KUWAIT: Detained members of an Al-Qaeda-linked group planned to attack Kuwait’s Shuaiba oil refinery during the holy month of Ramadan, a security official said on Wednesday.
Kuwait said on Tuesday it had foiled a plan by the six-member Al-Qaeda-linked network to bomb the Camp Arifjan, the main US base in the country, state security headquarters, and “important facilities,” but gave no further details on the other potential targets.
“The group planned to attack Shuaiba during Ramadan,” the security official told Reuters.
The aging 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) Shuaiba plant is the smallest of the OPEC member’s three refineries, which have a combined capacity of around 930,000 bpd.
Al-Qaeda, hard hit by government forces across the Arabian Peninsula, appears to be trying to regroup around its Yemeni wing, which announced plans earlier this year to widen the scope of operations to include the rest of the oil-exporting region.
Al-Qaeda leaders have repeatedly called for attacks on oil facilities and Western interests in the Gulf to destabilize the countries in the region and harm the economies of Western countries by blocking the flow of oil to their industrial economies.
Members of the cell, led by a surgeon at one of the Gulf state’s hospitals, confessed to planning attacks aimed at pressuring the United States to remove Kuwait-based troops, Al-Anbaa newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing unidentified sources, it said, were familiar with the investigation.
Kuwait was the launch pad for the 2003 US-led war on Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. The US Army uses sites in Kuwait as a logistics base to support troops in Iraq. Camp Arifjan is located south of the capital Kuwait.
The cell used Google Earth to acquire images of the refinery, the camp and a state security building, Anbaa said.
Al-Qaeda has waged attacks in Kuwait in recent years and bombed foreign housing complexes and oil sites in Arab states, but a crackdown by governments in the region has succeeded in preventing fresh violence. “This refinery is very well protected,” said a Kuwaiti oil official. “There is really no way to approach it by land.” Kuwait bolstered security around Shuaiba in 2005 and tightened measures to protect oil installations in 2007 after Saudi Arabia foiled an Al-Qaeda plot that included plans to attack a major oil facility.
Political analyst Shafiq Ghabra says the planned withdrawal of US troops from Iraq has not discouraged Al-Qaeda from planning attacks on Arab countries.
Al-Qaeda is now struggling to reassert its presence after setbacks in Iraq and Pakistan, Ghabra added. “They are trying to hit wherever they feel there is a weakness.” After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on US cities, there were a number of Al-Qaeda-inspired attacks in Kuwait, including a raid that killed one US Marine and wounded another in October 2002. The government has since waged a largely successful campaign to stamp out violence by militants.
