Echoes of Al Qaeda, Hints of Iraq
Experts differ on whether the attacks were the work of a
Britain-based terrorist cell or recent arrivals from the war zone.
By Sebastian Rotella, Greg Miller and Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writers
July 8, 2005
WASHINGTON — If Al Qaeda or its
allies carried out the bombings in London, as many investigators
suspect, Islamic extremists would have succeeded in striking their top
European target as terrorist networks are gaining combat experience and
inspiration from the conflict in Iraq, officials said Thursday.
Experts said the attacks bore many signatures of the fragmented but
virulent networks that have operational or ideological ties to Osama
bin Laden's organization: multiple targets, near-simultaneity,
significant civilian casualties and political timing.
But the
lack of details about the blasts prompted debate among experts about
whether the plot was the work of a longtime cell based in Britain,
recently arrived operatives from Iraq, or a combination of the two.
The bombs went off as President Bush sat down with Prime Minister Tony
Blair and other world leaders at the Group of 8 summit in Scotland, a
day after London was chosen to host the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The timing recalled the car bombings against British targets in
Istanbul, Turkey, in 2003 as Bush met with Blair in London, as well as
last year's bombings of commuter trains in Madrid that killed 191
people three days before Spanish national elections.
Like Spain
at the time of the Madrid bombings, Britain is a staunch ally in the
U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Britain had repeatedly been threatened by
Al Qaeda, leading security chiefs to say an attack was inevitable.
Experts said Britain's role in Iraq probably served as a strong
motivation for the bombers, citing a message posted on a website
declaring that Britain had paid the price for its presence there and
that other members of the coalition faced the same fate.
Some
investigators suspect the plot involved Islamic extremists from Europe
who went to Iraq, gained combat experience and ideological fervor and
then returned to wage their holy war.
Before Thursday's
attacks, investigators say, they had been concerned by the increasing
presence in Europe of veterans of the Iraq conflict. During the last
six months, Western intelligence reports described a "redeployment"
onto the continent of operatives of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al
Qaeda in Iraq. The operatives were thought to be planning attacks, a
senior European police official said.
A senior U.S.
intelligence official cited indications that Zarqawi had moved to
reestablish his network in Europe, where it had already been linked to
past plots in Britain, France and Germany. In February, U.S.
intelligence officials said they had intercepted a message from Bin
Laden to Zarqawi, urging him to expand his focus beyond the Iraq
insurgency. Bin Laden instructed Zarqawi to consider mounting attacks
on targets in the United States.
"We know Zarqawi has in fact
renewed efforts to try to expand his reach outside the Iraqi theater,
to include the European homeland," the senior intelligence official
said.
He also described intelligence about Al Qaeda's
aspirations to carry out new attacks in Europe. Although the official
said nothing was known about the ethnicity or citizenship of the
plotters, he noted that the name of the group claiming responsibility
for the London attacks, the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe,
was similar to the name of the group in Iraq.
A British law
enforcement official said Britain's counter-terrorism agencies, which
have been effective at infiltrating Islamic extremist groups at home,
would find it more difficult to detect foreign fighters back from Iraq.
"I think it's more likely to be returnees, perhaps people connected to
the Zarqawi group," said the British official, who requested anonymity.
"It doesn't feel like home-grown. Because we have got a pretty good
feel for what's going on among the groups in Britain. We have got good
contacts in the Muslim community, and you would have thought at some
point someone would have detected something. Unless it was a group that
completely slipped in under the wire."
But some investigators
and experts favored another scenario involving local plotters. A
British anti-terrorism official said returning fighters appear less
well-organized and cohesive than networks that have developed in
Britain.
"If we are talking about returning jihadis from Iraq,
our knowledge of them and how they are structured does not necessarily
fit with this operation," the official said.
Experts said the
bombings of a major transportation system required an extensive support
network in Britain, which, unlike neighboring countries, still screens
travelers from Western Europe at its borders, making it more difficult
for would-be terrorists to slip into the country.
"My point
of view is that it was not returnees from Iraq," said Stefano
Dambruoso, Italy's judicial attache in Vienna and a veteran
anti-terrorism prosecutor. "There was this desire to attack in London
for a long time. It was just a question of time. When Al Qaeda says
they are going to do something, eventually they do it."
Experts
say Bin Laden's battered organization has evolved into a constellation
of networks connected to the core command structure sometimes more by
ideology than clandestine messengers or Internet communications.
Partly because Al Qaeda's senior leadership has been degraded — with
Bin Laden and his senior deputies believed to be hiding along the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border — U.S. officials said the London bombings
were probably not planned or controlled by the group's leadership.
U.S. intelligence officials and counter-terrorism experts said
Thursday's violence demonstrated that terrorists remain capable of
unleashing devastation nearly four years after Sept. 11, even in a
country where security forces are vigilant and skilled.
