• 15 March 2004: Iraqi mujahedin killed four Southern Baptist missionaries near Mosul, in northern Iraq. The attack brought to eight the number of Southern Baptist missionaries killed by Islamists around the world since 2003.
• 22 March 2004: Israel assassinated wheelchair-bound HAMAS leader Shaykh Ahmed Yasin as he left the mosque after prayers. Yasin was a loss to HAMAS and the Islamist movement generally, but his status as martyr would increase recruits for Islamist groups worldwide. The United States enhanced the benefit derived by Islamists from Yasin’s murder by vetoing a UN resolution censuring the Israeli attack and reasserting Israel’s “right to defend herself from terror.”
• 28–31 March 2004: Multiple bombs were detonated by Islamist fighters in the Uzbek capital Tashkent over three days. The bombings and subsequent gunfights resulted in the death of thirty-three Islamists, seven of whom were women. Fourteen Uzbeks—including ten policemen—were killed and thirty-five were wounded. The Uzbek government suspected that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was responsible for the attacks.
• 2 May 2004: Islamist fighters attacked a major Saudi/Exxon-Mobil oil facility at Yanbu, 350 kilometers north of Jeddah. Five Westerners—two Americans, two Britons, and an Australian—and a Saudi were killed, and twenty-eight people were wounded. Three attackers were employees of the facility and used their passes to get the fourth attacker inside. All four were killed.60
• 29 May 2004: Islamist fighters attacked several oil company compounds in Yanbu. Twenty-two people were killed; nineteen were non-Saudis.61
• 9 September 2004: JI detonated a suicide car bomb near Australia’s embassy in Jakarta, killing nine and wounding 173. The JI’s post-attack communiqué explained, “We decided to call Australia to account, which we consider one of the worst of God’s enemies, and God’s religion of Islam.”62
• 7 October 2004: Islamist fighters detonated three bombs—one a suicide car bomb—at the Hilton Hotel in the Sinai resort town of Taba, Egypt, and two campsites in nearby Ras al-Shitan. Thirty-four people were killed, 173 were wounded. Many of the dead were foreigners, including thirteen Israeli tourists. Several groups claimed credit for the attack, including the Abdullah Azzam Brigades reportedly allied with al Qaeda.63
• 3 November 2004: Dutch-Moroccan Islamist Mohammad Bouyeri repeatedly shot and slit the throat of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a well-known critic of Islam. Bouyeri, a youth counselor said to be a “studious and respectable young man,” was arrested, and Dutch intelligence officials said he had “links to the international al-Qaeda network.” Van Gogh’s murder was followed by arson attacks against several Dutch mosques.64
• 6 December 2004: Al Qaeda fighters forcibly entered the U.S. Consulate’s compound in Jeddah and attacked with small arms, killing nine and wounding ten. There were no American casualties. The raid was the first on a Western diplomatic mission in Saudi Arabia.65
• 19 March 2005: A suicide car bomb was detonated outside the British School’s theater in Doha, Qatar. One Briton was killed, sixteen people were wounded. The attacker, Omar Ahmed Abdullah Ali, was an Egyptian who had been employed as an IT professional by the Qatar Petroleum Company since 1990. He was married with children. The attack was the first suicide bombing in Qatar and occurred two days after al Qaeda’s leader in Saudi Arabia, Saleh al-Awfi, had called for attacks on Westerners in the Persian Gulf.66
• 7 April 2005: An Islamist suicide bomber riding a motorcycle detonated himself among tourists in Cairo’s Khal al-Khalili bazaar. Two Frenchmen and one American were killed; twenty people were wounded. The attack was the first in Cairo in seven years.67
• April–June 2005: Several concurrent incidents suggested there was no slackening of Islamist militancy among the Saudi people and government. On 20 April, Saudi security forces arrested forty Pakistani Christians in a private home in Riyadh for holding prayers and practicing a religion other than Islam. On 23 April, Islamist candidates overwhelmingly won elections for 178 municipal councils, the first such elections in thirty years. The winners came from a “Golden List” of candidates endorsed and campaigned for by the government’s religious establishment. By late May, the Saudi interior ministry claimed that religiously devote Saudi males were going to Iraq to fight U.S. forces; unofficial estimates are that fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred Saudis are fighting in Iraq.68
