The aim of militant Islamic groups is to overthrow democracy and establish a Taliban-style Islamic government. In order to create the conditions necessary for revolution, they believe they need to foment civil unrest (see). In fact the three weeks after the July 2005 London bombings reported attacks on Muslims and people of ethnic minorities in the UK rose 500 per cent, and some 600 people in all were detained in the weeks following the attacks. -- The day before the July 2005 attacks in London, a group called the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) had put out a five-minute-long video showing young jihad volunteers (seen below) celebrating martyrs who'd died in suicide bombings in Iraq:
Just after news of the first casualties started to emerge on 7 July, a statement claiming responsibility for the attacks was posted on QaI3ah.org. In in April 2004 an author who called himself 'Lewis Attiyatullah', on the same website had published a letter titled 'Yes, Blair, this is a historic war'. And in Dec. 2004 a 1,600 p. e-book by Mustafa Setmarian Nasar (alias Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian national, distinguished by his fair complexion and red hair) called “The International Islamic Resistance Call” was placed on various jihad sites.
Immediately
after the bomb attack on July 7,2005, video footage and a message
appeared stating:
The murderers
had to pay the price for the massacre and crimes they have committed, and
today the Muslims are happy for God's revenge after the blasts which made
39 victims and 700 injured, and the number is still escalating. God is
great. Thursday, 7 July 2005.
A second, longer and more elaborate celebration video emerged the following day. The central section simply comprised footage from a pre-Iraq bin Laden speech. He said: 'You will be killed and attacked the same way you killed and attacked us.' In essence, the message the video producer was sending out was 'you had been warned'.
Both of the
videos were credited to Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF).
The group had
also been behind a series of threats to bomb underground stations
in the Swedish capital Stockholm on 29 April, a first sign that attacks
on transport systems in Europe were being considered by al-Qaeda followers,
and had been posted to two notorious jihad discussion forums.
The threats
had been aimed at pressurising the Swedish government into not acceding
to a request for the deportation of a terrorist suspect there. Oussama
Kassir, a Lebanese-born Swede, was one of two men who'd travelled from
London in November 1999 to meet James Ujaama in the USA and scope out the
site of a proposed jihad training camp in Ely, Oregon. He'd since returned
to Sweden, where he was found guilty of weapons violations in 2003 and
spent ten months in prison after illegal weapons were found in his Stockholm
house. Charges alleging that he was planning a terrorist attack were dropped.
He was a free
man now in 2005, and he later gave an interview to a local paper in which
he denied that he had anything to do with the London bombings, though he
described the bombers as 'martyrs'.
On 12 July, a fatwa was posted on the internet to refute other fatwas that had been issued to condemn the bombings. It was titled: 'The Base of Legitimacy for the London Bombings'. It argued that there was no need for Muslims to defend their religion with a fatwa each time an attack took place on enemy soil. The author's prime message was the prohibition of any sympathy for the enemy - on the contrary, Muslims should celebrate with joy every tragedy that befalls the infidel oppressors. Britain was described as an infidel country and an enemy of all Muslims: 'As long as it remains an enemy, it is a Muslim duty to terrorise it ... they are the allies of the worst devilish idol of our times - the USA and the Jews - and do their utmost to support them.' The fatwa argued that every British citizen who voted for an MP should be regarded as an attacker, or at least an assistant, as major political decisions are based upon public support voiced through parliament. And ended with “May Allah humiliate the UK and terrorize it.”
It was unsigned,
though there were indications that the author was a Saudi scholar, probably
Abu Hamza or Muhammad al-Massari.
On 4 August
2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, sitting by the obligatory propped up AK-47, claimed
the London attacks in the name of alQaeda. He named Tony Blair and his
policy towards Iraq as being the cause.
