AS THE DETAILS of the foiled Canadian terrorist plot continue to emerge, much is still unknown. Fifteen suspects were arrested in the Toronto area on June 2 and 3 in a police sting operation as they attempted to take possession of what they believed to be three tons of ammonium nitrate, roughly triple the amount used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Initially, many media reports said nothing about these suspects–and 2 others already in custody–beyond the fact that all are Canadian residents and most are Canadian citizens. Yet it soon emerged that the 12 adults and 5 teenagers are Muslims of Somali, Egyptian, Jamaican, and Trinidadian origin.
Media reports have named the Peace Tower in the Canadian Parliament, the CN Tower complex, and the Toronto Stock Exchange as possible targets for the plot, but what is reasonably clear is that the participants intended to inflict mass casualties. According to Luc Portelance, assistant operations director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, the suspects had “become adherents to a violent ideology inspired by al Qaeda.”
Despite all the uncertainties, a number of media outlets and terrorism analysts, taking a cue from Canadian police, rushed to declare the entire affair the work of homegrown terrorists operating independently of any broader network or organization. Typical of this interpretation were the comments of former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who told ABC News following the arrests, “This is leaderless terrorism, . . . cells that are not connected to anything. . . . There’s nothing in their communications that would indicate this is terrorist communication. The calls are domestic. They’re not going back to Afghanistan. And what’s probably being said is the equivalent of, ‘Let’s all get together at Joe’s house.'”
Yet there are good reasons to doubt this view.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Canadian arrests are “part of a continuing, multinational inquiry into suspected terrorist cells in at least seven countries.” Far from having completed their investigation, the Times reported, “authorities were combing through evidence seized during raids in Canada . . . to look for possible connections between 17 suspects arrested Friday and Saturday and at least 18 other Islamist militants who had been arrested in locations including the United States, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Britain, Denmark, and Sweden.”
CanWest News Service reported that “the six-month RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] investigation called Project Osage is one of several overlapping probes that includes an FBI case called Operation Northern Exposure and a British probe known as Operation Mazhar.” Further, the newswire noted, “the intricate web of connections between Toronto, London, Atlanta, Sarajevo, Dhaka, and elsewhere illustrates the challenge confronting counterterrorism investigators almost five years after 9/11.” According to CanWest, “linking the international probes are online communications, phone calls and in particular videotapes that authorities allege show some of the targets the young extremists considered blowing up.” While none of this proves an international dimension to the plot, it strongly suggests it.
And there are other hints of international connections. Canadian journalist and columnist Andrew Coyne notes that the father of terror suspect Shareef Abdelhaleen confirmed to the Canadian Press that he once posted bail for one Mohamed Mahjoub, who has been held by Canadian intelligence on the basis of secret evidence since June 2000. According to a CBC News article from September 2005, Mahjoub is accused of being a member of the Vanguards of Conquest–a faction of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group led by al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. While Mahjoub denies any connection to terrorism, he admits that he met bin Laden in Sudan in the 1990s. Perhaps the link between the Abdelhaleens and Mahjoub is just an amazing coincidence.
Another suggestive bit of information is that the Canadian suspects were in contact with Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee. These two men, both American citizens from the Atlanta area, are alleged by the U.S. government to have traveled to Canada in March 2005 to discuss “strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike” with three individuals subsequently identified in media reports as being among the Canadian suspects now in custody.
According to the FBI affidavit against Ahmed and Sadequee, the two discussed traveling to Pakistan to attend a terrorist training camp. WAGA-TV reported in April that Ahmed later traveled to Pakistan in an effort to do just that. As for Sadequee, he was arrested in April 2006 in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and turned over to the FBI, who according to the affidavit found him in possession of a CD-ROM with encrypted files and a map of the Washington area. The affidavit accuses Sadequee of lying about traveling to Bangladesh to visit his aunt. It should be noted that over the last year Bangladesh has been rocked by a wave of violence organized by Islamist groups loyal to the now-incarcerated Sheikh Abdur Rahman, a key signatory of bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war.
The nature of the relationship among the Canadian suspects, their Atlanta counterparts, and any additional accomplices requires further elucidation, as does the nature of any relationship between the younger Abdelhaleen and Mahjoub. And so also does the fact that two of the Canadian suspects, Mohammed Dirie and Yasim Abdi Mohamed, attempted to smuggle weapons and ammunition from the United States to Canada in August 2005 before being arrested by Canadian border police at Fort Erie, near Buffalo.
According to the Toronto Sun, documents from the Canadian National Parole Board show that Dirie told Canadian officials he had gone to Buffalo “frequently over a few months,” as well as to Ohio, where he claimed that he needed to purchase a gun because a friend had been robbed. The Canadian parole board didn’t buy that claim, but neither did it offer any comment on Dirie’s account of his travels to the United States. Was Dirie’s story true? If so, who did he meet with during these travels and why?
WITH SO MANY QUESTIONS UNANSWERED, it is far too soon to rule out connections between the Canadian conspiracy and terrorists abroad. Certainly, much evidence has come to light challenging the view that homegrown terrorism is an entirely insular phenomenon.
Unfortunately, the desire to ignore or downplay international connections between individual terrorist suspects on the one hand and terrorist networks on the other has become increasingly prevalent in public analysis since September 11 and particularly since the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. Today, even a careful observer could easily get the mistaken impression that terror cells are produced by something like spontaneous combustion.
Even more misleading are attempts to nail down a pseudo-legalistic “six degrees of separation” between terrorist organizations and specific attacks carried out by their followers. Thus, many analysts and reporters assert that no connection exists between al Qaeda and either the March 2004 train bombings in Spain or the July 2005 bombings in London. But that is far from incontrovertible. On the contrary, multiple investigations into these attacks by the Spanish and British governments have drawn clear connections between their perpetrators and al Qaeda or its associate groups.
Commentators who deny these connections often claim to be correcting a widespread misconception that all acts of Islamist terrorism are personally ordered by Osama bin Laden. Instead, they seek to highlight the role of extremist ideology in the shadowy world of international terrorism. But while Islamist ideology is indeed a powerful motive for terrorism, it is simply not the case that terrorist cells spring into existence altogether independently. Al Qaeda and allied organizations still play a role in providing strategy and direction as well as funding, training, and propaganda to prospective jihadists.
With regard to the Canadian plotters, if indeed they took their “inspiration” from al Qaeda, we do not yet know how this occurred. Did they read strategy documents posted on the Internet? Respond to calls by al Qaeda leaders to carry out attacks against Canada and Canadian nationals? Receive paramilitary training that some of the suspects appear to have conducted in Washago, Ontario, according to Canadian media reports? Such local training was encouraged by al Qaeda strategist Mustafa Setmariam Nasar prior to his capture last year.
No serious examination of the Canadian plot should minimize the potential foreign connections out of blind adherence to a convenient analytical model. Like all other leads, the considerable evidence suggesting foreign connections should be vigorously pursued.
Dan Darling is a counterterrorism consultant.
