Posted on 10/14/2002 3:00:10 PM PDT by knighthawk
A new diaspora of Al-Qaeda have taken refuge in South East Asia, working in small cells using political unrest as cover.
While attention in Washington continues to be focused on Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the war on terrorism is far from over and has entered a new phase.
US intelligence officials say Al-Qaeda operatives who found refuge in Pakistan are regrouping and moving back into Afghanistan less than a year after a successful US military campaign forced them to flee their one-time sanctuary by the thousands.
Officials say the movement back into Afghanistan is still relatively small and many who escaped Afghanistan are not seeking return. Instead, they remain scattered throughout South Asia and the Middle East, creating a terrorist diaspora that deeply concerns US counter-terrorism officials.
New dangers
Of growing concern is the presence of Al-Qaeda in South-East Asia. The US has presented the Indonesian government with the results of the interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative, Omar al-Faruq, who was arrested in Jakarta in June and turned over to American interrogators. In September, he told his captors that Abu Bakar Bashir (Ba’asyir), the leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (Islamic Group), had provided money, explosives and men for several terrorist acts, including a plan to blow up the US embassies in Jakarta and in Malaysia, according to intelligence sources.
The Jemaah Islamiyah in the country has a history going back decades, when it began advocating an Islamic state in Indonesia. A few years ago, it linked up with Al-Qaeda. The local group wanted the training and expertise Al-Qaeda could offer to help it press for an Islamic state; Al-Qaeda wanted links to the community and money for its attacks on the US.
In the Philippines, the group formed an alliance with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and with Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group that has kidnapped scores of Filipinos and foreigners over the past three years and killed three of its American captives. A senior Philippine intelligence official says: "Jemaah Islamiyah should be declared by the Indonesian government to be a terrorist organisation and Bashir should be arrested. The activities of people identified with him are jeopardising peace in the region."
Promoting religious war
The Bush administration is poised to declare Bashir’s group a terrorist organisation but it is prepared to give the Indonesian government a reasonable period to take some strong action against the group. Labelling the Islamic community as "terrorists" could cause serious problems for President Megawati Sukarnoputri. The group has a large following — vice president Hamzah Haz recently had Bashir to dinner and called him a Muslim brother — and the campaign against terrorism is seen by many in Indonesia as a campaign against Islam.
Faruq told his CIA interrogators that when he arrived in Indonesia in l998, having been sent by a top aide to Osama bin Laden, he linked up with Agus Dwikarna, an Indonesian businessman and member of Jemaah Islamiyah. Faruq helped Dwikarna set up an organisation, Laskar Jundullah, which carried out attacks on Christians in Sulawesi, intelligence officials said.
Al-Qaeda encouraged Bashir’s goal of trying to set off a religious war in Indonesia, Faruq told the CIA. A Bashir lieutenant obtained the explosives that were to be used in the attack on the US Embassy in Jakarta, according to Faruq. Bashir also dispatched another member of the Islamic community to bomb the US Embassy in Malaysia, an attack that had been intended for the 11 September anniversary, according to Faruq.
In mid-September, Singapore issued a detailed report on the activities of the Islamic community members in the country — l9 were arrested in August. The government said the group was plotting to overthrow the government in Malaysia and Singapore in order to form Islamic states. Officials allege the Singapore cell was also plotting to blow up the airport, a US navy ship and a bar frequented by US servicemen.
Joining forces <
According to Singapore, Islamic extremist groups with roots in at least five Southeast Asian countries have forged a coalition seeking to transform their separate local struggles into a campaign to establish a single regional Islamic state. The alliance, formed over the last three years, is the handiwork of Riduan Isamuddin; an Indonesian militant considered by regional intelligence agencies to be one of Al-Qaeda’s chief operatives in the area. At the same time that Isamuddin was plotting against targets in Singapore, he had bolder objectives in mind.
According to officials, Isamuddin was seeking to coordinate the activities of his Jemaah Islamiyah network with Muslim radicals in Thailand and Muslim separatists in the southern Philippines in a regional alliance called Rabitat ul-Mujahidin.
"The objective was to unify the Islamic militant groups in the region, with the ultimate goal of realising an Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia and (the southern Philippine island of) Mindanao, following which Singapore and Brunei would eventually be absorbed," reported Singapore’s home affairs ministry.
Many-headed Hydra
One year into the war on terrorism, US intelligence officials note that Al-Qaeda still operates terror cells in as many as 65 countries. Saudi Arabia, home of l5 of the l9 hijackers involved in the 11 September attacks, remains an Al-Qaeda stronghold.
Since June, nearly 80% of the hits on a secretive Al-Qaeda website have originated from e-mail addresses in Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda uses the website to deliver sermons against the West and encrypted messages to its operatives. "For every terrorist plot we discover and every terrorist cell we disrupt, there are dozens of others in the works," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate armed services committee in July.
Some experts believe that Al-Qaeda is less of a threat today than in the past. "The war on terror and the damage done to Al-Qaeda has at least blunted the threat," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorist specialist at the Washington-based Rand Corporation. "And that’s a significant achievement."
Others believe Al-Qaeda has mutated into a form that is no less deadly and even more difficult to combat. One counterterrorism investigator says: "We are confronted with cells that are all over the place, developing in a very horizontal structure without any evident big centre of co-ordination. Our operational evaluation today is that the threat is a lot greater than it was in December. That is to say, the worst is ahead of us, not behind us."
This may be overstating the case. But it is true that Al-Qaeda has become so diffuse that it is almost impossible to track with the whole world now its field of operations.
With at least two-thirds of Al-Qaeda’s leadership — and untold numbers of foot soldiers — still out there, the war on terrorism is clearly far from over.
(Excerpt) Read more at janes.com ...
What a surprise! I just want to know where Saudi is in the big list: #4, #5,...
Too late.
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