LONDON: Simply talking about Al Qaeda sustains fears of Islamist extremism, experts said after claims the group could stage another ‘9/11’ and Osama bin Laden re-emerged to taunt the West.

Analysts said the Al Qaeda chief, in hiding since the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, was succeeding in ‘scaring the hell’ out of everybody even though his shady and diffuse network is actually relatively weakened.

“It’s (Al-Qaeda’s) got an identity that is much stronger than it’s ever been and that’s largely as a function as how we’ve begun to talk about it,” Tahir Abbas, from the University of Birmingham in west central England, said.

“By talking about it, by making reference to it, we rarify it and that in a sense gives it the life that other people need it to have in order to buy into it.” Abbas, a specialist in the study of Islamic radicalisation, was speaking after the sixth anniversary commemorations this week of the Sept 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington.

At the same time, videos appeared showing Al Qaeda’s spiritual head Osama mocking the United States, threatening to escalate the conflict against US troops in Iraq and praising one of the ‘9/11’ hijackers as a ‘champion’.

The following day, the respected International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London said the Al Qaeda threat had not diminished and it could still plan and carry out ‘spectacular’ attacks on Western targets.

The report grabbed headlines but its conclusions were not universally accepted, despite several attacks this week blamed on Al Qaeda, including the death of key US ally Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha in Iraq.

At least 20 soldiers were killed in an attack on a military camp in Pakistan and concerns remain about the influence of Al Qaeda-inspired ideology in north Africa, where there have been suicide bombings, and south-east Asia.

—AFP