Dormant terror groups awaken

Two terror attacks on two continents this week, attributed to groups the authorities thought they had beaten long ago, suggest just how hard it is to win a war against terrorism.

On Wednesday in Lima, Peru, in the worst example of anti-American violence since the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, a package under a car exploded outside the US Embassy, killing nine people. Local terrorism experts said the attack bore the hallmarks of Shining Path, a Maoist revolutionary organization that was almost wiped out 10 years ago.

On Tuesday night, a labor adviser to the Italian government was gunned down as he cycled home after work in Bologna. The Red Brigades for the Building of a Fighting Communist Party – apparently an offshoot from the extreme leftist group active in the 1970s – claimed responsibility for Marco Biagi's murder on Thursday.

The resurgence of the two small, locally based groups highlights the difficulty of battling Al-Qaeda, an international, widespread organization, say analysts. While the Lima attack raises questions about whether Al Qaeda's successful Sept. 11 attack is emboldening other groups, most experts don't see a link. But they agree this week's attacks are cause for concern.

"We really cannot win the war against al-Qaeda," says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "We can degrade and contain it, and we have to do so offensively."

"The most likely way to defeat a terrorist group is to bring it into the political arena, rather than in the terrorist or insurgent arena," argues Chris Aaron, editor of Janes Intelligence Review. But in the case of Al-Qaeda, "there is no political solution", says Mr. Aaron, since participants in a global jihad see nothing to gain from compromising with the enemy.

The Red Brigades' last attack occurred in 1999, when gunmen killed another labor adviser to the government, Massimo D'Antona. Like Biagi, he had been drafting legislation that would make it easier for firms to fire their workers.

In an e-mail sent Thursday to a regional news agency website in Italy, the Red Brigades said Biagi's killing was part of a wider fight against "imperialism." The statement praised the September 11th attacks for showing "how it is possible to carry out highly destructive attacks in enemy territory, with destabilizing effects, without the use of technologically advanced weapons."

Italian officials said they did not fear a return to the so-called "years of lead," in the 1970's and 1980's, when Red Brigades' cells killed 420 people, including their most famous victim, former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. "We are dealing with small, isolated groups, the ideological heirs of the earlier Red Brigades" said Giovanni Pellegrino, head of parliament's terrorism committee, in a radio interview. "I do not believe in a return to the violent epidemic of before."

Neither did the bomb attack outside the US Embassy in Lima – three days before President George Bush is due to visit Peru - appear to herald a return to the all-out war that Shining Path waged against the government during the 1980s.

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