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Terror Networks
ISKP Goes Global: External Operations from Afghanistan
2023-09-17
[WashingtonInstitute] Two decades after the 9/11 attacks, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is once again becoming a haven for terrorist activities abroad—but this time by a local Islamic State branch.

Over the past three decades, successive jihadist organizations have sought to conduct external operations beyond their local battlefields, often from safe havens abroad. The long list includes actors such as the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (when it hijacked Air La Belle France Flight 8969 in 1994), al-Qaeda (most infamously via the 9/11 attacks, but also through plots by local branches al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
...the latest incarnation of various Qaeda and Qaeda-allied groups, including the now-defunct Aden-Abyan Islamic Army that boomed the USS Cole in 2000...
, al-Shabaab
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Europe
Former Gitmo Captive on Saudi Payroll Arrested in French ISIS Cell
2017-06-03
More on this story from a few days ago.
[JUDICIALWATCH.ORG] Surprise, surprise, another inmate released from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been tossed in the calaboose
Drop the rosco, Muggsy, or you're one with the ages!
 for reengaging in terrorism. His name is Sabir Mahfouz Lahmar and his Department of Defense (DOD) file says he has links to "multiple terrorist plots" and as a member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) plotted with Al Qaeda to attack the United States Embassy in Sarajevo.

"Detainee advocated hostilities against US forces and the international community in Bosnia, and is linked to multiple terrorist plots and criminal related activity," according to Lahmar’s DOD file. "Detainee had intentions to travel to Afghanistan and Iran, and is reported as doing so prior to his capture. Detainee has demonstrated a commitment to jihad, and would likely engage in anti-US activities if released." Lahmar ended up at Gitmo in 2002 because the Algerian government refused to take him into custody after Bosnian authorities exhausted the legal limits for detention. The Pentagon recommended continued detention and determined that he was a high risk that posed a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies. Lahmar was also labeled a "high threat" from a detention perspective and of high intelligence value.
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Europe
French intelligence under fire over Merah
2012-03-24
Pretty good intel brief on what was known about Merah. It's even more frustrating in retrospect of course, but it does seem that Merah was a well known bad boy who should have been allowed to finish his journey to Afghanistan -- and then be drone-zapped.
PARIS: France’s prime minister rejected accusations on Friday that intelligence lapses allowed a young Muslim with a violent criminal record, spotted twice in Afghanistan, to become the first Al-Qaeda-inspired killer to strike on its soil.

Hardened by battling Islamic militants from its former North African colony of Algeria, the French security services have long been regarded as among the most effective in Europe, having prevented militant attacks on French soil for the last 15 years.

Opposition politicians, including far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, suggested that negligence or errors had permitted Mohamed Merah, 23, to carry out three deadly shootings within 10 days before he was identified, located and killed.

But Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the police and intelligence agencies had done an exemplary job. “Resolving a criminal case of this importance in 10 days, I believe that’s practically unprecedented in the history of our country,” Fillon told RTL radio.

Foreign Minister Alain Juppe had appeared to acknowledged on Thursday that there were grounds to question possible security flaws, saying: “We need to bring some clarity to this.”

Merah shot dead three Jewish children and four adults in three separate attacks despite having been under surveillance by the DCRI domestic intelligence agency, which questioned him as recently as November.

“Since the DCRI was following Mohamed Merah for a year, how come they took so long to locate him?” Socialist party security spokesman Francois Rebsamen asked on the JDD.fr website.

Merah’s elder brother Abdelkader, 29, who is now under police questioning, was also on a security watch list after being linked with the smuggling of Jihadist militants into Iraq in 2007, government officials said.

The left-leaning daily Liberation asked in an editorial whether the intelligence services had not “failed miserably.”

“How could they have so underestimated the potential danger of an individual they already knew?“

Merah, a French citizen of Algerian extraction, amassed a cache of at least eight guns under the noses of French intelligence, including several Colt .45 pistols of the kind he used in the shootings, but also at least one Uzi submachine gun, a Sten gun and a pump action shotgun.

In Washington, two US officials said Merah was on a US government “no fly” list, barring him from boarding any US-bound aircraft. The officials said that his name had been on the list for some time.

The officials said the entry included sufficient biometric detail to make clear the man on the blacklist was the same person involved in the Toulouse shootings. He was put on the list because US officials deemed him a potential threat to aviation, one of the officials said.

Rebsamen said that after the shooting of two paratroopers in Montauban, near Toulouse, on March 15, Merah’s name was on top of a DCRI list of 20 people to be particularly closely watched in the southwestern Midi-Pyrenees region. Yet the agency appeared to have lost his trace.

Investigators only tracked down Merah on Tuesday, a day after he had shot dead three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Interior Minister Claude Gueant said Merah was identified with certainty when a police helicopter overflew his home and he came to the window.

Police came up with his name when a list of 576 people who viewed an Internet advertisement placed by the shooter’s first victim was compared with the DCRI’s watchlist on Monday and led them to the IP address of Merah’s mother.

He had, however, been known to the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI) - the powerful super agency created by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 - since 2010. Merah first visited Afghanistan that year, was stopped at a road checkpoint by Afghan police in Kandahar province and sent back to France by American forces.

His second visit ended after three months last October when he contracted hepatitis and returned home, according to the public prosecutor in charge of the case.

He was interviewed by DCRI agents in Toulouse in November but told them he had been on holiday - and even showed them photographs, prosecutor Francois Molins said.

Merah told police negotiators at his besieged home on Wednesday that he trained at an Al-Qaeda camp in the lawless Pakistani border region of Waziristan during the same trip.

Interior Minister Claude Gueant said there had been no grounds to arrest Merah prior to the attacks.

“The DCRI follows lots of people involved in radical Islam. Expressing ideas, espousing Salafist beliefs, is not a sufficient reason to arrest someone,” he said.

