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Japan, Korea new terror
fronts
By Jamie Miyazaki
"They came out to fight Islam in the name
of terrorism. Hundreds of thousands of people, young and
old, were killed in the farthest point on Earth in Japan
[in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. For them] this is not a
crime, but rather a debatable issue. They bombed Iraq
and considered that a debatable issue." - Osama bin
Laden, Aljazeera, October 7, 2001
"Let the
unjust ones know that we maintain our right to reply, at
the appropriate time and place, to all the states that
are taking part in this unjust war, particularly
Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland, Japan, and
Italy." - Osama bin Laden, Aljazeera, October 18,
2003
Last month's Aljazeera broadcast of a
(probably month-old) recording by Osama bin Laden
warning of attacks "at the appropriate time and place"
on the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, Spain, Poland
and, for the first time, Japan heralded one of the
bloodiest Ramadans on record. Twenty-six days after bin
Laden's broadcast, 19 Italian Caribinieri were dead in
Nasiriya. And on Thursday this week, the British
consulate and the UK's biggest bank, HSBC, suffered
devastating attacks in Istanbul.
Donald
Rumsfeld's Far East trip this week to rally South Korean
and Japanese assistance for the stabilization of postwar
Iraq was thus not the success it was hoping to be, even
before Thursday's outrage. The Nasiriya bombing was
particularly shocking for Seoul and Tokyo. The Italians
were reasonably popular with Iraqis and Nasiriya was
outside the volatile Sunni Triangle, and located in an
area touted as a dispatch site for Japan's Self Defense
Force (SDF).
A long-reluctant Seoul balked at
committing any more men than necessary to Iraq. A keener
but more constrained Japanese administration also lost
its appetite for any immediate dispatch. Tokyo faced
more problems last weekend after the Istanbul synagogue
bombings when the Arabic newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi
received a statement from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Abu
Hafz al-Masri Brigade announcing, "We tell the criminal
Bush and his lackeys ... especially Britain, Italy,
Australia, and Japan, that the cars of death will not be
limited to Baghdad, Riyadh, Istanbul, Djerba,
al-Nasiriyah, Jakarta." Another statement received by
the weekly al-Majalla from a purported senior al-Qaeda
figure stated, "If [the Japanese] want to see their
economic power destroyed by the military force of Allah,
they should send [the SDF] to Iraq. Our attacks will
reach the center of Tokyo."
Whether these
statements constitute real threats to commit atrocities
in Tokyo is not clear, but the intention to target
Japanese interests is, and shots fired at the Japanese
Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday did little to assuage
Japanese worries. Thursday's bombing of British
interests in Istanbul appears to further suggest
militants are working their way through October's hit
list and choosing the "appropriate time and place" to
strike again.
Even Seoul, which has not been
explicitly mentioned in any recent statements by
jihadis, faced a credible terrorist threat when its
embassy in Kabul was evacuated on Thursday after
receiving intelligence reports that its diplomatic
mission was being targeted.
Park Jong-soon, the
South Korean ambassador to Afghanistan, said in an
interview to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, "Although
al-Qaeda has aimed to conduct terror attack[s] on
Western embassies and Westerners, it was the first time
the group directly pointed to a certain country's
embassy as its target ... Unlike the other 20 embassies,
our embassy is located in a residential quarter."
Moreover, South Koreans in Iraq have also been targeted
by insurgents. A South Korean diplomat in Iraq was
recently kidnapped and told to leave the country before
being released. And on Friday there were reports that a
Baghdad hotel in which Korean officials were staying was
hit.
Bin Laden's initial citation after
September 11, 2001, of Japan as the victim of US nuclear
terrorism has just two years later morphed into explicit
threats against Japan. The intentional and motivational
capacity to strike at the interests and nationals of
South Korea and Japan, the United States' two main
allies in Northeast Asia, has been demonstrated. But
while the organizational capacity to launch attacks in
Southeast Asia and the Middle East undeniably exists,
does the capacity exist to conduct terrorist strikes in
either Japan or Korea?
