Islamist terror in Europe. Tackling a hydra

Date: 01/02/03

Europeans are rounding up a lot of Islamic terrorists - but more are at large

ON THE face of things, Europeans have recently been doing rather well at sniffing out and grabbing suspected Islamist terrorists. The biggest batch to date was scooped up on January 24th in Spain, when some 200 anti-terrorist policemen, after tip-offs from the French and British intelligence services, raided a dozen flats in towns in the north-eastern province of Catalonia and picked up 16 Arabs, all but one from Algeria, and found, among other dodgy items, bomb-making devices, false passports and nasty chemicals.

The day before, Italian policemen had swooped on a farmhouse near Venice, where they arrested five Moroccans, allegedly also found with explosives and chemicals, plus maps of NATO bases in Italy and the London underground. So far this year the British police, in five separate raids, one on a London mosque notorious for the virulence of its leading preacher, have arrested 26 suspects, nearly all of them also from North Africa.

Since September 11th 2001, around 200 Muslim terrorist suspects have been arrested in Europe - more than in any other region - including more than 50 in the past two months. Some 150 have been arrested in the United States, around 100 in the Middle East, about 50 in North Africa and 40 in Latin America. Thanks to the raids in Spain, Italy and Britain, at least one big terrorist attack either on a military base or on public transport somewhere in Europe may well have been foiled.

Time for a sigh of relief? Not a bit of it. There may be 15m Muslims in western Europe and the Balkans (1.3m in Britain, 3.2m in Germany, 4m-5m in France), not to mention perhaps another 15m in Russia. Turkey's 67m people are mostly Muslims. Only a minority of Muslims favour al-Qaeda's aims, let alone its methods. But a dedicated core of perhaps 1,000 or so living in the West might be willing to die for their cause by blowing up themselves and as many infidels as possible on the way.

Who are these suicidal zealots? It would be unwise to lump them together under the heading of al-Qaeda. That network of diehards, financed originally by Osama bin Laden, came mainly from Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arabian peninsula. Most of the 19 hijackers in September 2001 were Saudis.

Most of the people recently arrested in Europe, on the other hand, come from North Africa, with Algerians to the fore. Many of those detained may be connected to the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, an offshoot of Algeria's Armed Islamic Groups, which has been wreaking havoc in Algeria since 1992, when the army-led government refused to let a relatively mild Islamist party take power after it had won an election. These embittered extremists, many of them in exile in the West, have been active since well before the attacks of September 11th. Some 240,000 Algerians, quite a lot of them with radical Islamist leanings, are thought to have fled Algeria in the past decade.

What may be new, however, is a possible link, now under scrutiny by western intelligence services, between North African Islamic radicals, particularly Algerians, and al-Qaeda. The French, in particular, say that al-Qaeda has also been keen to involve itself more heavily with the Chechens in their war against Russia. Al-Qaeda's aim, it seems, is to use such groups, already well-established and with disciples scattered through western countries, to revive its own battered network.