Although Merah could not have been arrested without proof of criminal intent, critics say authorities could have taken intermediate steps. French anti-terrorist law allows for the telephones of suspects to be tapped without judicial approval on the authority of the prime minister and an advisory panel.

Le Pen suggested the DCRI may have missed the gunman partly because it had been diverted by Sarkozy’s government to snoop on journalists and political opponents.

The agency’s head, Bernard Squarcini, is under investigation himself for ordering the illegal surveillance of Le Monde reporters’ telephones.

Squarcini said in an interview with Le Monde that security officials had naturally asked themselves whether they had missed clues or could have acted differently or faster. “But it was impossible to say on Sunday evening (after the first shooting on March 11) ‘It’s Merah, let’s get him’.”

He also said Merah’s attack on the Jewish school had been a spur-of-the-moment decision after the gunman failed to find a soldier he planned to kill, according to his conversation with police negotiators during the siege of his home.

While allies Britain and Spain have suffered major militant attacks in the last decade, following the US-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taleban, France had not seen a major attack on its soil since the mid-1990s. The Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) carried out a wave of attacks, including the bombing of a crowded commuter train in July 1995 which killed eight and injured 150 people.

The rise of Al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, posed a new challenge to French security services more used to watching Algerian-related militants, often with connections in what some French officials called “Londonistan.”

French-born Zacarias Moussaoui was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States as one of the conspirators in the Sept. 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and French-born Muslims were also active among Jihadi militants in Iraq.

The terror alert in France was raised after Al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden singled it out as one of the worst offenders against Islam in October 2010.

But despite a spate of kidnappings of French citizens abroad, there were no attacks in mainland France. Officials say the intelligence services foiled several plots.

“In the last six years, at least eight attacks of the same type as the one that was perpetrated (by Merah) were broken up by the police without any publicity,” said Roland Jacquard, head of the International Terrorism Observatory.
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India-Pakistan
CIA winked at Pak Army training camps for LT: Paris
2009-11-14
[The News (Pak) Top Stories] Pakistan's army once ran training camps for the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) militant group with the apparent knowledge of the CIA, an example of complicity that raises questions about the current state of the nuclear-armed nation. So says former French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere, author of a new book that provides rare insight both into alleged past army support for the defunct Lashkar-e-Taiba and to the group's connections to a global network linked to al-Qaeda.

The question of Pakistani military support for Islamist militants is crucial for the United States as it tries to work out how to stabilise the country and neighbouring Afghanistan.Bruguiere bases the information in his book on international terrorism, "Ce que je n'ai pas pu dire" ("What I could not say") on testimony given by jailed Frenchman Willy Brigitte, who spent 2-1/2 months in a Lashkar-e-Taiba training camp in 2001-02.

In an interview, Bruguiere said he was convinced Lashkar-e-Taiba, first set up to fight India in its part of the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, had become part of an international network tied to al-Qaeda. "Lashkar-e-Taiba is no longer a Pakistani movement with only a Kashmir political or military agenda. Lashkar-e-Taiba is a member of al-Qaeda. Lashkar-e-Taiba has decided to expand violence worldwide," he told Reuters.
That's pretty much a given, isn't it? They provide training facilities and cadres for al-Qaeda. Three of them were arrested in Bangla in today's news plotting and kaboom the U.S. embassy in Dhaka in an expression of the Bangla people's outrage at our existence...
He was "very, very anxious about the situation" in Pakistan, where militants are staging a series of bloody urban attacks to avenge a government offensive against their strongholds. "The problem right now is to know if the Pakistanis have sufficient power to control the situation," he said.
They don't. If they change their ways they might in the future, but they're not really changing their ways. They're trying to go after the Pak Taliban but not the al-Qaeda infrastructure or the Afghan Taliban infrastructure in Balochistan and North Wazoo.
The problem was also "to know if all the members of the military forces and the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence agency) are playing the same game. I am not sure," he added.
I'm sure they're not, and I'm also sure that the ones who aren't are not "rogue."
Pakistan has long been accused of giving covert support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed for last year's attack on Mumbai in which 166 people were killed. It denies the allegation and has banned the organisation.
But Hafiz Saeed isn't in jug, the charges against him were dropped and he never did more than house arrest. Pak military trainers provided training and logistical assistance the the Mumbai killers. And LeT is about as "defunct" as I am, maybe less so.
New form of terrorism: Bruguiere said he became aware of the changing nature of international terrorism while investigating attacks in Paris in the mid-1990s by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA). These included an attempt to hijack a plane from Algiers to Paris in 1994 and crash it into the Eiffel Tower -- a forerunner of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. The plane was diverted to Marseilles and stormed by French security forces.

This new style of international terrorism was quite unlike militant groups he had investigated in the past, with their pyramidal structures and political objectives. "After 1994/1995, like viruses, all the groups have been spreading on a very large scale all over the world, in a horizontal way and even a random way," he said.
It doesn't cost much to be a terrorist. The November 14th-Red Brigades-Baader Meinhof model works perfectly well for small-scale operations, and even big blow-outs like killing Aldo Moro, if you're willing to take the casualties. Note that Jemaah Islamiyah, for instance, was effectively wiped out after the Bali bombings.
An early encounter with Lashkar-e-Taiba came while he was investigating shoe-bomber Richard Reid, who tried to set off explosives on a transatlantic flight from Paris in 2001. This investigation led to a man, who Bruguiere said was the Lashkar-e-Taiba's representative in Paris, and who was suspected of helping Reid -- an accusation he denied. Bruguiere said the link to Reid was not proved in court.

