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Triangle of
terrorism
By B Raman
At least
29 people - among them seven Americans, seven Saudis,
two Jordanians, two Filipinos, one Lebanese and one
Swiss - are reported to have been killed by multiple
suicide bombings in three housing compounds for
foreigners in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, on
the night of May 12-13. According to the Saudi
authorities, the bombings are believed to have been
carried out by nine suicide terrorists, who too were
killed.
The suicide bombings are the deadliest
since the Bali (Indonesia) and Mombasa (Kenya) strikes
of last year. Al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden might have
suffered setbacks due to the capture of some of its
important leaders in Pakistan since March last year, the
consequent dispersal of its trained cadres into numerous
cells and the disorganization of its command and control
system, rendering centralized direction and coordination
difficult, but the motivation of the survivors of the
US-led campaign against it remains as strong as ever,
and there has been no dearth of volunteers for suicide
missions.
The motivation is likely to have been
strengthened by the increased anger against the United
States consequent to its invasion and occupation of
Iraq. The only sure yardstick for judging the success of
a counter-terrorism campaign, whether carried out by
military or the police and paramilitary forces, is to
what extent the campaign has been able to dent the
motivation of the terrorists and deny them a continued
flow of volunteers for suicide and other dangerous
missions. Body counts and number of captured can be
misleading indicators, inducing a false sense of
complacency. Judging from this yardstick, the so-called
"war against terrorism" is yet to make any impact on
al-Qaeda and the other constituents of bin Laden's
International Islamic Front (IIF).
The Riyadh
blasts have received considerable media coverage because
of their spectacular nature, the audacity of the suicide
terrorists, the large number of foreigners, particularly
Americans, killed and the coincidence of the strikes
with the Middle Eastern tour of Colin Powell, the US
Secretary of State, but there have been other equally
worrisome and condemnable terrorist strikes in
Afghanistan, in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) in India
and in the southern Philippines, even after the Mombasa
attacks.
While those in Afghanistan, which have
not involved large casualties, have been carried out by
a regrouped Taliban, al-Qaeda and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's
Hezb-i-Islami, those in J&K were carried out by the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a Pakistani organization forming
part of the IIF. The attacks in the southern Philippines
were attributed by the local authorities to the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which in the past had
links with al-Qaeda but is not a member of the IIF. (The
LET is now operating under a different name to evade a
ban on it imposed by the Pakistani government on January
15, but I will continue to refer to it as LET.)
These attacks show that despite United Nations
Security Council Resolution No 1373 against terrorism
and despite the hype about the counter-terrorism and the
intelligence agencies of the world joining hands for a
common battle against terrorism, the networking of
governmental agencies of different nations that are
victims of terrorism has not been as strong and
effective as the networking of terrorist groups of
different countries under the leadership of al-Qaeda. To
break this network, it is important for the
international community to devote the same attention to
the task of neutralizing each and every component of the
IIF as to the task of neutralizing al-Qaeda. This is not
being done.
The international community is yet
to take serious notice of the emergence of the LET as a
coordinator of the activities of the various
constituents of the IIF to make up for the present
organizational disabilities of al-Qaeda. Next to
Pakistan, where the headquarters of the LET are located
(in Muridke, near Lahore), the second-most-important
infrastructure of the LET is in Saudi Arabia. Despite
being a Wahhabi (a branch of Islam) organization, it has
been critical of the Saudi ruling regime and shares bin
Laden's anathema for the Saudi ruling family. In the
past, it was not very articulate in its criticism of the
United States, but has in recent months been
increasingly virulent in its attacks on that country. It
has been collecting funds in Pakistan for its "martyrs"
who, it claims, died in the jihad against the Americans
in Iraq.
While the LET's headquarters in
Pakistan coordinate its activities in northern India,
including J&K, the Central Asian Republics (CARs)
and Russia (Chechnya and Dagestan), its headquarters in
Saudi Arabia coordinate its activities in Mumbai and
southern India, the Eastern province of Sri Lanka and in
the countries of Southeast Asia. Since 2001, a number of
LET cadres have been arrested in Mumbai and southern
India, who reportedly claimed to have been trained,
funded and directed by the LET setup in Saudi Arabia and
not directly by the LET headquarters in Pakistan.
