Intelligence agencies have been warned that al-Qaeda may be planning to attack air and rail travel in Europe during the busy holiday travel season. Intelligence sources say the warnings came from interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects, who recently left Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In a move that has been puzzling intelligence agencies, al-Qaeda has been withdrawing well-trained Arab terrorists from the mountains and battlefields of Afghanistan over the past six months while handing over its activities in Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Rohan Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at Singapore's Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies, said "We have seen that several hundred, perhaps five to six hundred al-Qaeda members who were located on the Afghan-Pakistan border, have now left."
Gunaratna adds that these al-Qaeda members have returned to their own home countries, particularly to Iraq, and also to other Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen. There is no consensus on the approximate numbers of Arabs who remain in Afghanistan, though Arab diplomats with responsibilities of tracking al-Qaeda said they suspected the number of active terrorists to run in the several hundreds in spring this year.
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