Some See U.S. as Terrorists’ Next Big Target

Six years after a fed-up France launched a vigorous crackdown on Islamic extremism, the campaign’s success is posing new dangers for the United States, which must cope with the potentially lethal spillover.

“Terrorism is like the weather: There are zones of high pressure and low pressure, and they change with time,” one high-ranking French law enforcement official said in an interview. “More and more in the future, the United States is going to be a target that will replace the traditional targets, like France.”

The United States, hated by many radical Muslims as the incarnation of godless evil and Western decadence, has already been bloodied by terrorist violence in Manhattan’s financial district, sub-Saharan Africa and other locales. But the recent U.S. arrests of a number of Algerians are regarded by experts in Europe and the Arab world as heralding a new phase in the holy war against America.

“When Europe started to track down and dismantle the networks, it was clear the GIA [Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group] would move elsewhere,” Reda Bekkat, editor in chief of the Algerian daily El Watan, said in a telephone interview from Algiers.

Members of the Islamic Salvation Front--a Muslim political party outlawed after it seemed set to win Algeria’s general election in December 1991--who “had been exchange students in the United States also did what they could to return to the U.S.,” he said.

France, the former colonial power in North Africa and traditional refuge and operations base for many of its transplanted revolutionaries, began waging a police and judicial war on armed Muslim extremism in 1993 and stepped up the pressure in 1994 and ’95. More than 1,000 arrests and hundreds of searches were carried out.

In one case last year, 24 people went on trial as alleged members of an Algerian network suspected of a series of Paris bombings that killed eight people and wounded more than 150 others in 1995. Neighboring countries, including Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, also made key arrests or dismantled cells of Islamic militants.

For France, the crackdown was a success; the last major terrorist act here in which Islamic radicals are suspected--the bombing of a Paris rapid-transit train that killed four and wounded 91--was more than three years ago. But for the United States, it turns out, the crackdown was not such good news.

Fleeing the dragnet cast in Europe, a number of Islamic revolutionaries crossed the Atlantic to seek a haven in North America. The French law enforcement official, an experienced anti-terrorism investigator, estimates the number of known Algerian extremists residing in North America, mostly in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, at “several hundred.”

In their odyssey, specialists say, the transplants have been able to benefit from a global and largely covert support network for radical Muslim causes that began during the CIA-financed jihad, or holy war, against the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Increasingly, the specialists say, the extremists operate in flexible and quickly changing groups, often made up of people of several nationalities, and they may resort to crime as a fund-raising tool.

“Banditry and terrorism go together,” said Bekkat, the editor.

Bin Laden Is Said to Be at Center of Loose Web

U.S. and European authorities say that at the center of this web, which has been loosely spun from the Philippines to North America, is Saudi militant Osama bin Laden. A former Afghan moujahedeen, or holy warrior, the 43-year-old Bin Laden is on the FBI’s 10-most-wanted list for allegedly sponsoring the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.

In a development indicative of Bin Laden’s esteem among his brothers in arms, after the United States succeeded in obtaining a U.N. Security Council resolution in October demanding Bin Laden’s extradition from Afghanistan, GIA leader Antar Zouabri issued a letter that condemned the West for persecuting Islamic militants and that vowed reprisals.

French officials said Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian national arrested Dec. 14 in Washington state on suspicion of plotting a bombing in the United States, received his military training at one of Bin Laden’s camps in eastern Afghanistan.

According to the French, the 33-year-old North African belonged to the “Roubaix gang,” a band of armed robbers of Algerian, Bosnian and French origin who trained in Islamic camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina and carried out a series of holdups in Belgium and northern France in early 1996.

Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, one of France’s top anti-terrorism investigators, says a flexible, diffuse and worldwide structure makes Muslim extremism a growing problem that demands more intense cross-border cooperation.

In the space of one month, the French judge’s investigations took him as far afield as Canada and Australia.

“The Islamic extremist threat is the Internet of terrorism,” Bruguiere said.

In fact, one sometimes uses the other. An Algerian physicist living in Switzerland, Mourad Dhina, was fired from his job at the European Nuclear Research Center in 1998 after prosecutors linked him to trafficking in Slovak-made machine guns and he was discovered to be using his center’s Web connections to contact GIA members in other countries, including the United States.

To many historians of Islamic radicalism, it is an irony of history that the United States may increasingly become a target of attacks. In a book to be published in English next month, Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere charts what he sees as U.S. complicity in the rise of violent Muslim movements, from the religious brotherhoods that combated nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser to the foreign recruits sent to Afghanistan during the ‘80s and that country’s present-day rulers, the Taliban.

“For America, the bill is now coming due,” Labeviere said.

Skepticism That Arrest Occurred by Chance

In October, Bruguiere and a colleague traveled to Montreal, where Ressam had been living, in a vain attempt to find him and a roommate, Said Atmani.

Paris sources said the French informed U.S. law enforcement officials of their interest in the pair. In France, there is broad skepticism that Ressam was arrested last month by pure chance. According to the U.S. Customs Service, the Algerian was chased down after taking a ferry from Canada to Port Angeles, Wash., in a car whose wheel well turned out to contain nitroglycerin and other bomb-making materials.

One U.S. expert said the ingredients were identical to those used in the February 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center, for which a number of Islamic radicals, including Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, were convicted.

Ressam’s arrest and the confiscation of the car’s contents may have averted a catastrophe, but European law enforcement officials caution that their experience and analysis indicate there will be more attempts on U.S. soil, even if Bin Laden himself is apprehended.

“We aren’t going to solve the terrorism problem by killing Bin Laden with a Tomahawk” cruise missile, the French official said. “It’s not Bin Laden, but the networks around him. He inspires others and finances them much more than he commands them.”