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The New Realities of
Terror
A hotel bombing in Kenya, a
missile attack on an Israeli civilian jet葉his is how terrorists are
rewriting the rules of engagement
By JOHANNA MCGEARY
EITAN HESS-ASHKENAZI/AP Safely Back: Passengers from Mombasa whose
plane was attacked hugged family upon their return to Tel Aviv
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Sunday, Dec.
01, 2002
Israeli pilot Rafi Marek was 90 seconds into his
flight from Mombasa, Kenya, at about 3,000 ft., when he felt an
unexpected thump. He thought it was the impact of a bird hitting the
fuselage of his Arkia charter Boeing 757 carrying 261 Israelis home
from a beach vacation. But he wondered if something far more
frightening might have been after his plane when crew members
spotted two white stripes of smoke streaming past the jet's tail,
only 100 yards away. Two shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles had
just missed blowing up Marek's plane: the launcher and shell casings
were found a mile from the Mombasa airport.
The big blast hit 18 miles away and five minutes later. Just as
another group of Israelis arrived at the Paradise Hotel on the
Indian Ocean, north of Mombasa, three suicide bombers smashed an
explosives-laden vehicle through the hotel gates into the front
door. One man draped in a bomb belt leaped from the green Mitsubishi
Pajero and blew himself up inside the lobby. His co-conspirators
detonated the explosives packed in the vehicle, incinerating the
car, themselves and the 160-room thatched-roof hotel within minutes.
Amid the screams and billowing black smoke, three Israelis,
including two small boys, and 10 Kenyans, mostly young village
dancers, died. Scores were badly injured. As the air filled with the
smell of burned flesh, witnesses spotted a single hand flung nearly
300 ft. away.
A day later, forensic analysts and intelligence agents from
Israel's Mossad and personnel from the big U.S. fbi and CIA offices
in Nairobi were picking through the tree stumps and smoldering ruins
for clues. Little red flags marked the remains of the car
suspension, and other tags stood by pieces of human flesh that might
have been the bombers'. Hotel workers and David Kalonzi, who sold
souvenirs opposite the hotel entrance, talked of the men they saw in
the Pajero: brown-skinned, thirtyish, Arab-looking. Kenyan police
quickly detained 12 people of assorted nationalities for
questioning, including an American woman who was soon released. An
unknown group in Lebanon calling itself the Army of Palestine
claimed responsibility, but nobody believed it.
Leaders in Tel Aviv, Washington and Nairobi think they already
know the culprit: al-Qaeda?either the network itself or perhaps a
local clone. The assaults bore plenty of al-Qaeda's trademarks:
double attacks, synchronized, well-organized and well-coordinated,
based on good local surveillance and precision timing, in a part of
East Africa where the terrorist organization has long operated. But
because Israelis were the target, intelligence agents are looking
hard at the possibility that Palestinians were somehow involved.
U.S. and Israeli leaders took heart that the death toll was
comparatively small because the jetliner attack had miraculously
failed. For the victims and their families, of course, the scale and
details of the carnage make no difference. But for those laboring to
deter future assaults, this one offers some daunting clues to the
new realities of terror.
SHIFTING TO "SOFT" TARGETS
terrorism is like a balloon: squeeze one end, and it expands at
the other. As the U.S. and other governments harden security around
military facilities, diplomatic posts, key businesses and
transportation nodes, terrorist operatives look for targets that are
not so well protected. cia interrogators questioning Omar al-Faruq,
the al-Qaeda lieutenant detained in Indonesia in the summer, learned
he had cased the U.S. embassy in Jakarta but abandoned an attack
when he saw the compound's hefty security. Terrorists have switched
to striking Westerners where the risks are lower. As a U.S.
intelligence officer says, "One of the things that figures into
their calculations are chances of success." So the terrorists are
taking aim at accessible places妖ance halls and hotels, shopping
malls and tourist sites, the nightclub in Bali and the French tanker
off Yemen葉hat are not and can never be very well protected. When
the soft targets are linked to tourism in countries that count on
it, the secondary economic impact can be almost worse.
Kenya made a ripe choice. Al-Qaeda has spent years operating
there. The government had done little to tighten security after the
1998 bomb blast that shattered the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, along
with a twin assault in Tanzania. Porous borders with war-ravaged
Somalia and Sudan made it easy to bring in surface-to-air missiles
(sams). Mombasa has little in the way of immigration or passport
controls, and the steamy seaside city is home to the most radical
Muslims in the country. Australian intelligence picked up enough
chatter about potential danger in Mombasa to issue a travel warning
to its citizens on Nov. 12. But the U.S. considered the Australian
information about Kenya too general to warrant any action.
The downside for the terrorists is that these soft assaults tally
fewer casualties per incident, and they suggest that al-Qaeda can't
mount big hits anymore. Yet the cumulative impact of the string of
smaller strikes from Bali to Mombasa can be just as telling, making
it appear that terrorists can hit anyone anywhere and the threat to
the U.S. and its friends is global. Some experts worry too that the
current taste for soft targets might be intended to divert attention
while al-Qaeda prepares a spectacular attack.
THE MISSILE FACTOR
The scariest aspect of Mombasa was that terrorists fired a
simple, shoulder-launched sam at a commercial airliner. For the
first time, terrorists showed that they are able and ready to shoot
down vulnerable civilian planes anywhere as they take off or land,
when a heat-seeking missile can easily lock onto a plane's engine.