"Willie Brigitte quickly understood that Sajid Mir belonged to the regular Pakistan army. The Toyota pick-up which took them to the training camp passed through four army checkpoints without being stopped."
Brigitte, a Frenchman originally from France's Caribbean department of Guadeloupe, had gone to Pakistan shortly after Sept 11 to try to reach Afghanistan. Unable to make it, he had been sent to a Lashkar centre outside Lahore. A man named Sajid Mir became his handler. "He quickly understood that Sajid belonged to the regular Pakistan army," wrote Bruguiere. After 1-1/2 months, he was taken with four other trainees, two British and two Americans, to a Lashkar camp in the hills in Punjab province. The Toyota pick-up which took them there passed through four army checkpoints without being stopped.

During his 2-1/2 months stay at the camp, Bruguiere says, Brigitte realised the instructors were soldiers on detachment. Military supplies were dropped by army helicopters. Brigitte said he and other foreigners were forced four times to leave the camp and move further up into the hills to avoid being caught by CIA officers. They were believed to be checking if Pakistan had kept to a deal under which the Americans turned a blind eye to Lashkar camps in Punjab provided no foreigners were trained there. In return, Bruguiere said, Pakistan under then president Pervez Musharraf helped track down leaders of al-Qaeda.

Double standards: Western countries were at the time accused by India of double standards in tolerating Pakistani support for Kashmir-focused organisations while pushing it to crack down on militant groups which threatened Western interests. Diplomats say that attitude has since changed, particularly after bombings in London in 2005 highlighted the risks of "home-grown terrorism" in Britain linked to militant groups based in Pakistan's Punjab province.

After leaving the camp accompanied by Sajid, Brigitte was sent back to France. Sajid then ordered him to fly to Australia where he joined a cell later accused of plotting attacks there. Tipped off by French police, Brigitte was deported from Australia in 2003 and convicted by a French court of links to terrorism.

Bruguiere said he had personally questioned Brigitte in the presence of his lawyer to check his testimony. Information provided by Brigitte was also crosschecked by French police based on mobile phone and e-mail traffic. Bruguiere went to Pakistan himself in 2006 as part of his investigations into the deaths of 11 Frenchmen in a bombing outside a hotel in Karachi in 2002. He stepped down as France's best-known counter-terrorism expert in 2007 and now represents the EU on the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme in Washington.
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Home Front: WoT
Terror-Funded MSA at Ohio State
2008-04-28
By Patrick Poole

February 20, 2006 proved to be an eventful day for the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at The Ohio State University. Not only did that date mark the conclusion of their weekend-long “Leaders of Tomorrow” conference, but that was also the day that their conference sponsor, Kindhearts, was raided by federal law enforcement and closed by order of the Department of the Treasury for financing terrorism, freezing its assets.

According to the US government, Kindhearts, which was established following the closure of the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, was not only engaged in providing millions for HAMAS in Lebanon and the West Bank, it had hired as a fundraising specialist the man identified by HAMAS head Khaled Mishal as the designated HAMAS bag man in the US, Mohammed El-Mezain. (For additional background on Kindhearts and its multiple connections to the international terrorism finance network, see Joe Kaufman’s FrontPage article, “The Black Hearts of Kindhearts”)

Kindhearts, however, was not the only terror-connected sponsor of the OSU MSA conference. Also supporting the MSA’s conference was its local parent organization, Masjid Omar Ibn El-Khattab, known affectionately in the Central Ohio area as “Masjid Al-Qaeda”. The mosque nearby the OSU campus was home to the largest known Al-Qaeda cell in the US since 9/11, with two former members – Iyman Faris and Nuradin Abdi – already convicted and serving prison terms for their participation, and another cell member – Christopher Paul – currently awaiting trial.

The third identified sponsor of the MSA conference, Ilmquest Productions, is the media arm of the Al-Maghrib Institute (profiled last year here at FrontPage, “Jihad U”). Ilmquest not only publishes and markets DVDs and CDs of Al-Maghrib “scholars”, but also a long-line of other extremist speakers, including Bilal Philips, Khalid Yasin, and Yemeni Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar Al-Aulaqi.

As noted recently here at FrontPage, the Ohio State MSA is no stranger to controversy. Three months after 9/11, the Associated Press reported that the OSU MSA was under federal investigation for its MSA News email list that regularly published news releases by a whole host of Islamic terrorist organizations, and also for encouraging readers to purchase videos from a terrorist support website:

— Ohio State University's Muslim Student Association produces and distributes MSA NEWS, which publicizes events featuring controversial speakers and has included news releases from terrorist groups such as the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations Americans are forbidden to support or finance, and the Islamic Salvation Front, a fundamentalist political party banned in Algeria.

— During last year's Ramadan fast, MSA-NEWS urged campus groups to purchase a videotape called The Martyrs of Bosnia and show it to Muslim-only gatherings. The video was sold by London-based Azzam Productions, which featured articles on its Web site like "Taliban: Allah's Blessing on Afghanistan," and solicited funds there for the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan. The site, and a related German site, were shut down by the British and German governments as part of their Sept. 11 response.

Two years later, the OSU MSA played a critical role in hosting the Third National Conference on Palestinian Solidarity, whose keynote speaker was none other than now-convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader and former University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian.

And more recently, the OSU MSA jointly sponsored an event to counter last October’s Islamofascism Awareness Week featuring notorious wife-beating advocate and Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi, “Interfaith Relations – A Muslim Perspective”. The event was paid for by the university through student fees. As I reported here at FrontPage, “Fatwa Fraud”, Badawi was one of the featured speakers and an honored guest last July at a terrorist confab in Doha, Qatar honoring HAMAS spiritual leader Yousef Al-Qaradawi and attended by HAMAS head Khaled Mishal.

College students and administrators would do well to consider that Islamic terrorism and extremism are not phenomena distant and far removed from American college campuses (even though Ohio State professor John Mueller contends there is no threat from Islamic terrorists).

