jerusalem | Reports that an al Qaida cell in Lebanon fired Katyusha rockets on northern Israel last week would not be the first sign that Osama bin Laden’s organization is moving into the neighborhood.
For some time, Israeli officials have noted that groups identifying with al Qaida — or the global jihad — are determined to acquire operational footholds close to Israel’s borders.
The most dramatic sign of this development was the Nov. 9, 2005 suicide bombing of three Jordanian hotels in Amman by al Qaida Mesopotamia — the organization led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian insurgency leader fighting the United States in Iraq.
Militant Islamic Web sites immediately announced: “After the attack in the heart of Jordan, it will soon be possible to reach Jewish targets in Israel.”
Dismissing the value of Israel’s security barrier, al Zarqawi’s Web site declared that the “separation wall … will feel the might of the mujahideen,” implying that his insurgent volunteers that had been used in Iraq might also be employed against Israel.
In the most recent attack Dec. 27, a volley of rockets landed in a residential neighborhood of Kiryat Shemona, causing damage but no casualties.
Israel blamed the attack on a radical Palestinian militia and bombed one of its bases near Beirut. Israeli officials would not immediately comment on the al Qaida statement.
“A group of al Qaida lions planned … a new attack on the Jewish state,” the al Qaida statement said. “The brothers accomplished their mission as it was planned and succeeded in their escape.”
It said the al Qaida fighters fired 10 rockets into northern Israel.
In August, an al Qaida rocket strike in the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba also reached Eilat. Al Zarqawi has been seeking to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and there is still a state of emergency in Amman because of warnings of terrorist attacks.
Until recently, Israel was not a high-priority target for al Qaida and affiliate organizations that have embraced its goals of worldwide jihad.
Al Qaida was formed in Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat in 1989 by the various mujahadin groups that were emboldened by their victory over a superpower and hence sought to carry their war to other arenas. Given its geographic location, however, the early al Qaida was more involved in militant Islamic struggles in Chechnya, Kashmir and against the Taliban’s Afghan rivals in the Northern Alliance — but not in the war against Israel.
Bin Laden’s 1990s obsession with the idea of evicting the United States from Saudi Arabia made America his primary target. Israel, according to historian Bernard Lewis, was at best a third priority. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, was in full agreement, according to writings of his from the 1990s that the route to Jerusalem came through the jihad in Algeria and Egypt.
The first indication that this prioritization began to shift came as al Qaida perpetrated a hotel bombing and a missile attack on an Israeli Arkia airliner in Mombassa, Kenya, in November 2002.
But the greatest factor behind the new focus of the global jihad on Israel has been the war in Iraq led by al Zarqawi, which has created a new center for radical Islamic militancy in the Middle East. “Among the greatest positive elements of this arena [Iraq] is that it is jihad in the Arab heartland,” al Zarqawi wrote in 2004.
For al Zarqawi, the main battle of Islamic militancy was to be fought here and not in the Hindu Kush mountains bordering Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan. “The true, decisive battle between infidelity and Islam is in this land, i.e., in [Greater] Syria and its surroundings,” he wrote.