Zawaya

The danger of terrorism is far-reaching

By: Abdelaziz Karraky

Any normal human being can’t but be shaken by the sight of murder scenes, wherever they take place, and whatever excuses are invoked, especially in places where people seek entertainment, only for their joy to evaporate in a second because of a terrorist act that tampers life and peace of mind.

We will not analyze the events of Kampala, but will rather identify some of the risks posed by terrorist groups at the global level.

In a world making unprecedented progress in science, many of the things that were considered mere fiction in the middle of the 20th century have become an indisputable reality today. The field of communication has achieved a good deal of development, turning the world into a small village in which people can easily communicate. It has become easier to access a lot of strategic information with a computer that is connected to the Internet. This also facilitates transferring funds from one country to another, thus enabling cross-border terrorist movements to finance activities in any place that has banks. It’s true that the banking system has developed some mechanisms to control the transfer of funds; but it’s also known that the more controllers evolve, the more contravenes evolve as well.

It is hard today to find a sector that does not use ITs as a work mechanism. The breakdown of an IT system in some sectors nowadays, means the breakdown of the entire sectors themselves. Things become even harder when the use of IT systems is combined with the dependence on the Internet, as this leads to a general paralysis of the sector. Therefore, hacking a website means paralyzing a sector completely. It is certain today, though, that the effectiveness of, and coordination among, security services in several regions of the world, hampered many terrorist movements, since we rarely hear today, for instance, about the hijacking of a plane in the air. Let’s imagine that terrorist movements can infiltrate websites, and instead of destroying them, they get to exploit their information and systems, and manipulate them to serve their interests; what can happen in this case?

On another note, the weapons used by terrorist movements so far are classic weapons; nuclear weapons are still out of their reach. However, biological and chemical weapons may one day become a means in the hands of terrorist groups, as Walter Laqueur, Chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the USA, had pointed out in 1997. Drug traffickers own laboratories that produce substances that can manipulate the human will; and these laboratories can shift to producing easy-to- use chemical weapons, in the case of an alliance and confluence of interests between drug traffickers and terrorist movements, as none of the two values life.