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| Terror Networks |
| Iraq, Mindanao main centers of global terrorist activities |
| 2006-01-08 |
| IRAQ has replaced Afghanistan as the nerve centre of global terrorism by militant groups whose ability to regenerate, despite setbacks, means that suicide bombings and other mass-casualty attacks remain a serious danger in 2006, analysts said. Three major developments are likely to define the security landscape this year, Singapore-based terrorism analyst Rohan Gunaratna told a forum organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) last week. "The first is that al-Qaeda has morphed or transformed from a small group into a terrorist movement," he told diplomats, academics, officials and business executives. "So today the threat is not so much from one single organisation called al-Qaeda but from the global jihad movement." Mr Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at the Singapore-based Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, said governments must "prepare for a challenge posed by a number of disparate groups" waging campaigns on the global, regional and local levels. "The second most significant development we have seen is that the centre of gravity of international terrorism has shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq," he said. "Iraq is the new land of jihad. "Like we saw the last generation of jihadists coming from Afghanistan, we will see the next generation of jihadists will come from Iraq." The US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 that ousted the fundamentalist Taliban regime resulted in the dismantling of al-Qaeda training bases there. Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was moving to establish a global terrorist network from Iraq similar to the way Osama bin Laden had done from Afghanistan, Mr Gunaratna said. The third significant development was the deepening co-operation among various militant groups worldwide, Mr Gunaratna said. In Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) remained a long-term threat, said Jakarta-based terrorism analyst Sidney Jones, Southeast Asia project director of the think-tank the International Crisis Group. JI had split into two -- the mainstream JI with an estimated membership of about 1000, and a radical faction called the JI Thoifah Muqotilah with 30 to 50 members bent on carrying out suicide attacks -- Mr Jones told the ISEAS forum. Mainstream JI leaders were opposed to indiscriminate bombing and their main goal was the establishment of an Islamic state in the region, Mr Jones said. The JI suicide brigade seemed to operate independently from the mainstream, and its main aim was to attack US and allied targets, Indonesian non-Muslims and Indonesians associated with the West, according to Mr Jones. Among the radical faction's members were Noordin Mohamed Top, Dulmatin and Umar Patek -- all linked to deadly bomb attacks, including blasts which killed more than 200 people on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002 and 2005. While bombing remained its weapon of choice, the radical JI faction had also contemplated kidnappings, both to raise funds and instill terror, Mr Jones said. Among the planned targets were Americans working at an electrical plant near Banyuwangi in Indonesia and an Australian hotel manager in Surabaya. None of the planned kidnappings were carried out. Zachary Abuza, a terrorism expert at Simmons College in Boston, told the same forum that clandestine JI training bases in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao continued to churn out militants. "Mindanao in many ways remains the soft underbelly in terms of security in Southeast Asia," Mr Abuza said. A conflict between the Philippine government and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) had left "vast swathes of ungoverned territory" in Mindanao, which groups like JI had moved into, he said. The JI had established training camps in Mindanao in the mid-1990s and "training continues there to this day, although on a much, much smaller scale," Mr Abuza said. According to Jones, two of the JI radical faction's senior operatives, Dulmatin and Umar Patek, are in Mindanao. Mr Abuza noted that the MILF had publicly denied ties with the JI, but that signal intercepts by the Philippine military and statements from arrested JI members showed otherwise. While the JI suicide squad packed lethality, it was the JI mainstream which posed the longer-term security threat, Mr Jones said. A mainstream JI leader, Abu Rusdan, was likely to rebuild the organisation following his recent release from prison, but Mr Jones expected him to focus on religious outreach programmes, not violence, to revive the group. "The problem in the long term for Indonesia is that as JI revives and reconstructs and rebuilds its mass base, what then is it going to do with that mass base?" Mr Jones said. "It is still continuing to give its members military training and once you do that, there's always a question of how that military training will be used." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |