The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks (26 page)

In the 1990s, al Qaeda tended to take several years to develop spectacular
50 Worst
-worthy attacks and rarely took credit for the attacks. Post9/11 affiliates became far more ready to claim responsibility, even for comparatively amateurish attacks and attempts.

With the main leadership—Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a succession of third-in-commands whose life spans were comparable to fruit flies—of al Qaeda on the run or in graves following the incursions into their Afghan safe havens, the group continued its strategy of evolving
rather than giving up. The group soon created a series of offshoots, some with formal franchise arrangements with al Qaeda in their names— al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, etc.—and some with extensive ties but no official commandand-control agreements, such as Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and various Philippine groups. Still other cells trained and sometimes obtained weapons from al Qaeda and Taliban remnants, then went on to conduct their own independent operations. Yet other lone wolves who on occasion had met with some flavor of al Qaeda leaders or franchisees, or were merely “selfradicalized” by studying the writings and YouTube videos of al Qaeda, popped up around the world. While the latter are in theory especially difficult to find, inept operational tradecraft of the loners, support for societal stability of peaceful Muslim communities who were quick to point out potential miscreants to government officials, and patient sting operations led to foiling numerous plots that would otherwise have added to the list of
50 Worst
.

International revulsion at the 9/11—and later 3/11 and 7/7—attacks led to an extensive coalition working to “find, fix, and finish” terrorists around the world. This in turn led to the arrests of thousands of terrorist suspects, including numerous “high value” terrorists, who were initially held in local prisons before being turned over to U.S. authorities. The cooperative efforts were so successful in taking terrorists off the streets that the United States was faced with a growing inventory problem. It was at least temporarily resolved with the opening of a terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay military base on Cuban shores. The detention without trial of scores of major threats to security caused constant tension between civil libertarians and potential prosecutors regarding the ultimately juridical disposition of these individuals. As of this writing, the debate continues.

As in earlier decades, the
worst
of the 2000s included attacks against transportation modes—planes, trains, ships—and symbolic soft targets, including mosques, schools, and theaters. Body counts, particularly of those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, continued to rise. While the literature of academic studies of terrorism debates whether “everything changed” after 9/11—and most garden variety attacks continued to mimic previous patterns of few casualties and exit strategies for the terrorists—suicide bombings and tactics difficult to defend against continued to increase in popularity. That said, the
worst
for this decade, except for occasional Chechen barricade-and-hostage situations causing hundreds of deaths, shows a virtual extinction of end-game calculations by the terrorists. Those that conducted more spectacular incidents were looking to kill, not bargain. Hostage-takers tended to go for a quick headline, then kill the hostages, rather than wait patiently, sometimes years, for negotiations to develop, as had been the case with Hizballah in the 1980s.

Women appeared more frequently as suicide bombers. RAND researcher Karla Cunningham determined that by mid-2008, female suicide bombers were responsible for 21 attacks in Iraqi markets and other Shi'ite civilian venues. State Department intelligence analyst Heidi Panetta added that between 2005 and 2010, women conducted more than 50 suicide attacks in Iraq, accounting for 10 percent of the group's attacks in-country. Between 2002 and 2012, women conducted half of the suicide bombings in Chechnya, Turkey, and Sri Lanka, including some of the
50 Worst
in Russia. Some observers suggested that this is a generational shift in how religious-based radical women now participate in their struggles against established authority. While women have previously been heavily involved in attacks—including in Morocco, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Japan, Western Europe (especially the 1970s-era groups led by women, including the Petra Kraus Group in Switzerland, the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany, and the Japanese Red Army of Fusako Shigenobu)—the lack of an exit strategy is new. Women also appeared in the legions of lone wolves who were caught, including Colleen R. La Rose (alias Jihad Jane) and Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, who attempted to support the jihad at the turn of the decade. Other U.S. women were indicted for supporting terrorists in Somalia, Afghanistan, Egypt, and the United Kingdom.

