Al-Qaeda now aiming to overthrow secular regimes
By Walter Pincus in Washington
June 17 2002
A small cadre of al-Qaeda leaders has refined the terrorist organisation's strategy to use small-scale attacks to destabilise and ultimately overthrow secular governments in Islamic countries, United States intelligence officials say.
The al-Qaeda leaders were also continuing to plan larger, sophisticated attacks on US targets, the current and former senior officials at the CIA and FBI said.
The car bomb attack on the US consulate in Karachi on Friday is part of what US analysts believe is al-Qaeda's strategy since being driven from its headquarters in Afghanistan.
The smaller attacks, once directed at targets worldwide, have been revised to use recruits prepared to die in strikes against US, Western and Jewish targets in countries where the population is Muslim but the government is secular.
Intelligence officials believe the goal is to overthrow the government of countries such as Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan and establish a "Muslim state in the heart of the Islamic world".
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This idea was outlined late last year by Ayman Zawahiri, a former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and since 1998 considered Osama bin Laden's top deputy and chief of policy and strategy. Like bin Laden, Zawahiri remains at large.
At the heart of al-Qaeda was a core group that might not be as large as previously estimated, one analyst said. He put the core number at "16 to 18, with some now dead and others in jail".
But the leadership still had the ability to reach out to hundreds if not thousands of Islamic extremists who had networked after training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan from the mid-1990s to early last year. They still met in Pakistan, the analyst said.
Meanwhile, US politicians voiced bipartisan support for expanded plans by the Bush Administration to topple Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, including the possible use of CIA and Special Forces teams authorised to kill him if they are threatened.
"We need a regime change in Iraq," said Senator John McCain, a Republican member of the Senate armed forces committee. "But we have to be prepared to do whatever is necessary to bring about this regime change."
The Senate majority leader, Democrat Tom Daschle, said: "The question is how do we do it and when do we do it."
Earlier this year President George Bush signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake a covert program to topple Saddam, The Washington Post reported at the weekend.
In Baghdad, Iraq's Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, said US plans to overthrow Saddam were nothing new.
The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Agence France-Presse
This story was found at: smh.com.au |
