HOW HE SEES IT Al-Qaida has woven a dense web

By PETER BERGEN
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON POST
What is Al-Qaida?
It seems a simple question. After all, "Al-Qaida" is a term much bandied about by the public, politicians and commentators. Indeed, it's now one of the best-known organizations in the world.
Yet there's much ambiguity about what exactly constitutes Al-Qaida. Is it a terrorist organization run in a top-down fashion by its CEO, Osama bin Laden? Is it a loose-knit group of Islamist militants around the world whose only common link is that many of them trained in Afghanistan? Has Al-Qaida, the organization, morphed into something best described as Al-Qaida, the movement -- a movement defined by adherence to bin Laden's virulent anti-Westernism/anti-Semitism and propensity for violence? Is "Al-Qaida" all of the above?
This is more than semantics. If we can better define what Al-Qaida is, we may better understand the threat it poses at a critical moment.
First there is Al-Qaida, the organization. Most non-specialists are surprised to learn that Al-Qaida has only 200 to 300 members. These are the men who have sworn bayat, an oath of allegiance, to serve bin Laden even unto death. (It is al-Qaida, the organization, that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.) The second concentric ring spreading out beyond this inner core consists of perhaps several thousand "holy warriors" trained in the group's Afghan camps in the terrorist black arts of bomb making and assassination.
Beyond this circle are tens of thousands of militants who received some kind of basic military training in Afghanistan over the past decade. Many went to Afghanistan for what amounted to little more than a jihad vacation.
Finally, untold numbers of Muslims around the world subscribe to bin Laden's Manichean worldview that the West is the enemy of Islam.
Investigations of the recent terror attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are ongoing, but already it seems that the various "Al-Qaidas" described above had some role in the attacks.
In the Nov. 8 bombing in Riyadh, Saudi officials say Al-Qaida itself planned the attacks. This is plausible, as Al-Qaida had already struck in Riyadh in a series of May attacks that killed 34 people.
In the case of the Nov. 12 attacks in Nasiriya, Iraq, that were directed at the Italian presence there, Italy's defense minister, Antonio Martino, blamed Saddam Hussein loyalists and Al-Qaida members. This attack, then, is not the work of Al-Qaida itself but of the wider circle of jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaida who will cooperate with groups on the ground with purely local interests such as Saddam loyalists.
Al-Qaida's affiliates
Two Turks carried out the Nov. 15 attacks on synagogues in Istanbul. Afterward a group called the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades claimed responsibility. Abu Hafs is the nom de guerre of Al-Qaida's former military commander, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in November 2001. The synagogue attacks seem, then, to have been carried out by one of Al-Qaida's many affiliates, recruiting local talent to execute the operation. This also appears to be the case for subsequent attacks against a bank and the British consulate in Istanbul.
These various attacks may well represent the future of "Al-Qaida" operations: Some attacks will be planned by the terrorist organization itself; others by affiliate groups acting in Al-Qaida's name; and still more by local jihadists with little or no direct connection to Al-Qaida.
The last is perhaps the most worrisome, suggesting that Al-Qaida has successfully turned itself from an organization into a mass movement -- one energized by the war in Iraq.
President Bush reportedly keeps photos of the 20 or so top terrorists in his desk, and when one of them is caught or killed writes an X through his picture. That might work for a Mafia crime family: Arrest all the key members and the organization will disappear. But al-Qaida is now a movement based on an ideology. Arresting a movement is quite a different proposition from arresting people.
X Bergen, author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden," is a fellow at the New America Foundation