Overseas Terrorism in Canada

Punjab-based individuals and organizations are still listed in the organizations and individuals deemed as "targets" in the CSIS Counter-Terrorism Program. Unfortunately, Canada continues to be a destination of choice for the violent radicals who still carry on the armed conflict in the Punjab. Although heavy-handed Indian security has lessened in the past decade, the potential for further terrorist acts with a Canadian connection still exists, as the flow of terrorists into this country continues.

In May 1995, a DK member convicted of hijacking an Air India flight entered Canada using a false name and claimed refugee status. He subsequently became the subject of a CSIS investigation, and eventually a deportation order was issued for him. A Babbar Khalsa terrorist was ordered deported from Canada in 1998. He admitted he was present when killings were planned while he was still in India and that he acted as a courier for the organization. In February of 1999 a refugee claimant admitted to a Canadian immigration officer that he was a member of the BK, and that he would assist the organization with non-combat related activities here in Canada (e.g. fund raising). Once deportation proceedings began, he changed his story, claiming that he hoped that the admission would strengthen his refugee claim, and that in reality he was not a member. A Federal Court justice upheld the original deportation order back to India. As recently as December 19, 2000 another active member of the Babbar Khalsa entered Canada without documentation and upon questioning admitted to his participation with the terrorist organization. He then became the subject of immigration proceedings.

In the struggle against Sikh terrorism in Canada, the greatest credit belongs to Canadian Sikhs themselves — many of who have withstood intimidation and violence by the militants in order to counter their attempts to wrest control of temple funds or indoctrinate their children. Men and women such as the late Tara Singh Hayer, the publisher of the Indo-Canadian Times who became a paraplegic after a 1988 attack and was murdered in 1998 for his stand against the terrorists, deserve our highest approbation.

Sri Lankan Tamils

Sri Lanka is an island state located in the Indian Ocean off the southern tip of India, with a population of over 19 million people. The majority are Sinhalese, who are largely Buddhist, and comprise approximately 75% of the population. The next largest community is the Tamils, whose ancestors arrived in the island before the Colonial era; they represent approximately 13% of the population. They trace their ancestry to the Dravidians of southern India and, like the majority of Indians, are Hindus. Between 5 to 6% of the population are Indian Tamils descended from laborers brought to the island under British colonial rule to work on the tea plantations. The Northern and Eastern provinces are primarily Tamil speaking. For centuries, the island has also been home to a Muslim population, descendants of traders, who had been equally comfortable in either Sinhalese or Tamil regions of the country. They represent about 7% of the country’s inhabitants.

Independence from British rule was granted in 1948, and a parliamentary system was established. At independence, most Tamils voted with the Sinhalese for non-ethnic, nationalist political parties. In 1949, a portion of the Tamil speaking elite, who had felt uncomfortable with the Sinhalese majority, created the Tamil Federal Party (FP). Previous disputes between the two were resolved by the British, whom most Tamils saw as being impartial. The FP linked territory to language, it wanted to create a separate province composed of the Northern and Eastern provinces. They also advanced the policy of granting citizenship and voting rights to the Indian Tamils as a means of partially off-setting the numeric superiority of the Sinhalese. In 1976, the FP joined with several parties to form the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). In the 1977 elections, they formed the Official Opposition. Throughout this period the FP, and later the TULF, adhered to political means and non-violet protests to advance their agenda and express their concerns.

In 1956, the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP), who harnessed the discontent of a segment of the Sinhalese, introduced legislation to make Sinhalese the island’s official language. However, after backing down from the policy of "Sinhalization" of national politics, the Prime Minister was assassinated by two radical Buddhist monks in 1959. His policies were continued by his widow, who assumed leadership of the SLFP. Civil disobedience campaigns were launched by Tamils over the next several years, and culminated in a state of emergency being declared in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. The responses by the mostly Sinhalese security forces to peaceful protests were, to say the least, excessive.

The political uncertainty allowed several relatively unsophisticated armed groups to emerge in Tamil dominated areas. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) began, more or less, as a street gang. Vellupillai Prabhakaran, its "supreme," consolidated his hold over the organization by proving his machismo and assassinating the Tamil mayor of Jaffna -- who was a member of the United National Party, a federal party that drew members from all ethnic groups on the island. This senseless violence against a Tamil in mainstream politics was a small sample of what was yet to be unleashed upon those who opposed the Tigers, either within or outside the democratic process.

The Tigers slowly grew from the handful of thugs around Prabhakaran into a terrorist group, and slowly laid the foundations for their emergence as a full-blown guerrilla force.

Sensing an opportunity to play realpolitik, and assert its claim as a regional power, India began training and funding the Tamil insurgents in the early 1980s. Prior to this, the LTTE had received some training by Palestinian terrorist groups. All major Tamil guerrilla groups received military training and logistical support from India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). This training took place in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where ethnic, linguistic, and trade ties exist between the Tamils of India and Sri Lanka. Within a short period of time, the first roving gangs of criminals turned into an insurgent movement capable of challenging the security forces of Sri Lanka and eventually controlling territory in Tamil areas.

