Issue 858, 24 July 2009

A jihadist presence in Bahrain

Like Yemen, the militant threat in Bahrain is intimately linked to Saudi Arabia. This was underlined by recent attempts to secure the extradition of three Bahrainis being held in Saudi Arabia on terrorism charges. Bahrain’s Al-Adala group (National Justice Movement) and National Detainees Committee are demanding the release of the men. The first is Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Majid Al-Naimi, who was detained by Saudi police at the King Fahd causeway on 10 October; he is one of six Bahrainis detained at Guantanamo, a surprisingly high number given Bahrain’s tiny population. Naimi was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and held in Guantanamo until being returned to Bahrain in November 2005. Hassan Yabis was also seized at a Saudi checkpoint in August 2008. Abdelrahim Al-Murbati (whose brother is a former Guantanamo detainee) has been held by the Saudis since June 2003.

As GSN reported early this year, Adel Mohammed Mahmoud Abdelkhaliq is in custody in the UAE, where immigration officials have raised the alert status regarding Bahraini citizens after a Bahraini attempted to smuggle bomb components through Dubai airport last year. Abdelkhaliq is accused of being an active member of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). According to UAE prosecutors, he trained at camps in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) area of Waziristan and travelled to Iran on five occasions to liaise with senior Al-Qaeda leaders operating from eastern Iran. According to the UAE government, he was recruited in 2004 to raise funds and purchase supplies for Al-Qaeda forces operating in the Afghan/Pakistan conflict zone. The US Treasury designation stated that Abdelkhaliq provided “electrical parts used in explosives, laptop computers, jackets, GPS devices, and other equipment”. It added: “Additionally, Abdelkhaliq arranged the transportation of fighters, money, and material to LIFG camps in Pakistan.”

Another Bahraini, Abdelrahman Mohammed Jaffar Ali, was indicted by the Bahraini High Criminal Court for allegedly facilitating movement by militants from training camps in NWFP areas. Described as a “financier and facilitator who has provided significant funding to Al-Qaeda”, he was also accused of attending training camps in Pakistan and travelling to Iran to meet Al-Qaeda leaders. Ali is now free, having been convicted in Bahrain and later released “with credit for time served”.

Some Bahrainis are being sent back to Manama from older theatres of jihad. Ali Ahmed Ali Hamad, a former emir of the Al-Mujaheed jihadist volunteer unit in the Bosnian war, was returned to Bahrain in May after serving 12 years in Bosnia on charges related to a car bombing. His testimony against former Bosnian army General Rasim Delic at the International Criminal Tribunal earned the release. The most experienced jihadist commander to be returned to Bahrain, Hamad is the only Bahraini to hold senior office in any of the international jihadist groups. A first-generation Arab-Afghan who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, Hamad is another ward for the small but competent Bahraini Secret Intelligence Service (BSIS) to trail.

Tit-for-tat politics

The emerging judicial response to terrorism is made more complicated not only by legal issues – there is still no law of conspiracy in Bahrain – but by politics. This was illustrated in the aftermath of the so-called Grand Prix plot, an incident that coincided with the Formula One event on 26 April but was otherwise unconnected. BSIS arrested a 22-year-old Jordanian who had recently been naturalised in Bahrain under the controversial immigration law. He had been detected communicating with suspected terrorists in Iran, a common staging post between the Af-Pak area and the Gulf. He led BSIS to a 21-year-old Bahraini accomplice, a customs officer. A safe house in East Riffa yielded two AK-47 assault rifles, six clips of ammunition, a pistol, knives and swords, according to official reports. Documents and files included materials for bomb-making, fabrication of improvised rockets, Google Earth and photographic images of US naval facilities in Bahrain and US naval vessels. US and Bahraini sources told GSN they were treating the incident as a foiled attack. The two-man cell may have tried to bring other Sunni militants into Bahrain under the nationality law, to attack the US naval presence.

In an increasingly tense Bahrain, the issue touched a raw nerve among Sunni establishment hardliners and advocates of the new citizenship laws, which the Shia population views as a means of altering the demography of the country to favour the Sunni. As a result, establishment hardliners have ramped up investigations into allegations of Shia terrorism. Though investigation of the National Day ‘bomb plot’ on 17 December has been suspended as a confidence-building measure by King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa, it is possible that investigations into some of the 35 suspects could be reopened, and there are indications that released suspects have been prevented from travelling out of the country. Hardliners say that suspects might once again be charged with threatening to attack police vehicles, government buildings and hotels with homemade explosives.

There are other signs that Sunni hardliners want to raise the profile of Shia terrorist investigations to offset the embarrassment caused by the Grand Prix plot and subsequent firebomb attacks on the homes of newly naturalised Syrians and Jordanians. There is currently an investigation into an explosion in a car in Daih village, west of Manama, on 7 April, which killed Shia Arab Musa Jaffar Khalil Ibrahim and seriously wounded his colleague Ali Abdullah Saad Ahmed. Though the Shia conspiracy mill believes the men were attacked by the security forces or other Sunni assailants using an under-vehicle improvised explosive device (UVIED), the Sunni-led Ministry of Interior is looking hard for signs of Shia militancy and possibly a foreign (Iranian) hand. The trial hearing on 30 April solidly painted the two occupants of the car (and a third accomplice) as bomb-makers who planned to detonate the device near a mosque on Exhibition Road. Arms from the 1990s appear to have been uncovered in Sitra during the same mid-May period, a legacy of the active period of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) support of Bahraini Hizbollah. Whatever the truth behind the 7 April explosion, the bombing was a sign that violence – and, perhaps, dirty tricks – are gaining momentum in Bahrain.