The Next Big Terror Network

The raging battles between Lebanon's armed forces and fighters from the al Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam provide disturbing proof that an over-abundance of jihadist volunteers for the Iraqi war has created a back-wash of extremists plotting violence and terror in the Middle East. But what the reports covering the current conflicts largely fail to note is that the violence is the inevitable consequence of a much broader evolution: the use of the Syria-Lebanon region as a center for disparate radical groups initiating contact, creating alliances, and cooperating in terror planning targeting all three shores of the Mediterranean.

"The chaos and instability in Lebanon, and blind eye usually turned in Syria, has created an atmosphere similar to what existed in Afghanistan in the late 1990s up to 2001," says a French counter-terrorism official. He says the war raging in Iraq combined with violence in Lebanon and Israel has created ambient confusion and political tension that has allowed extremists to operate with greater freedom. "That flux has been used to apply the original idea and operational mode of al Qaeda: establish a milieu within which like-minded jihadist individuals and groups can meet, inter-face, and coordinate. And thanks to the more organized armed groups like Fatah al-Islam, they’ve also be able to get training in terror techniques in houses in northern Lebanon."

Indeed, while the attacks by Fatah al-Islam have taken some by surprise, security officials say the group is merely the most openly belligerent and audacious movement to have taken root as recruits who had originally planned to join the Iraqi conflict pile up in surrounding nations, itching for action. The French official calls Fatah al-Islam only one of several similar, loosely-associated organizations now operating between Syria and Lebanon as al Qaeda-inspired militias that provide terror training to other radicals converging on the region from Europe and north Africa. But as the Lebanese Army's current artillery pounding of Fatah al-Islam strongholds suggests, the group's relatively high profile has left it far more open to retaliation than the many other informal groups forming among individual radicals in the area. While that concentration of extremists has become a threat for the stability of Lebanon — and yet another means for Syria to create havoc — French security experts say the freedom of movement and cross pollination that have allowed groups like Fatah al-Islam to take form poses serious terror threats elsewhere.

Back in September 2005, security authorities in the region and Europe got proof of the phenomenon following the bust of a terror cell plotting violence in Paris. Though its operatives were initially thought to have been acting under the influence of an Algerian jihadist group that now calls itself al Qaeda in Islamist Maghreb, officials later learned the Paris plot in fact arose from an April 2005 meeting in Damascus aimed at networking disconnected radical groups and plots. The gathering was organized by an al Qaeda-allied recruiter of fighters for the war in Iraq: Abu Ibrahim al-Tunisi, a Tunisian who was killed in 2006 in combat in Iraq. The goal of the Damascus summit, the French source says, was simple: "Get committed extremists from various places together, and work out ways their different objectives and efforts could be assisted through cooperation."

French investigators learned of the accords after a plotter was arrested in Algiers, and provided information leading to the surveillance and arrest of his fellow plotters. Further confirmation of the agreements came last January, when a dozen Algerian-trained Tunisian jihadists were killed in a gun battle with police shortly after returning to Tunisia to stage terror strikes. The massive bombing of government buildings that killed over 30 in Algiers last April would also suggest the Algerian radicals behind it may have similarly benefited from the Damascus cooperation before authorities began unraveling it.

But while al-Tunisi and the broad collective of radical networks he brought together may no longer pose a terror threat, European officials are still troubled and concerned about the free-flowing extremist milieu that created Tunisi's plot. And while Fatah al-Islam may be in a battle for its existence with the Lebanese Army, its infrastructure will remain useful for aspiring jihadists in the future. "The houses used for training people in terror techniques with explosives and poison may not turn out the vast numbers of operatives that the Afghan camps did, but they are turning out the human raw material for terrorism," the French official warns. "And while we've arrested some people who have trained in them, we also know [that there are] others from France [who] have as well — though we don't know who they are yet. We're hoping people being arrested in Lebanon right now may be able to tell us who they are — and very soon."