Terror groups more decentralized, attacked more Muslims in home countries amid global crackdown

While the U.S. government heightened alert levels at year's end, the shift in targets from Western to Muslim countries raises the possibility that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network has been stymied by Western security measures and battered in the war against terrorism, and that it now depends on local militants to carry out attacks.

The changing tactics led to bombings in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia and Morocco that were mostly linked to groups affiliated with al-Qaida or radicals trained in bin Laden's camps.

It was a reflection of both the strengths and the weaknesses of al-Qaida.

The network's core leadership has been targeted by U.S. attacks in Afghanistan and is on the run, but thousands of militants -- by some estimate up to 20,000 -- have trained in Afghanistan since 1996, analysts said. The militants returned home, where they set up local groups.

"The movement has metastasized well beyond the organizational boundaries of al-Qaida," said Steven Simon, a counterterrorism expert with the U.S. National Security Council in 1994-99. "Innumerable local groups now subscribe to the bin Laden agenda."

"The group has done its work," he said. "The group has spurred a worldwide insurgency."

That fight is now mostly being seen in Muslim countries.

In Turkey, attackers who killed 62 people in November in a spate of suicide bombings that targeted synagogues and British interests were believed to have been trained in bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

A bombing the same month in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, that killed 17 people -- including five children -- in an upscale housing compound bore the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, U.S. and Saudi officials said.

An August blast at the J. W. Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed a dozen people was blamed on a local group with ties to al-Qaida.

Five near-simultaneous suicide attacks on May 16 in Casablanca, Morocco, aimed at Jewish and Spanish targets killed 45 people including 33 bystanders. That was also tied to a local group whose members trained in Afghanistan.

The attacks on lightly guarded civilian targets in Muslim countries are in part due to increased security measures in the West that have made it more difficult to attack in the United States and Europe, analysts said.

That "doesn't mean at all that al-Qaida is not still trying to strike the United States on its own soil," Simon said. But "it is certainly more difficult."

It is also easier for militants to operate on their home turf, and the attacks might be part of a strategy to spread the movement.

In Turkey, for example, militants have been able to melt into the overwhelmingly Muslim society.

On Kenya's largely Muslim coast, al-Qaida operatives have settled down in small towns and married local women, integrating into a society where they can operate more freely.

Hundreds of new members have been recruited there, said U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commander of a U.S.-led anti-terror task force based in nearby Djibouti.

The four November bombings in Turkey was a clear example of the growing trend. The suspected attackers were Turks who trained in Afghanistan in al-Qaida camps.

A chief suspect in the bombings, Fevzi Yitiz, told Turkish police after his detention that some of the conspirators met with bin Laden before the attacks and that the al-Qaida leader suggested they target a military base in Turkey used by Americans, officials told The Associated Press.

But the attackers dropped plans to attack Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey due to the base's high security, the officials said. Instead they struck civilian targets, killing mostly Muslims and sparking outrage among Turks.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who began his career as a member of the country's pro-Islamic movement, questioned whether suicide bombers even have the right to call themselves Muslims.

"We are forced to tell those people, whoever they are, that they are monsters with blood on their hands and have nothing to do with the basic values of our religion," Erdogan said.

That anger is spreading in Muslim countries.

In Saudi Arabia, analyst Dawood al-Shirian said many Muslims who once sympathized with bin Laden's war against the West began to question his goals after two bombings in the kingdom in 2003 killed more than 50 people.

"When they see the images of dead children, when they see the images of a dead mother, if one of their own dies, they will turn away from the militants," al-Shirian said. "That's what will isolate the militants."

In Indonesia, the Muslim Lawyers Group, which has defended militants in the past, said it would not take on any of the men accused in the Marriott blast.

"We saw who the victims were ... almost 90 percent Muslim," said the group's leader, Mahendradatta, who uses only one name. "We don't want to defend people who are doing their struggle like a loose cannon. They have no vision, no mission."

But not all Muslims share those views. And some extremists say that killing Muslims who have adopted Western lifestyles is acceptable in the fight against the West.

One Saudi in his 30s phoned a reporter after the Riyadh bombings to say he was "ecstatic." Another said he wished that such attacks were happening every night but preferred they target Americans and other Westerners.

Governments in Muslim-majority countries reacted harshly to the attacks.

Turkey detained more than 100 people after the bombings and has been aggressively pursuing suspected attackers.

Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia also have been fighting extremist groups, and police in many Muslim countries are closely monitoring people who visited Afghanistan and may have trained in al-Qaida camps.

"Some states will be better able to control these activities than others," said Simon, the U.S. counter-terrorism expert. "But the worrying thing is that recruitment will probably remain very robust."

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Associated Press writers in Jakarta, Indonesia; Cairo, Egypt; Nairobi, Kenya; and Paris contributed to this report.