The Dockrat cousins were leading a seemingly normal life in South Africa — one a cleric at a mosque, the other a dentist with a neighbourhood practice in the country’s financial capital.
Then they popped up as suspects on Washington’s al-Qaeda radar screens and set off alarm bells from the United States to Pretoria about a country seldom associated with Osama bin Laden or radical Islam.
Had al-Qaeda’s powerful ideology spread to South Africa, where rampant crime, inequality left by apartheid and the 2010 Soccer World Cup are hot issues, not possible militant cells?
Dentist Junaid Dockrat and his businessman and cleric cousin Farhad deny US allegations they financed and recruited for al-Qaeda and accuse Washington of mounting a witch-hunt of Muslims.
Some security experts say South Africa’s townships have no resemblance to the Arab slums where Osama bin Laden’s message is said to appeal to frustrated, unemployed young men increasingly resentful of their US-backed, authoritarian governments.
Others dismiss the argument that poverty, widespread in South Africa, has driven Muslims into al-Qaeda’s embrace.
After all, they say, many relatively wealthy educated people became al-Qaeda operatives, like the ones who turned planes into suicide missiles in the September 11 attacks on the US.
Whatever the case, South Africa has come under Washington’s scrutiny and the Dockrats have landed on the US Treasury Department’s list of al-Qaeda supporters. Their US-linked assets — if they have any — will be frozen.
Magnus Ranstorp, of the Swedish National Defence College, said it was unlikely al-Qaeda had become a major concern in South Africa. But he did not rule out a presence.
”It is likely that they are only on the periphery,” he said.
Why South Africa?
US officials maintain al-Qaeda operatives are active in Somalia, Sudan and North Africa, and say fundraising for the group has become a serious worry in South Africa, Nigeria and the Saharan region.
But South Africa’s 600 000-strong minority Muslim community is an overwhelmingly moderate group in one of the continent’s most stable and richest countries.
So why would al-Qaeda invest time recruiting in a country where there is no obvious breeding ground for radical Islam, while waging raging holy wars against the powerful US military and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan and churning out internet calls for Jihad throughout the world.
Some analysts say al-Qaeda supporters from countries like Pakistan may have passed through South Africa, engaged locals and used the country as a back door to Western targets.
Nicholas Pratt, of the George C Marshall European Centre for Security Studies, said al-Qaeda would look to South Africa’s diverse Muslim community for practical reasons.
”Al-Qaeda is constantly looking for passports that would make its operatives very mobile and escape suspicion. It would make sense for them to lure two South Africans from a very diverse Muslim community,” he said, adding that the country also offered porous borders in a region that is not easy to govern.
With its modern infrastructure and communications, South Africa projects an image of stability and is not a high priority for the US intelligence community.
But there is some history of Islamic militant activity, with groups like Cape Town-based Pagad, a vigilante group accused of bombings.
‘Incubation period’
If the US allegations against the Dockrats are true, it would be another example of al-Qaeda’s method of plucking supporters from unlikely places, as it has done within the very Western powers it is fighting, security experts said.
”In places like Southern Africa, the majority of Muslims are pragmatic and most concerned about supporting their families. But al-Qaeda does not have no-go zones,” said Paul Wilkinson of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Saint Andrews.
South African security services declined comment on al-Qaeda. Pratt, who served in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, said Russian-trained South African agents who had served under the now ruling African National Congress have cracked al-Qaeda cells, a claim that could not be independently confirmed.
Strict Muslims in long beards, turbans and white robes that can be found in the hundreds at Farhad Dockrat’s sprawling, modern mosque were not necessarily al-Qaeda backers but are often vulnerable to indoctrination, he said.
”The real worry is the incubation period, when guys who are openly religious and peaceful get lured into al-Qaeda,” he said. — Reuters