A second positive result of a successful anti-Israeli attack producing heavy casualties or severe destruction would be to give al Qaeda the bona fides to be seen by Muslims as an active foe of Israel, and not, as it is now incorrectly perceived, as a largely rhetorical enemy. While bin Laden has railed against the reality that the “Al-Aqsa Mosque remains the prisoner of the Christian-Jewish Alliance”; decried “Zionist terrorism in Palestine, Lebanon, and elsewhere”; condemned “the state of the Jews that has a policy to destroy the future of these [Palestinian] children”; and anguished over the fact that “Jews are wreaking corruption in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the site of the Prophet’s ascension to heaven,” he has not been known to have mounted an attack specifically designed to kill Jews.12 This, if you will, is a credentials-acquiring loop one would assume al Qaeda would like to close, although, to be sure, it would sap some credibility from bin Laden’s contention that the United States must be Islam’s primary target.
After attacking Israel, bin Laden would have carved the four most vital notches in the stock of his well-used AK-47—dead Russians, dead Americans, dead Hindus, and dead Jews. Such an attack also would settle a personal score: bin Laden has long intended to avenge the murder of his mentor Shaykh Azzam, whom he believes was assassinated by “Israel, with some of its Arab agents.”13 Finally, an anti-Israel attack would yield a strategic victory for al Qaeda by increasing the already-severe difficulty the United States has in eliciting significant help against bin Laden from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states. While it would be tough at any time for a Muslim regime to turn over the heroic Mujahid of Islam to the Crusaders, it would be especially so once said heroic Mujahid struck a lethal blow against the “Zionist entity.”
While an al Qaeda attack on an Israeli or Jewish target must be considered likely—since late September 2001, bin Laden said “punishment should reach Israel” and Zawahiri noted “al Qaeda’s next target was Tel Aviv”—bin Laden has never shown that he is too worried about the Jews. That he hates Jews and Israel and wants both annihilated is clear, his position being that “every effort concentrated on … the Zionists will bring good, direct and positive results.” But as in the case of secular or pro-Western Muslim regimes, bin Laden believes the “Zionists” are the creatures and an extension of the United States, and that without U.S. backing, they will fall like ripe fruit to Islam’s forces. In this attitude, bin Laden shares a view of Israel that Professor Immanuel Wallerstein says is common among Islamists. Israel, Wallerstein has explained, “is regarded as primarily an outpost of the West, a settler state akin to the Crusader states of the Middle Ages” and, for bin Laden and his ilk “the recipe for resolution is the historical one: evict the Crusaders and their states whither.” Although bin Laden believes the “Jewish lobby” is powerful in America and at times can “pull the ropes of politics in the United States” in the direction of “weakening Muslim peoples and governments,”14 he is confident that U.S. backing alone permits Israel’s survival. The entry of U.S. forces into Saudi Arabia in 1990, bin Laden wrote, “is a new disaster the Christians have inflicted [after] having already enabled the Jews to seize Jerusalem and the blessed land around it.”15 All told, bin Laden would certainly concur with the late-1999 claim by Amman’s Al-Sabil that “the Jews would not [have] dared to Judaize and unify Jerusalem under the ‘Israeli’ flag were it not for U.S. support and encouragement.”16 For bin Laden, then, the key to destroying Israel, as it is for destroying the al-Sauds, Mubarak, and others, is to defeat the United States.
