What Is Al-Qaeda Without Its Boss?

By John Cloud

With U.S. forces in Afghanistan zeroing in on the leaders of the al-Qaeda network, one was tempted to imagine that Osama bin Laden and his top men were burning in an-Nar, the Koran's hell--and that the war on terrorism was coming to a close. But is the outlook really so clear? Will the network's foot soldiers retreat and hide, the hydra withering after its bearded heads are lopped off? Or can the beast survive even if bin Laden and his lieutenants are dead or captured? Can al-Qaeda operatives around the world keep terrorizing without their leaders' instructions?

Intelligence analysts in many of the 50 or so nations with an al-Qaeda presence are gaming out multiple scenarios, all highly speculative, but most observers agree that the network could still function without its board of directors. After all, the base has long been more metaphor than description; it's not as though there was a headquarters building. Rather, al-Qaeda provided training and inspiration to about 11,000 men--according to U.S. intelligence estimates--who passed through its Afghan camps. Al-Qaeda's leaders sent them back home with like-minded compatriots, a knowledge of explosives and heady ideas about global jihad. Many were willing to travel for a fight--perhaps to Chechnya and Bosnia, perhaps to the top floors of the World Trade Center.

"This movement, these groups, are far too spread out, diffuse and fluid for a single operation to knock them out," says Irene Stoller, who in May retired after 13 years as director of France's antiterror division. "Bin Laden and his lieutenants may seem from the outside like super-managers of international Islamist terror, but the real planning and execution is carried out at lower levels."

The question is, Will people at those lower levels continue to plan and execute strikes against the West, vivifying bin Laden's dreams of far-flung struggle? Or will they perhaps return to their native countries and direct their anger toward the homegrown grievances that so radicalized them in the first place? Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis. Would they have tried to battle their kingdom's supposed Islamic impurities--its corrupt princes, its hosting of U.S. soldiers--if bin Laden and his men hadn't given them another venue for their rage?

Though the answers are admittedly guesswork, French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard is among those who expect many al-Qaeda operatives to migrate home. "With the fall of Afghanistan, we'll be seeing a lot of 'ex-Taliban' and 'ex-al-Qaeda' without sanctuary. These people will probably return home to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and elsewhere to take up struggles there."

Mustafa Alani agrees. A Middle East expert at the London-based Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, he believes that many al-Qaeda operatives in Europe already have slipped away and gone back to their homelands, in part to avoid the law-enforcement dragnet on the Continent. "There are always guidelines about what to do in an emergency," he says, noting that terrorist groups like Egypt's al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and Egyptian Islamic Jihad always provided operatives with support teams to help arrange transportation along preplanned escape routes. A senior U.S. official told TIME recently that "bin Laden has always been a good forward thinker."

Which is one reason the Bush Administration will not ease its frantic domestic hunt for terrorists even after bin Laden and his lieutenants are caught. It's conceivable that a cell somewhere in the U.S. is just waiting for bin Laden to die so that it can unleash some bloody vengeance. Despite events in Afghanistan, the FBI believes al-Qaeda will try to strike a large gathering of Americans or a prominent U.S. site here or abroad. FBI counterterrorism officials are in Utah scrutinizing security for the Olympics in February.

FBI leaders have believed for weeks that any surviving players from the Sept. 11 attacks who had been in the U.S. fled the country shortly afterward. In fact, its investigators are most intensely interested in finding al-Qaeda operatives who were based not in the U.S. but in Germany--Said Bahaji, Ramzi Binalshibh and Zakariya Essabar. Friends of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, the three are suspected of having plotted the attacks with him in Hamburg and have been indicted on terrorism charges. As TIME reported last month, U.S. officials think Binalshibh was intended to have been the 20th hijacker on Sept. 11; he couldn't get a visa to enter the country for reasons that officials have not explained.

Outside bin Laden's inner circle, the most senior figure worrying U.S. investigators is Mustafa Ahmed, a.k.a. Shaikh Saiid, the bin Laden business manager and Sept. 11 paymaster who was in the United Arab Emirates until shortly before the attacks. Ahmed has the skills and connections to put together funding for another terrorist operation--and he doesn't need bin Laden's money. Investigators have learned over the past few weeks that al-Qaeda's money comes from many varied sources beyond bin Laden, including gem miners who help raise funds for the group in Tanzania; contraband traders in the Muslim-heavy border region where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet; and workers at charities throughout the Mideast.

"Bin Laden never needed to use his own money to finance his activity," says Jacquard. "He always found it from Islamic charities, solidarity funds for the Afghan jihad, etc. The flow of that money--more than $300 million per year--continues. And it will take years, if not decades, of Western pressure on Arab societies to submit the sources and conduits of such funds to regulation. If bin Laden disappears, someone else will step up and find the same funding he did. If no one steps up, the money will find its way to people at lower levels--until things radically change."

