The shocking events of this week show that global terrorism is entering an even more disturbing phase and that it cannot be defeated by brute force alone, writes Jonathan Eyal.
In the week that President George Bush accepted his party’s nomination for a new term in the White House by emphasising his credentials in the fight against international terrorism, terrorists struck with particular ferocity. After a lull of months, suicide bombers returned to Israel. In Iraq, 12 Nepalese citizens were killed, and people of other nationalities were taken hostage.
And in Russia, the destruction of two civilian aircraft was quickly followed by carnage in a Moscow underground station and the taking hostage, in massive numbers, of schoolchildren and their parents. The events are not directly related; each terrorist atrocity has its own reasons and internal logic.
Nevertheless, this wave of violence does provide some salutary lessons about how difficult the fight against international terrorism remains.
Violence in Iraq is, of course, nothing new. Neither is hostage-taking. But the motives of the terrorists inside Iraq appear to have changed in the last few weeks, and so has the intensity and frequency of their attacks. The handover of power from the US military to a civilian government in Iraq appears to have worked, at least in one respect: it has allowed US troops to concentrate in heavily fortified compounds or formations, thereby making it much more difficultfor individual American soldiers to be killed.
It is noticeable, therefore, that the terrorists’ attention has gradually shifted to what security specialists would call "soft targets". These include Iraqi civil servants, poorly protected small police stations, and public buildings used by Iraq’s new government. The shift in hostage-taking activities in Iraq is, however, even more telling.
Initially, hostages were carefully chosen from among the citizens of countries contributing to the US-led military force in Iraq, such as Italy, Japan, Korea or the Philippines. The tactic was clear: to persuade these countries to pull their troops out of Iraq, or at least to shatter the coalition which supported US operations in the Middle East.
Yet now, the process of hostage-taking has become indiscriminate, and often devoid of any clear political purpose. The biggest single hostage atrocity took place this week with the murder of 12 citizens of Nepal, a country that has no military presence in Iraq and no ability to influence events inside the country.
Most of the dead were cooks and low-paid maintenance workers, hardly the kind of people who are essential for military operations. And even the citizens of France – a country which has fiercely opposed the war in Iraq – have been seized. The demand put forward by the hostagetakers – that rance should renounce its legal ban on the wearing of Islamic headgear in its national schools – appeared to be a lame reason, hastily invented after the kidnappings had taken place, to justify what, in effect, has become a wanton campaign against all foreigners.
Russia is another country that is hardly a stranger to terrorist attacks. Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed more than a decade ago, a vicious war has raged in Chechnya which, almost from the start, involved mass outrages against civilians. Yet, even here, the events of the last two weeks show new and disturbing developments.
First, although Chechen terrorists have already displayed in the past their ability to strike at the heart of the Russian capital, and usually with impunity, they have not usually targeted civilian airliners. Yet, if current evidence is to be believed, this has now happened, with the recent destruction of two aircraft. This is a different kind of operation, requiring amuch more precise method of execution in order to penetrate the security of airports, which is always tighter than that of other civilian targets.
More importantly, previous Chechen terrorist attacks were large-scale and audacious, such as the seizure of a theatre in Moscow in October 2002. But they were usually single events, followed by a lull. Yet the simultaneous destruction of two airliners, and the synchronised timing of the strike against an underground station in Moscow with the seizure of hostages at a school near Chechnya indicate a much higher level of coordinated activity. And, incidentally, the attacks also reveal that Chechen separatists have a larger pool of suicide bombers than the various Palestinian organisations – which perfected the suicide- bombing technique in the first place – were ever able to put forward.
In the past week, no less than 100 Chechen suicide bombers may have been involved in various attacks in Russia, a staggering figure never encountered before.
The recent wave of terrorist attacks in Iraq and Chechnya cannot easily be linked, either in organisational terms or long-term political objectives. Iraqi terrorists wish to make their country ungovernable, and to destroy all foreign nationals on their soil. The Chechens, however, are fighting a more conventional battle to separate their land from Russia. They are therefore careful not to hit at foreign citizens; indeed, the Chechens’ objective is to win world sympathy for their cause.