Britain and France
Of America’s Western allies, Britain and France were atop bin Laden’s hit list long before the two nations committed forces to the current Afghan war; indeed, bin Laden has said “the British were in the forefront, sometimes even ahead of the United States, in advocating siege, collective punishment, and sanctions against the Muslim peoples of Sudan, Iran, Libya, and Iraq.” In 1996, for example, bin Laden told Nida’ul Islam that, with the United States, “Britain bears the greatest enmity toward the Islamic world,” and in a June 2000 speech he detailed the United Kingdom’s historic and contemporary transgressions. “The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system,” bin Laden said. “They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that two million Muslims were killed. They are the ones who are starving the Iraqi children. And they are continuously dropping bombs on these innocent Iraqi children.”17
Adding to this litany of grievances, British forces remain based in Saudi Arabia, and, in the United Kingdom, the British government has earned bin Laden’s ire by trying to close businesses owned by the country’s leading Islamist organizations—including Al-Muhajaroun and the Followers of the Sharia—and to amend terrorism laws to make it easier to convict people speaking in a way that can be construed as part of a conspiracy to incite terrorism. In this context, British Muslim journalist Faisal Bodi described the law as specifically targeting Muslims. “At a stroke the new act has reshaped the landscape in which opposition groups can work,” Bodi wrote in the Guardian. “It is now illegal to call for the violent overthrow of unelected, despotic governments in countries such as Algeria; to campaign for the liberation of occupied lands such as Kashmir and Palestine; or to engage in weapons training for purposes of freedom and self-determination…. You are now a threat to national security if you merely hold certain views or associations even if you don’t follow them through.” When the law took effect in early 2001, twenty-one groups—most Islamist—were named “terrorist organizations,” and the law was accompanied by U.K. security services arresting several Islamists in London, actions that earned the scorn of Islamists, Muslim governments, and the Arab League. The U.K.-based, probin Laden Islamist Omar Bakri, for example, said the law “is tantamount to a disdain for all Muslims acting to liberate their countries,” while the official Saudi position was delivered by Al-Watan, which said the law shows “that the word Islam has come to be synonymous with terror.”18
Also important, bin Laden stridently attacked the British government for arresting Khalid al-Fawwaz, one of his senior lieutenants and the chief of bin Laden’s London-based Advice and Reformation Committee (ARC). The United Kingdom’s arrest and readiness to extradite Fawwaz to the United States appear to have been the last straw for bin Laden vis-à-vis Britain. After the arrest, bin Laden said henceforth he would target British civilians. “The Committee vehemently denounces the British authorities actions [regarding Fawwaz],” the ARC communiqué said,
the real motive behind which seems to be British Crusader hatred against Muslims and the appeasement of the Americans, which has become a distinctive feature of British foreign policy, as demonstrated by Britain’s blind support of the hostile stands against Muslim peoples on more than one occasion. Britain’s support of the U.S. aggression against Sudan and Afghanistan recently and the U.S. policy against the besieged Iraqi people is nothing but an indication of this orientation of this policy. Does Britain want to put itself in the same corner as the United States?19
France has been sitting squarely in bin Laden’s sights since its participation in the war against Iraq. Beyond this offense, however, lies a more powerful animosity toward the French government based on its support for the Algerian government, harassment of Muslims living in France, reported cooperation with the United States and United Kingdom in hunting and capturing Islamists around the world, and military aid to Masood’s Northern Alliance. In February 2000, French prime minister Lionel Jospin capped these offenses by labeling all Arab opponents of Israel as “terrorists.” Bin Laden and his allies have long railed against the “French-made army in Algeria,” which they claim in early 1992 “swooped down on the Algerian people’s will and put the leaders of the [Islamic Salvation] Front in prison,”20 as well as against what the Los Angeles Times has described as France’s domestic “police and judicial war on armed Muslim extremism.�
�21 Bin Laden publicly has damned France for taking “the lead in supporting the military junta in Algeria” and for “persecuting and hounding over four million Muslims, mainly of North African origin living in France for generations, simply because they refuse to compromise their Islamic identity.” In addition, according to bin Laden, French intelligence has joined U.K. and U.S. services to counter al Qaeda’s operations by pursuing Algerian and Egyptian Islamists “inside and outside their [the services’] territories.”22 Finally, bin Laden and Mullah Omar have claimed that France delayed the Taliban’s final victory by sending assistance to Masood, a belief strengthened by Masood’s official visit to France in April 2001.