• 25 April 2005: U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials told Congress that the number of “significant” terrorist attacks increased in 2004. Official statistics show there were 650 such attacks in 2004, compared with 174 in 2003. The 2003 figure had been a twenty-year high.69
• 26 April 2005: Syria’s military completed withdrawing from Lebanon. The event opened Lebanese politics to increased factionalism among Shia, Sunni, and Christian parties. Without Syrian control, militant Sunnis would become major political players in the country. In Syria, the withdrawal was considered a humiliation. From Jordan, the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood chief, Dr. Hassan Howiedy, warned that unless President al-Asad allowed Syria’s Sunni Islamists greater freedom he would encounter a “great interior pressure, yet unrevealed, that will cause savage behavior—as happened in the past.”70
• 30 April 2005: Two female Islamist fighters attacked a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Cairo just after the attackers’ husband and brother attacked tourists near the Egyptian Museum. The latter died when his bomb exploded prematurely. Both women were killed; one shot the other and then herself. Nine people were wounded in the attacks; four were foreigners. This was the first attack by female fighters in Egypt, and the attackers were wearing burkas and were veiled. The Abdullah Azzam Brigades again claimed credit for the attacks.71
• 9 May 2005: Newsweek published a story describing the desecration of Korans by U.S. guards at Guantánamo Bay. The story sparked widespread anger and violent protests in the Muslim world. Newsweek’s later retraction was met with skepticism. The episode allowed Islamist writers to sharpen anti-Americanism that was already high because of Muslim resentment of prisoner treatment at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.72
• 13–14 May 2005: Islamists stormed a prison in the Uzbek city of Andijon to free twenty-three local businessmen who were jailed for being Islamic extremists. The storming led to large demonstrations and a violent confrontation with Uzbek security forces in which at least 750 demonstrators were killed. U.S. government criticisms of the Uzbek regime’s handling of the demonstrations prompted Uzbek president Islam Karimov to evict U.S. forces from the Karshi Khanabad air base, a key facility for logistical support for multinational forces in Afghanistan.73
• 28 May 2005: Indonesia’s JI appeared responsible for detonating several bombs in the market of the Christian town of Tentena on Sulawesi Island. The attack killed twenty-two and wounded fifty and was the first incident of interfaith conflict since a 2001 Muslim-Christian peace agreement.74
• 4 June 2005: GSPC attacked a Mauritanian military barracks in Linghet near the border with Algeria and Mali, killing fifteen soldiers and wounding thirteen. The GSPC’s communiqué said the attack was to “avenge our brothers who have been imprisoned by the infidel [Mauritanian] regime.” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq saluted the attack, “blessing the Algerian mujahedin operation against the enemies of God in Mauritania.”75
• 7 July 2005: Islamist suicide attackers detonated four bombs in four separate locations in London’s public transport system—one bus and three subway trains—killing fifty-six and wounding seven hundred. The attacks disrupted the first day of the annual G-8 Summit in Scotland. About a month before the attacks, British authorities lowered the alert level, concluding that “at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.” Bin Laden’s deputy al-Zawahiri claimed credit for the attack.76
• 21 July 2005: Islamist attackers detonated four bombs in London’s public transport system; as on 7 July, the bombs were in one bus and three subway trains. The detonators f
ailed to set off the explosives, however. There were no casualties, and the four attackers are soon arrested. Although damage was minor, the attackers beat the Western world’s best urban security services for the second time in two weeks.77
• 23 July 2005: Islamist fighters attacked the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh with two suicide car bombs and a satchel bomb, killing ninety and wounding 240. The resort had long been a priority target for bin Laden, who believed the several “peace conferences” held there were symbols of Arab regimes betraying the Palestinians to the United States and Israel. Al Qaeda also considered the resort an “Israeli” target; an estimated ten thousand Israeli tourists were in the resort’s vicinity when the attacks occurred. The Abdullah Azzam Brigades, the al Qaeda organization in the Levant and Egypt, and the Tawid and Jihad Group in Egypt claimed credit for the attack. After the attack, Egyptian security forces conducted a prolonged operation to eliminate Islamists insurgents based in the Sinai Peninsula’s mountainous northern region.78
