Update
from AIJAC
Hambali
Captured/ Terror Funding
August
15, 2003
Number 08/03 #07
The capture
of Jemaah Islamiyah operations head Hambali overnight is a big deal -
it's only a step or two short, in importance, to capturing Bin Laden,
and should really have a major effect on Jemaah Islamiyah. A discussion
of who Hambali is and what little has been released about his capture
from the American ABC is HERE.
Next, terrorism
expert Matthew Leavitt looks at the problem of terrorist funding, which
he says links, to some degree, Al-Qaeda and Palestinian groups like Hamas.
He says cutting this off is just as important as arrests and military
operations. For his discussion, CLICK HERE
Finally,
following up on yesterday's post, here is some detailed information by
Jonathan Schanzer of the extensive use of tunnels to smuggle weaponry
into the Palestinian areas during the Hudna. To learn more, CLICK
HERE.
"No
Longer a Problem"
CIA Nabs
Top Al Qaeda Leader, Alleged Mastermind of SE Asia Operations
By Brian
Ross
ABCnews.com
Aug. 14ó
The CIA has captured a major al Qaeda leader who is believed to have planned
bombings in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.
A top al
Qaeda member and a leader of Southeast Asian militant group Jemaah Islamiyah,
Riduan Isamuddin ó also known as Hambali ó was arrested as part of a CIA
undercover operation in the last 24 hours.
The operation
was in cooperation with an undisclosed Southeast Asian country that wants
its participation kept secret, officials told ABCNEWS. Hambali was being
returned to Indonesia to face terrorism charges.
The CIA called
the arrest the "most significant capture since that of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,"
who was nabbed in March and is believed to have been the military commander
al Qaeda's global terror network and to have masterminded the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks on the United States.
In the past,
the CIA has called the Indonesia-born Hambali the "Osama bin Laden of
Southeast Asia."
Prisoners
in custody have told the CIA that Hambali recently received a large sum
of money from al Qaeda to carry out attacks against U.S. targets in the
region. "He will certainly know about what is in the pipeline," an official
told ABCNEWS.
President
Bush announced Hambali's capture today in San Diego when he spoke to U.S.
troops, many of them just returning from Iraq. "He is no longer a problem
to those who love freedom," Bush said. "We're making progress slowly but
surely."
A Pentagon
official said Hambali is "unquestionably the A No. 1, senior terrorist
in Southeast Asia."
The official
said Hambali, 37, was "clearly implicated" in plotting the Bali disco
bombings of Oct. 12, 2002, which killed more than 200 people, and the
Aug. 5 attack on the Marriott hotel in Jakarta, in which 11 people died.
Hambali,
whose importance only recently became known, was in on the planning of
the Sept. 11 attacks, officials say.
Bush called
Hambali "one of the world's most lethal terrorists." The president also
said the United States was conducting a "broad and unrelenting campaign
against the global terror network."
In talking
about the U.S.-led effort to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the continuing
war on terror, Bush said: "Our enemies have seen the will and the might
of the United States military and they are meeting the fate they chose
for themselves."
A Product
of Suhartoís Repression
A shadowy
Islamic scholar, Hambali is believed to be the right-hand man of Abu Bakar
Bashir, the alleged head of Jemaah Islamiyah. Bashir is on trial in Jakarta
on treason charges and for his alleged involvement in a series of church
bombings in 2000. He has not, however, been charged in connection with
the Bali attacks.
Hambali's
capture is a significant victory in the fight against terrorism in Southeast
Asia. He is believed to have fled into neighboring Malaysia soon after
the Bali attacks as the dragnet closed around top Jemaah Islamiyah leaders.
Last week,
a court in Bali sentenced Amrozi ó a 40-year-old Javanese man who, like
many Indonesians, goes by one name ó to death for his role in the bombing
of the Sari club on Bali's Kuta beach.
Amrozi's
brother, Imam Samudra, believed to be the mastermind of the Bali bombings,
also faces the firing squad if found guilty.
