Saturday, March 20, 2004
MADRID BOMBING UP-DATE Lee Smith brings up an issue that I had considered before, namely that Madrid may have been targeted, because of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla:
If the Spanish electorate believed that committing 1,300 troops to Iraq had needlessly exposed it to the jihadists' ire, it ought to reconsider the 6,000 Spanish forces stationed in Ceuta and Melilla. The Spanish, whose new prime minister is fond of the word "occupation," say there's nothing unusual about having so many troops in Spanish cities. But these cities are not in Spain. Already some Islamist ideologues are beginning to group Ceuta and Melilla together with Palestine and Kashmir as Muslim lands to be liberated.
. . .
After the Madrid attacks, a number of journalists, academics, and other experts picked up on the idea, perhaps most fully expressed in Jason Burke's book Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, that al-Qaida may not be what many people think it is. It's not one vast organization with tentacles everywhere; it's a kind of franchise that helps with cash here, logistics there. Most important, it is the brand name of an umbrella ideology that all the jihadists subscribe to
Given that the attacks weren’t carried out by suicide bombers, I think the possibility that the perpetrators were Moroccan or Basque nationalists, perhaps working together, looks far more likely now. What this underlines again is that it is hard to differentiate terrorist groupings clearly from each other, they tend to clique together.
If the Spanish electorate believed that committing 1,300 troops to Iraq had needlessly exposed it to the jihadists' ire, it ought to reconsider the 6,000 Spanish forces stationed in Ceuta and Melilla. The Spanish, whose new prime minister is fond of the word "occupation," say there's nothing unusual about having so many troops in Spanish cities. But these cities are not in Spain. Already some Islamist ideologues are beginning to group Ceuta and Melilla together with Palestine and Kashmir as Muslim lands to be liberated.
. . .
After the Madrid attacks, a number of journalists, academics, and other experts picked up on the idea, perhaps most fully expressed in Jason Burke's book Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, that al-Qaida may not be what many people think it is. It's not one vast organization with tentacles everywhere; it's a kind of franchise that helps with cash here, logistics there. Most important, it is the brand name of an umbrella ideology that all the jihadists subscribe to
Given that the attacks weren’t carried out by suicide bombers, I think the possibility that the perpetrators were Moroccan or Basque nationalists, perhaps working together, looks far more likely now. What this underlines again is that it is hard to differentiate terrorist groupings clearly from each other, they tend to clique together.
