The Threat Matrix:
Conceptualizing al Qaeda and its Role in the Wider Islamist Threat Environment

Table of Contents:

[Overview]
[The Threat Matrix and its component parts]
[The Category One Threat: Islamist State Sponsors]
[The Second Category Threat: Islamist Terrorist/Insurgent Organizations]
[Al Qaeda Affiliated/Member Groups: Middle East]
[Al Qaeda Affiliated/Member Groups: Asia]
[Al Qaeda Affiliated/Member Groups: Africa]
[The Third Category Threat: "Arab Afghans"]
[The Fourth Category Threat: The Support Infrastructure]
[The Pre-October 2001 Structure of Al Qaeda and the Islamist Network]
[Part Two: The operation of the Threat Matrix]
[Geopolitics: Islamist State Sponsors and the Threat Matrix]
[Brothers-In-Arms: Al Qaeda, Terrorist/Insurgent Groups and the "Arab-Afghans"]
[The Infrastructure of Islamist Terror]
["Spectacular" Attacks: The Ultimate Objective of Al Qaeda and the Threat Matrix]
[Chronology of Pre-September 11, 2001 Terrorist Actions]
[Chronology of Post-September 11, 2001 Islamist Terrorist Operations ]
[Conclusions]

The Second Category Threat:
Islamist Terrorist/Insurgent Organizations

The single greatest accomplishment of the Islamists was the harnessing and coordinating of terrorist organizations of both the Sunni and Shi’ite factions. Turabi utilized his ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members formed the leadership core of many Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including Palestinian groups such as the PLO and Hamas and those operating in Egypt. Iran sponsored HizbAllah and supported groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, while Pakistan had ties to numerous groups existing in Asia, including those that were engaged in the Kashmir against India. Within a decade, a growing number of terrorist and insurgent groups emerged under the new Islamist banner.

In the early 1990s, Islamists offered assistance to the Bosnian Muslims and Albanians in the Balkan conflicts and to insurgents in the former Soviet Union, most notably the Chechens. Groups from countries such as East Africa and Yemen were also embraced by the Islamists --some of al Qaeda’s earliest operational successes were in that region, as were the 1998 embassy bombings. The most recent trend has been to expand the Islamist alliance into Muslim countries in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Currently al Qaeda is able to draw on the support of approximately six to seven million Islamists, with 120,000 willing to engage in violence. They also have the broad sympathies of hundreds of millions of other Muslims.

The following table lists terrorist and insurgent organizations that have an established relationship with al Qaeda. However, there are various levels of cooperation between al Qaeda and the member organizations. Many of the Egyptian groups are fully integrated into the new Jihad (Zawarhiri and his group is an excellent example of this). The Palestinian groups are willing to accept training and financing from the Islamist network, but are wary of becoming fully engulfed, fearing that their narrower nationalist cause will be made secondary to the great Jihad. The extreme and senseless brutality of the terrorism in Algeria has created a rift between the wider network and the Armed Islamic Group. Even though there was open disagreement between their respective leaderships, Algerian members of al Qaeda still functioned within the organization, but increasingly were shuffled into the Salafist Group for Call and Combat As al Qaeda expanded, it shifted from its original vision of waging a Jihad focused almost exclusively against the West and has accommodated its many associate members by creating a division of labour; it would attack strategic targets in the over all struggle, while member groups continued to engage tactical targets (their own regional conflicts).

The term "Arab Afghans" originally defined the volunteers who fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Most were recruited from the Middle East, hence the name. After the 1989 withdrawal of the Soviet Union, these veterans became key figures in many Islamist terrorist movements. Initially, most of them concentrated on bringing the Jihad to their home countries, with little or no success against the powerful security services of the Middle East. The relentless efforts to suppress these Jihadists forced many to leave their home countries and go to the only other place where they were welcome, the al Qaeda-Islamist network.

A second generation of "Arab Afghan" terrorists has emerged as a product of the Islamist alliance. They were trained in the camps of Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan and gained practical experience fighting in numerous insurgencies and attempting to spread the Islamist ideology. Like the first generation, the second was eager to fight in a Jihad. Their reputation for excess and brutality was earned in some of the most vicious conflicts waged in the past decade. Arab Afghans figured prominently in the Sudanese civil war, the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya and Kashmir as well as served in the now defunct Taliban’s war against the Northern Alliance.

