Juan Herveda of Netwar notes that Issue no. 10 of al-Qaeda's training manual Al-Battar has special coverage of kidnapping. Juan offers a series of excerpts for your perusal.
Since so many countries seem happy to pay ransoms and change their foreign policies in response to kidnappings, we can expect this to become an income-generating staple for Islamists in the Middle East. Kidnapping already fills this role in places like Colombia and other parts of Latin America, where the "Terror, Inc." model is more established, and Alaa's Sept. 16 post indicates that Iraq is moving in this direction as well.
My personal bet: I expect the Islamists to take further steps toward the Colombian model, as a likely extrapolation of current trends. The key difference from Latin America will be the monetary stakes involved if it begins to slow the inflow of expertise. Given the Middle East's much higher dependence on foreign experts in order to produce its main sources of income and run its societies, it will be interesting to see how Middle Eastern governments react if kidnappings start becoming more widespread in the region as a whole.
UPDATE: Belmont Club analyzes this trend in Iraq, the PA & Afghanistan.
As a contribution to Terrorist Trivia: The first really industrial level kidnapping operation was started by Basque ETA members who worked out of Nicaragua during the Sandinista years. They had been there working for the Sandinista's Fifth Directorate (counterintelligence) and contributed to the repression of contras and the miskito indians. When finally the Sandinistas lose power, they stayed behind and kept a true guerrilla supermarket in Managua under the cover of a car repair shop in the Santa Rosa neighborhod. There, in a sophisticated James Bond like vault with hidraulic steel doors, they kept huge amounts of weapons, fake papers, files on welthy people throughout Latin America, etc. It was some sorts of "one stop shopping center for Latin terrorists" for every guerrilla and insurgent movement in the Americas.
The "shop" eventually blew up in 1993 apparently by accident leaving a huge grater. Besides several tons of weapons, investigators found hundreds of passports from 26 countries. In fact, five Nicaraguan passports, that could have come from that cache, were used by the terrorists who carried out the first attack against the WTC in New York that year.
The owner of the Santa Rosa supermarket managed to fled. He was a Basque who eventually came back to Spain to reconstruct the ETA clandestine operation and then off to Colombia, where he contributed to the FARC some bomb technology and aparently started a database of "kidnappable" citizens theat the FARC memebers keep in laptops in checkpoints. The creative gentleman's name is Eusebio Arzalluz aka. Paticorto.
He's credited with authoring the first rationalized kidnapping manual and is one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.
One interesting link in Spanish: La Prensa, Nicaragua
US SD repport
Harvard International review
Obviously, the Colombian government has not developed any kind of policy that's preventing the kidnappings in any kind of meaningful way. I'm very afraid of this method spreading. Are there any governments that have successfully convinced terrorists within their borders that kidnapping won't work? If a government has, we had better take note of their techniques and consider the possibility that this will become an increasingly appealing method of exaction.
I think there is also a difference between kidnapping for money and kidnapping for political purposes. I'm not sure that the response to the kidnapping should be different, but preventing the spread of kidnapping for money might be done differently than preventing the spread of kidnapping as a political terror technique.
I think that kidnapping by guerrillas in Latin America has been evolving into some sorts of "enforcement tool" for the perception of the s.c. "revolutionary tax". Those groups strive always to establish a dual power situation in which they mimic where possible the state. They then try to weaken the enemy state while reinforcing their own... So, they always try to get people to pay taxes to them and, if they don't pay, kidnapping is one of the retaliatory mesures.
But then, they also use the roadside check-points to decide who to kidnap for a one-time ranson.
That logic is still far in Iraq, but no doubt it is the point of refreence, where the terrorist groups woul like to go from here. In Iraq they use kidnapping and the publicity around it to weaken the resolve of the countries of the Coalition, but then also you have France...
The two French journalists who have been "detained" by the terrorists for over 45 days are being used to coerce the Paris government into taking political stances favorable to them. I reckon they are having more than a little success...
Did you see this?
Excerpt:
"I went to an emergency meeting for foreign correspondents with the military and embassy to discuss the kidnappings. We were somberly told our fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was determined we were missing. Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to Al Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons flow the other way from Al Qaeda to the Baathisst to the criminals."