THE ROVING
EYE The emergence of
hyperterrorism By Pepe Escobar
"If you don't stop your injustices, more
blood will flow and these attacks are very little
compared with what may happen with what you call
terrorism." - Abu Dujan al-Afghani, purported
military spokesman for al-Qaeda in Europe, claiming
responsibility on video for the Madrid bombings.
The "al-Qaedization" of terrorism in Europe is a
political "big bang". According to intelligence
estimates in Brussels, there may be an invisible army of
up to 30,000 holy warriors spread around the world,
which begs the question: how will Western democracies be
able to fight them?
The Madrid bombings have
already produced the terrorists' desired effect: fear.
Cities all across Europe fear they may be targeted for
the next massacre of the innocents. On his October 18,
2003 tape, Osama bin Laden warned that Italy, Britain
and Poland, as well as Spain - all staunch Washington
allies in the invasion and occupation of Iraq - would be
struck. Sheikh Omar Bakri, spiritual leader of the
Islamist group al-Mouhajiroun, said in London he
"wouldn't be surprised if Italy is the next target".
Social paranoia inevitably will be on the rise -
and the main victims are bound to be millions of
European Muslims. Racist political parties like Jean
Marie le Pen's National Front in France and Umberto
Bossi's Northern League in Italy will pump up the volume
of their extremely vicious anti-Islamic xenophobia. For
scores of moderate European politicians, it will be
increasingly difficult to maintain their support for a
solution to the Palestinian tragedy - as the Sharon
government in Israel spins the line that both Israel and
Europe are "victims of terrorism".
This
Wednesday, the European Union's foreign policy chief,
Javier Solana, will ask the EU to name an expert to be
in charge of "coordinating" the action of the 15
countries (soon to be 25). Belgium's Prime Minister Guy
Verhofstadt has proposed the creation of a European
Intelligence Center to combat terrorism. Currently, each
national intelligence service acts on its own, not
always connected with Europol, the continent's police
body in The Hague. A special cell in Brussels, for
instance, conducts its own, separate investigations.
The new al-Qaeda virus The special
cell in Brussels considers that the Madrid bombings
required "minute preparations, money, experience and
cohesion". This has led European specialists on Islamist
movements, like Antoine Basbus, director of the
Observatory of Arab Countries, and Olivier Roy, a
research director at the French Center of Scientific
Research, to agree that al-Qaeda is now operating on
three layers: the originals, or Arab-Afghans who were
part of the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s; the
franchised local groups; and the recent "converts" who
provide the crucial link between the "base" and the
local outfits.
The anti-terrorist experts in
Brussels tell Asia Times Online they had known for some
time that the original "base" of the al-Qaeda was
greatly depleted. After all, Mohammed Atta, the leading
military planner, and Mahfouz Ould, one of the leading
ideologues, have been killed. Abu Zubaida, in charge of
recruiting, and Ibn Sheikh Al-Libi, in charge of
training, are in jail. But unlike the Americans roughly
a year ago, the experts in Brussels did not assume that
al-Qaeda was broken. They stress that al-Qaeda's real
danger is "their persistent capacity to incite and
collaborate with local groups" - they estimate there may
be around 40 of these - to act in their own countries.
"But we are even more concerned about groups that we
don't know anything about."
The Moroccan arm of
al-Qaeda, for instance, is the little-known Moroccan
Islamic Combatants Group. The experts in Brussels now
confirm that Saudis and Moroccans came to Madrid to plan
the bombings alongside Islamist residents of Spain. But
al-Qaeda is not only active in the Maghreb: it is very
well connected in sub-Saharan Africa, in places not yet
fully investigated like the Ivory Coast and the Central
African Republic.
For months now, ever since the
Istanbul bombings in November 2003, different European
intelligence services have been afraid they would have
to confront a mutated enemy. Most services were in fact
sure that Istanbul represented the first attack on
Europe. The possibility of further use of chemical and
bacteriological weapons, and even nuclear "dirty bombs",
was not, and now more than ever is not, discarded.
Roy says that recruiting is now being conducted
locally because "mobility is more difficult; there is
not a place anymore where one goes to meet the chief or
to get training". Recruiting campaigns continue all over
the EU. For instance, one of the perpetrators of the
bombing of the UN office in Baghdad in August 2003 was
recruited in Italy. Other recruits in Spain, Germany and
Norway ended up in Iraq via Syria. Global jihad, of
which al-Qaeda is the leading exponent, is above all an
idea. It thrives on spectacular terrorist attacks.
Targets may have no strategic interest: what matters is
terror as a spectacle - like bombing a nightclub in
Bali. Madrid represented something much more
sophisticated because in the Western collective
consciousness it was the link between an American ally
and the war on Iraq.
