When one of the men who directed the US embassy bombing in Nairobi was being interrogated by American detectives in the second week of August 1998, he issued this outburst after being asked why Al-Qaeda had chosen to attack Kenya.
“We have a plan to attack the US but we’re not ready yet,” said Mohammed al-‘Owhali, a native of Saudi Arabia who was caught in Eastleigh days after the blast. Residents had reported seeing a stranger with bloody wounds in the area.
He added: “We need to hit you in a couple of places so you won’t see what is going on inside. The big attack is coming. There is nothing you can do to stop it.”
Al-‘Owhali was, of course, referring to the September 11 attacks in New York, which occurred three years after the Kenya bombing.
His response says much about the difference between the early Al-Qaeda militants and the new wave of killers.
Osama bin Laden’s terror atrocities were noted for their complexity. They were typically planned for at least five years, usually cost a lot of money, were nearly always launched simultaneously from different locations and were often quite sophisticated.
The new wave is quite different— and arguably scarier than Al-Qaeda’s older brand of mass attacks. The killings in Paris in the last fortnight and Boko Haram’s continuing atrocities in Nigeria highlight a trend where terrorist attacks have gone noticeably low-tech — meaning the killings are far easier and cheaper to carry out.
The killers in France needed little more than high calibre guns and a car to arrive at the site where they planned to commit mass murder.
They still achieved their aim and shocked most of Europe by attacking a city mythologised as a dream holiday destination and a “city of love”.
The simplicity of the plot pales in comparison with the more complex operations Al-Qaeda was previously known for such as the efforts of the branch in Yemen to manufacture tiny bombs, which could be hidden in shoes and evade airport surveillance to bring down American-bound planes. Or the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings, which were planned for over five years.
Wadih el-Hage, Osama’s Lebanese-American lieutenant in charge of the US embassy bombing plan arrived in Kenya as far back as 1993 and spent five years coordinating the logistics of the devastating August 7, 1998 Nairobi blast, which took 213 lives and injured 4,500 people.
There is another aspect in which the new wave of jihadists differs from bin Laden’s attacks. It may seem strange to say this of a man blamed for launching the modern era of mass casualty suicide bombings but bin Laden was much less blood thirsty than the new generation of jihadis.
The suspects arrested in connection with the Nairobi bombing, whose story is summed up in American journalist Lawrence Wright’s award-winning book, The Looming Tower, explained that bin Laden had asked them to make sure they detonated the bomb at the basement of the US embassy and not outside the building, to maximise American casualties and minimise Kenyan ones.
Any death of innocents is terrible, of course, but this is a distinction the mass killers of today or Boko Haram are unlikely to strive for. In the event, in Nairobi, the guards bravely resisted opening the security barrier— meaning the bomb went off outside and killed far more Kenyans than Americans and remains the worst single terror atrocity the region has known.
In his last days, bin Laden strenuously criticised younger militants such as the man who set the stage for the emergence of the Islamic State— the Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi— for his indiscriminate murder of Shiites and moderate Sunnis.
In one letter, Al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Yadiye Gadahn warned that bin Laden would dissociate himself from the “ignorant and ungodly criminality” of some of the groups that claimed affiliation with Al-Qaeda. Somali’s Al-Shabaab was one such group.
The new generation of jihadis are, of course, much more blood thirsty. The Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria seem to thrive on the mass murder of anybody on their way, from Shiites and Sunnis that don’t support them to minorities such as the beleaguered Yazidi community.
When it comes to savagery, however, Nigeria’s Boko Haram are making a case for themselves as the most barbaric terror group in recent history, attacking and laying waste to whole towns.
Al-Shabaab, too, with the Westgate killings, showed itself not too fussed about killing women, babies and the elderly something which was also on display in many of its suicide bombings in Mogadishu until a recent revision of tactics prompted by a collapse of public support in Somalia.
The differences between Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State were evident in Paris. Amedy Coulibaly, who identified himself as a supporter of IS was happy to kill civilians while the two Kouachi brothers affiliated with Al-Qaeda operated more like assassins than standard terrorists.
At the offices of the provocative Charlie Hebdo magazine, they identified the cartoonists they sought to kill by name and spared the lives of other civilians including the young woman and her daughter who opened the door for them.
Even the hostages they took at the factory complex where they staged their last stand were dismissed with the words: “we don’t kill civilians,” something one would find difficult to imagine being uttered by an IS militant.
The key story of the last fortnight, however, is the ease with which the new generation of terror atrocities can be carried out in comparison to the complex plots of the bin Laden years.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has called “roving gun attacks,” where all attackers need are rifles, the greatest threat much of the world faces at the moment.
Although reports in the wake of the Paris attacks focused on Westgate as the place where this tactic was most prominently on display, the shooting rampage as terrorist tactic was previously applied in the Mumbai 2008 killings.
Although the attackers used a combination of bombings and shootings, the four-day siege was the forerunner to Westgate with its extensive use of gunmen on foot terrorising people in cafes and train stations.
This is a worrisome development for security forces across the world. In Kenya, counter-terror officials must have been quietly celebrating the problems Al-Shabaab is facing in Somalia.
A string of defections and the killing of top leaders depict an organisation marked by internal divisions and on the wane.
But the killings in other parts of the world highlights the fact that the threat remains high because the new wave makes it so easy for anyone to attack civilians. Kenyan anti-terror planners will do well to consider deploying enhanced foot patrols by armed and uniformed security personnel around key sites in the same manner as their counterparts in most of Europe to act as a deterrent.
Ultimately, the war across the world will be won through a battle of the minds involving rolling back the radicalising message that has poisoned so many young minds while addressing long-term problems such as the Israel-Palestine conflict.