Even in the early 1980s, unity between Tamil insurgent groups did not exist. In 1983, the LTTE began targeting the People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE,) and the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO,) assassinating its newest leader. In 1986, the LTTE began another series of assaults on TELO positions in Jaffna. Almost 100 of their guerillas were killed by the LTTE, who then issued demands that all insurgents follow them. In December of 1986, the LTTE turned its attention to the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), killing several hundred of their members. Fighting between the LTTE, the EPRLF, and PLOTE continued over the next several months. The Tigers’ sheer brutality was successful in devastating their rivals for supremacy. It was not uncommon for surrendering fighters, who were promised safety if they surrendered to the LTTE, to be massacred immediately.

Although active since the early 1970s, a bout of anti-Tamil rioting by Sinhalese Sri Lankans led to the LTTE’s transition from a small terrorist group to a major insurgency. As is common in terrorism, the rioting was triggered by the insurgents themselves.

On July 23, 1983, LTTE guerillas ambushed troops in the Jaffna area. A remote controlled mine was detonated, and was followed up by grenades and heavy automatic weapons fire, killing a total of 15 soldiers. In response, Sri Lankan soldiers stationed in the Jaffna area went on what can only be called a rampage, destroying property owned by Tamils. Many Tamils civilians were badly beaten by troops, and several died from the assaults. Rumors about the LTTE’s ambush quickly spread into Colombo, and Sinhalese mobs went "berserk" on the night of July 24 in Tamil areas. Many Tamils were beaten or hacked to death, while others who were accused of being Tigers were burned alive.

This senseless violence continued for several days while police and military personnel did little to protect Tamil civilians. The violence displaced many Tamils. In Colombo alone, 50,000 were left homeless, while as many as 100,000 were forced to flee their homes all across the island. Many of these unfortunate Tamils moved into Tamil speaking provinces, away from the mobs, where the presence of armed Tamil insurgents offered a false sense of security.

For the LTTE, the massacre of Tamil civilians was a victory, and their small-scale armed attacks began to have the intended devastating political effects of polarizing the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. This was clearly a textbook example of what the Brazilian Marxist Carlos Mergella advocated in the Mini-manual of the Urban Guerilla, "the small engine starting the larger engine". Previous attacks had provoked similar, although much smaller reactions by the security forces, which included the 1981 torching of the Jaffna library -- a cultural treasure of the Sri Lankan Tamils. The consequences of the government’s indifference to the fate of thousands of innocent Tamils rapidly escalated the status of the LTTE into a position where they could claim to be the "defenders" of the Tamil people.

In 1987, talks between Sri Lanka, India, and all the Tamil insurgent groups resulted in a peace accord being signed. India acted as its guarantor, and deployed troops to Sri Lanka’s Northern and Eastern Provinces. The only holdout was Prabhakaran. The Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) was tasked to disarm the insurgents and destroy the LTTE. The seemingly simple task of defeating the small insurgent organization proved to be too much for the IPKF, who sustained heavy losses, even as their most elite units were repeatedly repelled in advances against the LTTE in its stronghold of Jaffna. Moreover, the presence of Indian troops on the island triggered fears within the JVP (a Sinhalese Maoist group) who took up arms for a second time. The lack of success, and the discomfort felt by many Sri Lankans over the massive Indian presence, caused the withdrawal of the force in 1990.

In 1991, fighting resumed between the LTTE and the island’s security forces. That year, Prabhakaran also sent a young female suicide bomber to successfully assassinate India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (by approaching him with a garland of flowers while wearing an explosive vest-pack — the first known use of this as a terrorist tactic). The LTTE feared that he might have redeployed Indian troops against them. LTTE Suicide bombers also took the life of Sri Lankan President Premadasa in 1993 and nearly got Prime Minister Sirima Bandanaraike with a suicide bomber in 2000.

The LTTE also launched a series of suicide and military attacks in 1995, while sitting at the peace table with the Sri Lankan government. A revived military was able to respond by pushing most Tiger units out of the Jaffna region. Many of the gains made in 1995 by the island’s security forces have since been lost with the latest series of Tamil offensives, and another ceasefire went into place in late 2001, although it remains to be seen if this one will hold. While the Sri Lankan government is expressing confidence with the progress of the current talks, it is unknown what Prabhakaran actually thinks he can get out of them.

The LTTE’s battlefield successes, and its ability to recover considerably from the reverses inflicted on it in 1995, are due to its organizational complexity and the ruthlessness with which it is run both in combat and support operations. No effort (or Tamil, for that matter) has been spared in tearing the Northern and Eastern Provinces from the island state.

Modern terrorist organizations must be able to operate on a global scale. To an organization such as the LTTE, this does not mean being able to execute combat operations across the planet, but instead it carries out a diverse set of vital support functions such as raising funds, procuring weapons and ammunition, lobbying foreign governments, and carrying out a vast array of criminal activities designed to raise cash to support military and political activities. To the LTTE, winning a sovereign territory of their own in Sri Lanka is their declared objective. Therefore, their global network is designed to funnel resources back to their cadres on the island, but also to support the "alternate authority" the group needs to generate.

