The terrorists weren’t through yet, however. At about the same time as the Paradise Hotel was bombed, about 20 miles south, Capt. Rafi Marek of the Israeli charter serv-ice Arkia was just taking off from Mombasa airport with a full load of 261 passengers returning to Tel Aviv. At about 500 feet, he felt a thud. Marek’s first thought was that a bird had hit one of the wings. Marek checked the dials–no gas leaks, no system damage–and radioed Kenyan flight authorities that Flight 582 would continue its five-hour journey. But just as he heard the noise something else caught his eye–two white streaks bisecting the sky to his left. Those weren’t birds. They were shoulder-launched missiles.
The SA-7 missiles appear to have detonated near the plane, and the noise Marek heard may have been the force of the blast, or perhaps shrapnel. Israel swiftly sent two F-15 fighters to accompany the plane safely home. In the end, the low death toll from the combined attacks seemed to be little short of a lat–ter-day Chanukah miracle (the total: 16 dead, including the three car bombers). But the strikes were no less horrifying for that. Among the three Israeli dead at the Paradise: two boys, brothers, 12 and 13. “The two Israeli children were torn apart and completely burned. It’s indescribable,” said Yehuda Levinger, a 47-year-old Israeli businessman. But, as happened in 1998–when Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi–more Kenyans died than foreigners. Among them, six young members of a dance troupe that had just performed to welcome the Israeli tourists.
The sheer pitilessness of the attacks was the kind of thing Israelis have come to expect from Hamas or Islamic Jihad at home. But this was the first time in years that Israelis had been targeted abroad, and the coordinated nature of the strikes had all the earmarks of Al Qaeda. All of which suggested the terrorists were expanding their global war by trying to draw the much-resented Israelis into it. Over the weekend, federal authorities warned that missile attacks may also pose a new threat to American and other Western airports.
Intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK they believe the culprits may have been Al Qaeda and the Somali-based Islamist group Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya. The two organizations have worked together in the past, and Al-Itihaad may have access to SA-7s in the neighboring failed state of Somalia. According to a CIA report from last May obtained by NEWSWEEK, a foreign government source indicated that Al-Itihaad was planning attacks against U.S. interests in Mombasa, especially beach resorts. By last weekend Kenyan authorities had arrested 19 suspects, among them several Somalis and Pakistanis.
SA-7 missiles have appeared in Qaeda training films that were recovered from suspected safe houses in Afghanistan after 9-11. And last May, U.S officials said, the CIA warned U.S. government agencies about possible surface-to-air missile attacks on civil aviation–a warning prompted by the discovery of unfired SAMs at a site in Saudi Arabia. “Given Al Qaeda’s demonstrated objective to target the U.S. airline industry and its access to U.S. and Russian-made manpad [single-man] systems… the United States should remain alert to the potential use” of such missiles, said an FBI intelligence bulletin issued in May. Raanan Gissin, a longtime adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said Israeli investigators were looking hard at possible Palestinian or Hizbullah involvement. “In the past, we have seen evidence of collaboration between Al Qaeda and groups here,” he said. “This is definitely an angle we’ll be pursuing in the coming week.” An Israeli security official also said that authorities had stopped two Palestinian cells in the past year whose members were trained in Tikrit, Iraq, in a plot to fire missiles at airliners taking off from Tel Aviv airport. “We know these ideas [hitting airplanes upon takeoff] originated in Iraq,” he said.
The carefully orchestrated attack on Israelis so far from home suggests that Al Qaeda is no longer satisfied with simply invoking Israel as an enemy of Islam in taped messages. It may now want to divide the Bush administration from some of its Arab and European allies by provoking Israel to go global in its own struggle against terrorism. The terrorists realize how easily Western unity breaks down when it comes to support of Israel–precisely the unity that President George W. Bush is keen to maintain as he confronts Iraq. Case in point: when Treasury Under Secretary Jimmy Gurule traveled to Copenhagen recently to persuade the European Union to freeze the accounts of Islamic organizations believed to support terror, he was refused, NEWSWEEK has learned. The ground? The money links led to Hamas and Hizbullah, and the EU sees them less as terrorist organizations than as legitimate charities providing welfare to Palestinians and Lebanese.
