Smash hit

Before the September 11 hijackings, Al-Qaeda’s operations were characterised by multiple simultaneous attacks and the use of foreigners as suicide bombers. At the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan, Islamic militants from around the world were trained to carry out attacks. Fanatically loyal, they went wherever the Al-Qaeda leadership directed them.

“What we learnt was that Al-Qaeda is a top-down structure with command and control very closely controlled,” said Vincent Cannistraro, formerly a terrorism expert with the CIA.

Now that tight organisation has been transformed. In the two years since September 11 the international structure of Al-Qaeda has been heavily damaged. Many of its most important operatives have been arrested or killed; the world total is more than 3,000 in about 100 countries.

Experts doubt whether Bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri — both thought to be hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan border — exercise any day-to-day control over their remaining disciples. It is even questionable whether Al-Qaeda continues to exist as a single, identifiable organisation.

Instead, its methods and techniques are now being treated as blueprints for action by disparate local groups who see themselves as being inspired rather than directed by Bin Laden.

Earlier this year Thabet bin Qais, an Al-Qaeda spokesman, gave a chilling assessment of the new generation of global terrorist. “The Americans only have predictions and old intelligence,” he said. “It will take them a long time to understand the new form of Al-Qaeda.”

That “new form” of organisation sprang from the destruction of its terrorist training bases in Afghanistan. Many of the militants, some with experience of fighting the Americans, scattered back to their homelands. Others returned home after being radicalised in the mosques and madrassas (religious schools) of Pakistan.

Many have taken with them the expertise they were taught in the camps. Their instructions no longer come in the form of direct communications from the depleted and dislocated leadership.

Instead, Bin Laden and Zawahiri have issued a series of tape recordings calling for attacks on vaguely defined targets.

In almost every case the attacks that have been carried out have been the work of nationals of the country in which the operations were mounted. Claims of responsibility, too, are made in the names of unknown, nationally based organisations.

The bombers who hit Riyadh last May, killing 34 people, called themselves al-Muwahiddun (literally Those Who Profess the Oneness of God). The attacks on Casablanca four days later, which killed 33 people, were claimed by Assirat al Moustaquim (the Straight Path).

Bombers who blew up 19 Shell petrol stations in Pakistan at about the same time called themselves the Muslim United Army. The group behind the recent attacks in Istanbul was named as the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders’ Front. All the bombers came from the target countries.

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