Re: Two sides to the coin
I'm not sure I see the reason for an Al Qaeda clone to go after fiber-optic cables.
Looking at that one exchange with the 5 cables in Alexandria that was mentioned, if ISIS took it out and then stormed through the streets of Alexandria with 100-200 gunmen killing Coptic Christians or something, would taking out that exchange substantially help them? I'm going to bet not, as the military/police could probably summon reinforcements by radio, and I don't think taking out that exchange is going to badly effect the ability of citizens in Alexandria to warn eachother to get off the streets and shelter.
Could you do the old "We'll take out the cables and take Wall Street/the LSE/the Frankfurt DAX/Nikkei/Shanghai exchange offline and cost the infidels billions in stock losses!" scenario? Probably not, as those kind of targets are going to have a lot of fault-tolerance in case of a badly placed plane crash/subway derailment/irresponsible guy with the backhoe from hell scenario.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