In fact, Islamic terrorism and extremism might be closer than they would ever realize – as close as the nearest Muslim Student Association.
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Europe
Europe Is Growing Skeptical Of Dialogue With Muslims
2006-10-06
After years of dithering over political correctness with Muslims and Islam, Europe is waking up to a different morning.

A three-week tour of Italy, France, and Britain last month was enough for me to conclude that Western Europeans have moved way beyond dialogue. Confrontation, indeed even provocation, is their preferred approach to the Muslims in their midst.

Long before Pope Benedict XVI's scathing comments in mid-September on the fallacy of phony Muslim-Christian dialogue, signs of hardening European views toward current Islamic values were plentiful on the Continent.

It was telling, for example, to see how Europeans greeted the naïve commentary that surfaced in America's National Intelligence Estimate, titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States." The NIE told bemused Europeans, among other things, that "greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit."

Situated closer than America to that rough neighborhood called the Middle East, Europeans reacted by noting that the chances for "greater pluralism" in any Muslim country are about as plausible as hell freezing over.

Should the region's despotic regimes be toppled, a number of press outlets observed, their successors would be even nastier murderers. Possibilities include the saber-wielding soldiers of the Muslim Brotherhood and its tributaries — Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, among others — men who believe in carrying out ritual killings of their fellow Muslims even before the slaughter of infidels.

The common view in Europe is that pseudo-secularist tyrants in Muslim lands like Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia share the same aspirations to dominate, wage war, and rule as Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al Qaeda.

A more relevant passage in the NIE reads: "Jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests. Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diaspora in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings."

Indeed, what can one say about Britain's Muslims, when 10% of those polled after the August airliner plot said they would be "willing" to wage suicide attacks against their fellow Britons, and another 70% refused to condemn that view?

Europeans now see a need not to massage the Muslim ethos but to remove it. One can talk forever of the necessity for Islam to reform itself, but that fails to resonate within Muslim societies, Europeans tell me.

My European tour made it eminently clear that Western Europeans — if not their more liberal, compromised ruling and business elites — believe that for Muslims living in the West, it's either Western ways or the highway.

Harsh, maybe, but that is how it stands.

When the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci died in September, newspapers across Europe celebrated her for her journalistic exploits with the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini and Henry Kissinger. But above all, they celebrated her for her fierce, uncompromising, "rejectionist" book about Islam in Europe, "The Rage and the Pride," which called for nothing less than the expulsion of Muslims who insist on separate societies.

Shortly before and after the pope's pointed remarks on Islam — in which he added to his earlier statements that Turkey's 70 million Muslims have no place in "Christian Europe" — there were numerous other mini-explosions. They included Dutch revulsion over the ritual Muslim killing of the movie director Theo van Gogh; the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad; and, most recently, a September 19 article in Le Figaro by the French philosopher and schoolteacher Robert Redeker that made the case that Muslims are bent on muzzling Europe's democratic values.

Europe is no longer dithering. Every other week, parliaments are restricting the freedom of expression of Muslim fundamentalists, preachers, and madrassas, and questioning every value that militant Islam has attempted to sneak into the Continent over the past 20 years.

The dialogue is over. The time for action is closing in.

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Europe
Europe: Contrasting Reactions to the Militant Threat
2006-05-25
In the early morning hours of May 24, the police Anti-Terrorist Unit from Manchester, England, working with the British Immigration Service, four other police departments and the MI5 domestic intelligence service, conducted raids in five British cities, arresting nine people under the country's Terrorism Act. A day earlier, the Netherlands toughened its anti-terrorism stance, passing laws to give authorities greater leeway in dealing with suspects. While Britain, the Netherlands and other countries in Western Europe are reacting to the militant threat in their midst, France remains relatively complacent to its growing problem.

The British raids, which began at 3 a.m. local time, took place in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Middlesbrough. Authorities later released two of the detainees, but are holding five people on suspicion of immigration violations and two on suspicion of supporting terrorism abroad, primarily in Iraq. Those suspected of immigration violations likely will be deported.

Among those detained in Manchester is Taher Nasuf, a man the U.S. government says is a midlevel member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and an al Qaeda fundraiser. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, Nasuf was associated with other British-based Libyans who were linked to the al Qaeda-affiliated Algerian Armed Islamic Group. In February, London froze Nasuf's assets on behalf of the United States. Nasuf has denied any link to militant groups.

The Dutch parliament also is reacting to an apparent domestic militant threat in the Netherlands, as highlighted by the November 2004 slaying of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Parliament on May 23 adopted anti-terrorism measures that will allow prosecutors to approve surveillance, including wiretaps, on suspects as well as the infiltration of suspicious groups, even absent "reasonable suspicion" that the suspects have committed a crime. The law also will expand police authorization to carry out preventative searches and arrests.

In Italy, security forces frequently round up and deport those suspected of involvement in militant cells. In the immediate aftermath of the London Underground attacks of July 2005, Italian security forces conducted major sweeps in northern Italy, deporting dozens of Muslims. More recently, the Italians claim to have disrupted plots to attack mass transportation targets and a cathedral in northern Italy.

By contrast, the French have done little to toughen their anti-terrorism laws or to deport foreign suspects. This likely stems from a French belief that their existing laws are adequate to deal with the militant threat in France, as well as the high degree to which local French law enforcement agencies believe they have tapped into the country's Muslim communities. Indeed, it has been more than a decade since France experienced a serious terrorist attack on it soil. In 1995, two Algerians used homemade bombs to target civilians at Paris metro stations in a campaign that killed eight people and injured more than 150.

As France's Muslim immigrant community grows, however, it has experienced many serious social and economic problems, leading to increasing instability within the community. These tensions were most visibly expressed during riots that raged for weeks in the fall 2005.

