The hunt for al Qaeda

Origins

Al Qaeda (the base) was founded by Osama bin Laden in 1988 to channel funds and recruits to the Afghan Mujahideen fighting the Russian occupation of their country. He had helped the Mujahideen with funds and supplies from Pakistan from 1980 to 1986. He had long supported the Mujahideen, and even fought alongside them - and after the Russians left Afghanistan he returned to Saudi Arabia a hero.

He did not stick at the family construction business, and he was expelled from the country for denouncing the Saudis' alliance with America against Iraq in the Gulf War of 1990-91. He set up with the new fundamentalist regime in Sudan, using his businesses as a front to fund Islamic terrorist groups and three training camps in Sudan itself. In 1996 he was disowned by most of his family, and Sudan expelled him under American pressure. He returned to Afghanistan.

From 1993 he is believed to have funded or organised a number of terrorist acts, including the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the blowing up of 18 American soldiers at their barracks in Dahran in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of two American east African embassies in 1998, and the suicide attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Aden last year.

Aims

Bin Laden spelled out his aims in his "Declaration of Jihad" in 1996: to drive all US forces from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, to overthrow the current regime in Saudi Arabia in order to "liberate the Holy Sites" of Medina and Mecca, to support Islamic revolutionary groups worldwide and restore a caliphate - Muslim leadership - to rule all Islam. His hatred of America and the ruling house in Saudi Arabia, and the need to liberate the land of the Holy Sites of the Prophet from them, became the two guiding principles of his terrorist operations.

The intifada and the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has almost seemed secondary in his recent video broadcasts. He believed that once the liberation had been achieved Islam would become united with the revival of the medieval caliphate - and quite clearly sees himself as the new caliph. In his fanatical anti-Western view there is little new. The Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb opposed secularism and the American and Western influence in Islamic countries. He was executed in 1966 for allegedly trying to overthrow the rule of Gamel Abdul Nasser in Egypt. He became the patron-martyr of the Islamic Group al Gamaa'a al Islamiyya, which was behind the murder of President Sadat in 1981, and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Both are deeply involved in the structure and activities of al Qaeda.

Structure and organisations

This is the big surprise of latest intelligence assessments on both sides of the Atlantic. According to one, al Qaeda has trained over the years more than 50,000 fighters and political supporters, capable of combat in one form or another. Of these, about 10,000 are fully trained for terrorist subversion and may be living in North America and Europe already. They are run by a proper command structure of about 2,000 commanders, planners and strategists.

Many of these have served in various terrorist organisations while others have links with paramilitary and intelligence units of states that have sponsored terrorism in one form or another. Some are former intelligence officers of the secret services of countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and, possibly, Greece.

Roughly 15,000 combat-trained guerrillas, mostly Saudi and Gulf Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis, make up the al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. They are well funded, and get money from Gulf bank accounts brought by courier across the border with Pakistan. Other fighters or "Mujahideen" have been traced in Bosnia, Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and Albania. About 10,000 fighters are now understood to have "returned home" to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, to await further assignment. The more sophisticated have been "sleepers" in Europe and North America.

Profiles of the terrorists

From the profiles of the 19 suspected hijackers on 11 September and those behind attacks like the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, many of the terrorists are frustrated high achievers. Many of the radical Islamicist students at Egyptian universities are studying demanding disciplines like mathematics, law and molecular biology. They seek the same order in the spiritual and physical world that they find in their studies. Some come to universities in the West from relatively poor backgrounds, but then feel at sea and rejected by the societies they first seek to join in America and Europe.

Those who react violently to real or perceived rejection become "sociopathic walking time bombs". They then become bent on destruction of the community they once wanted to join, subjects of what psychiatrists call "active-maladaptive" personality disorders. Typical of this type is Mohammed Atta, and many of the kamikaze terrorists he led on 11 September.

Allied organisations

Al Qaeda has direct links to many of the 14 top terrorist organisations listed by the US State Department. The most powerful are Gamaa'a al Islamiyya (Islamic Group) and Islamic Jihad in Egypt, and the cluster of organisations involved in anti-Israel terror operations - Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, where many of the Afghan-trained guerrillas have fought. It is also funding or organising organisations like Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines.

State sponsors

Al Qaeda and its associates still enjoy official or unofficial patronage from a wide range of state sponsors. The obvious candidates are still Iran, Iraq, and Syria - Libya has laid off recently since it has lost the support of communist Eastern Europe and Colonel Gadaffy feels himself increasingly trapped between the Islamic fundamentalists on the one hand and encroachment of organised crime from Europe and Turkey on the other. The problem of Syria was given glaring publicity by Tony Blair's visit to Damascus. Unlike his father, the newly-anointed President Bashar Assad is the client as much as the patron of hardline organisations, like Hezbollah, the PFLP and Hamas, accredited to his regime in Damascus.

The most delicate issue of sponsorship, according to US intelligence analysis, is posed by America's two key regional allies in the conflict in Afghanistan - Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. There is now small doubt that Bin Laden and al Qaeda receive direct support from some Saudi princes and members of the business community as well as a sizeable pool of supporters in the south-west of the country and across the borders with Yemen. Al Qaeda has benefited from the labyrinthine Saudi banking system, as complex and secretive as the Swiss banks, and British and American intelligence experts say that rich Saudis have been bribing Bin Laden and his group to keep away from their backyard. Some have even sponsored activities abroad by the extremists, in North Africa, Chechnya, Afghanistan and even in Europe and America.

Relations with Pakistan are even more delicate. In the early Nineties, members of the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) helped set up the Taliban in the religious schools of the Afghan refugee camps. They also helped create Islamic militant groups like Harikut- ul Mujahideen for operations against the Indians in Kashmir. Both are deeply involved in al Qaeda. So General Musharraf, Pakistan's ruler, knows he has elements of his military intelligence and armed services which support the organisations against whom he is now allied with the Americans and British. They also have supported the man who is held ultimately responsible for the attacks of 11 September.

The counter terror strategy

Britain and America are now engaged in a 10-year strategy at several levels, first to dismantle the terrorist groups "from the bottom upî and then get at the command structure. Al Qaeda does not have a perfect cell structure, but leading elements of each cell and unit - like Mohammed Atta - link into the hierarchy of the top 800 or so planners, analysts, bankers, strategists, commanders and spiritual guides.

The biggest problem is sponsorship by failed, imperfect or deteriorating states. This is why the regional geopolitical focus of the long-term campaign - which hardly involves military force at all - is on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia and Sudan, and even Turkey. Tackling the problem of terrorism at its roots will be a race against time. The fear is that some of the groups will get biological, chemical, and even "dirtyî nuclear bombs before they can be taken off the board.