Last weekend’s bombings in Sweden illustrate the danger posed by a new generation of terrorists who are lured into attacks on the West through contacts with al Qaeda over the Internet, analysts said. That was the path 28-year-old Taimour Abdulwahab took to a suicide car bombing in Stockholm on Saturday. “This is a major problem now, the self-radicalized jihadist who reaches out to al Qaeda or its allies for training — usually in Pakistan or Yemen but perhaps this time in Iraq — and returns to Europe or America to conduct terror,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and terrorism expert at RAND, a think tank in Washington. “Because these individuals have very little exposure to other jihadists they are difficult to catch until it is too late.”
The difficulty of capturing terrorists who operate alone, while gaining advice and support over the Internet, has been evidenced recently in the United States by the Fort Hood shooting, the attempted Times Square bombing and the Oregon bomb plot, experts say.
A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work, stated that the intelligence community is “concerned that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are spreading propaganda on the Internet in ways that might radicalize individuals to conduct attacks. Lone-wolf attacks remain a problem, but most of the plotting we’re seeing these days [is] tied to extremist groups.”
Abdulwahab, an Iraqi-born Swedish citizen who lived in London, is believed to have acted alone on the day of the Swedish bombing. But investigators suspect he may have been aided by al Qaeda in the planning of the attack.
A military official said al Qaeda’s ability to spread its message globally through the Internet and other recruiting methods in the West “is due to our failure to dismantle the organization early and eliminate leaders like Osama bin Laden and their teachers before the ideology set in.”
Scandinavia’s largest news agency, TT, received an e-mailed voice message from Abdulwahab 10 minutes before the bombings, had no time to react to it, TT Foreign Editor Vicktor Olsson told The Washington Examiner in a telephone interview from Sweden on Monday.
The voice message — recorded in both Swedish and Arabic — was sent simultaneously to law enforcement, he said.
“This is a historic incident for Sweden,” Olsson said. “We are focusing most of our resources on it and there are many questions from the public as to why and how this attack took place.”
Abulwahab had spent “a great deal of time in Britain, where he lived for some period of time, and was traveling back and forth to Jordan, unbeknownst to his family,” Olsson said. “It is believed he had contacts there as well.”
The bomber had a Facebook page dedicated to Islamic extremism, and evidence suggests that he trained in Pakistan. British counterterrorism and law-enforcement officials are scouring his home outside London, where his wife and children live, according to British reports.
A U.S. official with knowledge of terrorist recruitment said that al Qaeda’s message has permeated the Internet. “There is active recruitment into al Qaeda both in Europe and the United States,” he said.
American allies in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere have uncovered evidence of terrorist groups using the Internet to recruit. A Taliban detainee interviewed by The Examiner in Pakistan earlier this year was captured transporting video, laptop computers and other high-tech equipment. He said the equipment was to be used to draw people to jihad and to get the Taliban’s side of the story out on the Web.
According to a taped message, Abdulwahab was angry at Sweden’s involvement in the Afghan war and with Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist who published a series of drawings in 2007 depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a dog.
“This was all an issue of free speech in principle, but since then we’ve suspected something like this has been sort of coming,” Olsson said.
Stockholm Police Department spokeswoman Petra Sjoelander told The Examiner that investigators are continuing to interview witnesses and search for evidence.
“This is an ongoing investigation and we are extending our police work, looking at every angle,” Sjoelander said.
Olsson said that in Sweden, as with the rest of Europe, it is the terrorist ideology and the lone-wolf trend that everybody is concerned about and trying to prevent before “something much worse takes place.”
Sara A. Carter is The Washington Examiner’s national security correspondent. She can be reached at [email protected].
