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The "ethnic rift" is unsurprising.
The goal of Usama bin Laden in founding al-Qa'ida was to form a grand coalition of Islamist terrorist groups around the world that would be something like the hydra-headed conspiracy of a Mack Bolan novel (or actual cooperation between Marxist terrorist groups like that seen between the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).
Thus, al-Qa'ida was supposed to unite groups around the world like the Abu Sayyaf Group (the Philippines), Jemaah Islamiyah (mainly Indonesia), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), etc. Hence the name - al-qa'ida means "the base" or "the foundation."
But these groups had little in common. Only a few shared the particular brand of Islamism of Bin Laden and the core al-Qa'ida members. And few had global ambitions. So while al-Qa'ida ostensibly has thousands of members worldwide, when it comes to operations with a true al-Qa'ida stamp, such as the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, the attack on the USS Cole, and the 9-11 attacks, the actual planners and perpetrators are almost always Arabs. In fact, they are almost always Arabs from the same areas - former Egyptian Islamic Jihad members who followed Ayman al-Zawahiri into the AQ fold, and Yemenis and Saudis recruited by Bin Laden. Of the 19 9-11 hijackers, 15 were Saudis, two were from the UAE, one was Egyptian and one was Lebanese. Among other conspirators, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was a Yemeni, Zakariyah Essabar was a Moroccan who lived in Germany, Muhammed al-Kahtani was a Saudi, Mustafa al-Hawsawi is apparently a Saudi, Zacarias Moussaoui was a French citizen of Moroccan descent.
Iraq is supposedly now a magnet for foreign jihadists worldwide, but a review of those actually captured or killed indicates virtually all are Arabs (overwhelmingly Saudis and Syrians). Arab jihadists went to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya to fight the infidel, but non-Arab jihadists don't appear to have returned the favor. And even the Arab jihadists in Iraq appear to have turned most of the locals against them.
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