No one is predicting with confidence who might emerge to run al-Qaeda if its current leadership is decimated. Jacquard believes that one individual to watch in a post-Osama world is Rifa'i Taha, who leads al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the group that claimed responsibility for the 1997 terrorist attacks on tourists in Luxor, Egypt. A co-founder of bin Laden's international jihad, Taha actually distanced himself from al-Qaeda earlier this year. He argued for focusing jihad activity on corrupt regimes in Arab lands, something bin Laden forsook to concentrate on the U.S. Taha's whereabouts are unknown, but last week, a well-connected Cairo publication reported that he had been arrested in Syria and handed over to Egyptian authorities. They would not confirm the story.

Might al-Qaeda refocus its fury closer to home? Possibly, yet working against Arab regimes from within their restrictive confines is tricky. Bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, served three years in an Egyptian prison in connection with the 1981 murder of President Anwar Sadat and afterward decided it would be better to be a terrorist outside his native land. He eventually moved to Afghanistan with bin Laden. The Egyptian government's unforgiving policies on terrorism, though decried by human rights groups, have brought a relative calm over the past four years.

Other Middle Eastern countries, particularly Lebanon and Yemen, aren't as thoroughly policed. Jordanian and Israeli intelligence officials have told TIME that there are al-Qaeda operatives from the Philippines, Egypt, Afghanistan and Lebanon at Lebanon's Ein al-Hilweh camp for Palestinian refugees. Al-Qaeda appears to be using the camp as a Middle East base, having cemented ties with the camp's extremist Palestinian Islamist group, Usbat al-Ansar, a year ago. Thanks to Usbat al-Ansar, the camp is a virtually autonomous area where the government has no authority.

Similarly, the Yemeni government lacks control over large patches of its country, which is home to many bin Laden followers. Like Afghanistan, Yemen has remote, mountainous regions that provide ideal havens for terrorists. The attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 was carried out by Saudi citizens of Yemeni origin as well as some Yemeni nationals (including Mohammed Omar al-Harazi, the suspected organizer of the bombing, who is being sought by the FBI and Yemeni authorities). Yemen has powerful tribal warlords and government officials whose sympathies and connections with bin Laden run deep.

Still, the Yemeni government has tried hard in recent weeks to keep its borders closed so that its Islamic extremists can't fight alongside the Taliban. Across the Middle East, hundreds of jihad organizers used to help send such fighters abroad with government approval. Thousands of Yemenis, Saudis and Gulf state nationals joined the Afghan mujahedin battling the Soviets in the 1980s and the Bosnian Muslims fighting Serbia in the '90s. But now many of those same jihad organizers have been detained by their governments. Officials learned the hard way that encouraging jihad can mean fomenting dissent at home when the radicalized fighters return from their battles.

Arab crackdowns could eventually just drive Islamic extremists to nations more respectful of civil liberties. Most countries in Europe--particularly France, Spain and Italy--are aggressively pursuing any suspected al-Qaeda members or sympathizers. But the British and Canadians have always been more squeamish about police tactics that require some religious and ethnic profiling. "London, all on its own, is home to probably more dangerous extremist leaders than Afghanistan," snipes a French terrorism expert. "These people and their intimates are the European command [of al-Qaeda]. There's no reason to imagine they'd stop simply if al-Qaeda or its leaders took a blow in Afghanistan."

One worrisome figure in Britain is Abu Qatada, a London-based Islamic cleric wanted in Jordan for alleged terrorist offenses. (Qatada told the Washington Post he was a "simple teacher of Islam" with a "big mouth.") The British government has given him sanctuary for years. However, it did recently freeze his bank account at the request of the U.S. And last week Home Secretary David Blunkett published a package of emergency legislation--expected to be law before Christmas--that includes the right to indefinitely detain foreign terrorist suspects who cannot be deported because of the risk they might be tortured or put to death in the countries that want them.

By now it's a truism that terrorism can't be eradicated 100%. Even in the U.S., which is under extraordinary security, officials fear an attack at any time. And liquidating the al-Qaeda command will only fix part of the problem. The long-term solution requires tackling the underlying political, economic and social roots of terrorism--unresolved demands for Palestinian rights, perversion of Islam by radical clerics, corruption and poverty in many Arab states and grievances over U.S. policy in the region. Bin Laden and his lieutenants didn't start the wave of Islamic terrorism; they only rode it for a while. Which is why they won't be totally defeated, even in the flames of an-Nar.

--Reported by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Helen Gibson/London, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, Matt Rees/Amman and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Helen Gibson/London, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, Matt Rees/Amman and Elaine Shannon/Washington