Eventually the six gunmen were chased into the desert and killed. They called themselves the Battalion of Havoc and Destruction, and one of their stated aims was to win the freedom of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric now serving a life sentence in an American prison for plotting to blow up New York City landmarks. The Luxor killers belong to a new breed of terrorist: religious fanatics who regard the wanton murder of innocent victims as a legitimate form of holy war. Old-line Palestinian or IRA terrorists look almost staid by comparison; they serve disciplined movements that seek public support for political agendas. The new kind of killer, in contrast, typically belongs to a smaller group–a faction within a faction, or a splinter from some larger organization. With little infrastructure, the new breed still has global reach, thanks to cheap air fares and high-tech communications. Rigidly dogmatic, they seek no one’s approval; they are accountable only to God.
The self-conferred license to kill is not limited to the extremist fringes of Islam. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, is a Jewish example: in his own mind, God and a sympathetic rabbi cleared him to pull the trigger. In the United States, federal investigators believe that the person or persons behind the bombings of abortion clinics and the Olympic Park in Atlanta may have a psychopathic ““Christian’’ agenda. The Aum Shinri Kyo cult in Japan, the first terrorist group to use poison gas on the public, grew out of grotesquely interpreted Buddhist, Hindu and Christian traditions.
So-called ““state sponsors’’ of terrorism don’t have as much influence on the new groups as they once did on Palestinian or Shiite Muslim organizations. But there are connections. Iran is accused of funding Egypt’s Gama’a Islamiya, which claimed responsibility for the Luxor massacre. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who once backed secular Palestinian hit men like Abu Nidal and Abul Abbas, has been hosting Muslim zealots from all over the world since the end of the Persian Gulf War. Washington thinks the last known fugitive in the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is living in Baghdad.
Preventing attacks by the new breed of killers is urgent but not easy. Intelligence sharing among Western allies helps. So do increased security measures in public places and government warnings to Westerners considering travel in troubled areas. But one of the most dangerous characteristics of the ’90s terrorist is his tendency to hit ““soft’’ targets that have little or no predictable connection to his goals: Swiss tourists die in Luxor, for example, to punish the United States. Given the right weapons, the unholy combination of religious fervor and random killing could take terrorism to a frightening new plateau. That’s one reason Washington is so concerned about Iraq’s attempt to develop chemical and biological weapons. Terrorists armed with knives, guns and bombs are bad enough. With poison gas or germ weapons, they could pose a threat most of us would rather not think about.
