Al-Qaeda is resurgent and seeking to carry out new terrorist atrocities against airliners and airports, the security minister Ben Wallace warned last night.
The terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks in 2001 poses a growing threat that is keeping ministers “awake at night”, he told The Sunday Times.
Wallace said intelligence had revealed that al-Qaeda was developing technology to bring down passenger jets. Whitehall officials say that could include miniaturised bombs. Islamists have also plotted to use drones packed with explosives to blow up key targets.
The disclosures will hasten the security crackdown under way at airports following three days of chaos at Gatwick which was brought to a standstill by rogue drone operators.
Wallace met airport bosses a week ago, before the Gatwick incident, to discuss the new menace, which also includes the “insider threat” of jihadist sleeper agents working undercover at airports.
“The aviation threat is real,” he said. “Aviation is still a blue riband event for these terrorists. Al-Qaeda are resurgent. They have reorganised. They are pushing more and more plots towards Europe and have become familiar with new methods and still aspire to aviation attacks.”
Wallace said ministers have ploughed £25m into a joint Home Office and Department for Transport research programme “on how to protect our planes even more from new chemicals, different methods of explosion and insider threats”.
He added that the decline of Isis meant al-Qaeda would seek to reassert itself as the world’s leading terror group and an aviation spectacular would be its calling card.
“Al-Qaeda sat quietly in the corner and tried to work out what the 21st century looked like, while Isis became the latest terrorist boy band, but they have not gone away. — they have reorganised. You’re seeing al-Qaeda appear in areas we thought were dormant,” he said.
Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are now active in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and other countries in the Middle East.
British intelligence chiefs are concerned that Donald Trump’s decision last week to withdraw US troops from Syria will create a new safe haven for Islamists to launch attacks on the West. The UK found out about his decision only when he tweeted it on Wednesday.
Security sources say sketches of drones designed to deliver bombs were discovered during a recent terrorist investigation in the UK,
British businesses have also been warned that Islamist terrorists are seeking to mount attacks using a drone armed with explosives or chemicals.
A threat assessment published by Pool Re, the government-backed terrorism reinsurer, states: “The vulnerability of airspace and the opportunity it provides to expand targets for an attack is increasingly recognised.”
The warning follows the use of drones by Isis in Syria and Iraq to deliver improvised bombs.
Wallace said improvements in airport security meant terrorists were less likely to smuggle explosive through terminal security systems: “They have explored other ways of getting bombs on planes. We’ve talked publicly about an insider threat issue. If you can’t get in the front door, you’re going to try to get in the back door.”
He pointed to a failed attack against an Australian airliner in July 2017 as evidence that aviation targets are still a favourite with terrorists: “In 2019 we should be alert to al-Qaeda. They are re-energising some previous links and support and their ambition towards aviation is real. We saw in Australia that terrorists do what works and they don’t give up.”
Al-Qaeda’s spiritual leader is still Osama bin Laden’s former deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. But Wallace said a new generation of leaders had “stepped up” and were “taking more decisions”.
He said that while al Qaeda was engaged on a “reunion tour” plotting “directed” attacks in the West, the Isis threat was now mainly one of inspiring home-grown jihadists to launch attacks in the UK.
“It is a different type of challenge, when people are sitting in their bedrooms on the internet, to predict their behaviour,” he said.
“Some of these guys talk about doing attacks for years. You can’t keep them under surveillance for years.
“They suddenly decide, ‘It’s Tuesday and I am going to go jump in a car and run over someone’.”
Wallace said 13 Islamist terror plots have been thwarted in Britain since March 2017.
While the sword of Isis flashed, the tentacles of al-Qaeda were spreading
While Isis has held the attention of the world since it swept across Iraq and Syria in 2014, al-Qaeda has lurked in the background, quietly building networks across the globe, Louise Callaghan writes.
Now, with Isis beaten back to a corner of the northeastern Syrian desert, attention is again falling on the old enemy in the war on terror.
On September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorism suddenly became the West’s chief security concern. An organisation led by Osama bin Laden, the son of a Saudi multi-millionaire businessman, killed thousands of American civilians on their home soil.
The US retaliated immediately and brutally. Al-Qaeda was hunted through Afghanistan and Pakistan — its training camps bombed and a campaign of drone strikes keeping members on the run.
Ten years later, a team of Navy Seals burst into a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed bin Laden along with others including his courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
Their leader’s death was a serious blow to the al-Qaeda represented by bin Laden and his acolytes — of bearded men hiding out in caves in the mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Soon afterwards came the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, the movement’s chief propagandist. Predictions of al-Qaeda’s demise came thick.
But as American drones flew over Pakistan, affiliates were springing up in other troubled parts of the world. In Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and beyond,
al-Qaeda has a presence. Though numerous, many of the affiliates are not closely tied to the central leadership. In 2016 Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s former branch in Syria, broke off relations with the group, preferring to go it alone.
A number of al-Qaeda plots against the West have been foiled in recent years and it still poses a threat, albeit one much reduced from the height of its powers.
“The al-Qaeda core in Pakistan has been hit hard in recent years and had not shown the capability to mount a terrorism spectacular in the West,” said Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on al-Qaeda. “Much of its time has been spent surviving. It has also tried to develop and work with affiliates but this has proven difficult.”
Al-Qaeda was started in 1988 in Peshawar as part of the campaign by mujahideen fighters against the invading Soviet forces, with the US providing millions of dollars for the battle against its Cold War foe. The mujahideen attracted large numbers of foreign fighters and inflicted big losses on the Soviet troops, which withdrew in 1989. By then, commanders were already looking towards new battlefields.
In recent years, al-Qaeda has worked to bolster its presence in Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan. This year it announced a new affiliate in Kashmir. Under the leadership of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former eye surgeon thought by some to have been the brains of al-Qaeda during bin Laden’s time, the organisation has grown. Together, the forces allied to the group number in the tens of thousands.
Unlike Isis, which always ruled by the sword, al-Qaeda has in the past tried to win the hearts and minds of local people and rebel groups. It avoids targeting Sunni civilians and often shies away from the type of gory propaganda videos favoured by Isis. In Syria its former affiliate, Hayat al-Tahrir al-Sham, presents itself as the legitimate government of the northwestern Idlib province. Much of the civilian population is not convinced.
Traditionally, al-Qaeda has mainly relied on donations as a source of funding, whereas Isis has had no qualms about smuggling oil, drugs and people to fund their operations. The two groups have come to blows in Syria, waging brutal military campaigns and asserting their own legitimacy to rule.
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