arabs have been blamed in the London attacks. Three Britons of Pakistani descent and a Briton of Jamaican descent were identified as the suspected suicide bombers in what has been seen as a "homegrown" operation.

The Red Sea resort city was believed to be one of the safest places in the country, so it would have been hard to carry out any attack without surveillance and expertise. This suggests the attacks were planned long ago.

"For an attack of this size and nature to happen in such a regionally important centre destroys the image of its tight security and sends a clear message to authorities that they can be hit anywhere," said Dia'a Rashwan, an Egyptian terrorism expert. "We can't blame a small, amateurish group for this."

July 24, 2005 at 01:41 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home