Into a jittery world came the Irish Republican Army. Last week three mortar shells blasted out of a white Ford van parked in Whitehall, the heart of official London. Two landed outside the British Foreign Office, slightly injuring three policemen and a government worker. The third hit the rear garden of 10 Downing Street, 50 feet from where Prime Minister John Major was meeting with his war cabinet. The IRA claimed responsibility, and while there was no obvious link with Mideast terrorists, said Home Secretary Kenneth Baker, “I don’t think one can rule it out, because Saddam Hussein has made it clear that he wants terrorism used as a weapon around the world.” In any event, the fact of a terrorist attack in one of the world’s most security-conscious districts was a reminder of the West’s vulnerability. “The plain fact is that terrorism is easy,” says Michael A. Yardley, a British expert on terrorist tactics. “If the Provisional IRA can mortar the war cabinet, there is no technical reason why Abu Nidal or another Middle Eastern group can’t try something similar at the White House.”
Since the war broke out on Jan. 16, the U.S. State Department has logged more than 100 attacks on Western interests around the world. Only a handful have been claimed in the name of Islam or known Middle East groups. But the rate is more than triple the average of recent years. Iraq is directly implicated in at least two incidents: the failed bombing that killed an Iraqi man in the Philippines and a botched effort to bomb the American ambassador’s residence in Jakarta. Each bomb was made from two dozen sticks of dynamite. The rest ranged from grenade and rocket attacks against Western embassies in Yemen to bombings in Athens; although there has been heavy property damage, only five victims have died.
A lone American was among them. Bobbie Mozelle, 44, of Detroit, was shot by a single assassin as he left his house in Adana, Turkey, last week for the giant U.S. air base in Incirlik, where he was a civilian employee. Allied warplanes are bombing Iraq from the base; in claiming the hit, the Turkish Dev Sol organization denounced “the bloody games of U.S. imperialism.” Since war began, the underground group has bombed more than a dozen buildings or vehicles linked to the United States or its coalition partners. Some members of the group have trained with Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Other active terrorist groups, such as 17 November in Greece and Tupac Amaru in Peru, are probably indigenous leftists taking advantage of the spotlight on Saddam.
The worst is probably yet to come, if only because large-scale terrorism takes planning. “We must anticipate continuing acts of terrorism long after the hostilities in the gulf have ceased,” says FBI associate deputy director Oliver Revell. European security agencies last week continued to arrest and deport suspected terrorists. The State Department’s list of countries considered unsafe for Americans grew to 31; it now includes most of the Muslim world. In Saudi Arabia, perhaps Saddam’s primary target, officials said they had arrested six Palestinians and Yemenis for shooting at a bus carrying U.S. military personnel; police at proliferating roadside checkpoints now search cars driven by Arab “guest workers,” and immigration officials deny re-entry to some Palestinians returning from vacations. “We will make you taste bitter death sooner or later,” Baghdad radio promised King Fahd last week. No one thought it an empty threat.
