U.S. Spared As Terror Hits Abroad

Bombings In Egypt, India And Britain Shake World, U.S. Kept On Edge

(AP)  In 2005 the terror of exploding bombs and broken bodies gripped central London and teeming New Delhi, Egypt's holiday beaches and Jordan's hilltop hotels. But for the fourth year since the morning of 9/11, the U.S. homeland again was spared a major terror attack.

In the counterterrorist front lines, they're on edge.

"I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing," FBI Director Robert Mueller said early in the year, speaking of possible covert cells in America. Later, as the year waned, FBI analyst Donald Van Duyn told The Associated Press, "I think there's increasing pressure on al Qaeda to do something."

The counterterrorism campaign scored successes in 2005, killing or capturing key figures around the globe, including a supposed top al Qaeda operative, and sending scores to prison. In midyear, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf even ventured that "we have broken their back."

But al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahri remained at large, presumably in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. And not long after Musharraf spoke, al-Zawahri spoke, too, declaring in a videotape that America's losses from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when almost 3,000 people died, "are merely the losses from the initial clashes."

In Iraq in particular, terrorism's back was far from broken in 2005.

Hundreds of Iraqis continued to die in a seemingly endless string of suicide and other bombings, from a February car-bomb attack in Hillah that killed 125, mostly police and national guard recruits, to two days of bombings in mid-November that killed a like number of civilians at mosques and a funeral procession north and east of Baghdad.

Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror," President Bush asserted in a speech Nov. 30 at the U.S. Naval Academy. If so, it became such when the U.S. invasion in 2003 stirred up an insurgent resistance and drew hundreds of Islamic militants from the Arab world to expel the invaders.

Now the Iraq war is producing a new cadre of "professionalized" terrorists who will spread around the globe, the U.S. National Intelligence Council warns.

That blowback seems to have begun.

On Nov. 11 in Morocco, for example, authorities arrested 17 men who allegedly plotted to bomb tourist hotels, led by two European-Arab veterans of the Iraq conflict. The deadliest repercussion from Iraq had come two nights earlier, however, in Jordan's capital, Amman, when three bombers struck three international hotels simultaneously, killing themselves and 59 other people.

The carnage was worst at a wedding party, where the newlyweds' fathers and the bride's mother were among the dead. The three killers were Iraqis, and al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility, denouncing Jordan's ties to Washington. One bomber's wife, who herself failed to detonate an explosives belt that night, had three brothers who were killed by U.S. forces in Iraq, friends said.

Along with newly trained terrorists exported from Iraq, the al Qaeda movement in 2005 seemed to rely more on local "jihadists" who gain video inspiration from the movement, but little else.

Four suicide bombers who struck in London on July 7, killing 52 rush-hour commuters on underground trains and a bus, were British Muslims. In a video that surfaced later, one spoke of being inspired by bin Laden, al-Zawahri and Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.

"We are at war, and I am a soldier," said one of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, who had traveled to Pakistan in 2004.

In Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, too, the suicide bombers were believed homegrown.

On July 23, in Sinai's Sharm el-Sheik seaside resort, car bombs and a knapsack bomb tore through a luxury hotel, a market street and the entrance to a beach promenade, killing at least 64 Egyptians and foreign tourists. By October, Egyptian authorities were claiming they had killed the organizer and bombmaker, and had captured others connected with the plot.

A fourth major attack terrorized the people of New Delhi on Oct. 29, eve of a Hindu holiday in the Indian capital, when three bombs went off in markets packed with shoppers and on a bus, killing 60 people. Indian authorities, who quickly made arrests, blamed Muslim militants fighting for Kashmiri secession.

The tactics of terror, of killing innocents, of striking "soft" targets, besieged dozens of countries in 2005. Some like Spain and Sri Lanka have long been bloodied by nationalist insurgencies. In Bangladesh, rocked by a rash of bombings, the terror was relatively new. In Israel, the number of Palestinian suicide bombings fell, as a spotty cease-fire took hold and a 26-foot-high security barrier reached farther along the West Bank border.

Most of the bombings and assassinations occurred in the Islamic world, both on the periphery of Muslim militancy, from southern Russia to Indonesia's island of Bali, and in the Islamic heartland.

In Saudi Arabia, after a series of devastating attacks in 2003 and 2004, authorities aggressively hunted down terror suspects in 2005, killing two identified as leaders of al Qaeda's Saudi branch. Al Qaeda's al-Zawahri, in a tape that surfaced Dec. 11, acknowledged this "defeat."

In Indonesia, in a raid on his hideout on Nov. 9, anti-terrorist forces killed Azahari bin Husin, said to be a key bombmaker for the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah group.

In Pakistan's rugged tribal borderlands, U.S.-Pakistani teamwork led to a missile strike on a mud-walled house Dec. 1 that killed Hamza Rabia, described as a close aide to al Qaeda's al-Zawahri. Six months earlier, U.S. intelligence led Pakistani forces to the capture of Abu Farraj al-Libbi, reputed al Qaeda No. 3. By year's end, however, with al-Libbi in U.S. interrogators' hands, al Qaeda's elusive top two still appeared no closer to capture.

As they have since 2001, governments sought to toughen anti-terrorism laws — in Britain, for example, by allowing police to detain terrorism suspects for up to three months without charge. Since July's London bombings, the British also have sought to deport 10 Muslim militants, not for any crime, but because they allegedly helped create the "climate" for attacks.

In Spain, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere in 2005, scores of terrorists were convicted and sent away for years in prison. In a U.S. federal court, Zacarias Moussaoui, the only suspect to face U.S. charges in the Sept. 11 attacks, pleaded guilty in April to conspiring to commit terrorism and kill Americans, among other counts, and will be sentenced next year to death or life imprisonment.

But terror prosecutions sometimes faltered.

In the biggest Spanish case, with 17 defendants, suspects allegedly tied to the Sept. 11 attacks were convicted only on lesser charges. The same held true for Indonesia's Abu Bakar Bashir, reputed spiritual leader of the deadly Jemaah Islamiyah, who was sent to prison for only 2 1/2 years.

Later, from his cell, Bashir described the latest Bali bombings, killing 23 people in three tourist restaurants Oct. 1, as a warning from God.