World-wide Terrorist Attacks Linked?

For some reason, not a great deal of attention has been paid to the likely relationship between yesterday’s simultaneous bombings in Riyadh and terrorist attacks in Chechnya, where 55 people were killed, and in Yemen, where the courthouse where an al Qaeda murderer was sentenced earlier this week was also bombed on Wednesday. The Russians are alleging that the Chechnya suicide attack, which preceded the Saudi bombings by only fourteen hours, was an al Qaeda operation carried out in conjunction with the Saudi attacks. That is very likely true, and while investigators are of course very interested in the precise origins of each terrorist attack, in a broader sense it does not make a great deal of difference whether a particular terrorist act is carried out by “al Qaeda” or by another Islamofascist group with similar aims, similar methods, and, often, interchangeable personnel.