Al Qaeda in South Africa?

Reuters reports an alarming development. Some US counterterrorism officials, including those responsible for following the money trail at the Treasury Department, are concerned anough about mosque preacher Farhad Docrat and his dentist cousin Junaid that they have placed the two men on its list of suspected al Qaeda supporters and will freeze their assets. The two men are based in Laudium, an unprepossessing community outside of Pretoria.

South African Muslims do not tend to have reputations for radicalism, and what radicalism there is stems from the anti-apartheid years when the demand was for more liberalism and democracy, a far cry from what radical Islamists demand. Nonetheless, what we see in this case, independent of what ultimately comes of the charges, is that one of al Qaeda's pernicious strengths, one of the aspects that makes the organizaton especially difficuly to combat, is that it is fungible. The organization does not know and barely recognizes national borders. I've long argued that all of Africa is potentially fertile ground for radical Islam. South Africa is unlikely to become a major safe haven for Islamic radicals, to be sure, but this news shows that no place is entirely safe either.