Thus, al-Qaeda as well as the LET have a
separate organizational presence in Saudi Arabia, which
has evaded detection and neutralization by the Saudi
authorities. It is difficult to assess at present
whether the Riyadh blasts might have been carried out by
al-Qaeda or the LET, or by the two acting in tandem.
The blasts came in the wake of more than one
indicator of a likely terrorist strike in Saudi Arabia.
According to the Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef,
as quoted by the Saudi media, the suicide bombers were
believed to be linked to the May 6 discovery of a large
weapons cache. The Saudi government was searching for 19
suspects in that case, including 17 Saudis, a Yemeni and
an Iraqi with Kuwaiti and Canadian citizenship who it
believed were receiving orders directly from bin Laden.
It is said that the group had been planning to use the
seized weapons to attack the Saudi royal family as well
as US and British interests.
One of the
absconding 19 surrendered to the Saudi authorities, but
his interrogation did not seem to have given them any
clue of the impending blasts. This speaks poorly of the
counter-terrorism capabilities of Saudi Arabia. More
disconcerting, it gives rise to suspicion of possible
complicity with the terrorists by elements inside the
Saudi security setup, which does not bode well for the
future stability of the regime.
Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia constitute a terrorism
triangle. So-called charity and other private
organizations in Saudi Arabia have been the generous
providers of funds and volunteers for terrorist
operations in different parts of the world; the jihadi
organizations of Pakistan have been the providers of
sanctuaries, training, arms, ammunition and explosives
and extra funds from the heroin trade; and Afghanistan
was another provider of sanctuaries and training
facilities, but this role has been reduced, if not
eliminated, after the US air strikes on the training
camps in Afghan territory. The Afghan-based terrorist
infrastructure has since been transferred to Pakistani
territory.
Since the New York World Trade Center
explosion of February 1993, there have been frequent
reports of anti-royal and anti-US Saudi recruits being
brought clandestinely to Pakistan to be trained in the
camps of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the LET, and
then sent back to Saudi Arabia. The HUM was a
co-signatory of bin Laden's first fatwa of 1998
against the United States and Israel and is a member of
his IIF. The arrest of Ramzi Yousef, one of the
principal accused in the Trade Center explosion, in
Pakistan in 1995, and his transfer to the US to face
trial, brought to light his role in the training of
Saudi terrorists in Pakistan.
In the first
exposure of the role of the Pakistan-based HUM in
organizing jihad worldwide in an arc extending from the
southern Philippines to Chechnya, Kamran Khan, the
well-known Pakistani journalist, brought out in some
detail the role of Ramzi Yousef in this matter. In an
article in the prestigious News of March 27, 1995, Khan
cited his Pakistani sources as claiming that acts of
violence committed by these groups trained in Pakistan
and Afghanistan inside Saudi Arabia were not known to
the outside world. According to him, dozens of Saudis
committed to jihad all over the world were visiting
military training camps in Afghanistan. "These training
camps are ideal places to rub shoulders with persons
like Ramzi and to learn from their experience," he said.
The Riyadh blasts of Monday night were not the
first sensational terrorist strikes in Saudi Arabia.
Such strikes have been taking place at regular intervals
since 1996 - some known to the outside world and some
covered up by the Saudi intelligence agencies. The Saudi
intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies have not
been as forthcoming as the agencies of other countries
in sharing with the international community the details
of their knowledge of the terrorist infrastructure in
their country.
The world knows a lot about the
complicity of the military and intelligence
establishments of Pakistan with terrorist groups of
various hues. Is there a similar complicity in Saudi
Arabia? If not, how has terrorism been able to thrive in
its territory, despite its reputation of being one of
the most tightly ruled states in the world?
No
convincing answers to these questions are available.
Saudi Arabia, consequently, continues to be the dark
side of the terrorism triangle. Unless it is brought
under the international spotlight, the fight against
terrorism is unlikely to make significant headway.
B Raman is additional secretary (ret),
Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, and currently
director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai; former
member of the National Security Advisory Board of the
Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also
head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research
& Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence
agency, from 1988 to August 1994.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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