Born into
a poor Indonesian family, Hambali is believed to be a product of the al
Mukmin Islamic school co-founded by Bashir. He was radicalized during
the 1970s and '80s, when then-President Suharto severely repressed Islamic
radicals seeking to establish an Islamic state in Indonesia.
Like several
other Indonesian Islamists, Hambali fled to neighboring Malaysia during
Suharto's reign. Intelligence sources say Hambali traveled to Afghanistan
during the mujahedeen's struggle against the Soviet occupation, where
he is believed to have established links with international militant Islamic
networks.
Following
Suharto's ouster in 1998, Hambali returned to Indonesia, where al Mukmin
functioned as the spiritual center of a growing group of radicalized Muslim
youth.
In addition
to Indonesia, he is wanted in Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines
in connection with a series of bomb attacks in the last two years. †
Back
to Top
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Combating
Terrorist Financing: Where the War on Terror Intersects the "Roadmap"
Matthew
Levitt
JERUSALEM
ISSUE BRIEF Vol. 3, No. 4 † †
14 August 2003
- Combating
terrorist financing is one of the most critical fronts in both the war
on terror and the implementation of the roadmap to peace. In both cases,
cutting off the flow of funds to terrorists hinges on focusing on logistical
and financial support networks.
- Too often
security, intelligence, and law enforcement services - and certainly
politicians and diplomats - make distinctions between terrorist "operatives"
and terrorist "supporters." Yet financial and logistical support networks
are central to the conduct of international terrorism. Those who fund
or facilitate acts of terror are equally as guilty of committing acts
of terror as those who pull the triggers, detonate the bombs, or crash
the airplanes.
- The main
effort in combating terror financing must be to shut down the key nodes
through which terrorists raise, launder, and transfer funds.
- Since
there is significant overlap between terrorist groups in the area of
financing, failure to deal with the financing of groups like Hamas undermines
efforts to stem the flow of funds to al-Qaeda.
Pundits and politicians alike tend to think of the war on terror against
al-Qaeda and the terrorist groups threatening the Arab-Israeli peace process
as completely separate phenomena. This is, in part, a logical supposition,
as neither Hamas nor Hizballah belong to the family of al-Qaeda-associated
terrorist groups. Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist groups do not conduct
joint operational activity with al-Qaeda and, despite some ad hoc cooperation
and personal relationships, they have no official or institutional links.
There have been a few cases of Hamas operatives who attended al-Qaeda
training camps or had other links to al-Qaeda personnel and were dispatched
to conduct attacks in Israel. Far more significant, however, are the longstanding
links between al-Qaeda and groups like Hamas at the level of their international
logistical and financial support networks.
Networks
and relationships best describe the current state of international terrorism.
This matrix of relationships among terrorists of various groups is what
makes the threat of international terrorism so dangerous today. For example,
while there are no known organizational links between al-Qaeda and Hizballah,
the two groups have held senior level meetings over the past decade and
there have been ad hoc, person-to-person ties in the areas of training
and logistical support.
Too often
people insist on pigeonholing terrorists as members of one group or another,
as if such operatives carry membership cards in their wallets. In reality,
much of the ěnetwork of networksî that characterizes today's terrorist
threat is informal and unstructured. Not every al-Qaeda operative has
pledged an oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden, while many terrorists
maintain affiliations with members of other terrorist groups and facilitate
one another's activities. This applies to Palestinian terrorist groups
as well. In the area of terrorist financing and logistical support there
is significant overlap between terrorist groups.
