Norway Special: The Oslo Bombing and the Threat from Al Qa'eda

Photo: APImages reminiscent of the devastation of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in the US are flooding in from the Norwegian capital Oslo. An explosion near the office of the Prime Minister has caused extensive damage to a number of buildings, multiple fatalities, and many injuries. It seems clear that it is a deliberate explosion carried out as part of a terrorist attack --- ABC News is reporting that US government sources have revealed that the explosion was caused by a vehicle-born bomb, and Oslo police have confirmed that this is a bombing.

See also Norway Video: Explosion in Prime Minister's Office Injures At Least 8

The targeting of Norway should not be a surprise. In 2003, Al Qaeda --- through its current leader, Ayman Al-Zawahiri --- first threatened Norway, possibly because of the involvement of Norwegian special forces in Afghanistan. Since then, the Norwegian role in Afghanistan has expanded, although its troops are to be withdrawn later this year.

In July 2010, the Norwegian police announced the arrests of three suspected Al Qaeda members who may have been planning an attack. Two months later, the suggestion was that the attack they were planning was in retaliation for the publication of the cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad. In December 2010, there was the suicide attack in neighbouring Sweden by a British resident. On 12 July, an Iraqi-born cleric, facing deportation since 2005 as a security risk, was charged with issuing death threats against Norwegian politicians. (For aA more detailed look at the Al Qaeda threat to Norway, see the report of the South Asia Analysis Group.)

The Oklahoma City comparison may be apt in terms of the nature of the bomb. The extent of the damage apparent from the television images indicates a powerful explosion or explosions with some eyewitness reports saying damage was apparent 5 blocks away from the centre of the explosion. The Oklahoma City bomb was fertilizer based and there have been two disrupted plots in the last ten years in Canada and the United Kingdom where efforts were made to acquire large amounts of fertilizer to use in powerful vehicle-born bombs. The peroxide-type bombs used in the attacks of 7 July 2005 would not be as relevant for such a massive explosion. In Oklahoma City and in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, which involved a bomb using urea nitrate and other chemicals, the massive bombs were transported in rental trucks. As Mike Davis notes in his history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, it long ago became the asymmetrical weapon of choice for terrorists. In the Oslo example, physical access to the area near the Prime Minister’s office and other symbolic targets related to justice and the media clearly was available to vehicles. Undoubtedly, footage from fixed cameras will soon show the nature of the vehicle and whether the individual or individuals behind the attack fled before the explosion or died in the blast.

Whatever the cause of the explosion, the attack will have widespread ramifications in terms of Norway’s security policies, domestic politics, and in relation to broader European security issues. If Al Qaeda is shown to have some connection to the attack, or even it claims a connection, it will represent at least a small resurgence of the organization under its new leader and potentially a shift to attack more “soft target” countries that are less protected than high profile targets such as the United Kingdom and the United States.