Nevertheless, the heightened level of terrorist attacks does provide some important pointers to the future, and all of them are rather ominous. First, it is clear that some terrorist organisations are splitting up into smaller components, and that new organisations are being created all the time.
Those who kidnapped Nepalese, Turkish or French citizens in Iraq during the last two weeks claimed to belong to shadowy organisations which were virtually unknown until very recently. And the gang which held children, parents and teachers hostage in a Russian school is believed to have been headed by a renegade Chechen rebel who was ostracised even by some of Chechnya’s other terrorist organisations.
Terrorism is therefore becoming more diverse and disparate. This is a huge blow to the intelligence services, which originally concentrated only on key terrorist organisations in theMiddle East, the Caucasus or south-east Asia. But the development should come as no surprise, as this was exactly what occurred with terrorist organisations in Europe a few decades ago.
Second, there is an increasingly pronounced link between terrorism as politically motivated violence and more banal levels of criminality. Many of he terrorist activities perpetrated in Iraq, and a great deal of what is happening in Russia itself, is fuelled by pure banditry, drugsmuggling, illegal funds and huge quantities of weapons and explosives.
To date, global efforts to cut off such criminal links have not succeeded, as a report recently published by the United Nations admitted. And they are unlikely to succeed either. A few thousand euro go a long way in Russia, facilitating the acquisition of quite a few personal weapons and explosives. Even the audacious terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001 are estimated to have cost only $500,000 to prepare, a relatively puny amount which cannot be tracked down accurately by law-enforcement authorities.
But, perhaps most importantly, this week’s events are a timely reminder that terrorism cannot be opposed in isolation, and cannot be defeated by military means alone. When the Soviet Union collapsed more than a decade ago, an opportunity to address the long-running ethnic dispute in Chechnya existed.
The new Russia which was created out of the rubble of the Soviet Union proclaimed itself to be a "federation", in which all the various nationalities were promised a large measure of autonomy. Believing these promises, the Chechens democratically elected a government that pledged to negotiate for their country a special status within Russia. Moscow, however, refused to deal, and overthrew one Chechen government after another.
The toll was terrible on both sides: thousands of young, inexperienced Russian soldiers were sent into unfamiliar territory where they were instantly slaughtered. Moscow, in turn, responded by carpet-bombing entire villages and cities. With each act of violence, the opportunity for a peaceful settlement faded further into the distance.
Many Russian families now have only a photograph of a lead coffin to remind them of a son who perished in that conflict; many more Russians fear that they will be blown up as they use an underground train to go to work each morning. And in Chechnya itself, destroyed towns are now inhabited almost exclusively by elderly people, left behind by younger men who escaped to the mountains to continue fighting.
Many of the suicide bombers and terrorists now are women, the so-called "Black Widows", sisters of dead Chechen fighters pledged to avenge their families even at the cost of their own lives. Not only has Russia’s attempt to defeat terrorism by brute force been a complete failure, but Moscow’s ham-fisted policy has fed the rise of new terrorist organisations.
And yet, for years, the West studiously ignored this problem, in the hope of enlisting Russia’s support against other terrorist organisations, particularly in the Middle East. It is now clear that the Chechen problem will be with us for decades, if not generations, a constant and persistent cancer on the border between Europe and Asia and adjacent to the Middle East.
To make matters even worse, the longer Russia continues with its crass policy of brute force without a political process, and the longer the West ignores the region, the more likely it is that Chechen terrorists will join the global network of extremist criminal organisations which claim to operate in the name of Islam.
Initial – and as yet unconfirmed – indications already point to the presence of some Arab fighters among those who seized the school in Russia. These claims may not be true this time, but they will become a self-fulfilling prophecy the longer the Chechen war continues.
The fight against terrorism must involve a judicious mix of force and politics, and must remain global. Ignoring Chechnya in order to concentrate on the Middle East – the policy the US has followed for the last few years – has clearly stoked up even more trouble. And providing no political outlet for ethnic grievances merely increases the potential for terrorism.
Meanwhile, the terrorist threat is constantly evolving. Seen from this perspective, it is no wonder that President Bush politely declined to claim a victory in the war against terrorism when he accepted his party’s nomination for another term in office.
This is one battle where victories remain elusive, and where brains are just as important as brawn.
• Jonathan Eyal is director of studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London