Taliban journals have blamed France—along with Iran, India, the United States, and Russia—for preventing the final “annihilation” of Alliance forces by sending Masood money, military advisers, trainers, and equipment, including Milan antitank missiles. Masood’s Pansjher Valley base “is not a holiday destination,” several Taliban journals have said, while demanding France and the others “stop this interference,” whose only “objective is to create chaos in Afghanistan and to keep the war going.” In October 2000 it became clear that al Qaeda had long been planning to attack French targets. In pleading guilty to terrorism charges before a U.S. court, EIJ and al Qaeda member Ali Mohammed testified that in 1994 bin Laden sent him to Djibouti to sur-veil several facilities, including French military bases and the U.S. embassy. Ali Mohammed also said that he had surveilled “French interests in Senegal in 1993 and France’s embassy and cultural center in Nairobi in 1994.”23
Possible Attack Sites
Bin Laden and his allies have demonstrated that they will attack in countries where their organizations have been hurt and against the organizations they hold responsible for inflicting the damage. Al Qaeda operates very much on an eye-for-an-eye basis; the pervasive common wisdom of the media’s dated terrorism experts that terrorists will not attack in places where they acquire funds or have developed infrastructures should have been cast aside even before the 11 September 2001 attacks on the U.S. homeland. Bin Laden’s cell in Nairobi, for example, was disrupted but not destroyed by Kenyan authorities and their allies in August–September 1997 and yet bin Laden destroyed the U.S. embassy there a year later, an action ensuring an even more determined effort to root out al Qaeda’s Kenyan network.24 Likewise, a cell in Tirana belonging to the EIJ, bin Laden’s closest ally, was damaged but not eliminated in summer 1998 by the Albanian police and others, and shortly thereafter the Albanians just barely thwarted an EIJ attempt to car bomb the U.S. embassy in Tirana.
Thus, if past is prologue, there probably are bin Laden retaliatory attacks ready for such places as Germany, where Abu Hajir was arrested in September 1998, and subsequently extradited to the United States, and bin Laden-related Islamists were arrested in December 2000 and April 2001; in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, where EIJ cells were broken up in late 1998 and late 2000; in London, where authorities arrested seven EIJ and bin Laden operatives in September 1998 and where they have agreed to extradite to the United States bin Laden’s lieutenant Khalid al-Fawwaz and two senior EIJ fighters, Ibrahim Eidarous and Yasir al-Sirri; in Baku, Azerbaijan, where an EIJ group was captured in October 1998; in South Africa, where authorities arrested three EIJ operatives in September 1998 and deported them to Egypt; in Mauritania, where police disrupted a bin Laden unit in March 1999; in Croatia, where senior Gama’at leader Talat Fuad Qassim disappeared in September 1995; in Jordan, where security forces broke up a bin Laden unit just before the millennium; and in Egypt, where many of the captured bin Laden-EIJ operatives have surfaced for trial and subsequent incarceration or execution. This recital, of course, does not mention the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, where al Qaeda fighters, EIJ members, and/or prominent Muslim clerics supported by bin Laden are imprisoned. And none of the foregoing is to say bin Laden’s planners will stop looking to hit soft American targets—in June 1999, for example, al Qaeda surveilled U.S. embassies in Ghana, Senegal, and Mozambique—or will not stage repeat attacks in Kenya, Tanzania, or New York to again humiliate the U.S. government.25 It does say, however, that there is no chance al Qaeda will back away from attacking either hard targets or targets in sites important to al Qaeda for financial, logistical, or safe-haven reasons.
Another type of revenge attack high on al Qaeda’s priority list will be actions to kill or kidnap American civilians or, especially, officials—diplomats, intelligence officers, and military personnel—at home and abroad. If there is a knee-jerk mantra common among Muslims, it is certainly that the U.S. intelligence service is everywhere, can do anything, and is the cause of most trouble in the Islamic world. Ubiquitous, omnipotent, and malignantly anti-Muslim, the U.S. service—for bin Laden and his lieutenants—has been the infidel world’s quintessential instigator and string-puller that has been working to assassinate him; destroy Islamic governments, as in Sudan and Afghanistan; humiliate Muslims by desecrating Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia and Jerusalem; and generally squash any Muslim individual or entity that has, in bin Laden’s words, raised the banner of “there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah.” From this mind-set, it is the smallest of steps to the conviction that U.S. intelligence is responsible for the multiple defeats suffered by bin Laden and the EIJ in the late 1990s. Indeed, bin Laden has said his attack in Nairobi was made in part because the U.S. embassy “housed the largest CIA center in the African Continent” and because it “had supervised the killing of at least 13,000 Somali civilians in the treacherous aggression against that Muslim country.” More recently, a leading Pakistani Islamist journal reported that the “CIA has started an active strategy against the Islamic movements throughout the world” and that its top five goals are to prevent Muslim unity, identify all Islamists as terrorists, halt Pakistan’s nuclear program and stop other Muslim states from developing such weapons, make false criminal charges against Islamists to impugn their character, and fund anti-Islamist organizations.26 While in no need of strengthening, repeated leaks by anonymous “senior U.S. officials” eager to grab credit for any success against bin Laden have and will continue to validate the Islamists’ view of the U.S. service. Notwithstanding that many captured bin Laden and EIJ operatives have been tried, jailed, and, at times, executed in Egypt, the CIA will be seen as the wizard behind the curtain making bad things happen to good Muslims.
