Terrorism: Can Al-Qaeda Find A New Nest?

To do their worst, terrorists need a sanctuary. The next order of battle is to deny them one

By Johanna Mcgeary Monday, Dec. 24, 2001

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    Last week five American officials dropped into western Somalia to talk with local warlords and Ethiopian military officers eager to subdue any Islamist threat to their country. Some analysts called the visit a scouting trip to pick out possible terrorist targets. Pentagon officials have been talking up the presence of al-Qaeda cells there, and if Washington feels a need to strike somewhere else, Somalia is an uncontroversial military and political target. But regional experts said the presence of U.S. intelligence agents was meant as a warning: we're watching you; we can readily get in and get out; be careful.

    Inside Somalia, locals doubt the terrorists are heading their way. Somalis tend to gossip too much for foreigners to feel secure, and few Somalis could resist the price on the heads of al-Qaeda leaders. "We would hand them over and claim the money to pay our men," says Mogadishu chief of police Hassan Awaale. "We have enough problems of our own without more [from them]." U.N. officials, Western diplomats and aid workers agree that al-Itihaad training camps of the '90s don't exist anymore and that the group was destroyed as a military force after Ethiopian forces entered Somalia and overran the group in 1997.

    YEMEN: It's bin Laden's ancestral land and long a hideout for terrorists, who can gather comfortably in the mountainous hinterlands well beyond the government's control. Plenty of former mujahedin who came home from the anti-Soviet Afghan war took up the bandit life and now abet Islamic radicals, and al-Qaeda sympathizers are in the army and bureaucracy. Al-Qaeda operatives arrested for bombing the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 received false documents from a former mujahedin fighter working for the Yemeni government. The country, says a senior Western diplomat in the capital of Sana'a, "is an important node for terrorist groups." Al-Qaeda agents ran free as facilitators to move people, supply documents and look after finances until the Cole attack proved they also had operational capabilities.

    That brought the U.S. down on Yemen's neck, as intelligence and FBI officials crowded in to investigate. It got more difficult for al-Qaeda men to go underground as the spooks threw big money around to put bandit lords on their payroll. Washington still complained bitterly that Yemen was not cooperating fully, but things changed after Sept. 11. The Yemeni government sized up the new risks in courting American displeasure, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh went to Washington last month showing "helpful new energy" in pursuing terrorists. Yemen began to share the intelligence Washington had begged for. Radical preachers were silenced, at least 100 former Afghan Arabs were arrested and the honey shops named by Washington as fronts for al-Qaeda financing were shuttered.

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