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What roles do the following states play in
the sponsorship of terrorism in Europe and the US?
Syria
"... diversified terrorist organizations became "mere
pawns on the chessboard of Syrian intelligence, which is the real one
pulling the strings." However, the highly proficient Syrian
intelligence did its utmost not to leave its fingerprints while
making full use of the large diversity of groups available for
credible deniability in overseas terrorism.
Iran
One of the main objectives of the Iranian terrorist
system was to launch daring operations in the West, especially in the
United States.
Sudan
The transformation of Sudan from a Libyan-Iraqi ally
to an Iranian fiefdom was not a mere change of hegemonic power, but
rather a profound process with far reaching ideological ramifications
for the entire Muslim World...
Sudan's profound shift toward Iran occurred in the early spring of
1991, in the wake of the Gulf Crisis, and especially Saddam Hussein's
failure to conduct the war as a genuine Islamic Jihad...
The Islamists developed the 'fulcrum theory,' arguing, in essence,
that in order to take on the Muslim world, the Islamists must first
have a solid base from which to affect the rest of the world...The
establishment of an Islamist regime in Khartoum in 1989 provided the
militant Islamists with the long sought-after fulcrum. Indeed, under
the guidance of Turabi, Sudan has been transformed into a center for
the exportation of the Sunni Islamist Revolution.
Pakistan
The leading terrorists are known as 'Afghans,'
having been trained with the mujahideen in Pakistan. Some fought in
Afghanistan. The Islamist legion sends its fighters all over Asia,
Africa, Europe, and America to support, further, incite, and
facilitate what the leadership considers Islamic liberation
struggles...
...the impact of Afghanistan on the Muslim world became strong around
the mid-1980s. Then, hundreds of Arabs, predominantly
fundamentalists, began joining the Afghan resistance to fight in
their ranks...
It was not long before Egyptian and other Arab Islamist groups began
using Peshawar, the center of the Afghan resistance in Pakistan, as a
center for their exiled headquarters. As a result of their growing
cooperation they established an "International Jihad Organization"
using Pakistan and Afghanistan as their springboard... Meanwhile, in
order to expedite and expand its own terrorist support programs,
Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) encouraged the expansion
and internationalization of the Islamist training and support effort.
Muslim volunteers from several Arab and Asian countries were
encourage to come to Pakistan and join the Afghan Jihad...
Thus, in the quest of Islamist violence, the camps of the Islamist
Afghan resistance in Pakistan have become the Sunni Islamist
terrorism what Lebanon used to be for radical leftist terrorists.
Pakistan has become a place of pilgrimage for aspiring Islamist
radicals. Islamist terrorist have always looked for semi-autonomy - a
sort of state within a state - as the ideal circumstance for their
training and center of operations.
Iran-Sudan Partnership
By November 1991, Iran already
assisted in the establishment of 30 terrorist training bases for
Muslim terrorists from all
over the world in several parts of Sudan...
Iran and Syria proved their basic argument in the ashes in Beirut -
that international terrorism is an effective vehicle capable of
delivering dramatic results that no other instrument of foreign
policy could. The success of the Beirut bombings sent a surge through
the ranks of the Islamists and their supporters...Iranian staff and
financing dominated this infrastructure. The Islamist movements
affiliated with Iran and Sudan will be identified by such names as
mujahideen, HizbAllah, Jihad, and
other religiously oriented names...
Tehran continues to improve terrorist training provided to the
Islamists in the vast infrastructure in Sudan...The terrorist
infrastructure in Sudan serves as the strongest example of the
cooperation between Tehran and Khartoum.
- Why is Europe a hotbed for Islamist terrorist activity?
It is evident that it is relatively easy and extremely inexpensive to
establish a clandestine network in a Western European
country. When they have the support of Syria, Libya and
Iran, groups such as ASALA, Islamic Jihad, the Fatah Revolutionary
Council or the Orgainization for Armed Arab Struggle
encounter no particular difficulty in establishing an efficient
network
overseas. The Middle East states support terrorism in a
constant manner and have long-term oversight...
