Amid Rising Strife, Kuwait Targets Extremists Who Target Westerners

After two shootouts in the last month that left eight suspected militants and four police officers dead, government officials have launched a crackdown on Islamic extremists and begun enforcing a regulation muzzling clerics who spread anti-government and anti-Western views.

Several suspects in the shootings were arrested Tuesday, and a suspected militant leader who had used a mosque as a base died in police custody last week.

The government also is scrubbing public school curriculums to eliminate the teaching of Islamic fundamentalism and destroying some mosques linked to the militants, said Prime Minister Sheik Sabah al Ahmed al Jabbar al Sabah. Thousands of copies of a book preaching holy war have been seized.

“War against terrorism, which is endangering our national security, has reached a point of no return,” the prime minister said in a statement.

“We didn’t expect the terrorists to reach this far,” he said. “Now that they have reached where they are, we have decided to end terrorism once and for all.”

This small, prosperous Persian Gulf nation, the staging point for American troops entering and leaving Iraq, is facing what some observers see as a crisis over attacks on Westerners.

In an opinion piece published Wednesday in the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, a leading Persian Gulf intellectual said Kuwait was undergoing “its most crucial test since liberation from the Iraqi invasion in 1991.”

N. Janardhan of the Gulf Research Center wrote that “extremists appear to be executing an agenda of taking Kuwait down the road to instability.”

The U.S. Embassy warned American citizens two weeks ago that “the possibility exists of further violent clashes between security officials and militants as police continue attempts to locate and arrest individuals” connected with the shootings.

Enhanced security at U.S. bases could lead extremists to attack “softer targets,” such as residential areas, shopping centers and hotels frequented by Americans, the warning said.

In 2002, a Marine was killed during an attack on a routine training exercise in Kuwait. An American contractor was killed in 2003 as the U.S. buildup for the invasion of Iraq was underway.

An estimated 12,000 American civilians live in Kuwait and 25,000 troops are at bases in the desert north of the capital city. The military restricts troops from leaving the bases.

For troops in Iraq, the Pentagon arranges four-day rest-and-recuperation trips. Troops are brought to Kuwait, then flown to another friendly nation in the region rather than letting them appear in public here.

Twenty Kuwaiti residents, including at least two connected with the security forces, await trial on charges that they plotted to attack U.S. troops in Kuwait and Iraq last year.

During raids in January and this month, Kuwaiti police allegedly found bomb-making equipment and material linked to planned kidnappings. Among the potential targets, officials said, was a residential complex favored by Westerners.

The crackdown by the new Terrorism Inspection Department could test Kuwait’s standards on due process of law and a free press.

Officials said the new agency would expedite suspected militants’ cases through the court system without compromising their rights. But one suspect’s lawyer has been arrested for allegedly libeling the state by criticizing its police methods.