France's Terrorism Judge, Marc Trevidic, reacts
to a question during an interview with the Associated Press in Paris,
Friday, Aug. 5, 2011. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Paris • France’s top judge in the fight
against Islamic terrorism said Friday that al-Qaida’s North African
wing has shown no ability to strike in Europe or elsewhere beyond its
zone of operations.
Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, born
of a former insurgent group in Algeria, remains motivated largely out of
a desire to attack former colonial power France. It currently holds
four French hostages, and French officials have called the group the
biggest terror threat to France and its interests.
In an interview, anti-terrorism judge
Marc Trevidic suggested AQIM is being forced to work hard to control
parts of its traditional territory in the Sahel region along the
southern Sahara.
"It’s been shown that AQIM is only
able to strike in its own zone, by wanting to kill tourists — and we
have seen nothing emerge as a significant foreign operation in Europe
that was really organized by AQIM," he said.
Still, AQIM has been active in
offering statements of support through the Internet to would-be
terrorists in Europe, Trevidic said, citing his recent case files.
"It’s incitation without a structure
behind it," he said. The group is "holed up, and already has troubles
controlling its zone ... Only when a terror group is very strong in its
own territory will it begin exporting."
Many European officials are more
concerned. In June, Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba
called AQIM a growing menace that could spread beyond its base unless
Western nations step up efforts to counter it. It has rendered huge
parts of Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Algeria off-limits to foreigners.
AQIM is active online and media-savvy,
and has also sparked arrests in Spain and France. French
counterterrorism and intelligence officials say its main source of
income comes from ransom payments from hostage-takings — in the millions
of dollars.
The 46-year-old Trevidic, member of a
special unit of the French judiciary devoted to fighting terrorism,
spoke at length about the changes in the global fight against Islamic
radicals following the death of Osama bin Laden, 10 years after the
Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
Over the last decade, the Iraq war
"shuffled the cards" in the global fight against terrorism, he said, by
luring dozens of youths from France — home to western Europe’s largest
Muslim population — to fight U.S. forces.
The global crackdown against terrorism
in Europe and elsewhere has largely driven Islamic militants
underground: recruiting of young fighters in mosques and open-air
training camps are largely a thing of the past, he said.
The newer phenomenon is
"self-radicalization" online, with Internet-savvy Islamist youths
watching videos and reading inflammatory texts that are a virtual-world
call to arms.
"Today, there is not a single case
where group members weren’t recruited on the Internet," Trevidic said in
the interview at the Paris AP office, with two bodyguards in tow.
He said American officials, too, are "starting to discover this danger from within."
"They’ve always reasoned in the United
States that ‘you just have to monitor the movements, the airplane
passengers, and make them strip their clothes off and everything will be
fine.’ Well, no," Trevidic said.
With NATO forces conducting air raids,
bombing strikes and surveillance missions over Afghanistan and
Pakistan, that region is no longer the training ground it once was for
al-Qaida and its Taliban allies, he said.
Instead, the potential al-Qaida
operational bases to watch today are the Somalia-Yemen area around the
Gulf of Aden, where Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has operated, and
AQIM’s zone.
"There’s always the possibility of a
bombing ... but something really organized, like on the scale of a Sept.
11, is a bit exaggerated," Trevidic said. "The entire stakes are making
sure that no group becomes powerful enough, because afterward, they in
fact can do what they want."
"That’s the lesson of Sept. 11, 2001,
let’s be clear: To have allowed training camps in the light of day, to
have let this Taliban-al-Qadia alliance do what it wanted, gave them the
possibility to organize a massive attack."
Trevidic reserved judgment about what
the "Arab Spring" — with autocratic regimes toppled in Tunisia and Egypt
and those of Libya, Syria and elsewhere under pressure — would mean for
the future of counterterrorism.
Trevidic also said it’s too early to
judge the long-term impact of France’s ban on face-covering Islamic
veils, which was enacted in the spring and has drawn fury in some
militant Islamic circles.
According to the SITE Intelligence
Group, amateur video posted online that showed the arrest of a woman who
refused to remove her niqab drew chatter among jihadists — with one
Internet forum user calling on AQIM to "take action."
The regional government office
confirmed Friday that the woman was stopped by police Sunday in
Aulnay-Sous-Bois, north of Paris. The video showed her yelling at
officers about her rights, then being driven away in a police vehicle.
She has been fined and charged with resisting arrest, and the case is now in the hands of a judge, the government office said.
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