Nevertheless
the lack of arrests relating to the support network for the 7/7 bombers
gradually refuelled ideas that there may be no direct connection with al-Qaeda,
and this generated conspiracy theories within the Muslim community that
people other than those named were behind the bombings. Apparently, the
so-called bombers were innocent patsies in a CIA-MI6 operation designed
to scare the population into conformity…
However it seemed
that the indications that al-Zarqawi's network was active but largely unmapped
in the UK and Europe were correct when figures emerged from the US in October
2005. Unnamed counter-terrorism officials estimated that al-Zarqawi's network
now operated in forty countries and encompassed two dozen terrorist groups.
They also admitted that little was known about how he and his group in
Iraq coordinate activities outside the country.
The multiple
suicide bombings in Bali that month came as a reminder that the threat
of repeat attacks on London remained. In the four months that followed
the 7/7 attacks, there was little visible evidence of progress in investigation.
It wasn't until
November 200S that the reasons for the official reticence to talk about
the 717 bombings started to emerge. One newspaper, quoting police sources,
claimed that all of the bombers had been under surveillance for several
weeks 12 months before the attacks took place, but they were discounted
as a threat because there was nothing suspicious about their activities;
they appeared to be living normal lives. The ringleader, Khan, was said
to have been filmed meeting a known al-Qaeda fixer, but no action was taken.
That version of events has not been disputed by the authorities.
Neither has
it been disputed that the bombers were among the five people who'd escaped
during the hastily launched 3 August 2004 raids to break up the alleged
US/UK bombing plot, after details of the capture of computer expert Noor
Khan were leaked to the media in Pakistan.
A Gov poll of British Muslims, the results of which were published in the Daily Telegraph days earlier, found that 56 per cent of respondents said that they understood why the bombers did what they did. Six per cent said the bombings were justified and another six per cent weren't sure. Thirteen per cent sympathised with the feelings and motives of the bombers. Ten per cent said they would not report an imam who was radicalising young Muslims and preaching hatred. With a size of the British Muslim population at between 1.8 million and 2 million, it can be deduced that the would-be martyrs could count on some 160,000 people for direct assistance, and more that wouldn’t report it.
A concern is that those returning from the Iraq theatre later on, might become the field commanders in domestic insurgencies. And for those who doubt relationships between the two, on Nov. 18, 2005, a double suicide bomb attack on a hotel in Baghdad was carried out in the name of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in jail in the US. The attack, on the Hamra Hotel on 18 November, targeted foreign journalists. Sheikh Omar was convicted of plotting terrorist attacks against landmark buildings in New York City and is the suspected mastermind behind the 1993 truck-bombing of the World Trade Centre. And a video shows the final planning for the attacks and includes the wills of the three terrorists.
E.P.W: Starting in Belgium, with most arrests in Spain, have led to dozens of al Qaeda suspects in 11 countries.
More than 50 senior operatives are known to have been detained so far and the circle is widening. Not all the arrests have been announced. The roundups, are believed to have broken the backs of seven networks and their regional headquarters, the most resounding blow ever inflicted on Osama bin Laden’s organization. Important al Qaeda operatives were picked up in Belgium – Brussels, Antwerp, Charleroi and Riemst; Morocco – Rabat, Casablanca and Agadir, and Spain – Alicante, Granada and Murcia, as well as France, Denmark, Holland and Turkey.
1. Osama bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan, where he first established and developed al Qaeda. He is not hiding on the Pakistan-Afghan border as believed by American intelligence hitherto. Instead, his new training camps are busy turning out new recruits. This discovery was confirmed by three reformed Saudi al Qaeda followers interviewed by Saudi TV Tuesday Nov. 29. They reported they had recently spent time in bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan where they met European tyro members.
2. Al Qaeda’s founder is far from being the iconic figurehead busy with theological doctrine and superseded by a younger generation of leaders - as depicted by many pundits in the West. Intelligence input hot off the hob of current interrogations explodes this myth and portrays him as vitally active and in supreme command of al Qaeda’s operations worldwide.
