'Iraq has been an absolute gift to al-Qaida'

July 24, 2005
BY DANICA KIRKA

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-Qaida 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 said Saturday.

''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.

Few links between London, Egypt

The constant images on Arab-language networks of dead and dying civilians -- coupled with U.S. soldiers conducting operations -- have only heightened sensitivities.

''Iraq has been an absolute gift to al-Qaida,'' said Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at England's Bradford University. ''[Al-Qaida] seems to have no difficulty in getting more and more recruits.''

The attack Saturday in Egypt came only two days after four bombs partially detonated on three London subway trains and a bus, causing no deaths but spreading panic two weeks after four suicide bombers hit similar targets, killing 52, not counting the bombers.

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 the terror more widespread.

''It's more about the timing -- to overwhelm the West,'' Ranstorp said.

He also said al-Qaida itself has long been divided into two camps -- one that favors targets on secular regimes in the Middle East and another favoring 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.

'They can be hit anywhere'

The Red Sea resort city was thought to be one of the safest places in Egypt -- a factor that would have made it harder to carry out any attack without surveillance, expertise and planning. The complexities involved suggest the attacks were planned long ago.

''For 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,'' said Dia'a Rashwan, an Egyptian terrorism expert. ''We can't blame a small, amateurish group for this.''

The attacks in London and Egypt also could be seen as an attempt to demonstrate al-Qaida's prowess in the face of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at a Dubai-based think-tank, the Gulf Research Center.

''They're saying this war is not winnable,'' Alani said. ''If you look at the map of al-Qaida operations, they stretch from London to Bali to Istanbul to Mombasa to Saudi Arabia and Iraq.''

http://www.suntimes.com/output/terror/cst-nws-ties24s1.html