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It's unlikely al Qaeda is to blame for the uprising in Libya, as embattled strongman Moammar Gadhafi asserts—but the country is home to a young cadre of Islamist extremists, many of whom fought against U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As anti-government forces take over the eastern part of Libya, concern is growing that extremists from that region could take advantage of the government's disintegration to morph into a wider terrorist threat.
"We're obviously aware that terrorist groups or known terrorists will try to take advantage of the deteriorating security situation in Libya. It's something we're watching closely," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said.
Many of the suicide bombers in deadly attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq came from Derna, a city in eastern Libya, according to documents uncovered by U.S. soldiers in 2007. An American diplomat visiting Derna in 2008 called the city a "wellspring" of foreign fighters in Iraq, according to a cable recently released by WikiLeaks.
But Libya's violent extremists were focused less on waging international terror than on undermining the Gadhafi regime. In Derna, the U.S. was seen as propping up Col. Gadhafi after his 2003 renunciation of weapons of mass destruction. Fighters from Derna fought U.S. forces in Iraq as "a last act of defiance against the Qadhafi regime," the U.S. diplomat said in the 2008 cable.
For years, resistance to the government came from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, founded by veterans of Afghan jihad in the early 1990s. It aimed to topple Col. Gadhafi through assassination attempts and attacks on military and police. By the end of the decade a government crackdown had battered the terror group.
The group was in the orbit of Osama bin Laden—and al Qaeda's own leadership included several Libyans—but it refused to join al Qaeda's global jihad a year before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Later, a splinter group allied itself with al Qaeda, but by that time the LIFG and the Libyan government were negotiating a truce, brokered by the LIFG's then-leader Noman Benotman and Col. Gadhafi's son, Saif al-Islam. In 2009, the LIFG publicly renounced its violent efforts to overthrow the Gadhafi government and released more than 200 prisoners. The group, which remains in Libya, didn't entirely renounce violence.
Today, eastern Libya is home to a younger generation of extremists, Mr. Benotman said in an interview. While not as well organized as the LIFG a decade ago, they see violent jihad—or struggle against the enemies of Islam—as a religious obligation. That zeal, coupled with high unemployment and the region's historical role as a source of resistance, has kept Derna a hotbed of Islamist ferment against the crumbling Gadhafi regime—and American forces in the region, he said.
Rebel commanders and many citizens in eastern Libya said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal this week that they are aware of the region's reputation as an Islamist haven and stressed that they aren't sheltering Islamists in their ranks. They said there was no religious motivation for their uprising against Col Gadhafi.
Most North African terror groups have attacked primarily local targets. Mr. Vietor, the White House spokesman, said it was "certainly premature to draw any kind of conclusion about a Libyan parallel to what we see with" al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, the al Qaeda offshoot that launched two aborted attacks on the U.S. in the last two years.
(source:the wallstreet journal)
(source:the wallstreet journal)
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