In Western Europe, Muslim communities will constitute 25% of the
population by 2000. At present, Muslims constitute
7-9% of the population in England and 8-10% in France.
Moreover, the Muslim emigre community, and especially the
younger, European-born, generation is rapidly becoming
militant Islamist. Since the mid-1980s, Iran and the HizbAllah have
successfully conducted a massive recruitment drive amon
these locally-born Muslim youth. Many have received advanced
terrorist training in Iran. It is a formidaable threat
because, by a cautious estimate, about 3%-6% of the over eight million
Muslim emigres in Western Europe are actively involved in
Islamist activities that border on or are outright, subversive. This
means around 250,000-500,000 potential terrorists and their
supporters.
- What is the relationship between terror operations
in Europe and terror operations in the US?
A close study of the development and performance of Islamic terrorism
in Western Europe is extremely important for the comprehension of the
terrorist threat to and in the United States. In essence, Western
Europe serves as a testing ground for Islamist terrorism. Many
operational and organizational concepts have been first refined in
Europe before being implemented in the U.S. Thus, the current state
of Islamist terrorism in Western Europe is also a forecast of the
Islamist terrorism awaiting America.
- What are the origins of the most recent wave of terrorist
attacks on the US?
The Islamist terrorist strategy for the forthcoming terrorist
campaign in the West, and especially the U.S., underwent a major
revision in a special conference of some 300 senior
terrorist commanders and Iranian intelligence officials held in
Tehran in
early February 1993.
In Tehran, the Iranian and HizbAllah leaders conceded that
Iran's policy of "moderation" failed to attract economic
assistance and investment from the West, and that instead
the West, and especially the United States, were paying increased
attention to Iran's growing power and to the spread of
Islam. U.S. policy in the Middle East and the Balkans was identified
as
a reflection of its growing threat to Islam. P. 171
Therefore the leaders decided that there was no alternative
to the resumption of the classic uncompromising terrorist struggle
against, and in, the West and particularly America.
Special attention has been paid to discussing the revival
of spectacular terrorist operations such as kidnapping foreign (mainly
American) hostages, political assassinations of the
"enemies of Islam," hijacking or blowing up transport aircraft, and
major
sabotage operations
- How do Islamist terrorist organizations succeed in
infiltrating and taking control of Muslim communities
in Europe and the US?
By the mid 1980s, the Shi'ites were everywhere in Western Europe,
quietly infiltrating the local Muslim communities in
order to gain control and subvert them from the
inside...Virtually all Iranian institutions, including international
organizations,
banks, students and schools and transport colonies
(shipping, airlines, etc.) received formal instructions from Tehran
and were
required to participate in this campaign...Another method
used to infiltrate Islamist operatives and terrorists is the sending
of
Iranian-trained agents, including Iranians, Lebanese,
Palestinians, Tunisians, Africans or Sri Lankans, to the West,
requesting
political asylum...
Iranians opened their own cultural and agitation centers and wrested
control of existing Islamic centers from
the Saudis. These centers are also used to shelter
terrorists. Thus, ultimately, these activities all end up promoting
terrorism...the established Muslim leadership in most of Western
Europe was helpless against the destabilation campaigns by the
spiritual messengers of Khomeini. There was always the
underlying threat that the Hizbollahi and their masters are quite
dangerous and that they would strike and kill anybody
standing in their way...
The impact of the Iranian financial assistance is great in the
impoverished Muslim communities
- How are ordinary Muslims in Europe unwittingly drawn into terrorist
support networks?
...At first he asked them to safe-keep innocent, and later not
so-innocent, items in their apartments. Most became ideologically
committed to the cause. Those who wavered or were frightened were
intimidated by being told they were already accomplices to violent
bombings because they had unwittingly stored bombs or guns.