At the top of the LTTE structure is Prabhakaran, who heads both the political and military wings of the Tigers, although the military wing is dominant over the political. Falling under the military wing are the regional commands which control the activities of the LTTE’s 5,000 ground troops; the Sea Tigers, a "brown water" navy capable of launching massive amphibious assaults and devastating suicide operations; police (in LTTE controlled areas); and the infamous Black Tigers, an elite suicide force. Under the LTTE political wing are the Tamil Eelam Economic Development Organization (TEEDOR) and its "justice" apparatus.

In Sri Lanka, the LTTE usually operates in the northern regions of the island as a sophisticated and ruthless guerilla insurgency, capable of mounting devastating attacks against government military bases. In the southern areas of the island, the LTTE usually employed a massive and sustained terrorist campaign with suicide bombings that targeted the island’s civilian population, as well as its political and cultural institutions.

Since its foundation, the LTTE also engaged in a systematic assassination campaign directed against any Tamil group or prominent individual who did not acknowledge the Tigers’ leading place in Tamil affairs, or the supremacy of Prabhakaran himself. The LTTE had turned their attention towards the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), a political party which represented Tamil interests. Fearing their legitimacy, Prabhakaran turned on them and ordered the assassination of its leader in July of 1989. Up until that point, the TULF had more or less been spared the brutal murders that befell countless hundreds of Tamils who occupied positions in the island’s government, including regional administrators and judges. Of particular concern to the LTTE were democratic organizations that were willing to accept some form of Tamil autonomy within a federal state, as opposed to domination by the LTTE. With the current peace talks, it seems that this is the very arrangement that the Tigers are willing to accept anyway.

The LTTE’s international apparatus has three primary functions: Political representation/propaganda; fund raising; and weapons procurement. The entire Tiger international network of front groups, "human rights organizations," "development agencies," and a criminal network is controlled by the intelligence branch headquartered in Tiger-occupied Northern Sri Lanka. The intimate link between the combat elements of the LTTE and its international political arm is further reinforced by its leadership. The International Secretariat, Lawrence Thaligar (until 1996) was revealed to have been a militarily trained cadre. His replacement was another militarily trained LTTE member, Sivagnanam Gopalarathinam, alias "Karikalan".

To carry out these tasks, the Tigers maintain offices throughout the world. Presently, they staff offices in approximately 40 countries. In most western countries, the LTTE must operate behind a front group, such as the World Tamil Movement, Tamil Coordinating Committee, United Organization of Tamils, or Tamil Confederation. In Denmark, for example, the Tigers operate under their true identity. Each LTTE front office is in contact with the Sri Lankan headquarters of the movement through either fax, phone, satellite phone or the Internet, receiving up-to-the-minute reports of the fighting to relay to Tamils. London (until recently) also served as the international headquarters for operations outside of Sri Lanka.

The advantage this network has given the LTTE has been invaluable. First, it kept the international Tamil community politicized and focused on their version of events, and thus more or less willing to pour huge sums into its war chest. Second, by circulating reports of human rights violations by police and soldiers, the LTTE has been able to maintain the negative image that the island’s government took on during the 1980s. Despite the resettlement of large numbers of Tamils in the Colombo area, decreased inter-racial tensions and vastly increased professionalism in the security forces, LTTE activists were still able, through western human rights groups, to convey a negative impression of the Sri Lankan government. Even after the Tamil Tigers were declared a terrorist organization in 1995 by the United States, weapons still could not be sold by the US to the Sri Lankan government because of this perception.

In Europe and North America, the LTTE operates on two distinct levels. Tiger operatives overtly engage in propaganda and lobbying activities, as well as coordinating a myriad of fronts and charities to raise — usually legally -- cash for the war. Another group of operatives run criminal enterprises including refugee smuggling, narcotics trafficking, sophisticated frauds, and extortion rings to deliver funds to feed the LTTE.

Throughout the Indian sub-continent, a host of illegal activities divert funds into Tiger coffers. Most notable and socially destructive are LTTE ties to heroin produced from the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Since the early 1980s, Tamils with ties to the LTTE have been apprehended at alarming rates in Western Europe and Canada, acting as drug couriers.

Cash-poor Eastern European states also became targets of dubious Tiger diplomacy. Corruption, coupled with an arms manufacturing industry which can no longer count on huge purchases through the former Soviet Bloc, have made Eastern European governments more willing to deal with anyone able to put up hard cash. One example of these purchases, 50 tons of TNT and 10 tons of RDX, were purchased from Ukraine and used for a number of deadly terrorist attacks in the Colombo area and elsewhere in southern Sri Lanka.

