Despite the anger, bin Laden's vision unfulfilled

Despite growing anger against the United States across the Muslim world, Osama bin Laden's vision of Muslims rising up against their governments and the West remains unfulfilled.

A year after the September 11 attacks, very few Muslim fundamentalist groups have made headway in local struggles or against the United States.

On the contrary, many groups from Kashmir to the Palestinian territories have felt the heat of a US backlash against political violence, with authorities using the "war on terror" to crack down on domestic opposition or movements seeking self-rule.

Analysts say these groups have not been able to translate rising public anger against US policies, widely seen in the Muslim world as anti-Islam, into larger support for militancy.

"These messages of the Islamic groups are still marginal and not accepted by most of the Muslim world," Reuven Paz, Islamist specialist at Israel's International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, said.

In the weeks that followed the September 11 attacks, bin Laden made several videotaped appearances in which he called on Muslims to rise up and "liberate" Saudi Arabia, topple pro-Western governments and fight against the United States.

"There is a growing understanding, among both the Muslim public and Arab governments, that this phenomenon is more dangerous for them than for the West because in the Arab world it could lead to changes of regimes and governments," Paz said.

The magnitude of the attacks on New York and Washington and the resulting US-led crackdown on bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and the overthrow of its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan sparked debate in many militant groups.

"I think part of the debate that has gone on in that camp since September 11 is that quite a few have said 'This is too big for us, we can't take this on'," Yezid Sayigh, a Middle East specialist at Britain's Cambridge University, said.

He said there had been a flourishing of "middle of the road" Islamist groups in which people became apolitical, not politicised.

The shadow of September 11 looms large over Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose main weapon in the fight against Israeli occupation remains suicide bombings.

The groups came under heavy US pressure to stop their attacks and under strong military pressure from Israel, which linked its fight against a Palestinian uprising for independence to that of Washington's "war on terror".

"No doubt the September 11 events had an impact on the entire region, including Hamas, but this has not affected the strategic position of the movement and its vision regarding the nature of the struggle and its right to resist the occupation," Ismail Haniyah, a Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, said.

"Resistance is a legitimate right and occupation is the terrorism which should be stopped," he said.

Lebanon's Hizbollah also came under pressure for its sporadic attacks on an Israeli-occupied ridge on the Lebanese border. Hizbollah says its attacks are not terrorism but acts of legitimate resistance.

In Pakistan, Islamic militancy rose after military ruler General Pervez Musharraf lent Islamabad's support to the war on terror.

There have been a series of attacks on Western and Christian targets in Pakistan in the past year blamed on Islamic militants. The attacks have killed dozens of people.

A December attack on the New Delhi parliament, which India blamed on Islamic militants, also brought Pakistan to the brink of war with its nuclear-armed neighbour.

Pakistan and India have massed a million troops along their border. India has called on Pakistan to stop militant incursions into its revolt-ridden part of the disputed state of Kashmir.

Musharraf, under growing international pressure to stem militancy, has banned five militants groups - two involved in domestic sectarian violence, two Kashmiri and one pro-Taliban.

Indonesia's small but vocal militant Muslim groups seized the spotlight when the US attacked Afghanistan, threatening to attack Western interests and protesting the American raids and US policies in the Middle East.

But they failed to garner support from Indonesia's overwhelmingly moderate Muslim populace. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Several governments in the Arab world, already dealing with Islamist threats, used the war on terror to crack down on militants and domestic opposition.

The crackdown in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden's birthplace where hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects and sympathisers were arrested, forced militants to keep a low profile with early expressions of support for the attack quickly suppressed by the authorities.

Islamic charities came under close scrutiny and several Islamic institutions were hurt by a crackdown on alleged terror funding, while Muslim clerics were told to voice opposition to bin Laden's extremist call.

In neighbouring Yemen, authorities detained thousands of suspected Muslim militants, lawyers and political sources said.

Yemen, scene of an attack on the US destroyer Cole nearly two years ago, blamed by Washington on bin Laden, received US military and intelligence help to hunt down extremists.

Ahmed al-Soufi, secretary-general of the independent Institution for the Promotion of Democracy in Yemen, said the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh had launched the crackdown on Islamists to defend his rule.

"Yemen has set up political executions to eliminate Islamists because they are the strongest candidates to take over power."