For now, the French seem to have adopted a policy of allowing potential militant communities to operate in France -- as long as they do not conduct attacks. This has led to the establishment of several militant networks in the country. As militants in other European countries are increasingly harried by tougher laws and efforts to disrupt their activities, however, they could find the French environment more favorable for operations. Should that happen, the French accord with its immigrants could break down.
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Europe
Algerian jailed for Paris metro blasts
2006-03-30
A French court has convicted an Algerian man for his role in a series of deadly terror attacks in Paris in 1995, sentencing him to the maximum 10 years in prison. Rachid Ramda, 36, was convicted on Wednesday for his role as the banker for Algerian fighters who carried out bombings of the Paris metro system that claimed eight lives and injured hundreds. Ramda was found guilty of giving logistical support to the attackers. The bombings were the worst seen in France since the second world war.

At the start of the trial last month, Ramda proclaimed his innocence and expressed sympathy for victims of the attacks. Originally arrested by British detectives in November 1995 on a French warrant, Ramda was the subject of a 10-year extradition battle with Britain, which finally handed him over in December. Relatives of victims attended the trial in Paris He was convicted for "criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise" for three of the attacks. The charges related only to the preparation of the attacks, which were blamed on the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA).
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Europe
Trial of orcs suspected terrorists opens in Paris
2006-03-22
The trial of 27 people suspected of planning terrorist attacks in France opened Monday in a Paris court, following one of the country's biggest anti-terrorism investigations in recent years. They are charged with associating with criminals connected to a terrorist organisation. Some of the suspects have given statements claiming that attacks were planned against French targets including the Eiffel Tower, police stations and a central Paris shopping centre. Others have said the group planned attacks on Russian targets in France to revenge the attack on a Chechen rebel unit in Moscow in October 2002.

Among those on trial are suspects charged with links to al-Qaeda or Chechen rebels, or suspected former members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and minor operatives recruited in the Paris suburbs. Some of them also face charges of making and carrying false documents and being in the country illegally.

The lawyer of one of the suspects questioned the competence of the French court to try his client for acts he says were committed outside France before his client was extradited there from Syria in September 2004. Sébastien Bono, representing 41-year-old Algerian former army officer and chemicals expert Said Arif, called for the court to reject evidence which he says was obtained from his client under torture in Damascus. He also criticised French authorities for letting Russian agents question Arif in January, after he was referred to the court. The trial is expected to last until May 12.
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Europe
Terrorism and crime go hand-in-hand in Europe
2006-01-18
Since the early 1990s, Western law enforcement agencies have noted an increasing reliance on criminal activity by terrorist networks around the world. Funding sources from the Persian Gulf, charities and other non-governmental fronts have been placed under pressure. This development, compounded by the arrests of several high-ranking coordinators and financiers of operations in Europe and North America—such as Abu Doha and Fateh Kamel—have compelled jihadi networks to adapt and further diversify their funding sources. Consequently “traditional” criminal activities like drug trafficking, robbery and smuggling are rapidly becoming the main source of terrorism funding. In fact, many recent terrorist attacks have been partly financed through crime proceeds.

Throughout the 1990s, European law enforcement officers tasked with combating the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) networks noticed that operatives had penetrated local criminal structures in Europe and North Africa by using ethnic and cultural links. With the jihad in Algeria at its height, the under-funded GIA became actively involved in drugs and weapons trafficking through logistics and financial support cells in Europe. GIA members such as Djamel Lounici and Mourad Dhina also trafficked stolen vehicles and forged documents. Similarly, for years the Fateh Kamel network in Montreal and an affiliated cell in Istanbul benefited from trafficking in stolen vehicles, theft and credit card fraud. One of its Montreal members, the Millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam, had also planned a series of armed robberies to secure funding for his aborted attack on the Los Angeles airport in 1999.

While a number of violent crimes involving jihadists have taken place in North Africa and Europe over the last decade, the full synthesis between criminality and terrorism took place in 1996 with a series of deadly armed robberies in the French town of Roubaix, which police initially assumed were perpetrated by criminals motivated solely by money. Following the attempted bombing of a G-7 meeting in Lille, French authorities discovered that the Roubaix gang was in fact a small Islamic militant organization that had also committed robberies in Bosnia to fund the jihad. An added benefit of these actions—from the Roubaix gang’s point of view—may have been that these unconventional “fundraising operations” were, in fact, terrorizing in themselves.

In December 2005, co-leader of the Roubaix gang and French convert Lionel Dumont was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Moreover, similar groups have been dismantled in France in the past months, including in a December 13th joint operation involving five French law enforcement agencies that netted over 25 suspects as well as high-grade explosives and weaponry. The group included known jihadists, radicalized delinquents and common criminals. Some of the members of this Zarqawi-linked cell—including presumed leader and ex-convict Ouassini Cherifi—were also involved in a number of armored car robberies that were undertaken to raise funds for the movement of recruits to Iraq.

A “triangular trade” is steadily evolving that consists of weapons, stolen/contraband goods and narcotics. New al-Qaeda affiliates, notably the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC), the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM) and North African branches of Takfir wa al-Hijra (Excommunication and exile) have inherited old GIA networks spread across Europe and are actively involved in various types of trafficking to fund operations, trade in weaponry and explosives and move/shelter militants. In Europe, this nexus is mostly active in France and especially Spain, which because of its geography is a major transit (and destination) point for Moroccan cannabis as well as a hub for forged documents and credit cards (Le Nouvel Observateur, October 7, 2004).