The KP Branch

The most secretive LTTE international operation is the procurement of weapons, explosives, and "dual use" technologies to sustain military and terrorist operations. This side of the LTTE is given the nickname of the "KP Branch", taking on the initials of its highest level operative, Kumaran Padmanathan. Members of this branch are not drawn from the fighting wing of the LTTE, as their identities would have been recorded and available to law enforcement and counter-intelligence agencies by India’s RAW, who had helped train many Tiger Cadres in the early 1980s. For further security, the KP Branch operates completely independently from all other sections of the LTTE, and hands the arms shipments to a small, highly trusted team in the Sea Tigers for final delivery into LTTE dominated areas.

To facilitate the activities of this clandestine international arms trafficking network, the LTTE owns and operates its own fleet of ocean-going vessels. This fleet only operates directly for the LTTE less than five percent of the time, the remainder of their time is spent transporting legitimate goods and raising hard cash for the purchase of weapons. Initially, the Tigers maintained a shipping base in Myanmar, until diplomatic pressure forced them to leave. A new base has been established on Phuket, a Thai island. LTTE ships are also known to transport heroin from the Golden Triangle to markets around the globe. Identifying the exact ownership of the vessels operating for the LTTE is a daunting task: registrations are constantly changed, holding companies are always being set up, and ships can be renamed several times on a single voyage. However, analysts are however confident that the real controller of the fleet is Padmanathan.

Probably the most skilled operation mounted by the KP Branch was the 1997 theft of 32,400 rounds of 81mm mortar ammunition purchased from Tanzania for the Sri Lankan Army. The LTTE was aware of the purchase of 35,000 mortar bombs, made a bid to the manufacturer through a numbered company to have one of their own vessels pick up the load, and then — once the bombs were loaded — switched the name and registration of their ship. Instead of transporting the cargo to its intended destination, it was taken to Tiger-held territory in Sri Lanka’s north. The Sri Lankan army eventually received the mortar bombs, one salvo at a time from LTTE mortars. It is difficult to imagine any of the old-style European groups, such as the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades, operating with this much sophistication or verve.

For the KP Branch, the West is their money-raising territory. Profits from donations made to various front groups and through criminal enterprises are transferred into bank accounts. Money can then be transferred to the accounts of a weapons broker, or, be taken by KP operatives themselves.

What becomes painfully apparent is that the LTTE war effort relies heavily on the civilian Tamil population in Sri Lanka and abroad. Currently, one quarter of all Tamils reside outside of Sri Lanka, most having left in the past decade, making this one of the most massive shifts of any single group since the Second World War. There is no coincidence between the movement of Tamils and the LTTE’s need for resources -- it is the backbone of their international strategy. In 1995, when the LTTE lost Jaffna, their international operatives were ordered to increase, by a massive 50%, the amount raised from Tamils outside of the island.

The LTTE and Tamils in Canada

Canada’s Sri Lankan community was a small one until 1984, when the first of a wave of Tamil refugees arrived by way of Europe. Typically, most were genuine in their desire to escape the fighting on the island, but it already seems that the LTTE was planning on establishing a Diaspora community as a support mechanism. This is a new wrinkle in the history of insurgent movements; while the use of overseas communities for support is an old story, deliberately encouraging the creation of such a community is not. In any event, 20 years after Tiger-supported immigration to Canada began, Toronto has become the World’s largest Sri Lankan Tamil city, with as many as 200,000 here, and another 50,000 or so in other cities. Estimates on how many are here vary, and are at odds with census data — suggesting much illegal immigration.

While the LTTE is very much present in Canada, it is almost invariably manifested through a pair of front organizations: The World Tamil Movement (WTM), which has spun off dozens of subordinate groups in other communities, and among Tamil students; and the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils (FACT). Both groups have been described by the annual US State Department Report Patterns of Global Terrorism as fronts for the LTTE since 1995.

The LTTE has almost never presented violence to anybody outside of Sri Lanka and southern India, and it has been a matter of policy to avoid deliberately targeting foreigners. This has meant that the risk of Tiger violence inside Canada is low — except to dissenting Tamils. A trio of low key incidents are all that can be easily categorized: A drive-by shooting at the home of a Tamil language broadcaster who refused to run pro-Tiger ads; the beating of a distributor of David Jeyaraj’s independent Tamil language newspaper Muncharie, and the torching of his van; and the firebombing of a Tamil cultural centre whose director opined that perhaps both sides in the war in Sri Lanka were guilty of human rights abuses. None of these incidents were lethal, and no more have been reported since 1996.

However, the Tamil community in Toronto is certainly not free of violence. Two rival Tamil gangs, the pro-Tiger VVT and the anti-Tiger AK Kanon, have engaged in dozens of violent incidents including mass armed brawls, gunfights, drive by shootings, armed robberies, and murders throughout the Toronto area since 1994 (and perhaps earlier still). Gang members have been convicted of offences relating to heroin and weapons trafficking, armed robberies, credit card fraud, and extortion. It is not clear if the VVT is raising money for the LTTE, while AK Kanon certainly is not. The violence between the gangs represents an embarrassment to FACT and the WTM, and is a vexation to ordinary Tamils themselves. FACT and the WTM have cooperated with the Metropolitan Toronto Police and officers from other Canadian police forces in working to reduce the gang violence — albeit with the strict proviso that they do not use joint platforms to further espouse their main cause.

