Posted on 05/21/2007 1:07:34 PM PDT by Sleeping Beauty
Maritime terrorism is positioned to be al Qaeda’s method of choice, according to an Israeli intelligence expert.
“In the near future we will witness more maritime attempts to disrupt the oil flow in the Persian Gulf and against cruise ships,” writes Akiva J. Lorenz of the Israel-based International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in a May 2007 paper.
Terrorists might sink a vessel in order to disrupt narrow chokepoints vital to trade.
“Six of the nine chokepoints in the world are located in geographical areas where local terrorist groups with ties to Al Qaeda possess maritime capabilities,” Lorenz writes.
Sinking a tanker at one particular chokepoint could block all traffic, according to Lorenz.
“As a result, the world economy would experience a sudden shortfall of 90 percent of Saudi crude oil and all of Kuwaiti and Iraqi crude oil,” he says. Some of the oil could be sent through an alternate route, but “the massive cut to the oil supply would increase the oil price to unknown heights.”
At another major chokepoint, sinking a ship could lead to re-routings that require much greater travel time, potentially costing over $500,000 per ship.
Among other maritime security concerns, al Qaeda possesses 23 ships, according to intelligence cited in the paper.
The al Qaeda ships were used to smuggle explosives to Kenya and Bali in preparation for the attacks in 1998 and 2002, and to smuggle terrorist operatives into European countries, according to the paper.
It also says that ships can also be used to launder illicit funds for a terrorist organization.
The “mastermind of maritime terrorist operations” for al Qaeda was Abdul al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the paper. Now detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, al-Nashiri developed plans to attack U.S. warships and crash a small aircraft into a ship, it says.
Al-Nashiri also considered using underwater demolition teams, and using a small boat packed with explosives to ram a ship or blow up a port, the paper says.
“Among the most experienced traditional terrorist groups that possess maritime capabilities are the Middle Eastern Palestinian Liberation Front, Fatah, Hezbollah and the South East Asian Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah,” the paper says.
They could easily set up a travel agency and get a thousand naive college kids on Spring Break to be taken hostage.
What’s old is new, again (Barbary Pirates circa. 18th & early 19th centuries). That’s where the line “to the shores of Tripoli” came from in the Marine Corps Hymn.
http://www.crf-usa.org/bria/bria18_1.htm
Exactly! I thought of that when I posted this.
Dammit I wish somebody would invent satellites so we could track these ships /s
“Naive college kid” is definitely redundant...
Of all Al Qaeda schemes I would think this would be the easiest to defend against.
Sink known Al Qaeda ships, arm merchant ships and/or have military ships in likely areas. The Somalia coast for instance.
It’s not like they can sneak up with any vigilance.
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