His is the deciding
voice on operational policy and execution; he picks the targets for attacks,
orchestrates the campaign against US forces in Iraq, orders the movements
of units from place to play and allocates funding. Bin Laden is fully abreast
of al Qaeda’s activities and the war waged on his organization.
New commanders
have indeed emerged - and will be exposed for the first time in the next
article in this issue - but they are bin Laden’s appointees and he keeps
them on a tight rein by efficient methods of communication.
3. Even Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, commander of the Iraq branch, is subordinate to bin Laden
and acts under his orders.
4. Al Qaeda
is a dynamically expanding organization, constantly building new regional
commands for the dual purpose of manpower recruitment and the staging of
terrorist attacks.
5. They also reported that, as of the winter of 2005-2006, a new al Qaeda operational tactic was to have gone into effect to correct a weakness. When a lone bomb-vested suicide attacker is caught, the operation is forfeit; this problem is to be overcome by fielding a large band of suicide killers against a single target, some of whom have a chance of getting through to complete the assigned mission even if some are seized.
6. While arrests were made in Algeria’s towns, the desert bases of al Qaeda’s branch in Algeria, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, Algeria’s largest radical jihadist movement – known also by its combat name of Al Muktaliya – proved unreachable. This group is the most covert and inaccessible of all the networks, but its impact is widespread. The detained network commanders all attested to the fingerprint of this dangerous group on all their organizations.
7. Al Qaeda has finally reached into the heart of the Berber people of Morocco and set up clandestine terror cells among its radical groups – and not just among the almost 7 million-strong nation in Morocco (one-fifth of the population at large), but also in expatriate communities living in Antwerp and other parts of West Europe.
8. Operational links are now confirmed between Russia’s Chechen rebels and al Qaeda networks in Turkey. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long claimed this tie-in, but Washington and London were never convinced.
Khalid Abu Basir, Emir of al Qaeda in Belgium, was the kingpin of the syndicate of the seven networks.With another Moroccan-born terror operative, Khalid Asiq, he was assigned in mid-2004 to rebuild the run-down cells in West Europe and North Africa into thriving operational networks. In the first stage, they were not given terrorist commissions; working out of Brussels and Antwerp, Charleroi and Riemst, they brought the seven networks into sync and collected a pool of volunteers willing to carry out terrorist and suicide strikes.Both men were arrested in Brussels.
Al Qaeda penetrated
the Berber people through the Belgian network, which recruited suicide
bombers from among radicalized elements in the expatriate community in
Antwerp. It also found Berbers who volunteered to go back to Morocco and
mobilize to al Qaeda more of their countrymen among disaffected Berber
elements.
Brussels and
Antwerp were the second communications stations for Osama bin Laden’s
orders that were transmitted first to the Istanbul center. Belgium relayed
those orders to the European, North African and Middle East cells, including
bin Laden’s instructions for Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq. Belgium had
clearly emerged by then as a center for supplying terrorists with fake
Belgian passports, among the myriad functions provided the fundamentalist
terror movement.
Under interrogation in Brussels, Khaled Azig recounted how he visited Istanbul to pick up bin Laden’s letters for the terrorist networks in Morocco and Europe. He revealed that the letters were written in the supreme leader’s own handwriting. The Istanbul center would request couriers from Morocco to carry Bin Laden’s letters to al Qaeda terror chiefs in Saudi Arabia.
Aziq’s frequent calls on the Chechens in Istanbul were his undoing. The suspicions of Turkish intelligence were aroused and they began to follow him. They were led to the Chechen cell and uncovered its link to Brussels and alerted Belgian intelligence who took it from there.
On Dec. 7, an Islamic website ran an excerpt of an earlier videotape in which bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri called on “holy warriors” to concentrate their attacks on oil targets. Four days later an explosion causes fires that devours Britain's fifth oil depot. A spokesman for Total denied however, there had been leaks in the run-up to the explosions.
