Authors: Jason Burke
In short, the operations of late 2001 put an end to the concentration of Islamic militant leadership, volunteers and infrastructure in Afghanistan that had come about in the late 1990s. The ‘ingathering’ that occurred between 1996 and 2001 was shown to have been merely a transient phase in the history of Islamic militancy. By the beginning of 2002, it was obvious that the physical assets of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan were destroyed, the personnel scattered. The ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’, the first of our three concentric circles of al-Qaeda, had taken a pounding. It was clear that a new phase of Islamic militancy was beginning. But, to start with at least, it was not entirely clear what shape that militancy would take.
In our scheme of concentric rings of ‘al-Qaeda’s’, the circle beyond the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ was composed of the ‘network of networks’. This element of al-Qaeda also suffered in the immediate aftermath of the war of 2001. Though some of the more established groups, such as the Pakistani Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Algerian GIA/GSPC and the Kurdish Ansar-ul-Islam were galvanised by the arrival of the battle hardened and motivated veterans who had fled from Afghanistan, almost all established local groups soon found themselves under immense – and often effective–pressure from governments and security services. Intelligence services’ efforts were assisted by the unprecedented freedom of action allowed by an international community scared by the ‘new’ threat as well as the military and diplomatic support now offered by Washington allies that were seen as partners in the ‘War on Terror’. The hugely enhanced security precautions at airports, government buildings, railway stations, docks and power installations as well as the vastly improved international co-operation between national agencies helped too. In Egypt any militancy that might have survived the crackdowns of the mid and late 1990s was crushed. In
Pakistan the military government tried to reverse, at least in part, the policy of nearly twenty years and rein in, if not entirely eradicate, the terrorists and militants that had been acting as Islamabad’s proxies for so long. In the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf group suffered under a series of American-supported military offensives. In Algeria, militancy remained at a relatively residual level. Even the Saudi Arabian regime recognized that some degree of change was inevitable and took unprecedented – if only partially effective – measures to restrict terrorist funding, arrest and detain known militants, prevent further recruitment and forestall new attacks, both in the kingdom and outside it. All across Europe the police, bolstered by new legislation, rounded up activists. And so, along with the central core of al-Qaeda being broken up, the constituent groups within the ‘network of networks’, as well as many other movements and cells that had never been directly linked to al-Qaeda began to fragment too.
Yet despite all this the attacks continued. Why?
When analysing the years immediately following the 11 September attacks and the war in Afghanistan it is possible to distinguish two main trends within Islamic militant violence. It is the steady replacement of one trend by the other that reveals the direction in which Islamic militancy is travelling and explains why, despite the damage done to the core of al-Qaeda and the network of networks, the attacks go on.
Like particles after the big bang, still travelling long after the explosion, or an engine running down slowly after power has been cut off, the pattern of militancy and the style of terrorist attacks established during the late 1990s continued unchanged for some time after the invasion of Afghanistan despite the damage done to the al-Qaeda hardcore. In late November 2001, while at Tora Bora, bin Laden told his associates to disperse. Money was given to anyone with a viable plan to launch attacks on Western interests. It took a few months for the results of this decision to become apparent but one example was the abortive attempt by three Saudis to pilot small power boats loaded with explosives into British and American warships passing through the straits of Gibraltar in May 2002. The cell was led by Mohammed al-Tubaiti, the man who had been told to go and do some homework when he had asked bin Laden’s aides for a ‘martyrdom operation’ a
year previously. As the American jets had roared over Tora Bora al-Tubaiti had been given $5,000 by Ahmed al-Moulla al-Bilal, the bin Laden lieutenant who had previously brushed him off, and told to get on with whatever attack he could manage.
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Al-Tubaiti was just one of many. A month before his arrest, a huge truck bomb had exploded outside a 2,000-year-old synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, killing twenty-one. This attack, too, had originated in Afghanistan during the last days of the fighting of 2001. The bomber was a 24-year-old drifter and former smuggler called Nizar Nouar, who had ended up in the training camps after leaving his lower-middle-class Tunisian family home several years previously. As the Taliban collapsed, Nouar, like al-Tubaiti, was given a sum of money and sent off to set in train terrorist operations. Investigators quickly established that he had called a number linked to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed a few hours before before he died.
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Such attacks, by men who had been in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, continued at regular intervals over the next months and years. The series of strikes in Istanbul in November 2003 can also be seen as part of this pattern. Like the Morocco plot and the Tunisia attack, the strikes on Turkey showed many typical features of the old-style of ‘al-Qaeda’ operation, with a committed militant (in this instance a Turk who had made his way to Afghanistan in the late 1990s, looking for training to go to fight in Chechnya), returning to his own country to recruit a group of local activists.
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The results, a British consulate in ruins, a British-owned bank destroyed, two synagogues wrecked, 57 dead and 700 wounded, were spectacular. Equally, the series of attacks that were committed in Saudi Arabia between 2002 and 2004, executed by groups of Saudi Arabian men who were recruited locally by more senior Saudi militants who had recently returned from Afghanistan, also fit this pattern of operation. A list of ten most wanted men issued (in an extraordinary break with previous practice) by Saudi authorities included one Moroccan, who had been with bin Laden and made his way to the kingdom after the 2001 war, and nine locals, of whom around half had been trained in Afghanistan.
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These operations, involving volunteers tapping into the central strategic and logistical resources held by more senior figures such as bin
Laden or his close aides, follow the pattern of Islamic terrorist attacks established between 1998 and 2001. But though they show the continued importance of what bin Laden and others were able to create in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 they also show how important it is not to overestimate the role the ‘Al-Qaeda hardcore’ played in the rise of Islamic militancy in this period. For critical to all these attacks was the ease with which a few motivated individuals with a degree of training and experience from the camps recruited many more people
who had limited or no previous experience of radical activism
. And it is this capacity of the alumni of the Afghan camps to find volunteers to help them that leads us to the second trend in contemporary violent militancy that began to emerge in the aftermath of the 2001 war. It was, logically enough, this type of activism which, as the older, more experienced individuals were killed or captured and access to the logistical necessities for attacks became increasingly restricted, became more and more evident and it is this type of activism that is likely to dominate radical Islamic militancy for years, if not decades to come.