Terrorists developed use of the Internet, but not in the way that pundits had initially thought. Rather than conduct cyber-attacks that could potentially cripple infrastructure and economies of “the far enemy,” al Qaeda and other terrorists found that the Internet was helpful in recruitment and directing overall strategies from afar. While the centralized al Qaeda was rapidly becoming a bad memory, individuals flocked to the jihadi websites to “self-radicalize,” publicize their exploits through posted videos of attacks, publish eulogies for their fallen comrades, and share operational tips. Rather than continue with multiyear meticulously planned attacks that had been the watchword of al Qaeda in the 1990s and early 2000s, the new lone wolves could continue the fight, with the enemy now pecked to death by ducks, rather than by one or two spectacular hits.

Finally, although the body and incident counts did not reach the high bar of the
worst
, a spate of beheadings in Iraq marked a new phase in terrorist violence during the decade. Begun initially as a headline-grabbing threat against American hostages, the tactic soon proliferated to threats against Kenyans, Turks, Somalis, Egyptians, Filipinos, Iraqis, and the gruesome murders of Nepalese. The beheaders again broke previous mores with their callous disregard for what had heretofore been commonly accepted norms of decency, and appalled publics wondered what the next group could devise that could be even worse. They soon had their answer when Chechen terrorists shot to death hundreds of fleeing children on their first day of school.

Overview:
Osama bin Laden's fatwa to attack Americans around the world proved troubling to U.S. policymakers, but did not become of general public concern until the bombings of the two U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August 1998 and the bombing of a U.S. Navy destroyer in Aden in 2000. While other terrorist groups were content to set off late-night bombs with no casualties, with these two operations, al Qaeda established itself as the world's preeminent terrorist group, willing to tackle complex terrorist operations. American determination to bring the perpetrators to justice has lasted more than a decade as of this writing, with debates continuing over the venue for the trial of those detained for this and other attacks.

Incident:
On October 12, 2000, a 20-foot Zodiac boat laden with explosives came alongside the 8,600-ton USS
Cole
, a 505-foot Arleigh Burkeclass guided-missile destroyer, and detonated, ripping a 40 × 40 foot hole in the hull's half-inch-thick armored steel plates near the engine rooms and adjacent eating and living quarters, killing 17 American sailors and injuring another 44. No Yemenis were killed in the Aden port blast.

A Syrian-born cleric living in the United Kingdom, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, said that the Islamic Army of Aden (alias Aden-Abyan Islamic Army) of Yemen had claimed credit.

Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh told CNN that some detainees belonged to the Egyptian al-Jihad, whose leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was with bin Laden in Afghanistan. Saleh said a 12-year-old boy told investigators that a bearded man with glasses gave him 2000 rials ($12) and asked him to watch a four-wheel drive vehicle parked near the port on the day of the attack. The man took a rubber boat off the top of the car and headed into the harbor, never to return. The car led investigators to a modest house in the Madinet al-Shaab suburb of Aden.

On October 16, Yemeni investigators discovered bomb-making material in an apartment used by individuals believed involved. Yemeni security said they were non-Yemeni Arabs; others said they were Saudis who stayed for six weeks in a house near Aden's power station. Another house, close to the Aden refinery and oil storage facilities in the al-Baraiqa neighborhood, was discovered by October 21. The suspects apparently had briefly left and then reentered Yemen before the bombing. They had parked a fiberglass boat in the driveway; the boat was now missing. Police tracked the car to a house in al-Baraiqa, or Little Aden, west of Aden.

The Navy revised its theory of the bombing on October 20, saying that the destroyer had been moored for two hours and was already refueling when the bomb boat came alongside. The boat blended in with harbor workboats and was not suspected by the gun crews on the ship.

