http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/international/europe/01threat.html?
th&emc=th
Europe Meets the New Face of Terrorism
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: August 1, 2005
LONDON, July 31 - One attack was deadly, the other was not. But
taken together, the two terrorist strikes that hit London in July
highlight a new, more ominous face of terrorism in Europe.
It transcends ethnic lines and national causes, blends ideological
fervor with common criminality and is rooted to a large extent
inside the target country. Shifting assumptions about the nature of
the terrorist threat, it also complicates efforts to devise
strategies to combat it.
Although some senior intelligence and law enforcement officials said
they began to recognize the mutating threat at the time of the train
bombings in Madrid in March 2004, the London bombings have
reinforced the lesson that, by all accounts, the centrally
controlled Al Qaeda of 9/11 is no more.
"We are seeing a terrorist threat that keeps changing," said Pierre
de Bousquet, the director of France's domestic intelligence service,
known as the D.S.T., in an interview in Paris. "Often the groups are
not homogeneous, but a variety of blends."
"Hard-core Islamists are mixing with petty criminals," he
added. "People of different backgrounds and nationalities are
working together. Some are European-born or have dual nationalities
that make it easier for them to travel. The networks are much less
structured than we used to believe. Maybe it's the mosque that
brings them together, maybe it's prison, maybe it's the
neighborhood. And that makes it much more difficult to identify them
and uproot them."
In the case of the London attacks of July 7 that left 56 people
dead, including the four bombers, three of the attackers were ethnic
Pakistanis born in Britain, the fourth a British citizen and convert
to Islam born in Jamaica.
The strike that followed two weeks later, in which the four bombs
did not explode, was carried out by an intriguing crew that the
police say included a British resident born in Somalia, an Ethiopian
who apparently posed as a Somali refugee to gain legal residency in
Britain and a British citizen born in Eritrea who acquaintances say
was radicalized in prison. The nationality and legal status of the
fourth would-be bomber has not been disclosed.
The police still say they have not found conclusive evidence linking
the two attacks, although the explosives used in both cases, as well
as other elements of the episodes, appear to be similar.
None of those identified so far as being involved in the two attacks
are believed to have been a battle-hardened veteran of Chechnya or
Iraq, and most of them are too young to have been trained in Qaeda
camps in Afghanistan, which were destroyed in 2001. They may have
learned their bomb-making techniques and terrorist strategies at
home, investigators and intelligence officials say, although the
officials caution that they do not yet know the extent of the
support network behind the attacks or whether either involved a
foreign mastermind.
Britain's most senior counterterrorism official himself anticipated
what was happening over a year ago. In a little-noticed speech to a
conference in Florence in June 2004, Peter Clarke, the
counterterrorism chief of Britain's police force, pointed out "the
complete change, the recalibration" that Britain was making in
investigating the new threat.
The shifting nature of the threat was made apparent early last year
with Operation Crevice, one of Britain's largest counterterrorism
operations ever, Mr. Clarke said. Seven hundred officers thwarted
what they believed was a plot to construct a large bomb intended for
a site somewhere in London. In more than two dozen police raids,
more than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which can be
used in making bombs, was seized and eight ethnic Pakistani British
citizens were arrested.
"Before this there was the perception that the international
terrorist threat was something that came from abroad," Mr. Clarke
said in the speech. "It came from the Maghreb. It came from the
Middle East. It came from Chechnya. It came from Afghanistan. These
individuals, however, were all British citizens."
"The parameters," he said, "have changed completely."
"If we take one or two leaders away," he added, "very quickly they
are replaced and the network is reformed."
He called the homegrown trend "deeply worrying." Equally worrying,
he added, was that the "key conspirator" in the plot revealed by
Operation Crevice was only 22 years old, and that others were 18 and
19.
A confidential British government assessment of the emerging threat
from young British Muslim radicals, prepared last year for Prime
Minister Tony Blair, concludes that poverty is not an indication of
radicalism, that students and young professionals from working- and
middle-class backgrounds "have also become involved in extremist
politics and even terrorism." Those recruits, the report warns, "may
have the capability for wider and more complex proselytizing."
