TIMED FOR THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of September 11, Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video tape calling for another round attacks. The tape includes at least two important items that should not be overlooked.
The early reporting on the tape indicated that Zawahiri had threatened Arab Gulf States. He made specific references to Iraq, but he also threatened attacks against one or more of the other Gulf States, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates. But it is now clear that he also threatened strikes against America (again). Of perhaps greater note, Zawahiri announced that a long-time al Qaeda affiliate, the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), had “joined” al Qaeda.
According to the Hindustan Times, Zawahiri claimed, “Osama bin Laden has told me to announce to Muslims that the GSPC has joined al Qaeda.” Zawahiri openly threatened attacks on America and France from this “new” al Qaeda force, “We pray to God that they will be a thorn in the side of the American and French crusaders and their allies.”
He added, “We pray to God that our brothers from the GSPC succeed in causing harm to the top members of the crusader coalition, and particularly their leader, the vicious America.” And according to an account from Reuters he called for the GSPC to become “a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders” and to put fear “in the hearts of the traitors and the apostate sons of France.”
THE GSPC is an offshoot of an Algerian group named the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). The GIA grew out of the violence that engulfed Algeria in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hundreds of Arab-Afghan veterans were part of the group’s founding. Osama bin Laden is said to have arranged financing and arms supplies for the group early in its existence.
The GIA and the Algerian government waged a brutal civil war which killed upwards of 100,000 people throughout ’90s. But the GIA’s violence was not confined to Northern Africa. The group was also responsible for a series of attacks on targets in France and Europe, including an eerie forerunner of the September 11 attacks. In December 1994, four GIA terrorists hijacked an Air France flight leaving Algiers. Their goal was to force the pilot to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower. Their plan failed when the plane landed in Marseille and French Special Forces boarded it, killing the hijackers in the process.
In 1998 there was a falling out between the core of al Qaeda’s leadership and some of the GIA’s senior leaders, resulting from the GIAs murder of thousands of Algerian civilians–which in turn had alienated much of the country and jeopardized al Qaeda’s chances for establishing an Islamist regime there.
In order to distance themselves from the GIA’s unpopular tactics, bin Laden and Zawahiri selected a young GIA emir named Hassan Hattab to establish a new al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria. Thus, the GSPC was born.
SINCE THEN, the GSPC has been an especially active al Qaeda affiliate. Acting in concert with al Qaeda affiliates from Morocco and Tunisia, the GSPC’s North African terror network provides al Qaeda easy access to the European mainland. In the last two years, several major GSPC plots have been uncovered on European soil, including a plot in Italy that may have aimed to kill as many as 10,000 people.
The GSPC was also central to al Qaeda’s last attempt to strike America prior to September 11, 2001. On December 14, 1999, an Algerian man named Ahmed Ressam was arrested on a ferry going from Victoria, British Columbia to Port Angeles, Washington after it was discovered that his truck with packed with explosives. Ressam was on his way to the LAX airport where he intended to take part in al Qaeda’s millennium bomb plot. An attack planned to simultaneously hit a hotel in Amman, Jordan, was also broken up.
The investigation into Ressam’s activities revealed his ties to both the Algerian GSPC and the senior leadership of al Qaeda. A PBS Frontline documentary provided a useful timeline of Ressam’s life. Culled from Ressam’s testimony and other evidence presented at his trial, the Frontline documentary notes that Ressam traveled to Canada in February 1994. There he stayed in an apartment building “identified by Canadian and international police as the Montreal headquarters of a terrorist cell connected to the Osama bin Laden network, and, more specifically, to an Algerian terrorist organization called the . . . GIA,” the GSPC’s predecessor.
Ressam supported himself through petty crimes, including robbery and trafficking in stolen identity documents. Ressam and his accomplices marketed stolen “driver’s license numbers, bank cards, and Social Security cards” and “provided Canadian passports and other identity documents to terrorist associates around the world.”
Ressam’s affiliation with the GIA was discovered by French authorities following a failed attempt to bomb a G-7 meeting in Belgium in March 1996. French authorities foiled the plot and, in the process, shot and killed a GIA member. On his person was “found an electronic organizer with the Montreal telephone number of the apartment Ressam was sharing with friends from Algeria.” The French authorities “notified CSIS, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service” and from then on “Ressam was under surveillance as part of a large investigation into a suspected terrorist ring from 1996 until he left for Afghanistan in 1998.”
RESSAM LEFT MONTREAL looking for trouble. On his way to Afghanistan, he met Abu Zubaydah, who served as al Qaeda’s travel facilitator and training camp coordinator. Zubaydah approved Ressam’s admission into one of al Qaeda’s training camps, where he received the usual training in “light arms . . . the use of explosives and poison gas, methods for assassination, sabotage, and urban warfare.”
After his training was completed, according to Frontline, Ressam said “he was assigned to the European-based cell of the Algerian group in the camp, and that the members of the cell planned to travel separately and meet in Canada to commence ‘an operation’ in America before the end of 1999.” Zubaydah also requested that Ressam “send original Canadian passports to be supplied to other members of the network.”
Ressam re-entered Canada under a nom de guerre and the Canadians never picked up on his presence. His part in the millennium plot was halted only because a suspicious customs agent thought Ressam seemed evasive under questioning. Ressam’s plot demonstrates that even after the schism between the old guard of the GIA and bin Laden’s new GSPC, that Algerian operatives were central to al Qaeda’s international designs.
And while the LAX plot and other al Qaeda plots involving the GSPC were foiled, Spain’s investigation into the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings shows that several of the terrorists involved were tied to the GSPC and its al Qaeda affiliates from North Africa.
AS THE WEEKLY STANDARD has reported, there were ties between al Qaeda’s Algerian affiliates (first the GIA and then the GSPC) and Saddam’s regime. In a USA Today article from December 2001, Stanley Bedlington, a former senior analyst in the CIA’s counterterrorism center, explained that the CIA had collected evidence in the early 1990s demonstrating that Saddam and bin Laden were both tied to the GIA.
Earlier this year, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported that 11 intelligence officials confirmed the existence of a set of documents and photographs demonstrating that Saddam ran training camps for thousands of terrorists. Among the terrorists trained at these camps were members of the Algerian GSPC.
There is no knowing, of course, if any of these terrorists are poised to strike the West. But now would be a good time to figure out who and where these terrorists are. After all, al Qaeda has used GSPC terrorists to strike the West since the early 1990s.
And Ayman al-Zawahiri now promises to do so again.
Thomas Joscelyn is an economist and writer living in New York.