• 3 August 2005: The Mauritanian military successfully overthrew the pro-U.S. regime of President Maaouya Ould Sid’ Taya. Taya was a key ally of the U.S. antiterrorism campaign in West Africa who imprisoned Islamic militants from several West African countries. The new military regime soon released several hundred “political prisoners,” including many Islamists jailed by Taya’s regime.79
• 17 August 2005: The Indonesian government reduces the jail terms of JI’s spiritual leader Abu Bakr Bashir and nineteen other Islamists who had been convicted of playing roles in the October 2002 Bali bombings.80
• 17 August 2005: More than three hundred crude time bombs are detonated within an hour in sixty-three of Bangladesh’s sixty-four political districts, killing two and wounding 150. Public and government venues were the main targets. Leaflets were found at the attack sites claiming credit for the “Jamaat ul Mujahedin.” The leaflets asserted that the attacks were aimed at the Dhaka regime and were also meant “to warn Bush and Blair to vacate Muslim countries or to [sic] facer [a] Muslim upsurge.” Analysts described the attacks as emblematic of the “rising tide of Islamic militarism” in Bangladesh; the media reported that there were fifty-eight known Islamic militant groups operating in the country.81
• 19 August 2005: Islamists fired Katyusha rockets at two U.S. Navy ships in the harbor of Aqaba, Jordan; one landed in the Israeli city of Eilat. The rockets missed and the ships pulled out to sea. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda organization in Iraq claimed the attack was a warning: “To the tyrant of Jordan [King Abdullah II] we say … the lions of God have stepped into Jordan and hold a grudge against you, so end the injustice exerted on our scholars in your prisons and abdicate.” Zarqawi also warned that the world would see attacks “soon in Tel Aviv.” The Aqaba attack was the first in what is likely to be an increasing flow of Islamist attacks into Jordan and Syria from Islamist insurgent bases in Iraq.82
• 27 August 2005: Under threat of deportation from the UK government, Saudi dissident Dr. Muhammed al-Massari closed his London-based Web site. The closure would be seen in the Arab world as Britain yielding to Saudi pressure and would reinforce bin Laden’s claim that the West protected freedom of expression for “whites,” but forbid it to Muslims.83
• 28 August 2005: Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh pledged to provide Afghan president Hamid Karzai “all possible assistance … to fight terrorism and rebuild.” Singh’s pledge—which implied an alliance between Karzai’s nominally Islamic regime and polytheist India—would harden Pakistan’s religious parties’ determination to support the Taliban and al Qaeda against Karzai’s regime and would increase the Pakistani military’s already strong belief that India was trying to surround Pakistan by creating an anti-Pakistani state on the country’s western border.84
• 29 August 2005: Saudi security forces battled five Iraqi Islamists in the industrial town of Jubail, east of Riyadh, killing one and capturing three. One infiltrator escaped. The Iraqis entered Saudi Arabia from Iraq to steal cars, apparently intending to take them to Iraq for military use. The Saudi interior ministry said this was the first such infiltration. The incident was the first in what was likely to be an increasing flow of Islamist insurgent infiltrators entering the Gulf states from bases in Iraq.85
• 30 August 2005: By this date, the U.S. Department of Defense was running extensive, military-assistance programs in Africa and Southeast Asia to train, equip, and advise indigenous conterterrorism forces. The programs were multiyear and slated to cost nearly a billion dollars. Even if effective, the programs contributed to bin Laden’s efforts to, in his words, “spread out U.S. forces” and “bleed [America] to bankruptcy.”86
• 12 September 2005: Israel’s military completed its withdrawal from Gaza. Islamist militants worldwide saw the withdrawal as another step toward Israel’s defeat, a step that followed victories in the concessions won in the Oslo negotiations, the Madrid conference, and the first and second Intifadahs, as well as from Israel’s forced withdrawal from southern Lebanon.87
• 1 October 2005: Three JI suicide bombers detonated themselves in a nightclub-restaurant district in Bali, killing twenty-six and wounding more than one hundred.
