Strategic Assessment

Over the past few years, the features of international terrorism originating in the Middle East have been changing. While several factors have served to restrain the spillover of violence from conflict arenas in the region to the international sphere, a new threat has evolved, the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in the summer of 1998 comprise a reflection of the developing source of concern. The attackers belonged to a terror apparatus established by the Saudi billionaire Usama Bin Laden, whose objective is, at least initially, to free the Saudi peninsula from American presence, and to free 'Palestine' from Zionist presence. Bin Laden's apparatus is affiliated with practically every organization and movement fueled by Islamic ideology, and his name has been mentioned repeatedly during recent years, in connection with terrorist attacks carried out against American targets in the Middle East. Beginning in the early 1990s, Islamic fanatics who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan alongside the Mujahiddin have been incorporated into Islamic movements throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, and Bin Laden's apparatus is part of this phenomenon.