While networks were initially involved in drugs-for-weapons exchanges, many eventually shifted to direct drug trafficking. Moroccan sources suspect drug money to be the main source of funding for the May 16, 2003 attacks in Casablanca. Moreover, according to Spanish police, the funding for the March 11, 2004 Madrid train attacks came from drug trafficking, and many of those who took part in the preparation and execution of the attack had been involved in criminal activities such as stolen vehicle trading, jewel thefts and various types of counterfeiting (La Vanguardia, May 24, 2005). Furthermore, over half of the members of the group planning suicide strikes against the Spanish High Court later that year were already in jail on drug-trafficking-related charges.

Additionally, in June and November of this year, Spanish police uncovered operational and logistics cells of the GSPC and the Zarqawi networks, and discovered that the suspects had engaged in credit card fraud, robberies, drug trafficking and vehicle theft. At times an operational cell may partially fund itself, as when police found 7 kilograms of hashish in the hideout of the suspects planning to bomb the Strasbourg cathedral in 2000. Although financed by Abu Doha, the group had been raising funds through drug trafficking in Frankfurt and London. Many other Islamist cells dismantled in Europe following September 11, 2001, had engaged in drug trafficking, including an al-Qaeda linked group operating in Antwerp and Brussels and a cell in the Netherlands involved in the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Aside from narcotics, militants and sympathizers also traffic in precious stones and metals, mainly because they are easy to transport and difficult to trace. This was the case with a Tunisian man charged in Germany with planning attacks against Western targets, who had used a travel agency as a front for gold and silver trafficking (Agence France-Presse, November 30, 2004). Front companies are ideal vehicles to transfer illicit funds and since the mid-1990s, dozens of terrorist front companies have been dismantled in Europe. Recent arrests in France uncovered a GICM support cell (linked to the Madrid bombings) operating various business ventures, just as Ould Slahi—involved in major al-Qaeda plots and closely linked to al-Qaeda financier Khaled Al Shanquiti—was first arrested in 1999 for laundering drug money through his import-export firm.

Following the arrests of several key players in the GIA’s European operations in the mid-1990s, networks reorganized themselves around contraband and arms-smuggling rings influenced by elements of the Russian and Sicilian mafia (the latter has also laundered money for the GIA) [1]. These types of relationships arise from mutual benefit, with the terrorists seeking entry into established trafficking/money laundering channels and traditional criminal groups taking advantage of profit opportunities. Ethnic or religious links are not necessarily essential for collaboration to take place; for example, the Madrid bombings were facilitated by members of local criminal groups and petty thieves. When in 2001 the Spanish police conducted a counter-narcotics operation, which netted, among other items, hashish, explosives and detonators, they initially arrested the procurer of explosives for 3/11, José Suárez. Furthermore, the arrests of Marc Muller and Stephen Wendler in the mid-1990s were two of many examples where arms traffickers knowingly supplied terrorist groups with weapons from ex-soviet bloc states. In a case of direct barter, two Pakistanis and a U.S. citizen were detained in Hong Kong in 2002 in an attempt to exchange 600kg of heroin and five tons of hashish for four Stinger missiles, which they intended to sell to al-Qaeda.

Since traffickers and terrorist organizations have similar logistical needs, there is ample room for collaboration in money laundering and even facilitating illegal immigration. Recent evidence from Morocco strongly suggests that jihadists are increasingly reliant on outsourcing to specialized migrant smuggling networks to infiltrate or exfiltrate targeted countries (La Gazette du Maroc, February 9, 2004).

There are additional concerns that trafficking channels can be used to move heavy weaponry and even weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and WMD components. In December 2004 members of Takfir were arrested in Barcelona for allegedly trying to purchase over 400kg of industrial explosives and material from a Czech source to build a “dirty bomb” (MAP Maghreb Arebe Presse, October 28, 2005). Moreover, in a recent case of arms smuggling from Russia, traffickers attempted to sell high-powered arms—and reportedly uranium—to an FBI informant posing as a middleman for al-Qaeda.

To retain legitimacy, contemporary terrorist groups are particularly concerned about providing religious justification for their acts, criminal or otherwise. The writings of a 13th century Islamic jurist, Ibn Taymiyya, are an important source of authorization in regard to seizing the enemy’s property during jihad. During the Algerian jihad, Ali Benhadj (a leader of the Islamic Salvation Front—FIS) quoted Ibn Taymiyya in declaring a fatwa authorizing GIA groups to assassinate and seize the property of all Muslims who opposed them. Terrorist mastermind Sheik Abdel Rahman had also authorized robbery against “the miscreants and the apostate state,” while in 1998 Osama bin Laden echoed this in his call to kill Americans and “plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.” In January 2004 a member of the Moroccan group, Salafiya Jihadiya admitted being shown videos that legitimized and promoted robbing “infidels and hypocrite Muslims,” suggesting that encouraging criminal behavior is emerging as an integral feature of al-Qaeda’s internal propaganda.

While Islamists are widely viewed as uncompromising literalists, pragmatism in the search for funds is evident in the religious decree by Salafist ideologue Nasreddine El Eulmi, which authorized the use and sale of drugs during the Algerian jihad. The most radical of contemporary terrorist groups, the Takfir, explicitly encourages robbery and drug trafficking as long as a fifth of the proceeds are used to fund the Islamist cause (Le Parisien, September 8, 2002). Arrests in Morocco in 2002 confirmed that its members were encouraged by their emir to steal “jewels, credit cards and money” from their victims (Maroc-Hebdo, August 3, 2002).

For terrorist organizations, the source of funding is irrelevant and only matters because it procures weapons, facilitates movement and produces propaganda. Even major operations cost relatively small sums when compared with the vast revenues of organized crime groups. For example, major operations like the Madrid bombings cost anywhere between $15,000 to $35,000, while the annual profits from cannabis trafficking in Europe alone are estimated at $12 billion.

The incorporation of organized criminality into terrorist ideology and operations shows the flexibility of terrorist organizations in adapting to dynamic fundraising environments. The border between the two worlds is ever more porous, with terror suspects now often imprisoned on multiple charges, both criminal and terrorist.

