PARIS, (Reuters) - France's top anti-terrorism judge says Syria could lash out at the West in response to growing pressure for an end to Bashar al-Assad's rule.
"Syriais scary,"Marc Trevidictold Reuters in an interview as the world marks ten years since the 9/11 attacks on New York'sWorld Trade Centreand thePentagon.
"A dictatorial regime under intense pressure, if it’s looking for ways to reduce international pressure on itself, can use weapons of the weak against the strong," he said. "A regime like that — we know how they resolved certain problems in Lebanon during the 1980s."
Trevidic cited no evidence that such an attack was being planned, saying only that Syria’s rulers had a history of resorting to unconventional means to exert influence abroad.
Syria supports Palestinian and Lebanese militant groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. It says they are resistance groups confronting Israel and denies any backing for terrorism.
With a bloody crackdown on civilian protesters now in its fifth month, international pressure on the Alawite-ruled country is steadily growing more intense.
The United States and the European Union are pressing for a U.N. Security Council resolution to condemn violence perpetrated by the regime against civilians — a measure diplomats say would almost certainly run into opposition from China and Russia.
On Tuesday, France said the EU was working to turn the screws on Bashar al-Assad’s regime a notch tighter. France and Britain are leading the push for a UN Security Council Resolution that would ramp up pressure on Syrian leaders.
The build-up of sanctions, diplomatic pressure, defections and grinding civil strife could lead the harassed Syrian government to foment an attack to divert attention from its internal problems, Trevidic said.
"As soon as you have serious pressure on a country, it can be tempted to send a clear message to the people who are applying that pressure," Trevidic said.
A 1983 bombing of U.S. and French barracks in Beirut killed 299 servicemen. Many researchers say Iran and Syria played a key role in planning and carrying out the attacks, something denied by both countries.
TERROR: THE ONLINE DATING PHASE
Ten years after al Qaeda militants killed nearly 3,000 people in their U.S. attacks, the face of global Islamist militantism has changed deeply, said Trevidic.
No longer defined by cells of professionally trained operatives, international terrorism, made the Internet its home base. Anonymous recruiters seek out young recruits with emotional arguments such as gruesome images of Muslim war victims in Iraq and elsewhere.
The nature of attacks being planned has also changed toward greater amateurism and simplicity, said Trevidic, who has led investigations into terrorism suspects in France since 2006.
"After September 11, 2001, all we did was talk about chemical or biological attacks, we imagined the absolute nightmare scenario, and none of that has happened," he said.
"Instead we fell into the most basic form of simplicity: the suicide attack… When you use suicide bombers there is no need to spend much time training them — all it takes is a few clicks to become an amateur terrorist."
Trevidic said the main reason for the reduction in international terrorism was a dearth of state sponsors, which had a hand in most attacks before 9/11.
With regard to France, on high alert for an attack for the past year, Trevidic said the dangers had diminished greatly since the death of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
Offshoots of al Qaeda, notably al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), its North African wing, maintained the ambition of striking at France but with far less appeal for young jihadists keen on joining a holy war against a visible enemy.
The presence of occupying forces in Iraq and Afghanistan was a magnet for recruits in the past decade, drawing dozens of French jihadists until the supply largely dried up from 2008.
By contrast there was no clear Western enemy in the Sahel region of Africa, where AQIM operates from a series of rapidly shifting bases, Trevidic said.
As for striking in France, the ideological appeal of AQIM’s anti-French rhetoric is nearly nonexistent when compared with arguments made by Algerian jihadists in the mid-1990s who carried out a deadly attacks on the Paris underground system.
"Is this (AQMI) a group that has enough strength to export itself? That’s far from being clear." (Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
