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Istanbul: Gateway to
terror
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - The recent bomb blasts in Istanbul are
neither isolated incidents nor simply local actions. All
indications point towards global Islamic radicals
determined to create a Muslim backlash against the West
through more suicide attacks in both Turkey and Europe.
 Initial European intelligence reaction suggests
that the Istanbul suicide blasts were the work of the
Tauheed group led by a Jordanian national of Palestinian
origin, Abu Mosub al-Zarqawi, who, it is speculated,
planned, helped finance and executed the attacks in
conjunction with Turkish counterparts.
Al-Zarqawi, known in senior al-Qaeda circles,
has recently been the focus of revived United States
attempts to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. Last
year, he had a leg amputated in Baghdad after being
wounded in Afghanistan. During al-Zarqawi's two-month
stay in Baghdad, the US has claimed, many al-Qaeda
affiliates established cells in the city. Al-Zarqawi
subsequently disappeared.
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When the dust settles in Iraq, it
could simply be the prelude to a much longer and
less defined war involving any number of militant
groups in addition to al-Qaeda.
A new war beyond the
war (March 24, '03)
Asia Times Online
| The
US has offered up to US$5 million for clues leading to
his arrest, as he is now accused of recruiting fighters
in Iraq. The reward appears on the program's website,
which is run in coordination with the State Department's
Bureau of Diplomatic Security. "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has
had a long-standing connection to senior al-Qaeda
leadership and appears to be highly regarded among
al-Qaeda and a close associate of Osama bin Laden and
Saif al-Adel," the announcement says. Al-Adel, for whom
there is also a large reward, is thought to be bin
Laden's number three and has been reported as being in
Iran.
Abu Mosub al-Zarqawi is also thought to
have provided weapons and money in connection with the
murder of US diplomat Laurence Foley in Jordan last
October. He is known to have been very active since the
fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan two years
ago, and has variously been tracked in Iran's Kurdish
region, northern and central Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and
Palestine.
He is said to have actively developed
networks with smaller groups in these regions, and he
coordinated his activities, for example, with Hezbollah
in Lebanon and Ansar al-Islam, a militant Iraqi Kurdish
group in northern Iraq. This month's Istanbul attacks
indicate that he also spent some time in the country
making contacts with local radical groups there.
Al-Zarqawi appears to favor US and Jewish
targets, as well as their allies. Initially, his main
playing field was Palestine, and later on Jordan, where
he established a network to bring down the monarchy
which, he believes, is hand-in-glove with "Zionist and
US interests".
Al-Zarqawi spent some time in
Afghanistan, where he operated independent training
camps for Jordanians. His Tauheed group is a part of bin
Laden's International Islamic Front, an umbrella body
that groups organizations which accept bin Laden as a
mentor and his pan-Islamic ideology.
Al-Zarqawi's known modus operadi, gleaned from
the few members of his network who have been captured by
European intelligence, does not involve guerilla
warfare, thus it is unlikely, as the US now claims, that
he has any serious involvement in Iraq. Rather, his
networks in different countries aim to take on the
interests of the US and its allies, or specifically, in
the language of the jihadis, "take on the Jewish and US
unholy nexus".
The recent attacks in Istanbul -
on November 15 in which 25 people were killed and last
Thursday's bombings which killed 30 - are symbolic in
many aspects, such as the choice of city, targets and
the timing.
Choice of city
Istanbul
was the capital of the last Ottoman caliph. Its Islamic
undercurrents have always characterized this city and
its Islamic links were so strong that the secular Turk
leadership in the post-Caliph period thought that a
modern secular state's affairs could not be run in this
city, so they shifted the capital to Ankara. After World
War II, Turkey gave shelter to many displaced German
Jewish families who mainly settled in Istanbul, which
now has a sizeable and influential Jewish population of
more than 20,000.
Targets
The targets
have been two synagogues, the British consulate and a
British-based bank, HSBC. This could be interpreted as
the opening up of a new campaign against "soft" Jewish
and Western targets, with Istanbul, strategically
located at the gateway between Asia and Europe, as the
staging point.
Timing
US-led forces
become more entangled by the day in Afghanistan and
Iraq, while US relations with Syria, Iran and Saudi
Arabia are tense, and could easily turn confrontational.
Al-Zarqawi is believed to be typical of the
jihadi mindset that September 11, 2001 was "zero hour"
in relations between the Muslim and Western worlds, and
that an entirely new world emerged. The subsequent
attack on Afghanistan is viewed as a symbolic one on
both Arabs and the Muslim world. Yet the reaction in
Muslim societies was almost apologetic and submissive.
Similarly, the invasion of Iraq drew little response
from neighboring countries, where the rulers are more
concerned with clinging onto their own power rather than
confront the US.
Yet these rulers are moving
further and further away from their people, as on the
street anti-US feelings are running high. The attacks
such as those in Istanbul in the past few weeks are
aimed by radicals to ignite the sparks that exist in the
Muslim world into an inferno of such intensity that a
clash between the two civilizations will be inevitable.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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