Extremist organizations have set up outlets on university campuses
and, if banned, simply open up again under different names, said the
document, whose contents were first disclosed in The Sunday Times.
The document divides young extremists into two broad categories. The
first category is "well-educated undergraduates" and those "with
degrees and technical professional qualifications in engineering" or
information technology. The second is "underachievers with few or no
qualifications, and often a criminal background."
In particular, the report said, "Muslims are more likely than other
faith groups to have no qualifications (over two-fifths have none)
and to be unemployed and economically inactive, and are over-
represented in deprived areas."
The idea that the terrorist threat is increasingly homegrown and
transcends both ethnicity and direct links to a global Qaeda
conspiracy is welcomed by Pakistan, which has been accused of not
doing enough to root out the remnants of Al Qaeda. Three of the four
bombers in the first London attack were of Pakistani descent and at
least two had spent time in Pakistan.
"When the first bombing happened and everyone focused on Pakistan,
we said, 'You may be making a mistake if you have a unifocal
view,' " said Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan's ambassador to Britain, in an
interview. "It's much more mixed up than people think. What you're
seeing is something very lethal and it has nothing to do with
ethnicity."
"We are seeing a lot of local groups that seem to have a random
pattern, no operational linkage or even inspirational linkage," she
said. "Some may claim to be Al Qaeda, some not, and that is foxing
everybody."
Earlier attacks reflected some of the same elements found in the
London bombings. First came Casablanca, then Madrid.
In May 2003, a dozen young, poor, undereducated men, all born and
reared in the same slum in Casablanca, Morocco, attacked five sites
there, four apparently chosen for their Jewish connections. Forty-
two people died, including the attackers.
"It was local guys thinking global," said Olivier Roy, author of the
book "Globalized Islam."
"They didn't target a symbol of the Moroccan government," he
added. "They inscribed their actions in a global perspective. I'm
not sure the ethnic Pakistanis involved in the first London attacks
have anything to do with Pakistan."
The train attacks in Madrid in March last year represented more of a
blend. While most of those involved were Moroccan, some were from
other countries. Some of the attackers were radicalized Muslims,
others common criminals.
The most senior member of the team, and the suspected local leader
of the cell, was a Tunisian who aspired to be a fashion model but
became a successful real estate agent before turning radical.
The Madrid plotters included native Spaniards, who had no connection
to global jihad, including a former miner who was arrested on
charges that he stole and handled the explosives used in the
operation and a 16-year-old nicknamed "The Gypsy" who was given a
six-year youth detention sentence last November after pleading
guilty to transporting explosives. In searching for the mastermind
of the Madrid attacks, the Spanish authorities have focused on a
number of foreign-based suspects, including an Egyptian and a Syrian.
In London, investigators are trying to determine whether the cells
involved in the attacks were homegrown or had any operational link
to a wider network.
Investigators say that while they see the terrorism threat in Europe
as more homegrown, the inspiration is increasingly Iraq. In the past
several months, a number of European countries have uncovered cells
of native-born men poised to travel to Iraq to fight alongside the
insurgency.
In an interview published in Le Parisien on Friday, Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy of France said at least seven Frenchmen had
been killed while fighting with the insurgency in Iraq.
The ever-shifting nature of the threat has made it increasingly
challenging, in Britain and elsewhere, to come up with a strategy to
combat it. Police and intelligence officials acknowledge that they
are still too focused on threats linked to clearly identifiable
ethnic radical groups, both domestic and international, and not
enough on homegrown blends.
In a cover letter to the 2004 British report on counter-terrorism,
Sir Andrew Turnbull, the cabinet secretary and one of Mr. Blair's
closest aides, said the goal of Britain's strategy was "to prevent
terrorism by tackling its underlying causes, to work together to
resolve regional conflicts to support moderate Islam and reform and
to diminish support for terrorists by influencing relevant social
and economic issues."
But, he added, "without being clear about the nature of the problem,
one can only tentatively identify possible responses in general
terms."
Hélène Fouquet contributed reporting for this article
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