While the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa, the crippling of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon dominated media reporting of bin Laden’s 1996–2005 activities, the range of military, political, economic, and propaganda successes outlined above covered the patient Islamist insurgent chief’s gamut of activities: fatalities, physical destruction, and acute embarrassment inflicted on the world’s greatest power in East Africa, in Yemen, and within the United States itself; the intimidation of U.S. forces worldwide; the terrorizing of Christians in East Asia; the addition of a high-profile irritant to the usually amiable conduct of Canada-U.S. diplomatic relations; support to jihads in Uzbekistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, and the Philippines; and attacks on “atheist” regimes in Russia, Chechnya, and Dagestan, an “infidel” regime in India, and the “apostate” al-Saud regime and U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia.
Loss for Standing Governments
In addition to these positive results for the al Qaeda forces, the attacks yielded other benefits that could not but be dear to the heart of a mujahid who fought in Afghanistan. The Islamist insurgencies in which bin Laden has been involved are causing the targeted governments economic losses and diplomatic complications. Egypt, Israel, the Philippines, and Yemen, for example, have suffered declines in tourism that for each is a top foreign-exchange earner. Manila and New Delhi are losing servicemen regularly and each is reported to be spending up to $2.5 million per day to fight the Islamist insurgents; oil exploration and development have been slowed in several Indonesian provinces; Manila is coping with “investigations” of its treatment of Muslims by the United Nations, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the Vatican; and the Philippine economy has slowed, with Japanese bankers, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank delaying investment disbursements because of the fighting in Mindanao.
These sorts of pressures put Manila, Jakarta, and New Delhi in the same intractable predicament the Soviet Union encountered during its occupation of Afghanistan. Moscow’s attempt to staunch its human and economic bleeding by using indiscriminate military power to end the war backfired by sharply increasing diplomatic, human rights, and economic pressure on the Soviet Union to stop the war by giving up rather than by winning. Boxed in by this conundrum, the Soviets eventually gave up and went home, an option not available to the already-at-home governments in Manila, Jakarta, and New Delhi. The attacks noted above also have given bin Laden and his allies unprecedented recognition among Muslims and in the world as a whole.
Bin Laden’s attacks and threats also humiliated America, always a top-priority goal for him. As described in this chapter’s chronology, until October 2000 he had not attacked U.S. interests since August 1998 and yet he had U.S. authorities running from pillar
to post in fear of the Arab Afghans. In this regard, an 8 March 2000 Wall Street Journal article, titled “Casting a Global Net, U.S. Security Forces Survive Terrorist Test,” graphically depicted how the senior levels of the U.S. government were tied in knots for an entire month because they feared a bin Laden attack at New Year’s 2000. This article is, incidentally, eloquent food for thought for those experts, scholars, and wise men who denigrate as “old-fashioned” the idea that a single individual’s words and actions can have a substantial impact on history. This point was dramatically underscored when the director of Central Intelligence told Congress in February 2001 that bin Laden was the nation’s “top national security threat.”
Overall, bin Laden’s 1996–2001 attempts to humble, humiliate, and defeat the United States came in violent and nonviolent forms, and, as the official Chinese newspaper Renmin Ribao said in August 1999, the nonviolent form on offer from “the Saudi with the heavy beard” produced a situation in which “the United States has totally lost its face and bearing as a big country.” In terms familiar to his countrymen, U.S. terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told the Los Angeles Times bin Laden resembles an Islamist P. T. Barnum: “He issues a threat and we react. He makes us jump.” In terms of gauging the level of humiliation imposed on the United States by bin Laden, there is no better summary than Robert Fisk’s description of the U.S. president’s March 2000 arrival in Pakistan. “So fearful were they of [a bin Laden] ‘terrorist’ attack on their president,” Fisk wrote, “that Clinton’s personal jet turned up on the tarmac of Islamabad’s military airport with a cargo of FBI men, while the most powerful man on earth slunk in later in an unmarked plane. For a man who was to read the riot act to [Pakistan chief executive] General Pervez Musharraf … it was a pathetic performance.”88
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