Al Qaeda grows by adding affiliates

Secure in its haven in northwestern Pakistan, a resurgent Al Qaeda is trying to expand its network, in some cases by executing corporate-style takeovers of regional Islamic extremist groups, according to U.S. intelligence officials and counter-terrorism experts.

Though not always successful, these moves indicate a shift in strategy by the terrorist network as it seeks to broaden its reach and renew its ability to strike Western targets, including the United States, officials and experts say.

“Certainly we do see Al Qaeda trying to influence the broader movement and to control some of these affiliates in a more direct way,” said a senior counter-terrorism official in the Bush administration. “The word I would use is ‘co-opt’ . . . as opposed to simply associating with or encouraging.

“By that I mean target selection, types of attacks, methodology, funding, all of the things that would make an affiliate suddenly a subsidiary.”

The senior official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of the subject matter. That person’s assessment coincided with those offered by a variety of current and former government authorities and private-sector experts.

Bruce Riedel, a senior CIA counter-terrorism official until late last year, said Al Qaeda “central” stands to gain hundreds or even thousands of foot soldiers, many of whom already have been radicalized, carry European passports and don’t require a visa to travel to the United States.

“I think what we are seeing is the reconstitution of their capabilities to strike targets in Western Europe and ultimately North America on a scale identical or bigger than Sept. 11,” said Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“Absolutely, we should be alarmed about this. They are creating franchises and buying franchises, offering expertise, networks, money.”

From northwest Pakistan, these current and former officials say, Al Qaeda leaders have rebuilt a network of field commanders that was largely decimated in the post-Sept. 11 attacks on its bases in Afghanistan.

These new mid-level operatives are reestablishing connections with long-standing affiliates that have been fairly independent. But they also are reaching past those groups to new organizations and even tribal and clan leaders.

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Degrees of influence

Al Qaeda’s efforts do not always pan out. In some cases, it has pulled back after making an initial approach. And some groups have rebuffed Osama bin Laden’s organization.

Sometimes, it is not clear exactly what influence senior Al Qaeda leaders have. Three men arrested this month in Germany for allegedly plotting attacks there against Americans have been linked to an extremist group based in Uzbekistan that broke away from an organization long under Al Qaeda’s umbrella. Authorities fear that the group, the Islamic Jihad Union, might have been drawn tightly into Al Qaeda’s orbit and aimed far beyond its previous targets in Central Asia.

From its early years in the 1990s, Al Qaeda has been an umbrella organization of groups in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries that has fostered symbiotic relationships with like-minded militant organizations without necessarily directing their operations.

Al Qaeda’s links to many outlying parts of its network were severed after the post-Sept. 11 attacks.

Signs of the rebuilding effort began to become apparent at least two years ago, but they have intensified significantly since then. U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say they have seen indications in numerous terrorist plots and attacks and other extremist violence in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

In congressional testimony Sept. 10, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said Al Qaeda’s “mergers with regional groups . . . have created a more diffuse violent Islamic extremist threat that complicates the task of detecting and deterring plots against the homeland.”

U.S. officials and private experts described it as a two-way process in which Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, including chief strategist Ayman Zawahiri and perhaps Bin Laden himself, reach out to the groups, sending them emissaries and providing them with financing, logistical support and training.

And they said the groups were also reaching out to Al Qaeda, sending their recruits to Pakistan for training and indoctrination.

U.S. officials say these liaisons combine Al Qaeda’s money, training, finely honed tactics and muscle with the widespread support and participation that the local and regional groups enjoy from within their communities.

Some of those groups have jumped at the chance to align themselves with the Al Qaeda “brand name,” which has soared in popularity because of its increasingly sophisticated multimedia campaigns and widespread opposition to U.S. foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq, the officials and private experts say.

The most clear-cut example is that of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an extremist group previously known as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, known by the French acronym GSPC. The earlier group consisted mostly of Algerians bent on overthrowing their own government.

But on Sept. 11, 2006, Zawahiri announced that the group had became Al Qaeda’s affiliate in the North African region to become “a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders.”

