Word: islamists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Boualem Bensaïd was standing just meters away from people whose lives he is accused of tearing asunder in a 1995 bombing campaign in the Paris Métro. He showed no feeling save contempt. The alleged Islamist terrorist from Algeria - on trial last week with co-defendant Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem for three blasts in which eight people died and more than 200 were injured - dismissed both the charges against him and those in court who "claim to be victims of an attack." Insisting that "We are not the extremists here," Bensa...
...gulf states, by diverted money intended for Islamic charitable purposes and, even to this day, by investments in companies and real estate made with bin Laden's own sizable fortune. In any event, for local operations, terrorist cells are quite skilled at living off the environment. "Many Islamist terror plots in Europe and North America," says Jean-Francois Ricard, one of France's top antiterrorism investigators, "were self-financed through criminal activity--mainly stolen-car trafficking and, above all, credit-card fraud." When Kamel Daoudi, a French alleged al-Qaeda terrorist, was arrested in Britain last year, he had more...
...briefly defanged it in its most important lair in Afghanistan, but even there it has not been extinguished. Saudi Arabia, the chief exporter of this murderous ideology, remains protected by the West. Saddam Hussein is currently laboring to manufacture weapons of mass destruction that his allies in the Islamist terrorist network would dearly love to use on American soil. Suicide bombers have not relented in attempting to destroy the democratic state of Israel. Anti-Semitism, now as in the past the kernel of the totalitarian mind, has metastasized like a cancer throughout the Middle East and back into its ancient...
...long ago, the jihadists appeared to be moving from one success to another: first the Iranian revolution in 1979, then the successful guerrilla war that forced the Soviet army from Afghanistan in 1989. But in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War, for example, a rupture appeared between moderate Islamists--those of the pious middle classes imbued with conservatism--and the more radical movements that view the Wahhabi kingdom as a U.S. protectorate that must be destroyed. In the first half of the 1990s, radical fighters sought to repeat the Afghan victory by making jihad in Bosnia, Egypt and Algeria...
...underworld also provides an ongoing source of finance. European anti-terror officials, particularly in France, have noted that radical Islamist groups, including those linked with al-Qaeda, have over the years built an elaborate criminal infrastructure - relying on low-key logistical operatives rather than their best-trained combatants - that can generate a continuous flow of funds through seemingly apolitical petty crime, such as credit card fraud, car theft and so on. Even if these operatives are caught, they have in many instances been tried, convicted and sentenced to short spells in prison without their terror connection becoming apparent. Of course...