AL-QAIDA - The face of evil

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Al-QAIDA: The face of evil

September 20, 2001

BY SUSAN DODGE AND DAVE NEWBART * Staff Reporters

They show a fanatical loyalty to their cause that the commander of any army would relish.

Their goal: creating a united Muslim world under one government.

They are physicists, engineers, social scientists, urban planners and medical doctors. The foot soldiers are the mujaheddin, the "holy warriors," some left over from the Afghan war against the Soviet Union and others drawn from around the world to the group's extreme beliefs.

A loose network of terrorists believed to be working out of more than 60 countries, they hide in plain sight here, blending into our motels and restaurants, learning in Florida flight schools and meeting in Boston hotels.

They are al-Qaida, meaning "the Base."

Osama bin Laden, the network's most visible leader, founded al-Qaida in 1989 at the end of the Afghan-Soviet war. He knitted together terrorist organizations that already existed in his web.

Few people had ever heard of al-Qaida before last week. The terrorists kept a deliberately low profile as they hid in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Germany, Chechnya and the United States, to name just a few.

Now that the U.S. government is pointing to bin Laden as the top suspect in last week's terrorist attacks, al-Qaida is being unveiled, bit by bit.

"One of the clever things that al-Qaida has done is that they have kind of personified themselves in this person, in Osama," said Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "It helps to reduce the prospect that everyone will be targeted and known."

But the U.S. government has been aware of al-Qaida for years, linking the group to a series of terrorist attacks around the globe, including the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 and the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, said Michael S. Swetnam, founder of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

Swetnam is the co-author of Usama bin Laden's al-Qaida: A Profile of a Terrorist Network, published in June by Transnational Publishers.

Yonah Alexander, co-author of the book and director of the International Center for Terrorism Studies in Washington, said al-Qaida has a basic agenda: "The idea is to restore the glory of Islam and Islamdom,"' he said.

Al-Qaida will stop at nothing to accomplish its goal, Alexander and Swetnam said.

"The agenda is to develop a 'Muslim United States' that abides by the law of Islam," Alexander said.

"They want to overthrow Islamic governments that they consider corrupt, like Saudi Arabia," he said.

"Even though they are strong Muslims in Saudi Arabia, that is not good enough for them," Alexander said. "They see them as corrupt. They see them as a government that invites the infidels, the Americans, to protect the sacred sites of Medina and Mecca."

Al-Qaida believes Islamic governments less extreme than the Taliban--in countries like Egypt, Algeria and Turkey--must be replaced with fundamentalists.

The organization

Most of the foot soldiers fight in brigades alongside the Taliban--but they are generally not native Afghans.

"They come from all over," said Barnett Rubin, studies director at New York University's Center on International Cooperation and one of the foremost experts on Afghanistan. "Most Afghans are very unhappy about all these Arabs in their country."

In the upper tier of al-Qaida, leaders are "extremely technologically literate," using computers and cellular telephones, Swetnam said.

Their usual mode of operation is training in places such as Algeria, Germany, Afghanistan and the Palestinian occupied territories of the West Bank, and then attempting to come into the United States via Canada.

"The best public example of this was when we caught them trying to cross the border to target the Seattle Space Needle during the millennium celebrations," Swetnam said. "There was also some evidence then that they were interested in blowing up the Los Angeles airport."

But al-Qaida experts were shocked that terrorists were, in fact, living in places such as south Florida and Boston before hijacking planes last week.

"We were astonished to find that the operatives of this last event resided for some time in the United States," Swetnam said. "That's not their usual modus operandi."

Al-Qaida, made up of "cells" of terrorists that are highly decentralized, is funded by bin Laden's wealth, as well as donations from followers around the world. Countries such as Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen and Algeria all have helped bankroll al-Qaida, Swetnam said. The size of a cell can be as few as two, but experts are unsure how large they get. And that's the point--the cells don't want anyone to know.

The decentralized nature of the organization helps its members avoid detection, experts say.

"Bin Laden has read accounts of Mao Tse-tung's military strategy where he used decentralized cells," said Gouttierre, who studied al-Qaida when he worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan in 1996 and 1997.

"If one cell is hurt or broken up, there is no traceable link to any other," he said. "All the others remain intact. They don't communicate back to a core."

The prince, the doctor

Bin Laden, known as "the prince" and "the emir," is the most visible leader. Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, he is the 17th son of 51 children of Muhammad bin Laden, who left bin Laden with a fortune from the construction company he owned.

Some of al-Qaida's leaders include militant and highly educated men.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, also known as "the Doctor," is a surgeon from Cairo who is a leading Islamic militant. He is the leader of the Egyptian Jihad, a group responsible for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, according to Alexander and Swetnam's book. Al-Zawahiri is believed to be in Afghanistan.

Wadih el Hage, known as "the Manager," attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana, where he received a bachelor's degree in urban planning in 1960. He was convicted this year of conspiring with bin Laden in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania--he is in custody.

"Many of the younger members come out of the religious schools, and they're trained at a very early age--almost brainwashed--in strict fundamentalist beliefs," Swetnam said. "It's not right to call it a faction of the Islam religion because it really aborts and twists Islam."

Al-Qaida has about 3,000 active members but includes as many as 10,000 contacts around the globe, Swetnam said.

Members of al-Qaida are able to hide behind Osama bin Laden and keep a lower profile, while bin Laden appears in the media and makes speeches.

"Until this week, we simply didn't realize the magnitude of that kind of network," said Alexander, who received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago. "You wouldn't know if your next-door neighbor is a terrorist."

Bin Laden and his followers gained enormous confidence when the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan 12 years ago, he said.

"Once they were victorious, they developed a superiority complex," he said. "They said we can take on a superpower. We don't have to worry about their nuclear weapons."

He is not optimistic.

"My conclusion is that the worst is yet to come. Unfortunately, it's not if, but when and where."

AL-QAIDA:The faces of evil

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-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001


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