“They had people but they had no arms, no training and no money. By pledging allegiance, they got all of those,” one recently departed State Department counter-terrorism official said. In return, Al Qaeda “got more juice” in the form of frequent attacks on Western targets that raised its visibility, the official said.

In recent months, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has launched as many as four attacks a week, often suicide bombings against Western targets and political enemies, including what intelligence officials believe was an attempt to assassinate Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika this month. That bombing killed at least 20 people.

Olivier Guitta, a Moroccan counter-terrorism consultant based in Washington, said that Al Qaeda was using structures already in place to advance its cause.

“It is really moving and shaking the region,” he said, adding that some loyalists are angry that the organization is now attacking civilians.

U.S. intelligence officials are convinced that the alliance is not so much a merger but a takeover of the GSPC, which Riedel said came only after “many, many months of discussions about what the terms and conditions would be” between Zawahiri and Bin Laden and GSPC leader Abdelmalek Droudkel.

The group now is active throughout much of North Africa and the sub-Saharan Sahel region. Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan are using the network’s contacts and foot soldiers in North Africa and in Spain and other parts of Europe.

In many parts of Europe, they can disappear into large North African communities to recruit operatives, raise money and plot attacks.

Al Qaeda’s expansion efforts in some cases have encountered resistance. In Southeast Asia, some groups have rejected advances by its affiliates Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines and Jemaah Islamiah, the senior administration official said.

In Iraq, Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership moved aggressively to exert more control over foreign fighters, sending Abu Ayyub Masri from Pakistan after Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of a group calling itself Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a U.S. airstrike last year. Masri, who had been in charge of Al Qaeda’s overseas networks, is considered more loyal to Al Qaeda than Zarqawi was.

But Al Qaeda in Iraq remains largely independent and consists mainly of local Iraqi insurgents, say U.S. intelligence officials. Some local tribal leaders have allied themselves with the U.S. military to counter the group’s advances.

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Elsewhere in the Mideast

Al Qaeda also has made strong overtures to the Palestinian group Army of Islam in the Gaza Strip, and to Fatah al Islam, which until recently was based in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el Bared in north Lebanon, according to the senior administration official and Fawaz Gerges, a scholar of Islamist militancy.

Two Al Qaeda operatives, Abdullah Bishi and Abd Rahman Afghani, were sent to Lebanon to investigate whether Fatah al Islam would make a suitable affiliate, but ultimately rejected the group because of its criminal activity and suspected ties to Syrian intelligence, Gerges said.

The senior administration counter-terrorism official said Al Qaeda was interested in forging alliances with similar groups in Lebanon, Jordan and other neighbors of Israel.

Gerges, author of the recent book “Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy,” said he saw signs of Al Qaeda’s outreach effort during interviews in the Middle East over the last 15 months. Al Qaeda is making connections to influential clans and tribal leaders and to disaffected Muslims with no previous ties to militant organizations.

“We have gone beyond ideology into a new terrain,” Gerges said. “Al Qaeda central has succeeded in replacing its field lieutenants who were captured or killed with new lieutenants, and not just in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Al Qaeda has been trying, with mixed results, to gain a stronger foothold in Egypt, which has a large recruiting pool of militants already sympathetic to Zawahiri, an Egyptian who is Bin Laden’s top deputy.

U.S. officials and experts believe Zawahiri is driving the current expansion effort. Last year, he announced a merger between Al Qaeda and the Egyptian terrorist group Gamaa al Islamiya. But many of the Egyptian group’s leaders denied that they had joined Al Qaeda’s ranks.

Al Qaeda has been negotiating with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, U.S. officials and experts say. Already, so many Al Qaeda fighters have shown up in Libya that the nation’s leader, Moammar Kadafi, a new but valuable counter- terrorism ally of Washington, has launched a crackdown that has led to hundreds of arrests.

In East Africa, Al Qaeda has been trying to exert more direct control over its longtime affiliates, which have been run by veteran operatives of the organization as largely independent -- and active -- cells since at least 1998, when they bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224.

Al Qaeda is also trying to forge closer alliances with clan-based militants in Somalia, who are fighting the U.S.-backed transitional government there, and in Yemen, Bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, current and former U.S. officials said.

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josh.meyer@latimes.com