The political side of the LTTE’s support structure can be witnessed by the demonstration mounted by 650 demonstrators from a full spread of their front groups outside the offices of the Toronto Sun on February 12^th, 2000. The campaign (along with a coordinated bombardment of e-mails and phone calls) subsequently proved successful in intimidating the Sun for some months. Interestingly, the demonstrators considered any story describing criminal activities in the paper to be discriminatory. The same campaign was also directed against the Mackenzie Institute, but circumstances restricted the Tiger’s supporters to jamming the phone lines. Usually eight to 10 callers would start ringing through at the start of every hour, mostly from unlisted phone numbers and payphones. Callers almost invariably followed an identical script; and the one quiet hour during the first day of the campaign appears to have been designed to allow a Liberal MP (who has many connections to the Tamil community) to get through.

The Toronto police have also been "roasted" in community meetings, particularly after a senior Police officer reported that the Tigers extracted $1 million a year out of Toronto (a conservative estimate). Police officials were invited to a community meeting hosted by the Tamil Eelam Society, but walked out after the nature of the meeting became clear.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the mass Tamil migration to Canada is that, under other circumstances, Sri Lankan Tamils would have made ideal immigrants to the country. Educated, hard working, innovative, and entrepreneurial, many of their gifts and much of their energy has been subordinated to the needs of the Tigers — whose deceitful and atrocious nature has poisoned the ethics of so many of their own people.

Islamic Fundamentalism

In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, and with the cascade of threats arising out of Islamic Fundamentalism, much effort has been spent in trying to describe the origins of this threat. There are no simple answers, but there are a number of factors to consider.

There is the nature of Islam itself: Although there have been apologists without number for Islam since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001, the Islamic faith is undeniably the most violent of the World’s universal religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and (arguably) Judaism. Buddha was a wealthy prince who renounced his life of ease and luxury to live and die as an impoverished mystic, telling others how to achieve enlightenment. The infant Christ was a political refugee who matured as a carpenter before going forth to preach a message of toleration and peace. Mohammed was a trader, and then he became a successful warlord who sent his followers out to bring fire and sword to all who denied his message.

The first couple of centuries after the death of a founder usually mark a religion’s attempt to shape itself into an enduring form, finalize the core of its doctrine, and establish its institutions. If it is to translate beyond its founding culture, as only the universal religions have, it must proselytize elsewhere. Buddhism and Christianity marked themselves as peaceful religions (it was almost three centuries after Christ’s death before followers took up arms in his name); and their initial spread was entirely through peaceful missionary work — often while undergoing persecution. In the three centuries after Mohammed’s death, Islam spread itself almost entirely by the sword, offering conversion or death to pagans, and higher taxes and second-class status to conquered Christians and Jews.

This is not to say that all Buddhists and Christians are peaceful and all Muslims are not; a distressing number of examples prove otherwise. However, a Buddhist or Christian who takes up arms for religious reasons is doing so contrary to the teachings and examples of Buddha and Christ. This cannot be said for a Muslim, notwithstanding the hundreds of millions of kindly, peaceful, and decent people who belong to the faith.

The other problem that Muslims must face is that Buddhism and Christianity remain faiths that are focused on the individual and his or her ultimate fate. Islam remains partially oriented on society, and its use of clerical jurists, who are bound by both written precedent and community consensus, has meant that Muslim societies are innately conservative and inflexible. As a result, both the rise of Modern Europe and the global technological revolution have presented enormous challenges to Muslim society, and they are having considerable difficulty meeting it.

One school of thought in Islam holds that all of the problems their civilization faces result from a series of confrontations with Christian societies/Western civilization -- many Muslims do not really distinguish between the two. It can be argued that extremism arose out of frustration with the long history of blocked expansion, as the West first checked Islamic conquest and then reversed it in the Middle Ages; and out of shock when the backward bumptious barbarians surged again out of Europe around 1500, and then imposed their rule on much of the Islamic world in the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.

Certainly, members of Islamic cultures and Western ones think differently. A Westerner is like to identify himself (or anyone else) primarily by his nation-state. Muslims tend to have dual allegiances that supercede the nation-state, these being their religion, and then their family/clan/tribe or ethnic group. A Westerner, when he or she thinks of religion at all, tends to compartmentalize it as a separate activity from government, law, and other institutions. A Muslim living in a Muslim society has enormous difficulty doing this. While Canadians might be blasé about violence directed against the United States or Christians in Indonesia as being their problem and nothing to do with us, many Muslims simply cannot feel this way about any violence directed by Westerners against any Islamic countries or peoples.

Beyond this general background, a number of factors contributed to the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism. These include the resurgence of Arab nationalism, the rapid growth rate of Muslim populations in the last few decades, the moribund nature of many of their governments, and a cascade of somewhat interrelated political events.