There are two other factors that suggest al Qaeda will take revenge against U.S. civilians, intelligence officers, diplomats, and military personnel when it is in a position to do so. First, bin Laden has had, and presumably has valued, a sterling reputation for taking care of his al Qaeda fighters and their allies, as well as taking a tooth-for-a-tooth from their enemies. From caring for wounded and crippled Arab Afghans and their families during and after the anti-Soviet jihad, to evacuating the families of EIJ members captured in Albania in 1998, to destroying the U.S. embassy in Nairobi a year after his network was disrupted, bin Laden is well known to have been a reliable, protective leader.
It is clear that bin Laden and the Islamic world generally believe that Americans have played the major role in capturing al Qaeda and EIJ fighters and therefore that the onus is on bin Laden’s movement to respond. It is not, for example, a coincidence that one of bin Laden’s demands for ceasing hostilities after his August 1998 attacks was “an end to the war of eradication being waged by the United States with the aid of governments in its pay, against young Muslims under the pretext of fighting terrorism.”27 Robert Fisk also has reported the growing ire among Islamists and across the Muslim world over “the vicious intelligence conflict being played out between America and Muslim groups in the United States” and internationally in which “America’s snatch squads … have abducted wanted men from Muslim countries—in past years, from Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon, and now Albania.”28 In this context, one of bin Laden’s most valuable coins—a reputation for evening scores and going his foe one better�
�would be greatly debased if he fails to exact a pound of flesh from U.S. “snatch squads.”
A second factor motivating bin Laden against this U.S. target set is the organizational imperative to respond to U.S. intelligence service attacks on the EIJ. U.S. actions are perceived by many in the group to be the result of Zawahiri’s decision to attach the EIJ to bin Laden’s World Front. Zawahiri had to face down internal critics who warned that joining bin Laden’s World Front and refocusing EIJ attacks on U.S. rather than Egyptian targets would cause the United States and other Western security services to pursue and catch EIJ operatives outside Egypt. These predictions came to pass, and Zawahiri and the forces of bin Laden will certainly try to blunt the dissension-raising potential of the I-told-you-so’ers by making the U.S. diplomatic and intelligence services pay a price for their successes.
Captured EIJ fighters have made clear that bin Laden and Zawahiri are planning revenge against the U.S. intelligence service. In early 1999, for example, imprisoned EIJ operative Ibrahim al-Najjar said that “the Islamist organizations will react violently to the U.S. intelligence services’ pursuit of fundamentalists.” He also told an Egyptian court that bin Laden’s World Front has expanded its target list to include kidnappings and hostage taking “so as to bargain with the ruling regimes and security services for the release of the detained members of the Islamic group or other pro-loyal groups.” In this regard, the consensus of the EIJ’s “Returnees from Albania” was that “U.S. and French interests” would be especially targeted because of their “pursuit of the organization’s members inside and outside their territories.” Even the EIJ’s not-always-collegial coreligionists in the Gama’at al-Islamiyya (IG) have supported such attacks; current IG chief Mustafa Hamza said in 1996 that the Gama’at was even then considering kidnapping Americans and using them to “ransom” Shaykh Rahman.29
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 39