While bin Laden provides inspiration and acts as a spiritual figure for the Islamist cause, the operational backbone or hardcore of the Threat Matrix remains the "Arab Afghans". They have provided leadership and technical expertise to their terrorist brothers-in-arms since the end of the Afghanistan campaign and have the capacity to blend into almost any Islamist organization; liaise with other violent organizations; or form cells and operate independently from al Qaeda or its associated groups.

A critical component of the international Islamist alliance is its massive infrastructure. It consists of bogus charities, social/cultural organizations, religious centres and seemingly legitimate businesses. Numerous terrorist groups maintain their own infrastructures and can offer these resources as a supplement to al Qaeda’s own networks. The state sponsors, through their own intelligence services, also operate various front groups worldwide. State sponsors such as Iran and Sudan have offered these resources in support of terrorist operations executed by al Qaeda. This aspect of the Islamist threat is often overlooked, yet it plays an indispensable role in raising cash, recruiting terrorists, offering cover for operatives, radicalizing Muslims and lobbying Western governments as "representatives of the Muslim community".

Gunaratna quotes CIA sources who maintain that one fifth of the world’s Islamic NGOs have been infiltrated by al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations. The role of these bogus or infiltrated charities and Islamic organizations was elevated when al Qaeda was forced to move from Sudan into Afghanistan. Afghanistan had no economy from which they could generate revenue. The situation had deteriorated to the point that the Taliban regime was reliant on the heroin trade as a source of finance. He also asserts that both HizbAllah and al Qaeda are using the same support infrastructure of charities to operate in Asia, where each is winning converts to their new Jihad.

Al Qaeda also operates numerous legitimate business enterprises, offering the terrorist arm access to the capital these fronts generate. In the early 1990s Sudan played a significant role in allowing bin Laden to own and operate companies that held monopolies on a number of agricultural exports including honey, dried fruit and gum arabic. Bin Laden also set up several construction companies which built infrastructure in Sudan, including the training camps and roads which allowed troops to move in and suppress rebelling tribes. Initially, these companies employed veterans of the anti-Soviet conflict.

Bin Laden himself was also able to provide his own personal fortune to the Jihad. It is estimated that he inherited approximately $25 million US upon his father’s death. His investments, including those in Sudan, allowed the sum to grow rapidly since then. The financial network maintained by bin Laden, both for the Islamists and his own personal wealth is exceptionally complex. Bodansky indicates that "… bin Laden maintains a tangled web of "companies", partnerships, and other-named entities that interact with one another and are ultimately concealed in a layer of bigger international financial entities so that his involvement in any of these investments cannot be discovered" This global financial network has several interacting cores: the Amsterdam-Belgium-Luxembourg triangle; the Far East (concentrated mostly in Indonesia and Malaysia) and finally, through the cooperation of the Russian mafiya, several countries of the former Soviet Union have formed a third core. Each core receives cash from Middle Eastern Islamists and various religious organizations in the region (especially from Saudi Arabia), launders it and distributes it accordingly. The increased international attention brought about from the embassy bombings in 1998, forced the network to add yet another layer of entities to protect the financial assets.

One of the most shocking statistics regarding the penetration of Islamists into the Muslim community in the United States is that an estimated eighty percent of mosques are now controlled by the extremists. A similar pattern can potentially be inferred for both Canada and Europe. While this does not at all mean that there are a corresponding proportion of individual Muslims who adhere to this violent and radical version of Islam, it does mean that Islamists are placed in key positions in organizations that receive funding from the Wahabiists of Saudi Arabia. This control of organizations, mosques, etc. allows Islamists to bring speakers to advocate their hate-filled version of Islam and advance a vicious propaganda effort aimed at Muslims in North America and Europe.

Steven Emerson in American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us has detailed the activities of various Islamist groups which included recruiting individuals for training in the Afghan camps (those with American citizenship were prized because of their ability to travel without rousing suspicion), holding "conferences" where anti-Western and anti-Semitic topics were presented and the distribution of literature and tapes produced by Islamist clerics from the Middle East which advocated extreme violence against the West and Israel.

Numerous criminal activities, especially fraud schemes have recently proven to be an important means of sustaining active Islamist cells around the world. Currently, U.S. authorities are investigating a number of small retailers for "coupon-clipping" scams. The fraudsters clip literally thousands of coupons from every source available to them. These in turn are provided to a retailer-accomplice who forwards them to the issuer and gets reimbursed, when no products were ever purchased by a consumer.

[Section 1] [Section 2] [Section 3]

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca