What Is Al-Qaeda Without Its Boss?

AMIR SHAH/AP
A Northern Alliance soldier reads through papers found in a suspected al-Qaeda compound

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"Bin Laden never needed to use his own money to finance his activity," says Jacquard. "He always found it from Islamic charities, solidarity funds for the Afghan jihad, etc. The flow of that money--more than $300 million per year--continues. And it will take years, if not decades, of Western pressure on Arab societies to submit the sources and conduits of such funds to regulation. If bin Laden disappears, someone else will step up and find the same funding he did. If no one steps up, the money will find its way to people at lower levels--until things radically change."

No one is predicting with confidence who might emerge to run al-Qaeda if its current leadership is decimated. Jacquard believes that one individual to watch in a post-Osama world is Rifa'i Taha, who leads al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the group that claimed responsibility for the 1997 terrorist attacks on tourists in Luxor, Egypt. A co-founder of bin Laden's international jihad, Taha actually distanced himself from al-Qaeda earlier this year. He argued for focusing jihad activity on corrupt regimes in Arab lands, something bin Laden forsook to concentrate on the U.S. Taha's whereabouts are unknown, but last week, a well-connected Cairo publication reported that he had been arrested in Syria and handed over to Egyptian authorities. They would not confirm the story.

Might al-Qaeda refocus its fury closer to home? Possibly, yet working against Arab regimes from within their restrictive confines is tricky. Bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, served three years in an Egyptian prison in connection with the 1981 murder of President Anwar Sadat and afterward decided it would be better to be a terrorist outside his native land. He eventually moved to Afghanistan with bin Laden. The Egyptian government's unforgiving policies on terrorism, though decried by human rights groups, have brought a relative calm over the past four years.

Other Middle Eastern countries, particularly Lebanon and Yemen, aren't as thoroughly policed. Jordanian and Israeli intelligence officials have told TIME that there are al-Qaeda operatives from the Philippines, Egypt, Afghanistan and Lebanon at Lebanon's Ein al-Hilweh camp for Palestinian refugees. Al-Qaeda appears to be using the camp as a Middle East base, having cemented ties with the camp's extremist Palestinian Islamist group, Usbat al-Ansar, a year ago. Thanks to Usbat al-Ansar, the camp is a virtually autonomous area where the government has no authority.

Similarly, the Yemeni government lacks control over large patches of its country, which is home to many bin Laden followers. Like Afghanistan, Yemen has remote, mountainous regions that provide ideal havens for terrorists. The attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 was carried out by Saudi citizens of Yemeni origin as well as some Yemeni nationals (including Mohammed Omar al-Harazi, the suspected organizer of the bombing, who is being sought by the FBI and Yemeni authorities). Yemen has powerful tribal warlords and government officials whose sympathies and connections with bin Laden run deep.

Still, the Yemeni government has tried hard in recent weeks to keep its borders closed so that its Islamic extremists can't fight alongside the Taliban. Across the Middle East, hundreds of jihad organizers used to help send such fighters abroad with government approval. Thousands of Yemenis, Saudis and Gulf state nationals joined the Afghan mujahedin battling the Soviets in the 1980s and the Bosnian Muslims fighting Serbia in the '90s. But now many of those same jihad organizers have been detained by their governments. Officials learned the hard way that encouraging jihad can mean fomenting dissent at home when the radicalized fighters return from their battles.

Arab crackdowns could eventually just drive Islamic extremists to nations more respectful of civil liberties. Most countries in Europe--particularly France, Spain and Italy--are aggressively pursuing any suspected al-Qaeda members or sympathizers. But the British and Canadians have always been more squeamish about police tactics that require some religious and ethnic profiling. "London, all on its own, is home to probably more dangerous extremist leaders than Afghanistan," snipes a French terrorism expert. "These people and their intimates are the European command [of al-Qaeda]. There's no reason to imagine they'd stop simply if al-Qaeda or its leaders took a blow in Afghanistan."

One worrisome figure in Britain is Abu Qatada, a London-based Islamic cleric wanted in Jordan for alleged terrorist offenses. (Qatada told the Washington Post he was a "simple teacher of Islam" with a "big mouth.") The British government has given him sanctuary for years. However, it did recently freeze his bank account at the request of the U.S. And last week Home Secretary David Blunkett published a package of emergency legislation--expected to be law before Christmas--that includes the right to indefinitely detain foreign terrorist suspects who cannot be deported because of the risk they might be tortured or put to death in the countries that want them.