Al-Qaeda is again top news. But perhaps with the wrong story. The more frightening plot may have happened Northeast, not Northwest.
After the botched Northwest Christmas plot, we now know that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was in Yemen from August until the beginning of December. Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, it seems, provided the explosives and might even have trained with its own high-tech equipment to bypass airport scanners. All bad news. For analysts of jihadi terrorism and counterinsurgency, the Northwest plot is a tough nut to crack: so far, it has no obvious connection to NATO’s current war. Abdulmutallab was not radicalized and trained on Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s “human terrain,” so securing that terrain may be less relevant than assumed — he rather was part of a new terror fringe, “more resilient and more innovative, but less professional, less successful, and ideologically less appealing” than in the past, in the view some backbench analysts.
So why Northeast? All the brouhaha threatens to bury even more disturbing news: al-Qaeda, it seems, plotted to bomb the 2012 Euro football tournament in Poland. Perhaps the plot would have been one of the organization’s most spectacular attacks ever. Allegedly a large explosion was planned in a stadium, live on TV, in front of millions of world-wide soccer fans watching the game.
The details remain unclear: according to the Polish weekly Angora, the plot was foiled by Poland’s two main intelligence agencies, the Agencja Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego, in charge of Poland’s internal security, and the Agencja Wywiadu, the country’s foreign intelligence agency. The Polish services reportedly cooperated with the CIA and German intelligence, probably the Bundesnachrichtendienst. The operation began already in 2005 when American intelligence agencies tipped off the alleged Al-Qaeda terrorist plot to the Polish authorities.
The operation apparently was codenamed “Trybuna,” or “Stand.” At first the intelligence agencies ostensibly knew only that an terrorist cell planned a “major offensive” in Europe. Then the services, as was reported in the past days, intercepted messages that showed the soccer tournament may be the target. They were then “allowed to plant their explosives during refurbishment works on a stadium in Poland before being arrested and held by para-military units,” one Austrian paper reported.
We still need to learn more about the plot. Although it sounds credible, it may be a hoax. Most newpapers, information services (such as Stratfor), and a number of blogs picked up the story from one source, Angora. I initially saw it on Islam in Europe, a blog.
But if true, al-Qaeda’s soccer plot may be even more alarming than the Northwest plot. Mostly for its organizational sophistication and potential impact: apparently, to maximize effect, the jihadi plotters decided to postpone the attack until the tournament when Poland and Ukraine won the battle to organise Euro 2012. If true, they also planned ahead over an unusually long period of time, installing explosives during the refurbishment of a stadium.
Let’s hope that we get some more solid, detailed, and better-sourced information on this soon. It would be interesting to know who the plotters were, and if — or how — they were connected to Afghanistan or Pakistan. European and American authorities could be better in explaining how precisely terrorism and counterterrorism at home are connected to expeditionary operations abroad.
