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Bin Laden's terror wave 2
By
Marc Erikson
 Reports - or call it hopeful
assumptions - of his demise were exaggerated. Osama bin
Laden is alive and proving it. The attack on the French
supertanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen on October 6,
the Bali bombing on October 12, and the Moscow theater
hostage drama show all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda
coordination, optimization of the organization's
remaining capabilities, and characteristic striving for
symbolic impact. Add to that Israeli intelligence
sources' claims that bin Laden, his operations chief
Ayman Zawahiri, and several hundred hardcore followers
since the end of September are back and safe in bin
Laden's ancestral territory in the border region of
Yemen and Saudi Arabia (the most inhospitable area of
the Arabian peninsula, the Rub al-Khali or Empty
Quarter, the largest sand sea on the face of the earth),
and the prospects for continuation of the present terror
wave and others to follow are high.
The US
Central Intelligence Agency, other Western and the
Jordanian intelligence services all now warn of an
impending large-scale "strategic" terrorist strike in
the next month or two. They have concluded that the
early October recorded threat messages of bin Laden and
Zawahiri broadcast by Al Jazeera TV were in all
likelihood genuine, that some form of al-Qaeda command
center has been re-established, and that intercepted
communications "chatter" and other intelligence
information all point to a "big one" in the near future.
According to US sources, the bin Laden tape was
played for captured al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, who
thought it to be authentic and a clear signal for
impending attack. Interrogation of Ramzi Binalshibh, the
Yemeni al-Qaeda man captured in Pakistan in
mid-September shortly after giving a lengthy interview
to Al Jazeera, broadly points in the same direction.
Binalshibh, while in Germany through August 2001, was a
key go-between for terror pilot Mohamed Atta and bin
Laden's Afghanistan headquarters, and has bragged to US
investigators that even with the losses that it has
suffered, al-Qaeda was fully capable of launching new
terror attacks. He also said that he had met bin Laden's
oldest son Saad in March, and in his Karachi apartment
three passports of wives and children of bin Laden were
found, suggesting that the bin Laden clan was alive and
well and on the move.
The October 6 attack on
the Limburg conforms to the bin Laden/Zawahiri threat
that al-Qaeda would be attacking the "economic lifeline"
of the US and the West. The same can in principle be
said for the Bali attack, killing mainly Australian
tourists, with the added fact that bin Laden has long
blamed Australia for assisting the independence of East
Timor, severing it from the "sacred Muslim territory" of
Indonesia. But in many ways, the Moscow hostage-taking
by radical Chechens was the most ominous event, showing
the continuing eminent al-Qaeda capability of striking
in the heart of "enemy" territory.
Skeptical
Western observers have long doubted and down-played
Russian assertions of tight Chechen-al Qaeda links and
instead have accused Russia of deliberate genocide in
Chechnya. But such doubts are critically mistaken. True,
in late 1994, when Jokar Dudayev, a former Soviet air
force general, began fighting for an independent
Chechnya, the struggle by the secular general and his
cohorts had more of the attributes of an independence
fight than an Islamic rebellion with global Islamist
terrorist connections. But that changed rapidly after
Dudayev's death at the hand of Russian troops. Bin Laden
and al-Qaeda saw the opportunity of creating "one Muslim
nation on the Caucasus" under Wahhabi Islamic
fundamentalist rule. Money started flowing to the tune
of several millions of dollars per month to Amir
al-Khattab (aka Samir Saleh Abdullah al-Suwailem), a
Saudi-born commander and close associate of bin Laden's
since 1987 when he joined the mujahideen fight against
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Khattab, after
the outbreak of the second Chechen war in 1999, aligned
ever more closely with the most radical Chechen elements
around Shamil Basayev and Arbi Barayev, sidelining more
moderate Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov. Not only did
significant funds and guns flow from al-Qaeda to
Khattab; Chechens also received training in Afghanistan
and an Islamic "learning center" preaching strict
Wahhabism (and at one point counting 1,000 recruits to
the Islamic jihad cause) was established in Chechnya.
Arbi Barayev, as much of a gangster as an
Islamic fighter, was responsible in 1998 for the capture
and beheading of three British subjects and one New
Zealand telecommunications engineer. After being killed
by Russian special forces in June 2001, his nephew,
Mosvar Barayev, the Moscow hostage taker, took over and
- with Khattab's help - built a more formidable
terrorist outfit, the "Special Purpose Islamic
Regiment", than his uncle would have dreamt of.
Commander Khattab met his death in March of this
year, most likely poisoned by a Russian special ops
team. For Movsar Barayev, the time for a spectacular
action had come. Prior to the Moscow attack, he and some
followers video-taped messages for Al Jazeera, women
fighters were dressed up Palestinian suicide bomber
style, the location chosen for the terrorist attack was
- most pointedly - a Moscow theater showing a celebrated
highly patriotic musical. The signals and handwriting of
an al-Qaeda coordinated action message could not have
been clearer. (Note also that this past week, Mounir
Motassadeq, a Moroccan who was Mohamed Atta's moneyman,
told a German court that initially it had been planned
that Atta join Khattab in Chechnya; similarly,
Zaccharias Moussaoui has told French intelligence that
his original mission was to recruit European Muslims for
the Chechnya jihad, which thus obviously has loomed
large on the al-Qaeda priorities list.)
Movsar
Barayev is dead. Those of his "regiment" who didn't die
with him are likely holed up in the Pankisi Gorge on the
Chechnya-Georgia border to which thousands of Chechen
terrorists have retreated - and been targeted, among
others, by US special forces in Georgia since earlier
this year. Movsar Barayev's action never had a chance of
forcing Russian troops out of Chechnya. It was a
symbolic, suicidal al-Qaeda-style act - and a portent of
things to come.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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