Global surveillance did not detect any increase in communications, or
"chatter," among suspected extremists before Thursday's attacks, U.S.
officials said. Similarly, last year there was no increase in chatter
hinting at the Madrid attacks, Spanish officials said.
On a
day when Al Qaeda also claimed to have killed an Egyptian diplomat in
Iraq, some counter-terrorism experts in the United States called for a
reassessment of the progress against the network.
"I think we
vastly overestimate the damage we have done to Al Qaeda," said Michael
Scheuer, a former senior counter-terrorism official at the CIA and a
critic of Bush administration policy.
Dozens of Al Qaeda
operatives have been killed or captured in the last four years, Scheuer
said, but the network has survived by becoming increasingly
decentralized and adopting new modes of communication.
Moreover, militants linked to Al Qaeda pulled off their first strikes
ever in Western Europe last year with the Madrid bombings and
November's assassination of a Dutch filmmaker.
Many of the
suspects in those cases were known to police as Islamic radicals and
were under surveillance at the time of the attacks.
Officials
say those cases revealed the rise in Europe of a new generation of
young, inexperienced terrorists of predominantly Moroccan origin. Anger
and propaganda about the Iraq conflict tended to drive their
fanaticism, and few attended the clandestine training camps like those
that produced thousands of religious warriors in Afghanistan until late
2001.
The London subway attacks bear a resemblance to the
Madrid bombings, in which explosives were detonated by remote control
on commuter trains.
The evidence suggests the Madrid bombing
attacks were mainly a local plot inspired by Al Qaeda that may also
have received technical expertise and limited direction from veteran
militants, particularly operatives tied to the Zarqawi network
operating in and around Iraq.
Some of the alleged ringleaders
played a role in recruiting and dispatching aspiring holy warriors from
Europe to Iraq, which may also have been at play in Thursday's attacks.
Police in Britain have disrupted several plots that illustrate the
multiethnic membership of extremist organizations that have made London
their base since the 1990s. London mosques have served as the
headquarters of leaders of Egyptian, North African, Persian Gulf and
Pakistani movements.
London was the longtime home of cleric Abu
Qatada, accused by Western security officials of acting as a top Al
Qaeda ideologue who inspired Zarqawi and others.
A group of
Britons of Pakistani descent were arrested last year for possessing
explosives for alleged plots against civilians in shopping malls and
other public places.
In 2002, British police investigated
intelligence reports that extremists planned to bomb aboveground subway
stations with vehicles packed with gasoline containers, but they were
unable to substantiate the tips, the British law enforcement official
said. British authorities have disrupted 20 plots in the last three
years, experts said.
The London attacks required long-term
planning, said Charles Heyman, a senior defense analyst at Jane's
Defense Consultancy, who talked with security officials in London after
the attacks.
"We suspect there's quite a bit of a home-grown
element to this," Heyman said. "The logistics, the planning, the
reconnaissance — the reconnaissance is absolutely vital in any
operation like this. They may spend months until they actually get it
right…. Somebody worked very hard at this one. It's very, very
well-planned."
The plot also suggests the involvement of a large number of people,
experts said.
"If we assume there were four bombs involved, you're not talking about
someone who just planted it, you're talking about people who
constructed the device, selected the target, briefed the bombers and
coordinated the operation, and you've got to take into account that
they were given some kind of safe housing while they were in London —
they may still be in London," said Paul Wilkinson, an international
relations professor at St. Andrews University, who chairs the advisory
board for the school's Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political
Violence.
Wilkinson and other experts speculated that the
attacks might have combined a local infrastructure with leaders or
skilled operatives from outside Britain.
If networks involved
in the Iraq violence played a role, that would be the worst-case
scenario feared by Europe's anti-terrorism services since the conflict
in Iraq began attracting holy warriors from Europe. Extremists from
Britain, France and other countries have died in suicide attacks in
Iraq.
Over the last year, authorities have detected an
increasing presence of insurgents back from the fighting in Iraq. The
Dutch alone have identified "dozens" of such former combatants, a U.S.
law enforcement official said.
Iraq could replace Russia's
Chechnya republic, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan as the breeding
ground for terrorists who could unleash their new experience, skills
and fervor on the West, European officials say. The CIA issued a
classified report in May warning that Iraq had become a more effective
training ground than Afghanistan for terrorists, and that the threat
would spread as foreign fighters left Iraq and returned to their home
countries or migrated elsewhere.
Muslims flocking to Iraq from
other countries are getting firsthand exposure to "a broad range of
terrorist activity, everything from assassinations, kidnappings,
bombings to attacks with conventional weapons," said a U.S.
intelligence official who described the contents of the classified
report on condition of anonymity.
In contrast to the rustic
training camps of Afghanistan, Iraq insurgents learn to operate and
evade detection in an urban environment, the official said.
Iraq is breeding "a generation of people who have the potential to be
the leadership of Islamic extremism for some time to come," the
intelligence official said.