One of the first examples of the new style came on 12 October 2002 when three bombs exploded in Bali, killing 202 people. The most devastating of the blasts destroyed a nightclub full of Western holidaymakers. A group of around a dozen local Indonesian Islamic activists, many related to each other, were behind the attack, and this ‘Bali cell’ appears to have been a radical splinter group within the nebulous southeast Asian network known as Jemaa Islamiyya. Crucially, though they received some assistance and direction from more senior militants who had visited Afghanistan in the preceding years, the cell was largely composed of young men who had no previous involvement in terrorism. They were not ‘recruited’ by bin Laden or anyone close to him but came together of their own accord and appear to have decided to go ahead with a campaign of violence directed at local Western targets despite the opposition of more moderate senior figures within Jamaa Islamiyya. The more junior members of the group appear to have been recruited only weeks before the attack itself. Though some funding may have been supplied by senior militants, possibly even Khaled Sheikh Mohammed himself, there still appears to have been no al-Qaeda master-bomber. The plan appears to have
been the bombers’ own with targets picked for very personal reasons.
This makes Bali significant. In the preceding chapters I have placed Islamic terrorist attacks on a scale with those entirely organized and executed by relatively senior activists with considerable experience and training who were closely associated with bin Laden at one end and those conducted with no input from anyone from the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ at the other. Most of the attacks during 2002, including the attempted strikes in Morocco, the attack on the synagogue in Tunisia and, possibly, the car-bombing of Israeli tourists at a hotel in Mombasa in November of that year, would be clustered in the middle of the scale. But Bali, a major attack involving sophisticated techniques and motivated by a profound hatred of anything that represented the West and kufr, was an attack,
in the style of al-Qaeda
, but apparently not directly involving the group itself. It would thus be placed further down the scale. It is true that at least one of the key figures in the Bali cell had fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and admitted knowing bin Laden (though he said that the Saudi had nothing to do with the attack), but what is clear is that the nightclub bombing was an independent operation, executed by men who were committed to the al-Qaeda agenda but in no way connected with the group itself. Had they been able to seek assistance from an al-Qaeda hardcore in Afghanistan they might well have done so. But such a question is hypothetical. By late 2002, there was no one in Afghanistan, or any where else for that matter, to go to for training and support. So the Bali bombers did it on their own.
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Nine months after the Bali attack came another major strike, at the other end of the Islamic world, in Casablanca. This attack too would be placed even further down towards the ‘autonomous’ end of our scale. It may have been masterminded by two men who had recently been in Afghanistan, but it was carried out by fourteen suicide bombers recruited locally. Even the Moroccan authorities did not attempt to prove any significant link to ‘al-Qaeda’.
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What is most striking about the Casablanca attacks, which killed 39 people, is the background of the suicide bombers. They were all Moroccan men, aged between 20 and 24 and from the sprawling slum of Sidi Moumin in the city. All were young and poor. Most were unmarried, unemployed and poorly
educated. Only one, a substitute teacher, had graduated from high school and been to college. The rest included a parking attendant, a pushcart vendor and a shoe repairman. None were previously known to authorities, none had any previous known involvement in Islamic activism and all were recruited during the four months it took one or two senior activists, themselves probably connected to a longstanding Moroccan Islamic group, to plan the attack.
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Again, the Casablanca attack provided a signpost to the future of Islamic radicalism. It was another step beyond Bali. In Casablanca a dozen young men, completely independently of anything happening in Afghanistan or Iraq or elsewhere, were bound together into a terrorist cell that was capable of delivering more than a dozen effective, if unsophisticated, bombs. ‘Al-Qaeda’, as commonly conceived, provided no help whatsoever.
This picture of autonomous cells forming independent of any wider co-ordination is reinforced when one considers the steady background hum of violence directed at Western targets throughout 2002 and 2003 that accompanied the big, ‘headline’ attacks. There were dozens of such incidents, including an attempt to blow up a US consulate in Pakistan, bombings in the Philippines and shootings in Kuwait and Jordan.
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In Yemen a bomb went off in Sana’a and, in December 2002, three American missionary doctors were shot and killed. Three months later a Briton was shot dead in his car in Riyadh. In Jakarta the Marriott hotel was attacked. By the end of 2003, rockets were being fired at American troops on an almost daily basis in Afghanistan. In Kashmir, where Islamic militant activity had been dominated by ‘foreigners’ from Pakistan or Afghanistan for many years, three local youths died in suicide bombings. A huge car bomb in Bombay in August 2003 was the work of an Indian Muslim inspired by a bizarre mixture of local and international grievances.
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None of these attacks were linked to bin Laden or anyone close to him and they are only a small selection of the hundreds of such incidents that occurred in this period.
Indeed, if all these attacks are added to the bigger bomb strikes already placed on our scale a clear pattern begins to emerge, indicating the direction in which Islamic terrorism was moving. The markers begin to shift to one end. By the middle of 2003 the dominance of the ‘new’ style of Islamic militancy involving autonomous groups
conducting operations independent of any central hub or authority, was becoming increasingly clear. Very few of the strikes seen since 2001 had involved the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ in any meaningful way. Indeed, as time passed, not only did the involvement of bin Laden and his associates seemed to drop away entirely but so too did the role of the Afghan alumni. Twelve months later an attack would come which would confirm this tendency in a spectacular fashion.