This poses significant challenges to law enforcement agencies, which have traditionally targeted terrorism and criminality separately.
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Europe
Spanish cell part of a network that spanned 5 other countries
2005-11-25
An Islamic gang linked to Al Qaeda was broken up by Civil Guards in a simultaneous operation in three Spanish provinces on Wednesday. The group allegedly supplied funds and false documents to terrorist cells belonging to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), close associates of Osama bin Laden in North Africa and Europe, said the Minister of the Interior, José Antonio Alonso.

The operation, carried out during the night and on Wednesday morning, resulted in eight arrests in the province of Alicante (in Torrevieja), two in Granada and one in Murcia. Searches were made in ten private homes and businesses - at least two telephone call centres and a mechanical workshop - belonging to suspects in the three provinces.

The Ministry of the Interior said that Civil Guards had seized, among other things, a kilo of cocaine and 35,000 euros in cash, the profits, according to sources involved in the investigation, from drug trafficking operations, robbery and the forgery of bank cards. This was how, said the sources, some of those under arrest obtained funds that were then handed over to terrorist cells. A large amount of documentation was also discovered during the searches, as well as bank cards and the material for forging them.

The investigators consider that the cell was in charge of financing and logistics for GSPC, a radical branch of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and sent documents to the latter in Algeria to facilitate the entry of members into Europe and their movement from one country to another within the continent. GSPC is the Al Qaeda associate with the greatest presence in Europe, along with the GIA, the alleged instigator of the March 11th attacks in Madrid last year.

Civil Guards suspect that the gang arrested forms part of a group that exists further afield, at an international level. Data have, therefore, been passed on to five other countries - Germany, Holland, the U.K., Belgium and Denmark - about links between the people under arrest and North Africans living in these countries so that it can be established whether they form part of the same Islamic network.

The Minister of the Interior said that nothing made the forces of law and order suspect that the group arrested were “planning a terrorist attack in the short or medium term in Spain”. He explained that the arrests constituted a preventative measure against the real threat of Islamic terrorism, in order to “cut off” these infrastructure groups “at the root” and thus to prevent them from maturing and developing into operative terrorist cells.
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Europe
Evaluating the Effectiveness of French Counter-Terrorism
2005-10-08
By Ludo Block

Over the last decade, French counter-terrorism strategy has been recognized as one of the most effective in Europe. The French system emerged from painful experience—unlike other European countries France has faced the deadly threat of Islamic terrorism on its soil since the 1980s. A number of attacks in Paris by the Iranian-linked Hezbollah network of Fouad Ali Saleh in 1985 and 1986 triggered profound changes in the organization and legislative base of French counter-terrorism. These were reinforced after the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) attacks in 1995 and 1996.

The key elements in the French counter-terrorism strategy are the privileged relationship between intelligence services and dedicated magistrates, as well as the qualification of acts of terrorism as autonomous offences punishable by increased penalties. The specific offence designated ‘association’ or ‘conspiring to terrorism,’ makes a pre-emptive judicial approach possible. Meanwhile a sophisticated system named Vigipirate (security alert plan) of nation-wide, pre-planned security measures were developed. After the July 2005 attacks in London, Vigipirate was put in stade rouge (level red) swiftly invoking a large number of extra security measures in public places and public transport throughout France and along its borders.

French authorities understood very early on that Islamist terrorism represented a new, complex threat and developed a system containing decisive advantages. This prevented acts of Islamic terrorism on French territory from December 1996 until October 2004, although various plots were disrupted during this period. These included a plan to bomb the Paris metro in December 2002 and a plot to attack tourist facilities on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean in June 2003. Clearly France remains high on the list of targets for al-Qaeda and associated groups while recent trends challenge the long term effectiveness of the French approach.

Trends and Future Concerns

The explosion near the Indonesian Embassy in Paris on October 8, 2004 was the first act of terrorism in France in eight years. It was claimed by the unknown Front Islamique Français Armé (FIFA) which threatened France and demanded—amongst other things—the liberation of two terrorists convicted for their participation in the 1995 attacks. The explosive device used was rudimentary, consisting of a gas tank in a bag pack, resembling the devices used in the 1995 attacks and showing once again that terror can be brought upon society cheaply. One person believed to be responsible for communicating the claims of responsibility for the attack was arrested soon after the incident. [1]

It is not this incident alone that has alarmed the French intelligence community. In the first six months of 2005, the French Secret Service (DST) made over sixty Islamic-related terrorism arrests, compared to seventy-six in 2004. This reflects the changes among international jihadists where, according to French counter-terrorism experts, new threats come in addition to existing ones, rather than replacing them. Several trends are regarded as especially worrisome by the French intelligence community.

Firstly, there is the growing importance of what is called the filiÚre Irakienne (Iraqi network); the network recruiting for the insurgency in Iraq. Recruitment seems to take place everywhere, as usual in and near mosques but also in prisons and private gatherings. Moreover, the Internet, where professional multimedia techniques are applied for this purpose, is actively used for recruitment. [2]

Secondly, the recruitment networks operate Europe-wide with recruiters traveling back and forth between various European cities. The Paris based Imam Ben Halim Abderraouf, a foreman of the extremist Jamaat al-Tabligh wal-Da’wa (Society for Propagation & Preaching) movement, apparently played a key role in the recruitment of young Dutch Muslims. Four of them recently traveled on fake Algerian passports via Paris and Damascus to the Syrian-Iraq border area to receive jihad training. A DVD containing footage of their training with explosives in the desert surfaced in the notorious Paris 19th arrondissement. It shows the making of suicide bombs hidden in jackets as well as the devastating effects of these bombs on an autobus and on a constructed scenery of a supermarket and a busy street. The DVD is used for recruiting and indoctrinating other young Muslims. [3]

Thirdly, French experts expect to find Iraq veterans back in France in due course to continue the jihad, just as happened after earlier conflicts. This time however, the insurgents avoid long stays in the combat zone, and instead use the conflict to gain sufficient training and motivation to return battle-hardened to Europe. [4] A dozen young Frenchmen are believed to be in Iraq as combatants, several were arrested along the Iraq/Syria border and an unknown number have probably already returned to France.

