by Mark Huband and David Buchan in Lon­don
Finan­cial Times

The al-Qaeda ter­ror­ist net­work is a “viable and effec­tive” organ­i­sa­tion that may be able to call on as many as 18,000 poten­tial oper­a­tives world­wide, a UK think-tank said on Tuesday.

In its annual strate­gic sur­vey, the Inter­na­tional Insti­tute for Strate­gic Stud­ies (IISS) says al-Qaeda’s finan­cial net­work has sur­vived largely intact, and that the war in Iraq has brought new recruits to its ranks.

The network’s “mid­dle man­agers” pro­vide exper­tise to Islamic mil­i­tants world­wide, the IISS adds, warn­ing that al-Qaeda can be expected to plan fur­ther attacks in North Amer­ica and Europe, and has the inten­tion of using weapons of mass destruc­tion. Bas­ing its assess­ment on intel­li­gence reports, the IISS’s fig­ure of 18,000 poten­tial oper­a­tives is cal­cu­lated by deduct­ing the 2,000 sus­pects killed or cap­tured since the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 attacks from the esti­mated 20,000 recruits thought to have passed through al-Qaeda train­ing camps in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

The IISS esti­mates that around 1,000 for­eign Islamists are in Iraq and have estab­lished links with for­mer mem­bers of the ousted Ba’athist regime to fight the US-led coalition.

The report says al-Qaeda is thought be pro­vid­ing plan­ning, logis­ti­cal advice, mate­r­ial and financ­ing to smaller groups in Saudi Ara­bia and Morocco, and prob­a­bly Indone­sia and Kenya.

IISS inter­prets the Madrid train bomb­ings as evi­dence that al-Qaeda has “fully recon­sti­tuted, set its sights firmly on the US and its clos­est West­ern allies in Europe, and estab­lished a new and effec­tive modus operandi”.

The report goes on to say that America’s global image has “hit rock bot­tom” since its inter­ven­tion in Iraq, and can only be sal­vaged with “an effi­ciently exe­cuted plan for the full han­dover of sov­er­eignty” to an Iraqi government.

The US was hav­ing to realise “the awful truth that the first law of peace­keep­ing is the same as the first law of foren­sics: ‘every con­tact leaves a trace’”, John Chip­man, IISS direc­tor, said on Tues­day. “Unfor­tu­nately, too many bad traces have been left recently, and many good ones will be needed for the US to recover its rep­u­ta­tion, its pres­tige and there­fore effec­tive power.”

The report says the main prob­lem fac­ing Iraq’s forth­com­ing interim gov­ern­ment is the pro­lif­er­a­tion of armed Iraqi mili­tia groups. While these pri­vate armies may not be that strong or pop­u­lar among Iraqis, the US-led forces can­not crush them, and these mili­tias are likely to “develop increas­ing influ­ence on, and a poten­tial veto over any deci­sions made by a tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment that threat­ens their inter­ests”, Mr Chip­man said.