In the aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalism began to appear along with the appearance of the first Arab nation-states: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, and Iraq. Persia and Turkey (both distinctly non-Arab entities) also began to modernize and developed a greater sense of self-identity. After the Second World War, Egypt and Morocco shed their protectorate status, Syria and Lebanon became independent (more or less peacefully) while Algerian Muslims ignited an insurgency to achieve their own independence from France.

A sore point with the emerging Arab nationalists was Jewish settlement in Palestine. The seminal conference on Arab nationalism in September 1937 in Syria was specifically concerned with Palestine. When the UN Partition of Palestine gave birth to Israel, war became inevitable and the infant state was immediately attacked by all of its neighbors. The triumph of Israeli arms in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 did nothing to endear the Jewish state to the Muslim World, particularly as two of these wars resulted in the creation of large numbers of displaced Palestinian Arabs -- whose cause was championed by many Arab states, though none of them were particularly willing to offer them new homes in their own territories if they could help it.

The repeated failure to defeat Israel undermined the authority of the various secular Nationalist-Socialist-Militarist parties that ruled many Arab nations, and encouraged the development of Fundamentalist-oriented groups. These emerging groups found it easy to conclude that these repeated defeats were the product of inept or corrupt governments who had refused to tackle Israel with all the zeal they could muster.

Naturally, particularly as oil wealth percolated throughout the Middle East in the 1970s, large numbers of Muslims felt that their collective identity was under threat in a world run by Western technology and financial structures, and constantly subjected to Western political ideals, concepts, and cultural influences. Drawing on groups and concepts that originated in the Pan-Arabist/Nationalist movements that appeared in the aftermath of the First World War, Fundamentalist thinkers started to articulate their position.

It was self-evident to the Fundamentalists that Islam was in danger and needed to be reformed so that it could compete with the Western world. However, it was also clear that the Turkish concept of state-secularism first espoused by Kemal Ataturk was a dead end proposition (although it works well for the Turks) -- so too was the nationalist-socialism practiced by the Ba’ath Parties in Syria and Iraq, and by Nasser’s heirs in Egypt. Moreover, the Fundamentalists were without political power and, like all ideologues, earnestly sought it.

Coupled with their seeming prosperity from oil revenues; the populations in Middle Eastern nations have been among the fastest growing in the world in recent years.

Nation	1979 Population	1995 Population
Algeria	19.07 million	28.14 million
Egypt	40.46 million	57.74 million
Iraq	12.73 million	21.04 million
Pakistan	80.17 million	129.70 million
Saudi Arabia	7.984 million (plus migrants)	12.84 million (plus migrants)

These figures don’t reflect emigration into the Western World, and the problems of extensive political violence in Algeria (and much more so in Iraq) don’t seem to have put much of a dent into population growth. When a society has a population growth rate that is this dramatic, has put money into its education systems, but cannot match opportunities to expectations, one certain consequence is increased restlessness among the young males. Anxious about their futures, and uncertain that their own society has much to offer them, they are ready to receive any ideology that assigns blame and offers a plan for action.

Islamic Fundamentalism fits the bill, and its leaders recruit heavily among young Muslims. Within Egypt’s universities in the 1980s and ‘90s, Fundamentalists played an aggressive role among the student bodies — in much the same way that Leftist groups function inside Western universities. There were also student-run campaigns to remove liberal professors from Egyptian faculties, and so assure that the fundamentalist perspective received a stronger footing inside the lecture halls.

While many well to do Muslim families place a high value on getting a professional education for their children (explaining the plethora of talented Muslim physicians and engineers who have arrived in the Western world in recent decades); the lesser prize for younger sons and less-well off families would be placement in a religious academy. Numbers of these schools have been funded in recent decades, particularly in Pakistan, by the Saudis — with the expectation that strict Wahhabist doctrines would be taught. Being religious institutions, most of these schools are not supervised by state authorities, and the Fundamentalists have a strong presence within them.

A faithful Muslim has five duties: prayer, charity, fasting (particularly during Ramadan), and making a pilgrimage to Mecca at some time in his or her life. The fifth duty is Jihad, or striving. While apologists for Islam mention that Jihad can mean an internal striving — much as a Christian or Buddhist might engage in — the most frequent interpretations about Jihad in Islamic literature and jurisprudence refer to the use of violence to spread the faith, protect Muslims from outside aggression, and to punish backsliders. The Fundamentalists quickly turned to Jihad, electing to use it in its violent sense.

1979 was a pivotal year for Fundamentalists. Firstly, the Iranian Revolution had resulted in an Islamic government after widespread popular opposition to the Shah kicked off widespread unrest. During the political struggles of January 1979, the Mullahs proved to be better organized and more ruthless than the Left, and power consolidated in the hands of their chosen leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Secondly, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and turned the civil war against a quasi-Communist government into resistance against a foreign invader. The Revolution was an inspiration while Afghanistan promised to become a training ground.