Both Logistical
and Financial Supporters of Terrorism are Terrorists
September
11 taught several painful lessons, not the least of which is that those
who conduct such support activities are terrorists of the same caliber
as those who carry out attacks. Indeed, the key ingredient that enabled
September 11 to happen was the fact that so many individuals and organizations
were able to provide the kind of financial and logistical support for
an operation of that magnitude. This is able to occur when security, intelligence,
and law enforcement services - and certainly politicians and diplomats
- make distinctions between terrorist ěoperativesî and terrorist ěsupporters.î
Several of the September 11 plotters had been defined prior to September
11 as merely terrorist ěsupporters,î not ěoperatives.î Thus it is critical
that intelligence agencies focus on the logistical and financial supporters
of terrorism, not only because they facilitate acts of terror, but because
distinguishing between ěsupportersî and ěoperativesî assures that the
plotters of the next terrorist attack - today's ěsupportersî - will only
be identified after they conduct their terrorist attack - and are thus
transformed into ěoperatives.î Those who fund or facilitate acts of terrorism
are no less terrorists than those who carry out the operation by pulling
the trigger, detonating the bomb, or crashing the airplane. September
11 should have taught us how financial and logistical support networks
are central to the conduct of international terrorism. Any serious effort
to crack down on terrorist financing, so critical to disrupt terrorist
activity, demands paying special attention to these support networks.
A close examination
of these networks reveals that there are key nodes in this matrix that
have become the preferred conduits used by terrorists from multiple terrorist
groups to fund and facilitate attacks. Shutting down these organizations,
front companies, and charities will go a long way toward stemming the
flow of funds to and among terrorist groups.
Shut Down
the Key Nodes of Funding
Many critics
of the economic war on terrorism suggest that because the amount of money
that has been frozen internationally is in the low millions, very little
has actually been accomplished. I suggest that the dollar amount frozen
is not the issue; the issue is shutting down the key nodes through which
terrorists raise, launder, and transfer funds.
Counterterrorism
is not about defeating terrorism; it is about constricting the operating
environment - making it harder for them to do what they want to do at
every level: conducting operations, procuring and transferring false documents,
ferrying fugitives from one place to another; financing, raising, and
laundering funds. It is about making it more difficult for terrorists
to conduct their operational, logistical, and financial activities.
To constrict
the terrorists' operating environment and crack down on terrorist financing,
let us consider a few examples of key nodes in the network of terrorist
logistical support groups. Many of these organizations are not particular
to one terrorist group:
Bank al
Taqwa: One of the first financial institutions shut down by the United
States after September 11 was a family of financial institutions known
as Bank al Taqwa. Announcing the seizure of al Taqwa's funds, President
Bush noted that al Taqwa and its various affiliates in the United States
and abroad were not only being used to raise funds for al-Qaeda, but as
a key means for transferring and laundering those funds and even for transferring
military and other equipment to al-Qaeda operatives internationally.
Bank al Taqwa
provided similar services to many other terrorist groups. In 1997 Hamas
used Bank al Taqwa to transfer as much as $60 million that it raised internationally
to the West Bank and Gaza. The Italians subsequently came forward with
information that Bank al Taqwa was servicing several North African groups
that now play a more central role in al-Qaeda.
IIRO:
One of the chief Saudi Arabian charities definitively linked to financing
a variety of international terrorist groups is the International Islamic
Relief Organization (IIRO). The IIRO has funded al-Qaeda directly, as
well as several of its satellite groups from Kashmir to the Philippines.
Bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, headed the organization's
office in the Philippines, and the organization's office in northern Virginia
shared office space with about 50 other financial shell organizations
that are now the subject of a massive counterterrorism investigation.
Israeli forces found a large collection of documents in the West Bank
with the IIRO logo including several lists of aid recipients with the
names of families of suicide bombers highlighted. The IIRO has sent at
least $280,000 to Hamas-affiliated organizations in the West Bank.
Saudis authorities
like to talk about bad apples that have fallen off good trees and, in
fact, that is sometimes the case. For many months the Saudis maintained
this argument regarding the al Haramain Islamic Foundation. Each time
the United States approach the Saudis about another branch of al Haramain
that had been definitively linked to financing not only terrorism in general
but specific terror operations the Saudis would write the office off as
another bad apple off an otherwise good tree. But sometimes the tree itself
is bad, and every so often the forest is rotten.
