Is Al Qaeda focusing on small-scale attacks?
By ANISunday, October 31, 2010
WASHINGTON - US authorities believe Al Qaeda is focusing on small-scale attacks against the West.
If the latest terrorist plots are less spectacular than 9/11, or the failed 2006 Heathrow plot against several trans-Atlantic jetliners, that doesn’t mean that Al Qaeda has become less dangerous, terrorism experts say.
Authorities said that parcel bombs bound from Yemen to the United States were addressed to two Jewish places of worship in Chicago.
US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the evidence collected so far is consistent with the idea that Al Qaeda may be behind this latest terror threat.
“All the hallmarks of Al Qaeda. I think we would agree with that, that it does contain all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda and in particular Al Qaeda,” Napolitano said in an interview on ABC News.
Al Qaeda may have pivoted and be “slowly raising a new army designed to wage traditional urban warfare,” Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations said recently, in a commentary co-authored with Jonathan Stevenson of the US Naval War College.
“There are indications that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are growing less attached to the kinds of spectacular attacks they once seemed to prefer,” a US official said.
He added: “They’re looking more and more to less sophisticated, less costly, and perhaps less detectable operations.”
Such attacks may achieve an important side goal-avoiding Muslim casualties that have been criticized by jihadist dissenters. (ANI)