Fourthly, there is a new category of Islamic extremists, almost all offspring of immigrants, who seem to be younger, more frustrated, and more radicalized than the French jihadists of the 1990s. Over the last year, five young Frenchmen were killed in Iraq, one while executing a suicide attack near Fallujah. Although no plots for suicide attacks in France have been discovered yet, the DST fears that cells are planning such a strike and is working hard to discover and foil them. Fears of suicide attacks by young French Muslims were reinforced after the events in London. [5]

Finally, another dangerous trend is the apparent change in focus of the Algerian-based Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), an offshoot of the GIA, beyond the borders of Algeria. Intelligence shows that the purported leader of the GSPC, the explosives specialist Abdelmalek Droukdal, has active contacts with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and is planning to combine efforts in the international jihad arena, focusing in particular on France. Since the GSPC is regarded as the most organized extremist organization in Algeria, with its tentacles already reaching far into Spain and presumably into France as well, French security experts take this development seriously. [6]

Developments in Counter-Terrorism

French law enforcement is highly hierarchical in nature, resulting in several agencies and departments within the same agency involved in counter-terrorism. In the National Police these are the aforementioned DST, the General Intelligence Service (RG) and the National Anti-terrorism Division (DNAT). Also the External Intelligence Service (DGSE) of the Defense Ministry has a role in countering terrorism and in addition both the Gendarmerie and the Judicial Police in Paris maintain counter-terrorist judicial and intelligence capabilities.

Frequently these bodies act as little kingdoms, invoking inevitable problems of coordination. Therefore several coordinating structures were created of which the Anti-terrorist Operational Coordination Unit (UCLAT) is the most important. However, without having direct access to the information of the participating bodies and largely dependant on face-to-face meetings, UCLAT’s coordinating role remains suboptimal.

A new—and against the French background, almost revolutionary—initiative aimed at streamlining this organizational jungle and boosting efficiency, is the sharing of one location and resources by the DST, RG and DNAT in 2006. Although ideas for sharing resources and even a fusion between them from time to time emerged since the 1995 GIA attacks, new threats are prompting a greater convergence of resources and capabilities.

Another initiative is last year’s creation of a joint French-Spanish anti-terrorism investigation team in which officers will have equal operative powers on each other’s territory. This is remarkable in contemporary European police cooperation. Another initiative of unprecedented caliber is the reinforced French-US counter-terrorism cooperation under the name ‘Alliance Base’ that has been in place since 2002, though only became public last July.

Although the London attacks predictably prompted several new repressive initiatives, like proposals to upgrade the 1995 legislation on video surveillance, tougher penalties for terrorism-related crimes and data retention on all communication, the French have already been searching for original alternatives to supplement conventional counter-terrorism strategies.

A first initiative in this regard was the decision in 2004 to elevate the fight against terrorism to the status of a Chantier national (Major Project); meaning a prioritized cause requiring nation wide efforts. [7] Amongst other things, this entailed an appeal on all government institutions to actively search for indications and information pointing to processes of radicalism in society. A following initiative is the recent announcement of the compilation of a white book on “the internal security and the threat of terrorism.” [8]

The white book should receive input from various government departments and provide answers to strategic, operational and pedagogical questions involving:

• evaluating the actual threat level;
• mapping the types of threats and targets relevant for France;
• exploring new technological counter-terrorism possibilities;
• finding an equilibrium between liberties and security;
• enhancing the international counter-terrorism cooperation;
• informing society adequately without creating unnecessary fear.
When completed, the white book should serve as a basis for public action against the threat of terrorism in the coming decennia. [9]

The broad appeal on various government institutions and society in both the ‘Chantier national’ and the White book are relatively new approaches in this field in Europe. These are necessary and important attempts to take countering terrorism out of the exclusive domain of law enforcement. After all, the recent attacks in London clearly indicate that Islamist terrorism will continue to threaten western European societies for the foreseeable future. As far as the French are concerned, even a very efficient law enforcement and intelligence community will only be part of the answer. To enhance its counter-terrorism approach, France has taken initial steps that ensure a wider participation of society to counter this growing menace.

1. ‘Attentat contre l'ambassade d'Indonésie à Paris : un homme en garde à vue’, Le Monde, October 12, 2004.
2. Bunt, G. ‘Cyber-terrorism: Using Internet as a recruitment tool’, paper delivered at the IRIS conference ‘L’Europe face au Terrorisme’, Paris, March 8, 2005.
3. ‘De Spin in het zelfmoord-net’, Dutch Daily De Telegraaf, July 2, 2005.
4. ‘Alerte sur les nouvelles filiÚres islamistes’, Le Figaro, May 25, 2005.
5. ‘Le djihadiste français est plus fruste, plus jeune, plus radicalisé’, Le Monde, May 24, 2005.
6. ‘Le GSPC algérien menacerait la France dans le cadre du ‘djihad’ international’, Le Monde, June 26, 2005.
7. Speech by the Minister, D. de Villepin, at the June 24, 2004 French Ministry of Interior press-conference.
8. ‘Préparation d’un Livre blanc sur la sécurité intérieure face au terrorisme’, statement at www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr , issued May 3, 2005.
9. ‘La lutte contre le terrorisme va faire l'objet d'un Livre blanc’, Le Monde May 5, 2005.
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