Some terror experts think so:
Terrorism analysts say al Qaeda may have conducted their first operation in Gaza. This after a video was released today of the two Fox News journalists held hostage since August 14 along with an accompanying written statement issued by a previously unknown group calling itself the “Holy Jihad Brigades.”
The language in the statement, which denounces the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is similar in style and content to the kind of dispatches issued by Abu Musab al Zarqawi when he was leading al Qaeda in Iraq.
Why would al Qaeda be in Gaza?
Analysts believe that al Qaeda has expressed an increasing interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict for a number of reasons, one of which is their major setbacks in Iraq. Their tactics of beheading and mass murder of innocent civilians have not been popular with the majority of Iraqis, and their leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. air attack two months ago.
Al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan have been dismantled after their allies, the Taliban, were overthrown by the U.S.-led war in October 2001, and their leadership has been forced to seek refuge in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Many of their top operatives have been arrested in the past four years.
Here’s the important part: This article suggests that “the increasing chaos in Gaza represents an opportunity for al Qaeda to tap into the growing rage of young Palestinians.”
This tracks with what Caroline Glick wrote in the Jerusalem Post last May: “Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza this past summer fomented Hamas’s rise to power in the Palestinian Authority and enabled the transformation of Gaza into a base for al-Qaida, Hizbullah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”
Can there be any doubt that withdrawing from Iraq now would create even worse chaos in that country, creating a powerful breeding ground for new al Qaeda terrorists?