The attacks may also hint at Al Qaeda’s desperation. Ironically, Al Qaeda’s possible attempt to draw Israel into its wider war comes at a time when the Palestinian intifada seems to be losing support among its own perpetrators. Yasir Arafat’s deputy, Abu Mazen, stunned his colleagues last week when he called the two-year-long intifada a failure. Similarly, a new poll shows that more Palestinians than ever before believe the intifada isn’t working.
Prime Minister Sharon, who won a landslide victory last week in his primary battle against Likud rival Benjamin Netanyahu, resumed his own months-long campaign to identify Israel’s war with America’s. He pledged swift retaliation and declared that the Kenyan attacks were part of a “world war against the terror.” (Sharon has also refused to promise that Israel will stay out of an Iraq war if it is attacked by Saddam Hussein.) An Israeli official noted the substantial U.S. presence in East Africa–FBI officials in Nairobi, U.S. Special Forces in nearby Djibouti–and said, “There will be a full [Israeli] exchange of information with Kenyans and Americans” and a “combined operation.”
A Bush administration official conceded there are “concerns in some quarters about how high-profile a role the Israelis play.” But, he added, “for their own domestic-policy reasons, they have to play a very prominent role because they were the target.” State Department officials tell NEWSWEEK they are also exploring how the United Nations Security Council could play “a leading role” in responding to the terrorist attacks against Israeli targets.
The Bush administration has plenty of reasons to feel cozy with the Israelis. Osama bin Laden’s remaining strategists seem to want to declare that no place on earth, no matter how idyllic, is safe. The Kenyan coast was the second beach resort in as many months, after Bali, to be hit with a devastating attack. And despite its near disaster in Mombasa, Israel has long years of experience in protecting its commercial planes. Shmuel Gordon, a Reserve fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, says surface-to-air missiles don’t pose big threats to civilian airliners. He says the SAM is old, its range is limited and it is hard to fire. “You have to be lined up directly with the runway and you have to fire it quickly after takeoff, before the plane rises out of range.”
While U.S. officials have occasionally discussed equipping planes with expensive “countermeasures,” Gordon believes aviation authorities can provide significant protection against missiles without spending too much money. He says the area around airports should be patrolled hourly by helicopters, and airline pilots should be instructed to achieve altitude quickly after takeoff. But the best way to deal with the threat is to prevent the attacks before they occur, he says, and that requires good intelligence. “It takes these groups a long time to prepare an attack, to train for it, to gather information and make connections in the host country,” says Gordon. “This gives security agencies a window of opportunity to act.” But as the terrorists expand their war to new targets and new places, authorities find that the risks as well as opportunities are multiplying.
title: “Open Season” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-04” author: “Ruby Hulsizer”
Another factor: in the first weeks of the U.S.-led occupation, a demonstration went wild and ended up with American soldiers from the 82d Airborne shooting 15 protesters dead in the streets. In this tribal Sunni Triangle town, that meant dozens more close relatives sworn to revenge. Then the U.S.’s First Marine Expeditionary Unit took over a few weeks ago, with much fanfare from its officers, who announced they were going to show their Army predecessors how to run a hearts-and-minds campaign. But they had hardly unpacked their rucksacks when another demonstration went wild, shots were fired from the crowd and five locals were killed–plus an Arab cameraman for ABC-TV and a U.S. Marine.
So it would be tempting to say that Fallujah hardly typifies this war, but it would be wrong. Certainly there are few communities where anti-American sentiment is as widespread as in Fallujah. But the savagery and utter abandonment of any sort of civilized conduct, so amply demonstrated on the streets of the city Wednesday, is actually pretty typical of the way the opposition has chosen to fight its war against American occupation everywhere else, as well. Wednesday’s attack itself was hardly the worst thing we’ve seen; in fact, since the victims had been armed, attacking them was arguably within the rules of war. Many of the attacks we’ve seen in just the past 10 days were clearly not; the victims often were attacked merely because they were civilians, many of them not even from Coalition countries. They included two Finnish businessmen, a German and a Dutchman, four missionaries working on a water project and a Time magazine translator. It’s become increasingly clear that any foreigner, and anyone working even remotely with foreigners, has become what the opposition regards as fair game, armed, or not. Attacks on Iraqis have been–if possible–even more savage, and divorced from any possible justification. Suicide bombs and ambushes of Iraqi policemen, who have now lost more men than the occupation forces, are one thing; the Americans chose and trained them. But the Shia who were slaughtered by teams of suicide bombers during the Ashoura festival in Karbala last month were doing nothing more than peacefully exercising their religious beliefs–something denied them under Saddam’s Sunni rule.
