December 31, 2009
Jet Plot Shows Growing Ability of Qaeda Affiliates
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over American soil on Christmas Day represents an ominously new and lethal ability by a branch of Al Qaeda to attack the United States directly, according to government and independent counterterrorism specialists.

Until now, American officials had expressed concern over the capability of Qaeda affiliates in North Africa, Yemen and Iraq, and a militant Islamist group in Somalia closely tied to Al Qaeda, to attack American and other Western targets in their regions. But they remained confident that these groups — unlike Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda in Pakistan — could not threaten the United States itself.

That assessment has changed, as American intelligence officials say Qaeda operatives in Yemen trained and equipped a 23-year-old Nigerian man to evade airport security measures and ignite a powerful explosive on a commercial airliner. Four months ago, a suicide bomber from the same group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, using a similar explosive, nearly killed a top Saudi counterterrorism minister.

“Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has grown in confidence and seems to be developing a capability beyond the other Al Qaeda nodes,” said Richard Barrett, a British former intelligence officer now monitoring Al Qaeda and the Taliban for the United Nations, who visited Yemen two weeks ago.

Even as the United States pours 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and increases pressure on Pakistan to eliminate Al Qaeda’s top leaders and sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the thwarted attack on an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight underscores how the Obama administration must now defend the United States from attacks conceived in multiple havens abroad.

“This is the canary in the coal mine,” said Juan Carlos Zarate, a top counterterrorism official under President George W. Bush. “Al Qaeda’s regional satellites are seen as platforms for Al Qaeda’s global agenda.”

Last month, federal officials unsealed terrorism-related charges against men they say were important actors in a recruitment effort that led roughly 20 young Americans to join the Shabab, a violent insurgent group in Somalia with ties to Al Qaeda. Law enforcement officials fear that the recruits, who hold American passports, could be tapped to return to the United States to carry out attacks here, though so far there is no evidence of such plots.

Al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa has carried out a string of killings, bombings and kidnappings against Westerners and African security forces in recent months that have raised fears that the Algerian-based group may be taking a deadlier turn.

“We think of core Al Qaeda in Pakistan as a very potent group, but not huge,” said Daniel L. Byman, a former intelligence analyst now at Georgetown University. “But if you add the affiliates that are actively targeting us, it becomes a much bigger number.”

Al Qaeda’s ties with its affiliates play out at different levels. This year, American officials began seeing the first evidence that dozens of fighters from Pakistan, along with a handful of the terrorist group’s midlevel leaders, were moving to Somalia and Yemen. The terrorist groups in all three locations are now communicating more frequently, and apparently are trying to coordinate their actions, the officials said.

“Al Qaeda in the tribal areas — Al Qaeda central — gives strategic guidance to its regional affiliates,” said an American counterterrorism official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the group publicly. “It’s not a hands-on, day-to-day, tactical relationship.”

To be sure, American and European counterterrorism experts say the ability and expertise of the Qaeda satellites are still limited. A report by Dutch counterterrorism specialists issued Wednesday, for example, concluded that the planning and preparation for the failed attack against the Northwest Airlines flight was “fairly professional, but its execution was amateurish.”

And the groups’ effectiveness often hinges greatly on the personalities of their leaders. The death in 2006 of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, coincided with the decline of that group’s influence in Iraq.

By design as well as necessity, the plots hatched by Al Qaeda’s regional affiliates are typically smaller and less spectacular than, say, Al Qaeda’s failed plans to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic in 2006.

But in setting their sights lower and relying on lone suicide bombers, rather than complicated plots with several confederates, these Qaeda affiliates may also pose a threat that is harder to thwart, as the Christmas Day incident demonstrated.

The threat from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — the combination of Yemeni and Saudi operatives announced in January — has drawn increasing attention from American officials. The group has carried out several attacks against foreign embassies and Yemeni officials in the past two years, adding to security threats in Yemen that include an armed rebellion in the north and a secessionist movement in the south.

As the United States and Yemen have increased their counterterrorism cooperation in recent months, the Qaeda affiliate sharpened its rhetorical attacks against the United States. In the latest issue of Sada al-Malahim, the Internet magazine of the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, the group’s leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, urged his followers to use small bombs “in airports in the Western crusade countries that participated in the war against Muslims; or on their planes, or in their residential complexes or their subways.”

A Qaeda operative in Yemen eulogized fellow militants killed in a Dec. 17 airstrike against an insurgent training camp in Abyan Province in southern Yemen.

In a video recording of the speech several days after the strike, the speaker said his fight was not against Yemeni soldiers, only Americans: “We are carrying a bomb to hit the enemies of God. O soldiers, you should learn that we do not want to fight you, nor do we have an issue with you,” according to a translation by IntelCenter, a terrorism research company. “We only have an issue with America and its agents. So, be careful not to side with America.”

In airstrikes facilitated by the United States this month, Yemeni officials said they had made targets of the leader, Mr. Wuhayshi, and his deputy, Said Ali al-Shihri, who were believed to be meeting with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric linked to the suspect in the November shooting at Fort Hood in Texas.

Relatives of the cleric say he is still alive, and senior American officials said Wednesday that they were still trying to determine which, if any, of the top Yemeni militant leaders were killed or wounded in that attack.