by Helen McArdle

The al-Qaeda network is able to "directly recruit British muslims at street level in the UK", according to a ground-breaking new report by the UK's premier anti-extremism think-tank.

The research paper produced by the Quilliam Foundation, just published in the US military journal, The Sentinel, says the success of attacks such as 7/7, compared with the failed bombings at Glasgow Airport and London's West End, is proof of the "direct assistance" from senior al-Qaeda members to British homegrown terrorist, without which "few of these attacks would have ever been viable".

Author James Brandon also rejects the consensus that al-Qaeda has adopted a strategy of "leaderless jihad", recruiting and mobilizing followers purely through the internet. While counter-terrorism initiatives introduced since 9/11 have driven the movement underground, Brandon claims the evidence suggests al-Qaeda "continues to operate through a traditional hierarchical structure based on face-to-face contact" and is able to recruit directly in Britain.

The report compiles evidence based on recent criminal trials to show how most of the major and successful terrorist plots in the post-9/11 era have had direct ties to high level al-Qaeda figures in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region, calling into question the idea of terrorist self-starters'.

Brandon told the Sunday Herald: "People aren't radicalised just by watching news about Iraq or Afghanistan or Gaza. It's a much more complex process than that. And the key thing to understand is that there are actually people out deliberately trying to radicalise other people - people aren't just self-radicalising. And once you understand that then it's slightly easier to deal with, because if you can simply tackle the people involved in the radicalisation then the problem to an extent goes away."

Terror expert David Capitanchik, formerly of Aberdeen university international relations department, said: "Unlike the IRA, which was one organisation and quite easy to infiltrate, it's difficult to infiltrate al-Qaeda as the groups are very small."

But professor Alex Schmid, director of St Andrews university's centre for terrorism studies, criticised Brandon for drawing definitive conclusions from a "nebulous jihadi landscape". He said: "I have been talking to people with access to classified intelligence and they have given me diametrically opposed accounts regarding the degree of control of core al-Qaeda on plots beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East."