Arrests stir worry about Qaeda plots in West

Their place in history assured, are al-Qaeda's ageing leaders content merely to propagate their ideology and tactics among like-minded militant groups?

Counter-terrorism analysts say the answer is no: evidence emerging in the West shows the veteran Islamist instigators of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States retain an ambition to execute plots and not just act as propagandists.

They point to investigations into suspected conspiracies uncovered in the past 18 months in the United States, Norway and Britain, which law enforcement officers say were directed by a group of operatives in the core leadership's bases in Pakistan.

Gauging the influence and expertise of the movement's leaders, believed to be hiding in northwest Pakistan near the Afghan border, is important for Western strategists since Washington has said its main goal in the Afghan war is fighting al-Qaeda.

In recent years the threat of US drone strikes is believed to have constrained the ability of a once-active core of plotters around Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri to bring to fruition significant conspiracies beyond South Asia.

But experts say that in 2008 Saleh al-Somali, then al-Qaeda external operations chief and believed to be close to the leadership, set in motion a plot in the United States and two alleged conspiracies uncovered in Britain and Norway.

He organised bomb-training for terrorists in northwest Pakistan and sent them back to prepare attacks in the United States, Britain and Norway, analysts say.

Ambitions undimmed

A Western counter-terrorism official said the evidence of Somali's involvement suggested to Western governments that the group's leaders retained an ambition to launch attacks.

US prosecutors said Somali was helped in the US plot by Adnan al-Shukrijumah, a Saudi Arabia-born operative, and Rashid Rauf, a British al-Qaeda-linked terrorist of Pakistani ancestry.

Paul Cruickshank, a terrorism expert and alumni fellow at the Centre on Law and Security at New York University's School of Law, said the plots "show al-Qaeda core remains a threat".

"Westerners are still travelling [from homes in the West] to the tribal areas [of Pakistan] in significant numbers... It gives al-Qaeda a chance to turn them around and send them back.

"Some of al-Qaeda's most experienced bomb makers are there, and so the area remains a significant danger," he said.

For al-Qaeda, carrying out a big attack in the West is key to raising funds among wealthy supporters, some of whom have been demoralised by the failure of the group to strike at the West successfully since the London bombings of July 7, 2005, which killed 52 people.

Risk is spread

Bill Braniff, a senior expert at the Combating Terrorism Centre at the US Military Academy at West Point, said Somali's siting of the plots in three different countries was intended to reduce the risk that all three would be detected.

"These plots show al-Qaeda's trademark complex attack, geographically distributed," he said, referring to the group's style of multiple bombings.

"If they had succeeded, you would have had a huge propaganda effect from attacks in all three countries."

The plots were dealt successive blows when Rauf was reported killed in a US drone strike in November 2008 and Somali was killed by a drone in December 2009.

But Shukrijumah is widely believed to be alive and is now considered "a very prominent member of the inner circle" of operational planning, according to Roger Cressey, a US security expert and president of Good Harbor Consulting.

Western governments are concerned that subsequent groups of terrorists trained in northwest Pakistan in 2009 and 2010 may have now made their way to the West to prepare other attacks.

Brynjar Lia and Petter Nesser, research fellows at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, said the discovery of an alleged al-Qaeda cell in Norway suggested that the group sought a new capability to strike Europe's periphery after disruption to cells in Spain, Britain, Germany and France.

Terrorist cells hardly ever emerge in a vacuum because they need supporters to recruit and train, they said. "Discovery of such cells is usually a strong sign that radicalism and underground extremist networks are on the rise," they wrote in a joint article in CTC Sentinel.