Title: Al Qaeda Reaching Out To Non-Islamic Militant Groups
Author:  Paolo Pontoniere
Publication: Pacific News Service
Date: Nov 16, 2001
URL: http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2001/nov

Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization has already been linked to violent Islamic groups worldwide. But troubling reports from Europe link the terrorist group to a host of non-Islamic, anti-American organizations, including the continent's neo-Nazis. PNS contributor Paolo Pontoniere (pmpurpont@aol.com) is a freelance writer and a correspondent for Italy's leading news weekly, L'Espresso.

The leader of the Shiite anti-Israel Hezbollah organization believes that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda may be losing the battle in Afghanistan, but winning the war on terrorism.

While speaking to European reporters following the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, Lebanese Grand Mullah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who had previously condemned the attacks of Sept. 11, said that U.S. actions in Afghanistan were providing formerly unrelated terrorist groups with a common reason to attack the United States. "They will all attack America, and we will have a hard time controlling them," Fadlallah said.

Al Qaeda has already been linked to militant Islamic organizations in countries all over the world, from the Philippines to Algeria to the breakaway Russian province of Chechnya. Al Qaeda cells have been discovered throughout Europe. But reports in the European press now reveal troubling new associations between all sorts of non-Islamic, militant movements and bin Laden's terrorist organization.

Setting aside their differences, these groups -- representing diverse ideological viewpoints and religious beliefs -- seek to forge a united front to defeat what they see as a evil triumvirate poisoning the world: the United States, the consumerist West, and a Zionist lobby they say controls the whole affair.

European reporters and commentators increasingly track the connections.

According to London's Financial Times, an alliance may already be underway between two unlikely partners: Al Qaeda and central European neo-Nazis. Europe's neo-Nazis tend to be white, young, blue collar, and unemployed. They're also violent: In a two-year period, German neo-Nazis were responsible for about 1,000 ethnically related hate crimes. French neo-Nazis chalked up 500 such offenses in a single year.

Some of the crimes were against Muslims and Middle Easterners. Yet anti-Semitism shared by the neo-Nazis and Al Qaeda may provide common ground for cooperation. Interpol investigators suspect that the point of contact between Al Qaeda and the European neo-Nazis is Ahmed Huber, a flamboyant former Swiss journalist, now a businessman, who converted to Islam in the 1960s. Huber, according to Rome's La Repubblica, is a member of the board of directors of Nada Management, Al Qaeda's financial arm in continental Europe. According to the Financial Times, Huber has also worked to forge ties between Islamic fundamentalists and neo-Nazi movements in Switzerland and Germany.

In Germany, representatives from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a sort of Homeland Security Office, believe that Huber is part of a revisionist movement that maintains the Holocaust never happened. Huber considers himself a mediator between Islam and right-wing groups. A spokesperson for National Democratic Party, Germany's leading far-right political party, said recently that Huber has often been a major attraction at NPD rallies. Huber himself confirmed that he had already had some contact with associates of Osama bin Laden at an Islamic conference in Beirut, according to European media.

Al Qaeda has been connected to other non-Islamic terrorist groups:

In Ireland, army intelligence has been investigating the possibility that funds raised by Mercy International Relief Agency (MIRA), long identified as a money-laundering operation associated with Al Qaeda, may have ended up in the coffers of Real IRA, an Irish terrorist group noted for car bombings.

In Spain, investigators recently discovered a plan devised by Al Qaeda and ETA, the Basque terrorist organization, to car bomb a meeting of the leaders of the European Union.

In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group fighting the country's government, has been charged with selling millions of dollars of illegally mined diamonds to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. Al Qaeda reportedly resold many of the gems for a huge profit. Others were allegedly hidden as an asset to be used in case the network's bank accounts were frozen.

In Sri Lanka last September, following the attacks on the World Trade Center, media reported that the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam movement had developed links to Al Qaeda. Founded in 1976, the LTTE is the most powerful Tamil group in Sri Lanka. It is known to use illegal methods to raise funds, acquire weapons, and publicize its quest to establish an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka. Since 1983, LTTE has relied on a guerrilla strategy that includes the use of terrorist tactics and suicide bombing attacks.

Al Qaeda is clearly not an ant to be stepped on and eliminated. It's more like the head of an octopus, extending its tentacles all over the world, entwining resistance movements, the disaffected and criminals wherever they may be. A simple military policy will not suffice to confront such a new, nefarious phenomenon. The Western alliance needs simultaneously to develop its military solutions and a global strategy to address the underlying problems that give rise to terrorist impulses in the first place.