The Madrid
Cell: Perhaps the most significant al-Qaeda cell to be broken up since
9/11 is not the Hamburg cell but the one in Madrid, Spain. A member of
the Madrid cell provided pre-operational surveillance of the Twin Towers,
several bridges in New York and California, and other sites during a supposed
tourist visit to the U.S. in the late 1990s. The Madrid cell also provided
much of the financing for key members of the Hamburg cell directly, even
as it funded other cells and other groups. For example, the leader of
the Madrid cell sent money to a charity committee in Hebron that American
and Israeli officials both linked to Hamas, and provided money to an imam
in Madrid with known ties to Hamas.
Al Aqsa
International Foundation: After significant pressure and lobbying
by both Israeli and American authorities, several individual European
countries (but not the European Union) have joined the United States in
banning the al Aqsa International Foundation, a Hamas front organization
which is also suspected of sending money to Hizballah. The head of the
foundation's office in Yemen was arrested in Germany - not for fundraising
on behalf of Hamas but for sending weapons and millions of dollars to
al-Qaeda operatives well after September 11.
Indeed, a
careful look at the relationships between terrorists from various groups
reveals that most of the overlap between groups occurs at key nodes within
a matrix of financial and logistical support networks.
Recently
disclosed Italian telephone wiretaps reveal that al-Qaeda associates in
Italy and elsewhere in Europe were radicalizing and recruiting local Muslim
youth to engage in terrorist training at the Ansar al-Islam training camp
in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq near the Iranian border. Recruits
were sent via Syria, where the European operatives' al-Qaeda commanders
were located - likely with the knowledge of the Syrian government.
In one conversation,
a senior individual in Syria offers his lieutenant in Italy a series of
instructions on how to evade the counterterrorism measures put in place
since 9-11. He gave very specific advice on how long to stay on the phone,
what type of phone to use, not to use the Internet, where to hold meetings,
and where not to hold meetings. The commander in Syria added that they
need not worry about money ěbecause Saudi Arabia's money is your money.î
These examples
show that terrorist support networks are very often intertwined. Operationally,
failure to crack down on the financing of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic
Jihad and Hizballah will only undermine the larger war on terror.
The Majority
of Hamas Funding Comes from Saudi Arabia
The fact
that Hamas is the only organization providing Palestinians with critical
social services does not excuse the group's terrorist activity. Hamas
uses the same institutions to finance suicide bombings and help the needy.
In the schools it funds, the classrooms are decorated with posters of
suicide bombers and slogans inciting the children to violence.
It costs
a tremendous amount of money to maintain the Hamas dawa, the social
welfare infrastructure which Hamas utilizes to facilitate terror attacks,
as well as to build grassroots support among the Palestinian population.
Frequently, Hamas dawa operatives are the ones who ferry the suicide bomber
and the explosives to the point of departure for the mission. Numerous
Hamas members with terrorist track records are officials of Hamas charity
committees.
Recent assessments
indicate that the majority of Hamas funding currently comes from sources
within Saudi Arabia. Sources like the International Islamic Relief Organization
are just one step removed from the Saudi government as subsidiaries of
the Muslim World League - a pseudo-governmental agency. Hamas also gets
money from Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world, as well as from North
America and Europe.
Islamic Jihad
is practically a wholly-owned subsidiary of Iran, serving Iranian foreign
policy. Iran used to fund Islamic Jihad through its budget for Hizballah,
which is said to receive at least $100 million a year. However, about
a year into the latest intifada, Iran separated Islamic Jihad's budget
from Hizballah, and increased it by 75 percent.
Neither al-Qaeda,
Hamas, nor Islamic Jihad currently lack for money, and this situation
will continue until we do something about it. In the context of both the
war on terror and the roadmap to peace, failure to effectively combat
the financing of terrorist groups will translate into nothing less than
our failure to combat terror and secure peace in the Middle East.
* † † * †
† *
Matthew
Levitt is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
This Jerusalem Issue Brief is based on his presentation at the Institute
for Contemporary Affairs in Jerusalem on July 17, 2003.
