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The Associated Press has put out an analysis on splinter groups of al_Queda and their growing threat.

The groups are small, little known and highly militant, with ideologies like al-Qaida’s. They have struck around the world, carrying out suicide bombings in Morocco, kidnapping civilians in Iraq and attacking Western residential compounds in Saudi Arabia.

The emergence of these groups is making the fight against terrorism more challenging. Instead of targeting one enemy — just al-Qaida — the West and its allies now face many “al-Qaidas,” splinter groups that are mostly unrelated to each other but are bound by the same hatred of the West — especially the United States and its allies, including Israel.

“It’s like McDonald’s giving out franchises,” said Dia’a Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on militant groups. “All they have to do is follow the company’s manual. They don’t consult with headquarters every time they want to produce a meal.”

A key conclusion in last month’s Sept. 11 commission report said that even though Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida has been weakened, its imitators pose a “catastrophic threat” to the United States.

“The enemy is not just ‘terrorism,’ some generic evil,” said the report. “The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism — especially the al-Qaida network, its affiliates and its ideology.”

“The second enemy is gathering, and will menace Americans and American interests long after … Bin Laden and his cohorts are killed or captured,” the report said.

It’s good to see the AP is catching up with President Bush, who had this much figured out on September 20, 2001.

Americans are asking: Who attacked our country? The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda. They are the same murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for bombing the USS Cole.

Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world — and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.

The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics — a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam. The terrorists’ directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children.

This group and its leader — a person named Osama bin Laden — are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction.

The day was filled with developments in Iraq, not all good from my perspective.

First, Iraq has hung a one-month closed sign on the door of Al-Jazeera’s Baghdad office.

“This decision was taken to protect the people of Iraq and the interests of Iraq,” Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s told a news conference Saturday.

Allawi said the order to close Al-Jazeera, which was to take effect immediately, came after an independent commission monitored the network’s reports.

The findings of the commission were “compelling,” he said.

“They came up with a concise report on the issues of incitement and the problems Al-Jazeera has been causing.”

Al-Jazeera also reported the closing.

Jihad Ballout, the network’s spokesman, told The Associated Press that Al-Jazeera was not given a reason for the closure.

“It is a regrettable decision, but Al-Jazeera will endeavor to cover the situation in Iraq as best as we can within the constraints,” he said.

Two things to note in this story. First, the name Jihad Ballout makes me chuckle. He should change his name to something more intimidating, like Jihad Ballstothewall. Second, this closing will have no immediate impact on what Al-Jazeera reports and how they spin it to the Arab world, but it may have more of a local effect. I generally have to come down against this, instead supporting the promotion of respected rival news sources. The one-month technical difficulties will probably end up a non-issue.

Jihad Ballout. Chuckling.

The next story is of a limited offer of amnesty by the Iraqi government to minor criminals in the insurgency.

Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi signed an amnesty Saturday intended to persuade militants fighting a 15-month-old insurgency to put down their weapons and join government efforts to rebuild the country.

But the law pardons only minor criminals, not killers or terrorists, and appeared unlikely to dampen the violence, as some insurgent leaders called it “insignificant.”

….

The long-delayed amnesty, coupled with a tough emergency law passed last month, was supposed to help end the violence by coaxing nationalist guerrillas to the government’s side.

The amnesty applies to minor crimes such as weapons possession, hiding intelligence about terror attacks or harboring terrorists and appears intended to persuade people with information on attacks to share it with police.

The amnesty forgives those who committed minor crimes between May 1, 2003, just after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, and Saturday, Allawi said.

“This amnesty is not for people … who have killed. Those people will be brought to justice, starting from Zarqawi down to the person in the street,” Allawi said, referring to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose followers have claimed responsibility for deadly suicide bombings.

Rape, kidnapping, looting and terror attacks also are excluded.

This peaked my interest because of the manner in which it meshes with the Al-Jazeera shutdown. The Iraqi government is moving to relieve its people from the insurrection by chipping away at its propaganda and low-level support. At the same time, these moves may work to establish the validity of the new government in the minds of the Iraqi citizenry. I’ll have to check if Iraq the Model commented on either of these.

The third development seems to have gone under the radar but NATO has started to officially arrive in Iraq.

NATO sent a group of officers to Iraq on Saturday to begin its training mission for Iraqi forces.

The first four officers left Saturday from a command center in the southern Italian city of Naples, NATO said in a statement from Naples, calling it the official start of the mission in Iraq.

The main part of the NATO training mission group, initially consisting of 45 members, will deploy next week, said the statement.

The NATO trainers are due to report back by early September so that a decision can be made on the scope and content of any NATO training mission.

The 26-nation alliance agreed on July 30 to send the team after sidestepping a dispute between the US and France over command of the alliance operation.

The mission’s tasks include liaising with the Iraqi interim government and US-led coalition forces, helping Iraq establish defense and military headquarters and identifying Iraqi personnel for training outside the country.

Al-Lafayette, we are here.