Obama could face terrorist attacks abroad

MADRID, Spain — Amid the focus on wars that President-elect Obama will inherit in Iraq and Afghanistan, a third conflict gets less attention: the shadow-war against stateless networks of Islamic extremists.

Terror greeted the past two presidents early in their terms. Clinton faced the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and Bush the world-changing attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"I fear al-Qaida could try to test Obama," said a top Italian anti-terror official who asked to remain anonymous.

A weaker al-Qaida, tighter U.S. borders and the apparent lack of U.S. support networks make a new strike on U.S. soil unlikely, though not impossible, say Western anti-terror officials. Instead, the foremost scenario is an attack on U.S. targets in Europe similar to the alleged foiled plots against U.S. troops in Germany last year and transatlantic flights from London in 2006.

Security officials worry particularly about al-Qaida recruits returning to Britain and other Western countries from Pakistani-training compounds. The new administration also will face the threat of attacks, training hubs and radicalization in locales ranging from Somalia to Yemen to Western Europe, the front line for a new generation of homegrown extremists, Western investigators say.

As he takes office, Obama will inherit strong anti-terror alliances. Many European investigations today grow out of shared U.S. intercepts of online communications, leads made possible because most Internet servers are based in the United States.

Cross-border teamwork has driven cases such as the roundup this year in Barcelona, Spain, of an alleged Pakistani terror cell that was infiltrated by a French undercover operative with the help of Spanish and U.S. spies.

"Even during the worst times of diplomatic conflict over Iraq, close cooperation continued because it was in everybody's interests," said security consultant Louis Caprioli, former counterterror chief of the DST, France's lead intelligence agency.

Looking elsewhere, experts cite some familiar threats and new ones. An emerging concern: the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), a rival offshoot of al-Qaida that operates in the same semiautonomous tribal regions of northwest Pakistan.

The IJU allegedly directed a group of German converts and Turks arrested last year for plotting to bomb U.S. military targets in Germany. Last month, German police asked for the public's help in tracking down another IJU-trained convert who is considered dangerous and has posted videos on Turkish Web sites.

"It is a splinter organization trying to make its mark," said former CIA officer Marc Sageman, now scholar-in-residence at the New York Police Department. "The only way to do that, to make their mark, is to do an attack. There is an internal rivalry among terror groups. The IJU wants to claim to be the new al-Qaida."

Other hot spots include Yemen, the Sahel region of northern Africa and war-torn Somalia, where an increasing number of foreign radicals go to train, officials said. Activity also has picked up in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia as the Balkans become a refuge for foreign extremists who fought in Iraq, the Italian anti-terror official said.

Spy agencies have become good at detecting plots in the making. But the Obama administration will inherit a persistent nightmare: self-radicalized cells that form with minimal links to established networks and strikes without warning.

The Muslim immigrant doctors on trial for attempted bombings in London in 2007 illustrate such a scenario. Sageman argues that autonomous, Internet-driven groups are the threat of the future.