Al Qaeda grows by adding affiliates

In Iraq, Al Qaeda's Pakistan-based leadership moved aggressively to exert more control over foreign fighters, sending Abu Ayyub Masri from Pakistan after Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of a group calling itself Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a U.S. airstrike last year. Masri, who had been in charge of Al Qaeda's overseas networks, is considered more loyal to Al Qaeda than Zarqawi was.

But Al Qaeda in Iraq remains largely independent and consists mainly of local Iraqi insurgents, say U.S. intelligence officials. Some local tribal leaders have allied themselves with the U.S. military to counter the group's advances.

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Elsewhere in the Mideast

Al Qaeda also has made strong overtures to the Palestinian group Army of Islam in the Gaza Strip, and to Fatah al Islam, which until recently was based in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el Bared in north Lebanon, according to the senior administration official and Fawaz Gerges, a scholar of Islamist militancy.

Two Al Qaeda operatives, Abdullah Bishi and Abd Rahman Afghani, were sent to Lebanon to investigate whether Fatah al Islam would make a suitable affiliate, but ultimately rejected the group because of its criminal activity and suspected ties to Syrian intelligence, Gerges said.

The senior administration counter-terrorism official said Al Qaeda was interested in forging alliances with similar groups in Lebanon, Jordan and other neighbors of Israel.

Gerges, author of the recent book "Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy," said he saw signs of Al Qaeda's outreach effort during interviews in the Middle East over the last 15 months. Al Qaeda is making connections to influential clans and tribal leaders and to disaffected Muslims with no previous ties to militant organizations.

"We have gone beyond ideology into a new terrain," Gerges said. "Al Qaeda central has succeeded in replacing its field lieutenants who were captured or killed with new lieutenants, and not just in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq."

Al Qaeda has been trying, with mixed results, to gain a stronger foothold in Egypt, which has a large recruiting pool of militants already sympathetic to Zawahiri, an Egyptian who is Bin Laden's top deputy.

U.S. officials and experts believe Zawahiri is driving the current expansion effort. Last year, he announced a merger between Al Qaeda and the Egyptian terrorist group Gamaa al Islamiya. But many of the Egyptian group's leaders denied that they had joined Al Qaeda's ranks.

Al Qaeda has been negotiating with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, U.S. officials and experts say. Already, so many Al Qaeda fighters have shown up in Libya that the nation's leader, Moammar Kadafi, a new but valuable counter- terrorism ally of Washington, has launched a crackdown that has led to hundreds of arrests.

In East Africa, Al Qaeda has been trying to exert more direct control over its longtime affiliates, which have been run by veteran operatives of the organization as largely independent -- and active -- cells since at least 1998, when they bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224.

Al Qaeda is also trying to forge closer alliances with clan-based militants in Somalia, who are fighting the U.S.-backed transitional government there, and in Yemen, Bin Laden's ancestral homeland, current and former U.S. officials said.

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josh.meyer@latimes.com