Al-Qaeda Globalizes Its Jihad

October 20, 2002

DUBAI (AFP) - Al-Qaeda, the terror network whose followers are blamed for a fresh flurry of attacks in Yemen, Kuwait and Indonesia, is engaged in a "global confrontation" with the United States, the strategy so dear to its chief Osama bin Laden, pundits said.

"Following the 1991 Gulf War, bin Laden declared jihad (holy war) against the United States, accusing it of occupying his native Saudi Arabia by deploying troops" in the kingdom after Iraq invaded Kuwait the previous year, said London-based Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih.

"In a bid to galvanize his troops, bin Laden took a leaf out of the Hadeeth (sayings) of (Islam's) Prophet Mohammad, who from his deathbed called on the faithful to 'expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula'," said former Kuwaiti Islamist MP Abdullah al-Nafisi.

Bin Laden began practising what he preached in November 1995 when a car bomb explosed outside premises used by US military personnel in Riyadh, killing five Americans and two Indians, and wounding 60 other people.

A more lethal attack came seven months later, when 19 American servicemen were killed and around 500 people injured in a truck bomb explosion at a US military housing complex in the eastern Saudi city of al-Khobar near Dhahran.

"When Americans did not take bin Laden's call for the departure of infidels from the Arabian Peninsula seriously, he went on to declare all-out war against America toward the end of 1997," Faqih, who heads the Movement for Islamic Reform, told AFP.

Bin Laden's shift to total war should be credited to Ayman al-Zawahri, the presumed founder of Egypt's Jihad Organization who is purported to be al-Qaeda's mentor, said Abdulbari Atwan, editor of the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi.

"In February 1998, their alliance gave birth to the Islamic International Front for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jews, whose goal was to kill American civilians and military personnel anywhere," said Atwan, who met bin Laden in 1996 in Afghanistan.

The first "fruit" of the alliance was the twin bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 that killed 224 people, mostly Africans.

In October 2000, the new Islamist International rammed an explosives-laden boat into the US destroyer Cole in the south Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors.

And last April, a gas tanker went off outside a synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, killing 19 people.

But al-Qaeda's "spectacular" was uncontestably the September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that claimed some 3,000 lives and whose architect is thought to be none other than Zawahri.

"This all-out confrontation, which goes well beyond the initial goal of driving infidels from the Arabian Peninsula, is designed to mobilize the whole Islamic world against America and deal a blow to its image as a superpower," Faqih explained.

Al-Qaeda's attacks have come against a backdrop of occasional statements attributed to bin Laden or his lieutenants denouncing the West's "crusade" against Islam and threatening to strike at vital sectors of the US economy.

In the course of its jihad, al-Qaeda espoused the Palestinians, whose cause is guaranteed to strike a chord with ordinary Arabs. More recently, it began championing the Iraqi cause too.

Thus, a major al-Qaeda operation cannot be ruled out if the United States makes good on its threats to attack Iraq, according to both Atwan and Faqih.

The operation would be aimed at "fuelling the (Arab) masses' anger at their rulers," Atwan told AFP.

"Bin Laden would exploit an attack (on Iraq) to show that he is capable of avenging the Arabs and Muslims at a time when their leaders are either impotent or in cahoots with the United States," Faqih said.

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