Back
to Top
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tunnel
Vision
Bad things
are happening underground in the Gaza Strip.
by Jonathan
Schanzer
The Weekly
Standard, 08/14/2003 12:00:00 AM
WITH SO MUCH
RECENT FOCUS on the West Bank "separation fence," the issue that prompted
Israel to build a barrier in the first place has been obscured. But as
this week's suicide bombings show, the threat of continued Palestinian
terror lingers. And in some cases, that threat literally lingers just
beneath the surface.
For a decade
now, the arsenals of Palestinian terror groups have been armed and replenished
by way of short smuggling tunnels that stretch across Egypt's border with
the Gaza Strip. It is this Palestinian-made labyrinth, more than the Israeli-made
fence, that poses a long-term threat to Middle East peace.
To be sure,
this issue is not new. After the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, it
was reported that the Palestinians had built a network of tunnels for
smuggling black market items like cigarettes and drugs, as well as weaponry,
explosives, and even people from Egypt to Israel.
In some cases,
the tunnels are elaborate; media reports indicate that some have wood
paneling, electricity, lighting systems, air ducts, communications equipment,
rails, wagons--even elevators. Building them takes less than three months
and costs up to $10,000. The better ones are burrowed well beneath the
surface--sometimes more than 50 feet--so as to evade sonar detection by
the Israeli engineer corps.
Shockingly,
many of the tunnels lead into the homes of Palestinians in Gaza, concealed
beneath bedrooms, living rooms, and bathrooms. On October 12, 2001, the
Israeli Defense Forces discovered a tunnel that actually led to a child's
bedroom. Indeed, at the risk of putting loved ones in danger of an Israeli
bulldozer raid, Gazans operate their tunnels because they are a lucrative
source of income. Smuggling a person or an AK-47 rifle can yield $1,000.
According
to one Israeli spokesman, the Palestinians have made "hundreds" of tunnels
in recent years. Indeed, more than twenty have been found and destroyed
in 2003. Nonetheless, thousands of weapons and much ammunition have passed
through, including heavy machine guns, armor piercing weapons, rocket-propelled
grenades and, according to a July 30, 2000 Sunday Telegraph report,
possibly even SAM-7 antiaircraft missiles. According to the Jerusalem
Post, "raw materials necessary to build rockets" are often smuggled
below ground to Gaza. Worse still, high explosives for suicide bombings
have passed through these caverns
Some of the
tunnels are meant for more than smuggling: In one report, Israeli engineers
expressed concerns that the tunnels would be used to transport captured
Israeli soldiers. Tunnels can also be used for complicated attacks against
Israeli military targets. In September 2001, an explosion in a tunnel
along the Egypt-Gaza border injured three Israeli soldiers.
According
to Israeli sources, there are always three or four tunnels operational
at any one time. They are extremely hard to find without good intelligence,
and when soldiers work to locate and destroy the tunnels, they often come
under sniper fire.
MEANWHILE,
Egypt, which claims to be working feverishly to maintain the Israeli-Palestinian
cease-fire, is not without blame. After all, that's where the weapons
are coming from.
According
to Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz, the Egyptians "aren't making
a 100 percent effort to prevent the smuggling of weapons through the tunnels."
Another military official calls Egypt a "central oxygen supply line" for
smuggling weapons. According to recent reports, the tunnels coming from
Gaza actually lead to Egyptian military guard posts.
Of course
the Egyptian government denies this. President Hosni Mubarak insists that
Cairo "will not allow such activities, and if we found smuggled weapons,
we would confiscate them." Indeed, the Egyptians have blown up a number
of tunnels in recent years. But even so, the problem persists. Cairo is
not doing enough. And it's probably a matter of will.
The fence?
Sure, it's a source of contention. But the Israelis wouldn't want it so
badly were it not for the continued importing of weapons that lead to
suicide bombings. The one-sided focus on the West Bank fence is nothing
but tunnel vision.
Jonathan
Schanzer is a Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Back
to Top
|
