WASHINGTON, July 27, (Agencies): The United States issued a worldwide caution Tuesday warning that al-Qaeda was plotting strikes in many regions, and urging its nationals to maintain a “high level of vigilance.” The State Department anticipates “enhanced potential for anti-American violence given the death of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011,” said the statement, which replaced an earlier caution version issued Jan 31. “Current information suggests that al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks against US interests in multiple regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

“These attacks may employ a wide variety of tactics including suicide operations, assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings, and bombings,” the statement warned. Likely targets included “high-profile sporting events, residential areas, business offices, hotels, clubs, restaurants” as well as places of worship and schools. As such Americans “are reminded to maintain a high level of vigilance and to take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness,” the State Department said. In addition, “credible information” suggests US interests are being targeted in the Middle East and North Africa, the statement warned.

“Security threat levels remain high in Yemen due to terrorist activities there,” the statement added, noting Libya also remained “volatile and dangerous and the threat of violent military and terrorist operations remains high, even in opposition-controlled areas.”
The State Department also warned against sea travel in the Horn of Africa or the southern Red Sea due to “a notable increase in armed attacks, robberies, and kidnappings for ransom by pirates.”
Despite what the State Department painted as significant risks in multiple regions, the new US defense chief Leon Panetta said earlier this month that the “strategic defeat” of al-Qaeda is “within reach,” on a visit to Afghanistan.
Striking the United States remains a “significant goal” for al-Qaeda and its affiliates nearly a decade after the Sept 11 attacks, the president’s nominee to head the National Counterterrorism Center said on Tuesday.

The killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was a “significant milestone” and “substantial progress” has been made against al-Qaeda, but the group still poses a top terrorism threat to the Unites States, Matthew Olsen said at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“That threat is not so much from the senior (al-Qaeda) leadership in Pakistan with one unified goal, it is now diffused in various regional locations under various leaders and with various goals,” he said.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which operates in Yemen and claimed responsibility for a Dec 25, 2009 attempt to bomb a US-bound passenger plane, “has shown a willingness and a level of capability to strike in the United States,” Olsen said.
Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia also has shown a willingness and ability to strike outside that country, he said.

If confirmed by the Senate, Olsen will become director of an agency created in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks as the hub for analyzing and sharing terrorist threat information.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the intelligence committee, expressed concern that the period before the tenth anniversary of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, was one of “heightened threat.”
The Somalia-based Shebab terror group is actively recruiting Muslim Americans for terror strikes on the United States, a US lawmaker warned Wednesday.
“We must face the reality that Al-Shebab is a growing threat to our homeland,” said Representative Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security committee.
Wednesday’s hearing was the third in a controversial series studying the possible threat posed by homegrown Islamist extremists.

Critics charge that King’s focus on Muslim Americans plays into the hands of extremists who say Washington is wrongly targeting Islam in the wake of the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist strikes.
Tens of thousands of Somali immigrants and their US-born children live in places like Minneapolis-Saint Paul, in the midwestern US state of Minnesota.
According to King, senior US counter-terrorism officials told the committee they fear that a Shebab fighter “may attempt an attack here.”
King mentioned Shirwa Ahmed, a Minneapolis resident who is “the first confirmed American suicide bomber in our history,” as well as Omar Hammami, identified as a Shebab commander “who was raised a Baptist in Alabama, and who has repeatedly threatened the US homeland.”
King said the Shebab “has successfully recruited and radicalized more than 40 Muslim Americans and 20 Canadians, who have joined the terror group inside Somalia.”
Neither al-Qaeda “nor any of its other affiliates, have come close to drawing so many Muslim Americans and Westerners to jihad,” he said.