Spain may have become a new
symbol of the clash between the jihadis' version of
Islam and the "Jews and Crusaders". But as far as global
jihad is concerned, it doesn't matter whether a European
democracy like Spain is governed by conservatives or
socialists. Al-Qaeda is an apocalyptic sect betting on
the clash of civilizations: Islamic jihadis against
"Jews and Crusaders". It is the same with the Bush
administration spinning a "war on terror": James
Woolsey, a former Central Intelligence Agency head,
believes this is the Fourth World War and conservative
guru Samuel Huntington bets on, what else, a "clash of
civilizations".
Al-Qaeda's biggest problem is
that it has no legitimacy in the Middle East as far as
the key issues, Palestine and Iraq, are concerned. Osama
bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's No 2, were
never interested in the Palestinian struggle. In Roy's
formula, "Al-Qaeda represents the globalization of
Islam, not of the Middle Eastern conflicts."
The Osama factor Al-Qaeda is a nebula
in total dispersion, locally and globally. Take Osama's
audio-video productions: they are always delivered to
the world via Islamabad, but the distribution chain is
so fragmented that no one can go back to the source.
Tribal chiefs protect bin Laden all over the
Pakistan-Afghan border for two reasons: because he is a
Muslim and because he fought in the anti-Soviet jihad in
the 1980s. This has nothing to do with September 11 -
which for tribal leaders is something akin to a trip to
the moon - and it goes beyond the US$25 million bounty
on bin Laden's head. Most Afghans don't like Arabs and
blame them for every disaster in the last 25 years. But
every tomb of an Arab killed by an American bomb in 2001
is honored like a holy place.
The experts in
Brussels consider that the possible capture of Osama in
the upcoming spring offensive may not change anything,
because in the current global jihad modus operandi the
"base" retains all the initiative.
Roy insists
military muscle simply does not work: "We are able to
fight al-Qaeda with police operations, intelligence and
justice. On a political level, one must make sure that
they don't have a social base: already they don't have a
political wing, sympathizers, intellectuals, newspapers
or unions. They must be isolated. There's only one way
for this to happen: full integration of Muslims," That's
the exact opposite of the stigma privileged by
conservative governments and racist, xenophobic parties.
Key conclusions According to the
experts in the Brussels anti-terrorist cell, proving
al-Qaeda's responsibility in the Madrid bombings will
lead to three important conclusions: 1. Al-Qaeda is
back in the spectacular attack business, even if the
attack is perpetrated by affiliates. 2. Cells remain
very much active around Europe, and the West as a whole
remains a key target. 3. Global jihad has achieved
one of its key objectives, which is to strike against
one of Washington's allies in Iraq.
The
repercussions of all these conclusions are of course
immense - from Washington to all major European capitals
and spilling to the arc from the Middle East to Central
and South Asia.
Brussels also alerts that this
happens independently of other al-Qaeda objectives which
remain very much in place: the departure of all American
soldiers from Saudi soil; the fall of the House of Saud;
and the expulsion of Jews from the Middle East.
Al-Qaeda's ultimate objective is a caliphate. As far as
the absolute majority of Muslims in the world are
concerned, the global jihad's most seductive appeal
undoubtedly remains its struggle to end the American
imperial control of Islamic lands.
Romano Prodi,
head of the European Commission, says that force is not
working against terrorism: "Terrorism now is more
powerful than before." Most European politicians and
intellectuals - apart from Blair, Berlusconi, Aznar and
their friends - consider that the Bush administration's
response to asymmetric warfare has only served to
increase the threat. It's a classic reductio ad
absurdum. Increasingly lethal American military
muscle deployed all over the Islamic world has led to
more lethal terrorist attacks, in the Islamic world and
also in the West. More muscled defense of hard targets,
or strategic targets, has led to more indiscriminate
attacks on so-called soft targets (like the Madrid
trains). Madrid is a tragic mirror of Baghdad and
Karbala: more than 200 innocent workers and students
died in Madrid, more than 200 innocent pilgrims died in
Iraq.
Not only in Brussels or the European
Parliament in Strasbourg is there practically a
consensus that the beginning of a solution for the
terrorism problem is the end of both the Israeli
occupation of Palestine and the American occupation of
Iraq. Madrid once again proved that terrorism practices
the ultimate in nihilist politics. There's no possible
diplomacy. No possible negotiation. It does not bend
when attacked by military power. It has no territory and
no population to defend, and no military or civil
installations to protect. Al-Qaeda is not a Joint Chiefs
of Staff: it is an idea. It commands faithful servants,
not soldiers. It has nothing to do with war - as the
Bush administration insists - and much less with a war
on Iraq. One of the reasons invoked for the war on Iraq
- the link between Saddam and al-Qaeda - was turned
upside down: more al-Qaeda infiltration in the West is a
consequence of the war, not less.
In the
corridors of Brussels, and in the streets of Madrid,
Barcelona, Rome, Milan, London and Paris, Europe was
given a rude awakening. All the evidence now screams
that reshaping the Middle East from a base in occupied
Iraq is not leading to less terrorism: it is leading to
hyperterrorism.
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