The Mombasa shooters used an antiquated Soviet-era SA-7 Strela that
missed only because of equipment malfunction or operator error.
Shoulder-launched sams are efficient and easy to fire and require
little instruction; al-Qaeda trainees were taught how to use them in
the Afghan camps. The U.S. supplied hundreds of shoulder-fired
Stinger missiles to the mujahedin fighting the Soviets in
Afghanistan; Washington was so concerned about their potential for
trouble afterward that it offered as much as $100,000 per missile to
try to buy them back. But shoulder-fired missiles made in
Yugoslavia, Pakistan and China slosh around the weapons black
market, where they sell for a few thousand dollars each.
Some military planes are equipped with automatic anti-sam
systems, and the U.S. Air Force has just awarded its first contract
to equip its cargo planes with such devices. But no commercial
airline, with the possible exception of Israel's El Al, has been
willing to spend the estimated $3 million per plane that it would
take to protect its aircraft. U.S. officials believe such systems
will have to be put on civilian airliners容specially if one is shot
down.
SUBCONTRACTING TERROR
the u.s. invasion of afghanistan resulted in the capture of a
country but not bin Laden. Yet while al-Qaeda may be weakened, it's
more elusive. The organization has dispersed, decentralized and
delegated decisionmaking downward. Its leaders have shown immense
skill in adapting to the more difficult working environment, relying
on a looser network with more local initiative. Small-scale attacks
on unprotected targets with simple weapons don't need the direct
approval of superiors. Ideas have been implanted among Islamists
that can be worked into plans by independent cells and free-lance
jihadists. Mombasa highlights the diffuse configuration of terrorism
today. In Kenya, sleeper cells or refugees from Afghanistan or
remnants of the embassy-bombing conspiracy still operate. Several
suspects from the 1998 plot are still at large, including two
Mombasa-based men who, according to court records, bought the
suicide truck. Locals may have relied on al-Qaeda coordinators to
bring in weapons and then conducted the attack themselves. As
intelligence agents from three countries comb the Mombasa rubble, an
area group in their sights is the extremist al-Ittihad al-Islami
(AIAI), based in Somalia. With 2,000 members, it is the largest,
most powerful radical band in the Horn of Africa and has been funded
by al-Qaeda in the past. Its aims and activities have focused on
Somalia, but U.S. intelligence has uncovered aiai cells in Kenya.
"It is possible this was the work of aiai, done in concert with
al-Qaeda," says an American intelligence agent.
DRAGGING IN ISRAEL
If al-Qaeda is indeed responsible for Mombasa, it will mark the
first time the group has deliberately spilled Israeli blood. Osama
bin Laden has railed against Israel for years but never struck
against its people. The Mombasa attacks followed anti-Israeli
references on his latest audiotape. For the administration of Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, these attacks offered evidence to back up its
long-standing argument, now gaining ground in Washington, that
Israel's problems with the Palestinians are simply a subset of a
world-terrorism conspiracy. On the same day as the Mombasa attacks,
when Sharon's Likud Party was holding a primary, six Israelis were
gunned down in the town of Beit Shean. "Terror is indivisible," said
the Israeli Foreign Ministry on Thursday. With Mossad on the job,
Israel warned the terrorists, "our arm is long."
The most potentially explosive connections experts are searching
for is between al-Qaeda and Palestinian groups. Was al-Qaeda acting
as a subcontractor for the Palestinians? Though CIA officials
consider it a long shot, they haven't ruled out the possibility that
Hizballah, a practitioner of suicide bombing, with a history of
terrorism against Jews abroad, sponsored the mission. A 2001 State
Department report warned that Hizballah, along with al-Qaeda,
exploited Africa's permissive environment of open borders, lax
financial laws and wide availability of weapons. Israeli experts
maintain that they have found no concrete cases of direct
cooperation between al-Qaeda and Palestinian groups. A Hamas leader
in the occupied territories told Time, "Our battle front is here,
not in Africa." Nor has Israel uncovered indications that the
Palestinians want to internationalize the conflict. Even the most
radical of them have resisted cooperation with al-Qaeda, says French
terrorism expert Roland Jacquard, because they fear bin Laden's
religious zeal would damage the national-liberation legitimacy of
their cause.
It is more likely, Jacquard and others believe, that al-Qaeda is
trying to piggyback on the Palestinian conflict to broaden its
appeal and its pool of recruits beyond the militant religious
fringe. It's in al-Qaeda's interest to make Washington and Jerusalem
a single, indistinguishable enemy to draw support for its anti-U.S.
campaign from nonreligious Arabs angry at the conflict with Israel.
The terrorists may also hope Israel will strike back in ways that
will trigger a backlash among those moderate Muslims whom the U.S.
is trying to enlist in a war against Iraq.
The big lesson of Mombasa is that terrorism is in constant
metamorphosis. That is, above all, what defines it after 9/11. And
with so many possible targets and so many jihadis willing to die,
counterterrorism often remains a deadly step behind.
由eported by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Ilona Eveleens/Mombasa,
Aharon Klein and Eric Silver/Jerusalem, J.F.O. McAllister/London and
Elaine Shannon, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington
From the Dec. 09,
2002 issue of TIME magazine
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