whodunit?
Oct. 16, 2003 Whodunit? By MATTHEW GUTMAN
The "whodunit" atmosphere surrounding Wednesday's attack on a US convoy in the Gaza Strip could easily cloud over into what the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Matthew Levitt likes to call "specubabble."
That occurs when analysts and pundits construct scenarios based entirely on speculation.
What is clear so far, however, is that its architects have a sincere interest either in driving the Americans out of the region or linking and punishing the Middle East's two occupiers: Israel and now the US.
They also feel immune to the consequences of the first fatal terror attack against US targets in Israel or the territories.
The perpetrators are no mere ideologues, but expert practitioners of terrorism. Working on accurate intelligence tips, they knew precisely when the convoy entered Gaza, knew which vehicle to hit, had access to powerful explosives, and the expertise to rig them.
While Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah leaders immediately and almost hysterically denied culpability, two relatively anonymous groups – the Public Resistance Committee and the Ansar al-Qaida Palestine (the Disciples of al-Qaida) – jumped in to claim the attacks.
The Public Resistance Committee is a rough miscellany of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah dropouts, who merged to form a purely military group with the aim of fighting the IDF and launching attacks on settlements in the Gaza Strip.
They received brief accolades in Gaza in the past two years for detonating mines which destroyed three Merkava tanks.
In an interview last year with The Jerusalem Post, the group's shadowy spokesman, Abu Adnan, explained how the group acquires the explosives necessary to blow up a tank or, as in the case of Wednesday's bombing, a heavily armored car.
"We get the material using three methods," he said. "We smuggle it into Gaza; we trade mostly with Israelis, but also with the Egyptians. We also manufacture the material here, and sometimes we steal it from Israeli army bases."
One of the sources of the homemade explosives is a substance called urea nitrate, also used as fertilizer, which can be made with little difficulty from human urine.
When contacted Wednesday night, Abu Adnan denied anyone from his group had contacted AFP to claim responsibility for the attack.
Little is known about Ansar al-Qaida, although the IDF has long warned that al-Qaida elements have infiltrated Gaza, and are working to bankroll terrorism and to bolster terrorists' techniques. The IDF refused to say whether it had heard of the group previously.
Sources in Gaza said they had never heard of the group, although last year, PA Preventive Security Service chief Rashid Abu Shabak admitted that al-Qaida elements had operated in Gaza. These same sources said that the bombing might have been a Palestinian trial balloon of attack plans in preparation for a possible Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Yet the sophistication and timing of the explosive device that shredded what is called a "Level 5" armored GMC truck, able to withstand RPG fire, hints to Israeli experts that the bombing was an "inside-outside job." The roadside bomb, which had to be planted beforehand on a heavily traveled route and detonated at precisely the right time by remote control, hints at foreign involvement, said Shmuel Bar, a veteran of the intelligence community,.
He noted that any number of foreign forces, from al-Qaida to Iranian agents to Hizbullah, have both the motivation and the expertise for such a bombing.
Still he said, "this is an inside job, these are people who are not unaware of the territory."
He noted that the attack likely required the assistance of members of the PA security forces. In Gaza, he said, "you have to consider that everybody who belongs to one group is liable to belong to another."
The attack took place just a few hundred meters from a PA Police checkpoint, and analysts wondered how no one noticed the laying of the device.
Others believe it might simply be the expression of a growing phenomenon. "The proliferation of individuals and groups, thinking that their groups are insufficiently militant, and not conferring with headquarters in Beirut or Damascus," said Levitt.
These elements view US targets as tantamount to Israeli ones, because of US support for Israel. "When you combine individualism with the kind of training and weapons that Palestinian elements have been provided in the terrorist free-for-all, including that of Hizbullah, you find yourself in extremely dangerous situation," he said. He added that countless terror alerts on American targets in Israel had been issued, but that they were "a dime a dozen."
Ultimately, the bombing puts the PA in an unenviable position, Bar said. "If they crack down on these people, then the question is, 'If you can do that, when it seems important to you, they why can't you crack down on terrorism in general.'"