Both Seoul and Tokyo have
supported, with varying degrees of enthusiasm,
Washington's anti-terrorist efforts, but Northeast Asia
has so far not been an active front in the "war on
terror". In culturally homogenous Northeast Asia, the
principal actors in armed conflicts have been states,
not terrorist groups, composed of disaffected ethnic and
religious groups. Therefore, the potential emergence of
an Islamic terrorist threat would be worrying.
Both nations have denied the existence of active
al-Qaeda cells in their nations and they are probably
correct. Nations with more than 90 percent ethnic
homogeneity and no large Muslim communities are
difficult but not impossible for Middle Eastern
militants to hide in successfully (although the task
would be relatively easier for Southeast Asian
militants). However, this is not to say that neither
nation has been exposed to some form of Islamic militant
activity.
This month the US military alerted
South Korean authorities that a cargo ship heading for
the port of Kunsan was carrying al-Qaeda members. The
ship had already been under Australian and New Zealand
authorities' scrutiny. In the end no militants were
discovered and the vessel was released, but fear that
Islamic militants might be trying to enter the country,
where 37,000 US troops are stationed, is real.
More worrying were rumors that an al-Qaeda
terrorist entered South Korea this year from Southeast
Asia and collected information about major US
facilities, possibly as potential targets for attacks.
The terrorist was apparently arrested in a third country
and is now under interrogation in the United States. The
National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea's
central spy agency, refused to comment on the reports.
Islamic militants, including those
with links to al-Qaeda, are also known to have visited
Japan. Radio equipment thought to have been used in the
1998 Nairobi and Dar es Salaam US Embassy bombings was
purchased in Tokyo's Akihabara electrical district back
in 1995 by Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, an Iraqi with links to
bin Laden. Salim was arrested in Germany in 1998 for
involvement in the attacks and is also suspected of
involvement in the 1995 attempted assassination of
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda's
No 3 man, visited Japan back in 1987 for three months
and was trained as a rock-drill operator by a
construction-machinery maker in Shizuoka prefecture. He
left Japan with about 150 rock-drilling machines and is
suspected of having used his training to dig cave
complexes in Afghanistan. It has also been reported that
a senior al-Qaeda member came to Japan in 2000 to raise
funds and stayed until just before the September 2001
attacks.
More recently, in 2002, six al-Qaeda
members hiding in Pakistan planned to enter Japan on
fake passports, but failed when the Japanese Muslim they
contacted refused to be their guarantor. The rationale
behind the move was that entering Japan was easier than
entering Europe or the United States after September 11.
This is worrying reasoning: Islamic militants have shown
a willingness before to target unsuspecting nations and
switch from government targets to "soft" targets to
avoid the extensive security provided to foreign
embassies and government installations.
Last
year Japan also deported Naim Feroz, a Pakistani
national and suspected al-Qaeda member, living in Tokyo.
Feroz had allegedly undergone training in Afghanistan
and documents indicating al-Qaeda links were uncovered
during a raid on his house. Police suspect he may have
been in phone contact with al-Qaeda members in other
countries during his stay in Japan.
The
perceived threat so far for both nations has been on its
nationals and interests abroad, and in response to
recent developments, the Japanese Foreign Ministry has
issued a series of travel advisories for its citizens.
Unfortunately, while none of the above suggests that
Islamic militants are planning immediate attacks on
targets in South Korea or Japan, it does suggest that
Islamists have taken an interest in both nations and, at
a very basic level, perhaps the operational capacity to
begin formulating attacks in both nations and certainly
abroad.
However, it is worth keeping in mind
that organizations such as the Abu Hafz al-Masri Brigade
have in the past claimed responsibility for acts they
have not committed, such as the August blackouts in the
United States and Britain. This may suggest a limited
capacity for the Abu Hafz al-Masri Brigade at least to
conduct attacks outside of the Middle East, a fact that
Seoul and Tokyo may be able to take some small comfort
in. In the meantime, though, the fallout from the Iraq
conflict continues to spread, as the British and Turks
have tragically discovered.
(Copyright 2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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