As an aside, while Islamic Fundamentalists often claim victory in Afghanistan against the Soviets, it was a most hollow one. The Soviets were ruthless in an already savage civil war, and about 1.5 million Afghans were killed in the decade the Soviets were there — while the Soviets lost 15,000 dead. While the guerrillas were a constant vexation, they couldn’t prevent the Soviet military from going wherever it wanted to. As it was, the prime cause behind the Soviet pullout in 1989 was the pending political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

Through the 1980s, Islamic Fundamentalists became a growing threat. Egypt’s leader, Anwar Saddat, was assassinated while watching a military parade in 1981 (the specific cited cause for the attack by the Egyptian Fundamentalists was the relaxing of traditional restrictions on Egypt’s Coptic Christians). The 1983 suicide truck bombings of a French and a US Marine barracks in Beirut was a shock, but also introduced a brand new tactic to the terrorist’s inventory. Meanwhile, in Iran’s repulse of an Iraqi invasion, teenaged boys with 40-year old bolt-action rifles and plastic keys to the gates of Heaven charged into Iraqi artillery barrages; while Afghan guerrillas took appalling casualties to inflict pinprick losses on the Soviets.

With the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, cadres of ex-guerrillas, many of whom were volunteers from a number of Islamic nations, were now crouched ready for employment. They had often been thoroughly imbued with Islamic Fundamentalist doctrine when in the frontier regions of northwest Pakistan, particularly as Saudi money that helped pay for these guerrillas had also come with fiery Wahhabi clerics from the Saudi kingdom.

Wahhabism is the final component to the explosive mix of Islamic Fundamentalism. Left to their own devices, many Muslims have strayed from the exacting path defined in the early years of Islam. For example, Bosnian Muslims used to raise pigs, drank plum brandy, and their women were neither sheltered nor veiled. Similar degrees of laxity were noticed in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and among the Persians by explorers and anthropologists. However, in 18^th Century Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab created a new Sunni sect that has proven to be as intolerant, zealous, and destructive as the worst of Europe’s 16^tthCentury Calvinists and Puritans were.

The Wahhabis, with the backing of the House of Ibn Saud (the Saudi Royal Family) seek to impose the strictest interpretations of Islam among believers. Their interpretations of the Hadith and Sharia Laws are on the narrowest possible limits -- with dire results for women, cultural artifacts that predate the arrival of Islamic society, and toleration for non-Muslims within Muslim-dominated societies. From here, it was not impossible for some Wahhabis to also dream of a return to Islam’s "days of glory" and the days when Islam was spread by fire and sword among the unbelievers… enter Osama Bin Laden.

The Rise of al Qaeda

There were a number of Islamic Fundamentalist groups in existence by the mid-1980s. Hizbollah was active in southern Lebanon, Hamas was starting to appear in the Israeli occupied West Bank (albeit as more of an Islamic aid group than a terrorist organization), and Sunni Fundamentalism was on the rise in Egypt — both in reaction to the crisis among the young, but also because of Anwar Sadat’s liberal policies toward the Christian Coptic community and his making peace with Israel.

Worse still, the excitement of the Arab world had been kindled by the short lived takeover of the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979, by an improvised force of 1,300 or so Muslims who rejected both the Communist/Secular influences among the existing Middle Eastern insurgents of the time, and the American/Western connections of the Saudi Royal Family. The leader of the group, an adventurer named Juhayman ibn-Muhammad ibn-Sayf al-Utabi, did not survive the incident (in which well over a thousand other people were killed), but he did touch a cord with many restive Muslims.

However, all the elements that created al Qaeda and the explosion in Islamic Insurgent movements really fused together in the 1980s in Afghanistan. Volunteers from throughout the Muslim world gathered together in the base camps that supported Afghan Guerrillas in Pakistan’s often wild and un-policed North West Frontier districts. This is where they connected with Saudi money, were exposed to Islamic Fundamentalist organizers like Sheik AbdAllah Yussuf Azzam, and received arms and training sponsored by Pakistan’s security forces (who had been supporting terrorist groups operating in India since the 1970s).

Osama bin Laden, the restless younger son of an enormously wealthy Saudi construction magnate (and a billionaire in his own right) was among those who flocked to the camps and he reinvented himself there. Few of the foreign volunteers spent much time deep inside Afghanistan, and so were only exposed to enough of the fighting to whet their interest in it without running the serious risk of being killed. However, as they waited in the camps inside Pakistan, there was ample time for political conditioning, and the Islamic Fundamentalists had the monopoly in this market.

The cluster of Fundamentalist state supporters, radicalized individuals, terrorist groups, and their infrastructures gradually evolved into what it is today. Bin Laden himself was first exposed to the violent Fundamentalist cause when he participated in the Afghanistan conflict in the 1980s. There, he met with another significant figure in modern Islamist extremism, Sheikh AbdAllah Yussuf Azzam. Azzam left the Palestinian struggle, disgusted at its secular nationalism, and found himself drawn to the Jihad in Afghanistan. There he found an outlet for his radical beliefs: "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues." He established training camps for the arriving Mujahideen in neighboring Pakistan. With Azzam’s zeal and bin Laden’s cash, the two created the Mujahideen Services Bureau (mekhtab al khidemat or MAK), which recruited Muslims from its international offices in over 50 countries for the anti-Soviet Jihad.

