PARIS, 14 September 2004 — Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group has failed miserably in its political aims, leaving behind a trail of freelance terror and chaos that is backfiring on the Muslim world, according to French expert Gilles Kepel.
Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, his right-hand man and main strategist, originally hoped the spectacular Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington would mobilize the masses in Muslim countries to bring Islamist rulers to power.
But all they have succeeded in doing is creating imitators whose bloody attacks are undermining the jihadist cause by creating uncontrolled strife, said Kepel, head of Middle East Studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.
“Three years after Sept. 11, the jihad has turned against those who launched it,” he said in an interview.
“They haven’t succeeded in seizing power anywhere and the only state they controlled, the Taleban emirate (of Afghanistan), was destroyed,” he said at the weekend as New York marked the third anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.
“But they have created imitators and they have spread — and that’s the most worrying,” he said.
Kepel, a fluent Arabic speaker who frequently comments on Islamic issues in France and abroad, describes this evolution in his latest book, “The War For Muslim Minds”, which has just been published in French and English.
Meanwhile, Switzerland said yesterday it had completed a blacklist of people and groups linked to Al-Qaeda or the Taleban, adding eight individuals and six organizations to a list of those already subjected to financial sanctions and barred from entering Swizerland.
Six of the eight new people on the list live in the Varese region in northern Italy, near the border to the Swiss canton of Ticino.
The residence of the two others is not known, according to information published by the Federal Department of Economy.
The six new organizations on the list are all branches of the Al-Hamarain organization based in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Albania, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and the Netherlands. In all, 174 individuals and 111 organizations are now on the Swiss terrorist blacklist.
In addition, 82 bank accounts with combined holdings of about 34 million Swiss francs ($27 million, 22 million euros) have been blocked.
In a related development, a suspect told an Istanbul court that Al-Qaeda financed the bomb attacks against two synagogues and the British Consulate in Istanbul that killed a total of 63 people in November 2003.
Adnan Ersoz, who faces a possible term of life in prison without parole, said the money was brought to Turkey by an unidentified “Syrian militant... $50,000 (about 41,000 euros) of it via Europe and the other $100,000 via Iran.”
“We cannot speak of an Al-Qaeda branch in Turkey, but there were ties of mutual assistance between the group that committed the bombings and Al-Qaeda, and the money came from Al-Qaeda,” Ersoz said.
Ersoz denied participating in the attacks, saying he was in Iran at the time and news of the bombings caught him by surprise.
In the third session of the trial that opened on May 31, Ersoz admitted to having trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan and met top Al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama Bin Laden in Kandahar before Sept. 11, 2001, but denied he was a member of the terror group.
Ozer said the presumed leader of the terrorist group that planned the Istanbul attacks, Habib Akdas, had approached him several times, asking him to help bring into the country the cash to finance the attacks, but he refused.
