Al-Qaeda is expected to launch attacks every three months in 2004, with growing threats from a number of smaller terrorist organisations, an international terrorist expert warned on Wednesday.
”As the memory of 9/11 recedes, the West is likely to witness another mass casualty attack on Western soil,” Rohan Gunaratna told a Southeast Asian outlook forum in Singapore.
Before September 11, the network launched an attack every two years, but since then, there has been one al-Qaeda-linked attack every three months, he said.
Singapore-based Gunaratna, the author of Inside al-Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, said that the bulk of the attacks will come from groups trained and financed by Osama bin Laden and not the network itself.
”The threat of terrorism and its associated groups will persist throughout 2004,” he said in his paper.
Gunaratna said that maritime targets are vulnerable to attack but added that ”almost all the attacks will be suicide vehicle bombings, an al-Qaeda hallmark”.
If left unchecked, Gunaratna said Iran, part of United States President George Bush’s axis of evil, could emerge as a training ground for al-Qaeda terrorists.
He said groups that remain a threat include Al Ansar Al Islami in Iraq, Jemaah Islamiyah in southeast Asia, Al Ansar Mujahidin in Chechnya, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Salafi Group for Call and Combat in Algeria.
”Small, disparate organisations mounting operations are in many ways Osama bin Laden’s greatest achievement,” said Gunaratna.
In southeast Asia, Gunaratna claims a fresh batch of Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists, an al-Qaeda-funded regional group, will graduate on January 15 2004 from a camp in the southern Philippines.
The camp, he said, is run by the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (Milf), which is fighting for an independent Muslim homeland in Mindanao.
He did not elaborate on the number of ”graduates” or where he gleaned his information from.
Sidney Jones, the Indonesian project director for the International Crisis Group — a Brussels-based international think tank — supported Gunaratna’s assessment on the Philippines being a Jemaah Islamiyah training ground.
”There are several Milfs, all using the same name,” Jones said, adding that these factions are not the same as the group now in peace negotiations with Manila.
Despite the arrest of Jemaah Islamiyah’s alleged operations chief Hambali in Thailand last year, she said there are a number of key group operatives still at large, including Azahari Husin and Nordin Mohamed Top.
The two men are accused of planning the October 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people. — Sapa-AP
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