According to Rohan Gunaratna, it was in the latter stages of the Afghan Jihad that Azzam first conceptualized al Qaeda. He visualized a cohesive, self-sacrificing Islamic Fundamentalist vanguard that would, by means of an armed struggle, create a greater Islamic state. Elements of MAK’s infrastructure, by this time significant, began to evolve into what is now known as al Qaeda, yet the two still remained separate entities. MAK was also an efficient conduit for cash generated in the Middle East, and from Western sources to train and support volunteers fighting the Soviets. Azzam was concerned that without an organization such as al Qaeda, the massive Mujahideen force then fighting the Soviets could be corrupted.

In 1988, a dispute erupted between bin Laden and Azzam over the direction in which the fledgling al Qaeda would proceed. Bin Laden wanted it to become a global terrorist organization, but Azzam opposed this. In 1989, Azzam was killed by a car bomb. Gunaratna argues that it was the Egyptian Mujahideen, (with ties to terrorists in that country) who allied themselves with bin Laden, who actually carried out the assassination. Even after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, al Qaeda still maintained a presence in Pakistan.

During the 1990-1991 Gulf War, bin Laden became openly enraged at the Saudi government’s decision to allow American and European troops to be stationed there. The Saudi Royal Family rejected his plan for a Mujahideen force as an alternative to the Coalition invasion of Kuwait. In the eyes of bin Laden and other Fundamentalists, it was sacrilege to allow Western Christians (infidels and ‘Crusaders") to guard the holy sites of Islam — which is the role the Saudi Royal family is supposed to fill. The Saudi royals forced bin Laden into exile.

Bin Laden was then drawn to Sudan, and into the orbit of its spiritual leader Hassan Abdallah al-Turabi, who offered the fig leaf of legitimacy to a brutal Islamic Fundamentalist military dictatorship. Al-Turabi had ambitions to create a wider Islamic revolution beyond his own country, and placed both Sudan’s wealth and territory behind this objective. In the early 1990s, extensive efforts were undertaken in that country to build a support infrastructure by numerous terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. Al-Turabi, a Sunni Fundamentalist, formed an alliance with Tehran, the primary Shi’ite sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. The significance of this new alliance, consisting of the two major factions within Islamist terrorism, cannot be understated -- the resources of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hizbollah were brought together with the "Arab Afghans" and the emerging al Qaeda organization.

Sudan offered a safe haven for these terrorist organizations to train, plan and organize. Soon, another state sponsor, Pakistan and the Fundamentalist terrorist groups trained and run by its Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI), joined the alliance and offered their existing training camps and expertise to the equation. They also used their influence and presence in Afghanistan to open even more facilities. Numerous other insurgent and terrorist organizations joined, including Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front. The brutal Taliban, after winning the civil war in Afghanistan, immediately embraced bin Laden and his associates. Within several years, the foundations were laid for a massive network of terrorists to generate and launder cash, train and deploy terrorists, and strike around the globe. Bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization became rising stars in this endeavor. His expertise in international business and construction, as well as his experience as a veteran of the Afghan conflict, made him indispensable in the formation stages. Over time, his organizational successes allowed him to attain a position of authority and prominence.

Al Qaeda in Canada

The first al Qaeda terrorist to be noticed in Canada was Ahmed Ressam. He was a former member of the GIA in Algeria, fled to France in 1993, and arrived in Canada (with a bogus French passport) to make a refugee claim in 1994 — by which time he was already tied to into a Salafist cell in France. As the French unraveled this cell, they noticed a number of ties to a similar cell in Montreal, and increasingly urged Canadian authorities to investigate it. By the time the RCMP launched themselves on Ressam’s trail, he was already preparing to cross the US border with a car trunk full of explosives and sophisticated bomb timers.

There are many other Canadian connections to al Qaeda. Perhaps the most senior member is Ahmad Sa’id Al-Kadr (the Canadian): Born in Egypt, and a long-time Canadian resident, he left his family behind in Toronto and went to Afghanistan to act as the regional coordinator for Human Concern International. While there, he took up a friendship with Osama bin Laden and is reported to have become one of his aides as well as security coordinator. In 1995, the Pakistanis held him in detention in connection with the bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. He was released after Prime Minister Chrétien personally raised his case with then Prime Minister Benizir Bhutto. His whereabouts are currently unknown, but he is probably somewhere near Osama bin Laden. Al Kadr has had two sons picked up by Coalition troops in Afghanistan. One was just 16 when taken prisoner shortly after mortally wounding a US Army medic with a grenade.

All told, some 25 Canadian residents/citizens have been publicly identified as members of al Qaeda and its subsets, and the Canadian government has banned 15 of its member organizations so far. It is possible that there are dozens of other members who are yet to be identified. We have been used as source for recruits and fundraising. While it is unlikely that Canadians will directly experience the full force of an al Qaeda attack like that of 9-11, or the 1998 African Embassy bombings, we are not immune to their threat.

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

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