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The trial of 69 Turkish al-Qa'ida suspects charged with suicide bombings in Istanbul last November got off to a near-farcical start yesterday, as a Turkish court opened proceedings only to rule that it was unfit to hear the case under recent changes to the law.

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Al Qaeda cells largely operate independently of each other and without much horizontal or vertical contact.

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my understanding of al-qaeda, before the afghan war, was that:

i) in afghanistan

quote:

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Bin Laden set up a system to cream off the élite from the existing training camps to al-Qaeda. The camp administrators told the volunteers that the best of them would earn an audience with 'the Emir'. When bin Laden met them, his aides would pick the most promising and send them to more specialised camps where, instead of basic infantry techniques, they had psychological and physical tests, combat trials and finally instruction in the skills of the modern terrorist. Within a year, bin Laden had created the terrorist version of special forces.

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ii) they served as a financing and co-ordination clearing house for international jihad (i.e. they would pick and choose who had the best ideas, mohammad atta, come on down, you're the next contestant, and fund/network/safehouse them ... and the rest would get the CD-ROM/VCR take-home game sent in the mail from afghanistan)

post-afghan war,

the disturbing metaphor has been metastasis, whereby you may not have a centralized clearing house but networks are springing up, led by former jihadis or those inspired by sept 11th, i.e. istanbul, morocco (for casablanca/madrid), indonesia/JI, etc.

[ 02 June 2004: Message edited by: Willowdale Wizard ]