A rchive Date
[ 27-10-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Italy ]
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[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5772911/site/newsweek/
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Italy's Sleeper Cells
The threat of an Al Qaeda attack there is real—and growing
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET Aug. 20, 2004
Aug. 20 - Who’d have thought laid-back Italy would be a major hub for Al Qaeda operatives? But their reach extends from Casablanca to Baghdad to Milan.
With growing frequency and ferocity, Web sites supposedly linked to Al Qaeda threaten Italy with gruesome terrorist attacks “hitting quality targets with nonconventional weapons that will cause a huge disaster.” If Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi doesn’t pull his troops out of Iraq, bloggers from hell say they’ll call on secret sleeper cells to raze Italy’s cities to the ground, make people “taste the bitter fruits of blood” … and so on.
Well, some people get to a point where they’ve been scared so long, they just can’t be scared anymore. And some folks just aren’t sharp enough to be scared in the first place. Italians may qualify in both categories—at least this month. After all, it’s August, and this was the week of ferragosto, when a lot of Italians go to the beach, and those few who are still on the job often act as if they’re not. Reuters reported that an e-mailed threat to blow up Rome's Fiumicino Airport on Monday, sent directly to security officers, wasn’t actually opened and read for 24 hours.
There is good news too: the much-cited Internet threats from the so-called Abu-Hafs Al-Masri Brigades, which purport to be an offshoot of Al Qaeda, are probably less nuclear, biological or chemical than they are chimerical. A recent study by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) concluded “the ‘Brigades’ lack credibility.” They have a long history of false claims, even attempting to take credit for the blackout in the Northeastern region of the United States a year ago. Nobody remotely connected to the group has ever been captured. Their agenda seems to be entirely about Iraq, and their language has few of the Qur'anic citations we’ve learned to expect from Osama bin Laden’s A Team. So maybe it makes sense that Italians are wearing Speedos under beach umbrellas instead of gas masks in their basements.
But Italy’s counterterror cops and prosecutors know there’s still a lot to worry about. When I went to Milan a couple of weeks ago, I found them hard at work in office buildings that were otherwise almost empty, and I found the cases they’re developing have some very scary implications indeed.
Hundreds of pages of documents filed in Italy’s courts show that sleeper cells have indeed been set up all over northern Italy, and much of Western Europe. Cities like Milan, Cremona, Parma and Padua have been used by extremists as logistical hubs channeling would-be holy warriors and suicide bombers to Afghanistan, Chechnya and, since 2002, to Iraq. But the organization that’s taken shape in Europe is more important than a mere smuggling and logistics network.
As arrest warrants and indictments issued last year and this year tell the tale, after some of bin Laden’s allies were forced out of Afghanistan by the American invasion in 2001, they used the immigrant-filled cities of Western Europe to regroup and reshape their organization. Under the direction of the now-infamous Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, they set out to create “a new hierarchical coordinating structure” to communicate among the various European cells already in operation. The Italy-based groups were closely linked to a little fringe organization of fundamentalists who were then holed up in northern Iraq, known as Ansar al Islam.
But the overall direction for what amounted to a new or parallel Al Qaeda came from members of Zarqawi’s Al Tawhid group in Germany, according to these court papers. The operations of other cells were traced to Spain, Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, even Norway. And apart from their shared religious extremism, no racial or national profile is useful identifying them. In their ranks are Kurds, Somalis, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Syrians and others. There are women as well as men. Some members of the cells have no papers, some are refugees, others are European citizens. (Those in the last category are eligible for visa waivers to enter the United States, leading some analysts like the Nixon Center’s Robert Leiken to argue that European Muslims now pose the single biggest risk to American security.)
Reports like the Reuters story about the lazy security at Rome's airport often give the impression that Italian counterterror operations are sloppy. The Italian press does tend to exaggerate the investigators’ findings, just as it exaggerates the Internet threats. But Italy’s counterterror units have a lot of useful experience in brutal wars against shadowy organizations. The magistrate now leading investigations in Milan, Armando Spataro, is a veteran of Italy’s fight against the Red Brigades in the 1970s and the ongoing struggle against the Mafia. Other European intelligence and police services have learned to appreciate the Italians’ particular penchant for tape-recording suspects. Indictments against 12 alleged terrorists that Spataro filed at the beginning of the month included transcripts from tapped phones, bugged apartments, even microphones placed in a mosque.
The information gleaned helps not only the struggle against terrorists in Europe, but in Iraq, where Zarqawi is linked to many of the most spectacular bombings and beheadings. As described in the Italian courts, an underground railroad for would-be martyrs working with Zarqawi ran through Istanbul and Syria, directed by a wanted fugitive known as Mullah Fouad, and straight into Iraq.
I spent days in a Piemontese farmhouse with stacks of these records spread around me (there are worse places to work, I confess), and the picture that emerged from the dense legalese syntax was at once fascinating and terrifying.
The network indicted in Milan this month is accused of sending at least five suicide bombers to attack American, Italian and other Coalition forces. One, a Moroccan named Morchidi Kamal, was responsible for the rocket attack against the Hotel Rashid in Baghdad last October when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was staying there.
According to numbers released by the Italian interior ministry this week, from July 2003 to the end of June this year, 46 alleged terrorists were arrested and held in Italy. Among them are three Moroccans accused of involvement in the murderous May 2003 attacks that killed 45 people in Casablanca. Another is an Egyptian arrested after tape recordings caught him bragging about his role directing the Madrid bombings that killed 191 people in March. Nothing but intelligence gathering and good police work prevents such terrorists from attacking elsewhere in Europe at the time and place of their choosing. After all, they’re already there.
So when Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said last Sunday that he didn’t exclude the possibility that "dormant or partially active terrorist groups or even lone individuals could mobilize unexpectedly and make a direct hit on our territory," he was hardly exaggerating. Many of the specific threats may be bogus, but the threat itself is real.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
© 2005 Microsoft
 World Fact Book (CIA]
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