By October 24, the investigators were looking at three safe houses that served as the terrorists' quarters in Little Aden, workshop in Madinet ash-Shaab, and lookout perch in the Tawahi neighborhood. A lease for the lookout apartment was signed by Abdullah Ahmed Khaled al-Musawah. Binoculars and Islamic publications were found in the apartment. The same name was found in a fake ID card in personal documents seized in the safe houses. Yemeni investigators detained employees of the Lajeh civil registration office in the northern farming region. Investigators looked at a possible Saudi connection—one of the individuals had a Saudi accent. Others looked at the mountainous province of Hadramaut—one suspect used a name common to the area. The press also indicated that the terrorists' wills dedicated the attack to the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

On October 25, Yemeni president Saleh said that the bombing was carried out by Muslims who fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then moved to Yemen. Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorists affiliated with bin Laden remained the key suspects; a witness identified one of the bombers as an Egyptian. Yemeni authorities arrested Islamic activists originally from Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere, as well as local Yemenis. A local carpenter confessed that he had worked with two suspects in modifying a small boat to hold explosives and helped them to load the explosives on board. He had rented the suspects the building where they prepared the boat. A Somali woman who owned a car used by the suspects to haul the boat was questioned. Yemeni investigators believed the terrorists had given her money to buy the car.

The Taliban in Afghanistan said that bin Laden was not responsible. Osama bin Laden welcomed the attack.

Yemen arrested four men living in Aden on November 5 and 6 after tracing them via phone records that showed that they had been in contact with the suspected bombers. Officials in Lahej had provided the bombing suspects with government cars for use in Aden. The bombers knew the officials from their time together in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

On November 11, Yemeni investigators said that at least three plots against U.S. targets in Yemen had failed in the past year. Yemeni officials said a detainee claimed that terrorists had planned to bomb the U.S. destroyer USS
The Sullivans
during refueling in Aden on January 3, 2000. The explosives-laden small boat sank instead from the weight of the explosives.

On November 16, Yemeni prime minister Abdel-Karim Ali Iryani said that the two Yemeni bombers were veterans of the Afghan war. One was a Yemeni born in the eastern province of Hadramaut. (Osama bin Laden had Yemeni citizenship because of his father's birth in the Hadramaut region.)

On November 19, Yemeni authorities said that they had detained “less than 10” suspected accomplices out of the more than 50 people still held for questioning.

An explosives expert reconfigured the charge using lightweight C-4 plastique. The
Yemen Observer
reported that the fiberglass boat was brought in from another country.

On November 21, U.S. officials said that the bombing appeared to be linked to the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. A composite sketch of one of the bombers appeared to match that of a man wanted for questioning in the Africa bombings.

The State Department announced on December 7 that it supported Yemen's decision to prosecute three and possibly six Yemeni suspects in January, following the end of the holy month of Ramadan. One of them, Fhad al-Qoso, reportedly told investigators that an associate of bin Laden gave him more than $5,000 to finance the
Cole
attack's planning and video-taping of the suicide bombing. Suspect Jamal al-Badawi admitted that he was trained in bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan and was sent with bin Laden's forces to fight in Bosnia's civil war. He was believed to have obtained the boat. Yemen had also identified Muhammad Omar alHarazi, a Saudi born in Yemen, as a planner of the attack and a member of al Qaeda. He may also have played a role in the truck bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.

On January 30, 2001,
ABC News
reported that U.S. African embassies bombing defendant Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali allegedly told the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1998 about a plan for a rocket attack on a U.S. warship in Yemen.

On February 17, 2001, Yemen detained two more suspects when they returned from Afghanistan.

Bin Laden applauded the attack on February 26, 2001, saying the
Cole
was a ship of injustice that sailed “to its doom.” His comments were made at a family celebration in Afghanistan and broadcast on Qatar's satellite channel
Al Jazeera
. He recited a poem to celebrate the January marriage of his son, Mohammed, in Qandahar, saying “In Aden, the young man stood up for holy war and destroyed a destroyer feared by the powerful.” He said the
Cole
sailed on a course of “false arrogance, self-conceit, and strength.”