A nation must think before it acts.
Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post followed later by the New York Times reported that three Palestinians seeking to attack targets in Jerusalem were interdicted. The story alleges the three men were recruited, online, by an al Qaeda operative in Gaza. The Jerusalem Post says the targets of the three men “…included the Jerusalem Convention Center, a bus traveling between the capital and Ma’aleh Adumim, the US embassy in Tel Aviv, and emergency responders who would have arrived at the scene of attacks.”
While al Qaeda connections to Gaza and Palestinians are not unheard of, they appear less frequently. Terrorist group competition for Palestinian manpower continues to be quite intense. Al Qaeda came after, not before, groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and many others. But with Hamas pursuing a more political path and young boys willing to fight, al Qaeda might be finding a ripe audience for their message. The article continues by explaining how the Internet facilitated recruitment of parallel operatives:
“The Shin Bet said an al-Qaida operative in Gaza, named as Ariv Al-Sham, recruited the men separately from one another, and had planned to activate three independent terrorist cells via his recruits. Senior Shin Bet sources said they believed Al-Sham received his orders directly from the head of al-Qaida’s central structure, Ayman Al-Zawahri….In the planned attack, terrorists would have fired shots at the bus’s wheels, causing it to overturn, before gunning down passengers at close range, and firing on emergency responders….Abu-Sara also volunteered to help orchestrate a double suicide bombing, involving the dispatching of two suicide bomber to the Jerusalem Convention Center and the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, simultaneously. Subsequently, Abu-Sara planned to detonate a suicide truck bomb in the vicinity of emergency responders arriving at the Convention Center….Abu-Sara was also supposed to travel to Syria for training in combat and explosives manufacturing, and had purchased a flight ticket to Turkey, a gateway to Syria.”
If these initial reports are true, this plot would represent a notable shift in ‘Old Guard’ al Qaeda’s targeting – one that I had been expecting for some time (see the closing paragraph here.) For Zawahiri and his ‘Old Guard’ al Qaeda compadres, they will always seek the end of the U.S. However, the al Qaeda organization, if it is to survive in an era of terrorism competition, must recalibrate its objectives. In its inception, al Qaeda sought to:
A cursory examination of these broad ‘Old Guard’ al Qaeda objectives suggests that most don’t hold much water more than a decade after 9/11/2001. The U.S. no longer occupies holy lands in Saudi Arabia. As evidenced by the Taliban before 9/11 and AQIM and AQAP temporary caliphates in recent years, the U.S. either doesn’t, or is slow to, respond directly to a caliphate if it does not pursue terrorism against the U.S. As for attacking the “far enemy” to relieve support for the “near enemy”, the U.S. either helped topple apostate rulers (Libya) or stood by and watched as dictators fell during the Arab Spring. If this were truly an Al Qaeda objective, they should be seen as failures as their actions had nothing to do with the recent fall of apostate rulers. The remaining objective is Israel. With Syria boiling and Egypt ripe, in my opinion, shifting focus to Israel makes a lot of sense from al Qaeda’s perspective: