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| Terror Networks & Islam |
| More links between London and Sharm el-Sheikh |
| 2005-07-24 |
| Car bombs at an Egyptian resort, explosions in London subways and suicide blasts in Baghdad: the terror war seems to be drawing from an ever-growing pool of recruits bound by motives and cause rather than a single Al Qaeda mastermind, terror experts say. With havens in Afghanistan under pressure and their finances under scrutiny, militants may take philosophical guidance from the likes of Osama bin Laden, but rely largely on themselves to carry out operations, experts surveyed by The Associated Press say. âThey all want to be part of this phenomenon,â said Loretta Napoleoni, author of âTerror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networksâ as she explained the terror wave. âItâs not like someone is telling (the militants), âYou bomb on the first of July.â â Though the attack Saturday in Egypt came only two weeks after bombs exploded on three subway lines and a bus in London killed 52 people, the Sharm el-Sheik operation would have been months in the making, experts said. The resort city is believed to be one of the safest places in the country - a factor, which would have made it harder to carry out any attack without surveillance, expertise and planning. âFor an attack of this size and nature to happen in such a regionally important center destroys the image of its tight security and sends a clear message to authorities that they can be hit anywhere,â said Egyptian terrorism expert Diaâa Rashwan. âWe canât blame a small, amateurish group for this.â However, the attackers may have taken note of the London attacks and opted to accelerate their plans of attack - hoping to make people even more afraid and the terror more widespread. âItâs more about the timing - to overwhelm the West,â said Magnus Ranstorp, Director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He said the idea may have been to âoverstretch the enemy.â Ranstorp said few definitive links between the attacks in London and Egypt were likely, in part because Al Qaeda itself has been long been divided into two camps - one which favored targets on secular regimes in the Middle East while the other favored targets in the West. Whatâs more, no Arabs have been identified as having taken part in the London attacks. Three Britons of Pakistani descent and a Briton of Jamaican descent have been identified as the suspected suicide bombers in what has been seen as a âhomegrownâ operation. However, a strange twist in the Egyptian bombing investigation suggested that while all the attacks might not be related, some of them might be. A new video by Al Qaeda in Iraq showing a missing Egyptian envoy offered a justification for Islamic militants to focus on the Sinai, saying that Egypt lets Israelis âdesecrateâ the peninsula by entering a coastal strip stretching from Taba to Sharm. The tape, which shows Egyptian envoy Ihab al-Sherif, who was kidnapped this month and reportedly killed, did not mention Saturdayâs attacks in Egypt, but its release on the day of the bombings was noteworthy. Even so, the spate of bombings - or attempted bombings - in London and Egypt can be seen as an attempt to demonstrate Al Qaedaâs prowess in the face of the US-led war on terrorism, said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at Dubai-based think-tank, the Gulf Research Center. âTheyâre saying this war is not winnable,â Alani said. âIf you look at the map of Al Qaeda operations, they stretch from London to Bali to Istanbul to Mombasa to Saudi Arabia and Iraq.â The devastating blasts are likely meant as revenge for Western involvement in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Alani said. The message to Westerners is, âYou are not safe anywhere as long as your government is involved in this unjust war.â Though US President George W. Bushâs administration argued that it was necessary to defeat the insurgents in Iraq to prevent them from being able to launch attacks on Western targets, the war has instead turned into a recruiting tool, experts said. The constant images on Arab television networks like Al-Jazeera of dead and dying civilians - coupled with US soldiers conducting operations - has only heightened sensitivities. âIraq has been an absolute gift to Al Qaeda,â said Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at Bradford University in northern England. â(Al Qaeda) seems to have no difficulty in getting more and more recruits.â In the longer term, the attackers seek to physically isolate Muslims and the West, Alani said. Some isolation will occur if the terrorists keep up their assaults. âAmericans will not go to the Middle East anymore. Europeans will find different destinations,â he said. âAnd Middle Easterners will be very careful in going to the West.â Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who chairs the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, told reporters the fresh attacks only underline the need to study the root causes of violence. âThe whole world is getting very disturbed. The frequency (of terrorist attacks) seems to be mounting,â he said. âYou just cannot tell these people (the terrorists) to stop.â |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |