Word: mombasa
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...Mombasa shooters used an antiquated Soviet-era SA-7 Strela that missed only because of equipment malfunction or operator error. Shoulder-launched SAMs are efficient and easy to fire and require little instruction; al-Qaeda trainees were taught how to use them in the Afghan camps. The U.S. supplied hundreds of shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to the mujahedin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan; Washington was so concerned about their potential for trouble afterward that it offered as much as $100,000 per missile to try to buy them back. But shoulder-fired missiles made in Yugoslavia, Pakistan and China slosh...
...Mombasa highlights the diffuse configuration of terrorism today. In Kenya, sleeper cells or refugees from Afghanistan or remnants of the embassy-bombing conspiracy still operate. Several suspects from the 1998 plot are still at large, including two Mombasa-based men who, according to court records, bought the suicide truck. Locals may have relied on al-Qaeda coordinators to bring in weapons and then conducted the attack themselves...
...intelligence agents from three countries comb the Mombasa rubble, an area group in their sights is the extremist al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI), based in Somalia. With 2,000 members, it is the largest, most powerful radical band in the Horn of Africa and has been funded by al-Qaeda in the past. Its aims and activities have focused on Somalia, but U.S. intelligence has uncovered AIAI cells in Kenya. "It is possible this was the work of AIAI, done in concert with al-Qaeda," says an American intelligence agent...
...Qaeda is indeed responsible for Mombasa, it will mark the first time the group has deliberately spilled Israeli blood. Osama bin Laden has railed against Israel for years but never struck against its people. The Mombasa attacks followed anti-Israeli references on his latest audiotape. For the administration of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, these attacks offered evidence to back up its long-standing argument, now gaining ground in Washington, that Israel's problems with the Palestinians are simply a subset of a world-terrorism conspiracy. On the same day as the Mombasa attacks, when Sharon's Likud Party was holding...
Born on Dec. 28, 1982, in Mombasa, Kenya, while her parents were on vacation there, Smith spent her first eight years in Somalia and then moved to Luxembourg, where she graduated from the European School of Luxembourg. Her family moved to France after she came to Harvard in the fall...