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Al Qaeda Ready for Major Chemical Assault
by Dr. Joe Duarte
April 26, 2004

EDITOR'S WEB NOTE:
Dr. Joe Duarte's Market I. Q. reported on the Jordanian bust of al-Qaeda plans for a major attack in Ammon on 4-22-04. The story appeared on CNN and AFP on 4-26. The original report was from intelligence web site Debka.com. Dr. Duarte's Market I.Q. can be found daily at www.joe-duarte.com 

April 21 Explosions Point To Growing Complexity In Middle East

The Saudi Police headquarters in Ryadh was attacked by a suicide car bomber and sustained serious damage. Reports noted that the building’s façade was blown off by the explosions.

According to the New York Times, the attack “happened on the second day of a four-day international conference on terrorism, which opened in Riyadh with a call for peace and tolerance.” But violence in Ryadh has been escalating over the last few months. Aside from attacks on residential compounds last year, of which Al-Qaeda was accused, “on April 12, a shootout in Riyadh left one suspected militant and one policeman dead. The next day, militants opened fire at a checkpoint in Riyadh, killing four police officers. Eight people have been arrested in connection with the shootouts.”

And “last week, Washington ordered nonessential diplomats out of Saudi Arabia and warned Americans that they should leave, citing fresh signals of possible attacks on American and other Western interests.”

Shia Versus Sunni

The attacks came on the same day that a major attack was perpetrated in Basra, Iraq, which was linked to Al-Qaeda.

According to Stratfor.com, the Basra attacks may be an attempt by jihadists to undermine Ayatollah Al-Sistani: “Because the attacks involved suicide bombers and were directed against a predominantly Shiite city, it is probable foreign jihadists working for the al Qaeda-linked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are responsible. The attacks appear to be a response to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's containment of the uprising by followers of radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr.”

Stratfor also expects more attacks against the Shias: “By relentlessly targeting the Shia, the masterminds of the attacks aim to create a crisis of integrity for al-Sistani and make him appear unable to provide security for his people.”

Stratfor concludes that the goal of the jihadists is to capitalize from the division between al-Sadar and al-Sistani, in order to create disorder amongst the Shia, the majority population in Iraq. Once that is in place, the intelligence web site would expect an attempt by the jihadists to foster a civil war between the Sunni and the Shia, and to use the diversion to install the Al-Qaeda related sects as the dominant force in Iraq.

Al Qaeda Ready For Major Chemical Assault

What the stories above reveal, is that the war against terrorism is moving into a new phase, whose context is further fleshed out by an even more chilling report.

The new and extremely dangerous Al-Qaeda has arrived. Debka.com, in what is one of their most sensational stories in recent memory claims, in an exclusive report that its sources have uncovered a huge new regional offensive plotted by Al-Qaeda, and that the action on April 21st, is the fruit of that new organization.

According to the Israeli intelligence site, whose reports seem outlandish to some, here is the new situation.

“Instead of operating on a local scale with the help of local terrorist affiliates, Osama bin Laden’s network is for the first time striking simultaneously in a number of different countries using imported operatives. Their orders and tactics are dictated from inside Saudi Arabia; the technology, bomb cars and non-conventional substances rigged in Syria; the homicide teams, Iraqis. This new mode of operation extends the area of the Iraq conflict into other Middle East countries, including Israel, and provides the fundamentalists with a broad, regional war theatre.”

Adding flesh to Debka’s report, Reuters reported that “Saudi militant followers of al Qaeda claimed responsibility for Wednesday's suicide bombing that targeted a security forces' headquarters in the capital Riyadh and vowed more bombings against government symbols.”

But According to the analysis by Debka.com, the attack was coordinated with the Basra attack, and was part of a regionally organized plot, which at some point in the offensive would have included chemical weapons. “The horrifying homicide bomb blasts that hit four police facilities and two school buses in the British-controlled south Iraqi port of Basra and the Saudi General Security building in Riyadh on Wednesday, April 21 were part of a wider al Qaeda plot.”

Debka reported that the “original plot included Amman and the Adam border crossing from Jordan into Israel and the West Bank. These two targets were singled out for al Qaeda’s first chemical attack, which Jordanian security authorities foiled earlier this month when they intercepted one of the pickups loaded with explosives and poison gas containers after it crossed in from Syria. That capture led to more team members being apprehended. In Amman, government buildings, a luxury hotel, the US embassy and thousands of lives were saved. The second part of the hit-team was to have attempted to cross into Israel through the Adam terminal. If it failed to pass through, the suicide terrorists were to blow themselves up and release the poison gas in the middle of the crowds of travelers and tourists to and from Israel that normally crowd the facility.”

Debka, in an exclusive report, describing activity, little reported by the mainstream media about an April 20 incident in Jordan, continued with: “ Iraqi insurgents have been captured outside their country on a suicide mission for al Qaeda. If this discovery were not chilling enough, the information Jordanian interrogators gained from their Iraqi captives set alarm bells jangling in Washington, Jerusalem, Amman and every Western capital alive to the threat of non-conventional, multiple-casualty terrorism.”

Debka revealed, in its report that Jordan’s authorities extracted the following information from its captives:

1. The cell captured Tuesday belonged to the team that entered Jordan from Syria three weeks ago with three booby-trapped trucks loaded with explosives and poison gas containers. King Abdullah and his intelligence chief General Kheir estimated that their cargoes were sufficient to massacre 20,000 human beings.

2. The multiple strikes in Amman were planned for Wednesday, April 21, to coincide with the Basra and Riyadh bombings. But that was not all.

3. At the same time, toxic gas attacks were plotted for Israel or the Adam border terminal. There is no certainty that one last death truck is not still at large.

4. The most disturbing discovery for the Americans and Israel was al Qaeda’s new division of labor revealed by the chemical bomb team. It showed the network had departed from the methods familiar to US, Jordanian and Israeli intelligence. The terrorists who drove the trucks across the border from Syria into Jordan were not suicide bombers. Their job was to deliver the trucks to the Iraqis in the villa, who would then drive them on to targets and blow them up. Asked where they got their orders, the Iraqis replied from Saudi Arabia.

© 2004 Dr. Joe Duarte
Dr. Duarte's Bio and Archive

Joe Duarte, M.D.

Joe Duarte M.D. is founder and Editor in Chief of Joe-Duarte.com. Dr. Duarte is a board certified anesthesiologist, a registered investment advisor, and President of River Willow Capital Management, where he manages individual client accounts. His latest books "Successful Energy Sector Investing" and "Successful Biotech Investing" (Prima/Random House) are available on line at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, borders.com, Traders Press, and all major online and brick and mortar bookstores in the U.S., U.K. Europe, and Australia. Dr. Joe Duarte’s Daily Market I.Q. is a subscriber service that provides daily intelligence, trading strategies, and technical analysis at www.joe-duarte.com.