WASHINGTON Ñ The United States is bracing for a terrorist attack during the current fast
month of Ramadan following suggestions of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaida in a tape broadcast last week.
National Security Advisor Condelezza Rice warned of Iraqi backing for terrorist strikes against Western targets, and Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden is believed to have relayed orders to
his followers to carry out a major attack. Officials said the orders could
have been
contained in a tape broadcast by Qatar's satellite television network
A-Jazeera.
The broadcast last week expressed empathy with Iraq and welcomed
Islamic attacks in the Middle East, Russia and other areas, Middle East Newsline reported.
"I am confident that very serious effort is being given not only to the
tape itself and whether or not it might represent the voice of Bin Laden,
but also to the content of the tape and what might be signaled in the
wording of the tape," Attorney General John Ashcroft said.
U.S. officials said Al Qaida and a range of Islamic insurgency groups
are planning a major strike against U.S. interests. They said the motive for
the attack is both the increased Islamic fervor during Ramadan as well the execution of the Pakistani Islamic
fundamentalist. On Thursday, Mir Aimal Kansi was executed after he was
convicted in the 1993 killing of two CIA agents.
National Security Advisor Condeleezza Rice said the Bush administration
can not rule out the possibility that Iraq and Al Qaida have joined forces
against the United States.
"If you look at a regime like Iraq, with growing capabilities in terms
of weapons of mass destruction and with extreme animus toward the United
States, and you look at the potential for that to link up with
terrorist organizations," Rice said, "you have to be concerned about that."
[In London, Britain's MI5 domestic intelligence agency has helped
capture three North African nationals who allegedly planned to release
cyanide gas on the London Underground. The detainees were said to be linked
to Al Qaida.]
"If we go to war with Iraq, Iraqi terrorists could be dispatched
throughout the world," Russell Ross, a senior analyst for the State
Department's Overseas Advisory Council, said. "Before the [1991] Gulf War
Iraq dispatched terrorist teams throughout the world to attack including
Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. Next time I fear Iraqi
teams will have better documents, better explosives and better armed
devices. They will be harder to detect."
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz agreed. "The most dangerous
assumption of all, I believe, is the assumption that Saddam would not use
terrorists as an instrument of revenge," Wolfowitz said.
So far, the FBI has issued a warning of an attack that could take place
over nearly the next three weeks of Ramadan. The fast is expected to end
around Dec. 5 and so far the United States has determined a yellow alert,
which signals heightened risk of attack.
Officials have also warned businessmen to be aware of the increased
dangers of traveling abroad. They said Iraq in cooperation with Al Qaida
could deploy killer squads to hunt for U.S. and other Western nationals.
Ms. Rice said the U.S. intelligence community
does not yet have hard evidence of such a collaboration.