So we should really not be too surprised at what happened in the streets of Fallujah; it’s perfectly in character. In other places, the opposition doesn’t have the numbers and widespread support they do in Fallujah; but they have the same vicious streak. After four men with AK-47s ambushed the two unarmored vehicles, firing into them until they were sure the occupants were all dead, they immediately left the scene. Then the crowd took over. The victims’ cars were set afire, and their bodies pulled from them and set upon, kicked, dragged, stoned, hacked at and beaten with metal poles. A 10-year-old boy chanting slogans for Saddam stomped on the face of one of the corpses, while his elders danced around encouraging him. Several men took up shovels and dismembered a couple of the victims. Pieces were cut off and strung up on poles. They were tied to a pickup truck, to a small car and to a donkey, and dragged through the streets in the center of Fallujah, where two of the bodies were hoisted onto a bridge and hung there, for passersby to abuse the bodies further. There’s even one account, impossible to verify, that one of the victims was still alive when set afire. Those who couldn’t get to the bodies themselves stoned and pounded on the destroyed vehicles. When police recovered the bodies many hours later, they could only find three–the fourth either stolen, or destroyed beyond any recognition as human remains.
Coaliltion spokesmen tried to depict that as the work of a small minority, even in Fallujah. “The cowards and ghouls who acted yesterday represent the worst of society,” said Coalition spokesman Dan Senor today. Unfortunately, in Fallujah, they represent most of the society.
What is surprising is that four American contractors would have put themselves into such a vulnerable situation, in such a well-known trouble spot. The victims apparently worked for Blackwater Security Consulting, a North Carolina-based security company that specializes in close-protection VIP details and has the high-profile, no-bid contract to provide bodyguards for L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator. U.S. officials have released little detail about why they were in Fallujah, except to say they were guarding food convoys into the area. Not only does that sound improbable, but there was no sign of any trucks being escorted by them at the time. However, Iraqi eyewitnesses interviewed on the street in Fallujah today say the two SUVs carrying the four victims were actually part of a four-vehicle convoy but that the two other SUVs managed to escape after the attack. Standard operating procedure for close-protection details is to put the people they’re protecting into more expensive and less maneuverable armored cars, and then follow in soft-skinned cars with the shooters. But U.S. officials insist there were only two cars.
The incident is inexplicably mysterious, even two days later. Witnesses in Fallujah insisted that one of the four victims, all of whom had been armed with sidearms and long weapons, was a woman, described as fair-skinned, red-headed and dressed in a military uniform. Military spokesmen, however, described all four as men. When did it happen, even? Witnesses say 11 a.m. or noon on Wednesday, Iraqi police say 9 or 10 a.m. and Coalition spokesmen say about 8 a.m. And why did the Marines, who have troops stationed on the outskirts of Fallujah, fail to respond to the scene, either during or after the attack–at least not as of late this afternoon, 30 hours after the incident?
No doubt the Marines were concerned that the initial attack was only to bait the military to come in and get jumped on by an even bigger ambush, a la Mogadishu. But any sign of vacillation seemed likely to embolden the insurgents into further attacks, and today the Coalition’s military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, all but declared war on Fallujah. “We also have the opportunity to persuade the people of Fallujah that there are other alternatives to violence. One of those alternatives to violence is not for the Coalition forces to stay outside of Fallujah. They are coming back. They are going to hunt down the people responsible for this bestial act. It is up to … people in Fallujah to determine if they want to do it with a fight or without a fight.” He suggested that Fallujah “city officials should get out from behind their desks” and turn the culprits over–or else. There’s little chance of that, and the “or else” won’t be pretty, whatever happens.
