Terror Refuge: South Afristan

Jonathan Schanzer at the Weekly Standard takes a look at how al Qaeda is increasingly using South Africa as a base of operations, and meeting very little resistance.

According to one reported U.S. intelligence estimate, al Qaeda leaders are operating throughout South Africa. Other reports indicate that terrorists are exploiting the country's banking system, and that South African passports are finding their way to al Qaeda operatives worldwide.

It is only natural, then, that South African jihadists are popping up in terrorist hotspots. In July 2004, Pakistani police arrested two South Africans--Feroz Ibrahim and Zubair Ismail--along with Khalfan Ghailani, who was on the FBI's most wanted list for his role in the 1998 embassy
bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Subsequent investigations have revealed that the pair was plotting to attack the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the parliament complex in Pretoria, and several other high-profile targets in South Africa.

Another South African, Haroon Aswat, was tied to the July 7, 2005, London mass transit bombings. After the attacks, Zambian officials detained Aswat, who reportedly had exchanged a spate of phone calls with each of the four suicide bombers before they carried out their deadly attacks. Further research reveals that in the 1990s, Aswat was an assistant to London-based Abu Hamza al-Masri, a one-eyed, one-handed terrorist ideologue tied to al Qaeda groups in Yemen and Algeria. Aswat worked with al-Masri at the radical Finsbury Park Mosque, where a number of other terrorists received their training, including shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Read the whole thing.

The government in Pretoria is not our friend.