- What is the reason for popular support of the extremist
views and actions of Islamist terrorists?
The lack of success of the Islamist political elites must not be
confused with widespread popular sentiments. Even in the
pseudo-democracies in the Muslim world, the masses are not
really represented because the real power remains the domain of
very limited elites, and the "parliaments" are limited to
symbolism and titular procedures. The masses are disenchanted and,
due to a widespread social and economic malaise in the Arab
world, increasingly withdraw into the panacea of the absolute
solutions offered by radical Islam.
- How sophisticated is the training received
by terrorist operatives currently deployed in the US?
General training includes advanced sabotage with SEMTEX, armed
ambushes, clandestine activities and counter-political work
(subversion and the disruption of political rallies, etc.). (SEMTEX
is a Czechoslovak-made plastic explosive, perhaps the best in the
world. It is extremely powerful and undetectable by most detection
machines.)...
Several of the 30 terrorist training bases in Sudan have unique
missions and roles... The two most important sites are the al-Shambat
and al-Mazra'ah camps where terrorists from Tunisia, Algeria, France,
and
Belgium receive advanced terrorist training. At these camps plans
have been made for long-term terrorist operations in Western Europe.
The subjects taught in these camps include the use of small arms,
self-defense, explosives, laying ambushes, "manufacturing of
explosives from local materials," topography, and using night-vision
equipment. In the summer of 1991 there was a delay in sabotage
training due to shortages of SEMTEX, but Iran ultimately supplied
large quantities.
- How good are the counterespionage (detection avoidance)
capacities of terrorist networks in the US and Europe?
The most important recommendation on security issues was the
realization that after 15 years of operational experience in Europe,
the terrorist organizations had streamlined their operations and have
acquired valuable experience to the point that they are basically
invulnerable to conventional surveillance-wiretaps, photography and
other kinds of surveillance...
They were prepared meticulously to state their claim for political
asylum convincingly so they would be in a position to get permanent
residence papers, thus freeing them from the surveillance that
existed for diplomats and officials.
- Why are the leaders of the terrorist states opposed
to a US-brokered peace settlements in the Middle East?
Both Tehran and Damascus have realized that U.S. influence in the
region, being demonstrated and enhanced in the peace process, would
not enable the realization of their strategic designs - the New
Islamic World Order. The U.S. must be evicted from the Middle East
and South-West Asia as a precondition for the rise of the Islamic
bloc. Thus, a confrontation with Washington is inevitable. Damascus
and Tehran believe, on the basis of their experience in Beirut in the
early 1980s, that it is possible to compel Washington into drastic
changes in its policy by a few spectacular terrorist operations,
especially if the
carnage is massive. This time, however, they would do it on U.S. soil.
- Besides Western Europe and the US, where else have
Islamist terror operations been active?
Beginning in early 1992, the Islamists' commitment to Jihad against
the West come to be tested in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in
what was formerly Yugolavia...The "Muslim Forces" include
several hundred volunteers primarily from Iran, Algeria, Egypt,
Sudan, Persian Gulf arab states, Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Syria and Turkey...
In early November 1992, more than 50 expert
terrorists and instructors of the HizbAllah and the Tawhid
(its Sunni counterpart under Sheikh Sha'ban) were sent from
Baalbak to Bosnia-Herzegovina to train local cadres and
launch operations on their own... Indeed, since the summer of 1992,
there has been a marked escalation in provocations by the
Muslim forces, the goal of which is to secure the military
intervention of the West against the Serbs (and to a lesser
extent, the Croats). Initially, these provocations were mainly
senseless attacks on their own Muslim population. The UN
concluded that a special group of Bosnian-Muslim forces, many
of whom had served with Islamist terrorist organizations,
committed a series of atrocities, including "some of the worst
recent killings", against Muslim civilians in Sarajevo "as
a propaganda ploy to win world sympathy and military
intervention."