28 August 2004	Saturday	11 Rajab 1425

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 27: The threat of more Al Qaeda-backed attacks demands an organised global response but UN-led sanctions and other measures are not working, according to a damning new report by experts at the United Nations.

The experts call into question many of the basic assumptions in the war on terror, including efforts to cut off the flow of money to would-be terrorists even though all but the most spectacular attacks, such as September 11, can be carried out at little cost.

Meanwhile Al Qaeda and its supporters are making effective use of the media to drum up support in the Muslim world, capitalising on anger over the war in Iraq and continuing to try for a potentially devastating chemical or biological bomb attack, the report said.

Drafted by a panel of outside experts, it paints a bleak picture of countries either languishing several steps behind international terrorists or unwilling to go beyond the basic paperwork required to demonstrate a good-faith effort to crack down on terror.

"The threat from Al Qaeda-related terrorism remains as great as ever, but the nature of the threat has changed," said the report to the UN Security Council, which put in place the monitoring mechanism being evaluated by the high-level panel.

"There is no prospect of an early end to attacks from Al Qaeda associated terrorists," it said. "Using minimal resources and exploiting worldwide publicity, they have managed to create an international sense of crisis."

Efforts to block the sale of weapons and the movement of terror suspects - cornerstones of the UN sanctions regime against Al Qaeda and Afghanistan's former Taliban rulers - have not been effective, the study said.

It recalled that the Security Council first determined that Al Qaeda merited a united world response in October 1999 - two years before the 2001 attacks on the United States that brought down the World Trade Center.

After September 11, the council then passed a resolution requiring all UN member nations to freeze the assets, block arms sales and restrict the travel of any person or group believed to be linked to terrorism.

But the experts found that not even one nation had reported stopping either the travel or the sale of weapons to anyone on the UN list of those suspected of links to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

"Security Council sanctions aimed at curbing Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorism have achieved less than was hoped," the report said. "This list has begun to lose credibility."

Only 19 nations have said any person or group linked to Al Qaeda is on their soil, even though the number of nations where the terror group operates is higher, the experts said, and just 34 countries have reported freezing assets.

Even then, they said, "in some cases it has been hard to tell what this means. It is not clear from all reports of asset freezing, for example, what those assets are, their value, or who owns them." In Azerbaijan, only 40 dollars in assets have been frozen. In Portugal, the figure is less than 325 euros. -AFP