Al-Qaeda (35 page)

Following Ressam’s arrest, thousands of FBI agents were assigned to the ‘Borderbom’ investigation. With less than two weeks until the Millennium, with millions worldwide planning to attend events that would be easy targets for terrorists, the pressure to roll up any broader network linked to Ressam was huge. In fact, Ressam was not the first arrest to be made of conspirators in the so-called ‘Millennium plot’, a series of attacks linked to ‘al-Qaeda’ and bin Laden timed to coincide with the end of 1999. On 30 November, police and paramilitary security forces in Amman, Jordan had raided several addresses around the city and on its outskirts and arrested sixteen people who, officials said, had hoped to machine-gun tourists at biblical sites in the Middle East and to blow up a huge hotel in central Amman full of Jewish and American tourists and pilgrims. Ressam himself had hoped, evidence indicated, to kill hundreds with a large bomb on the crowded concourse
of Los Angeles airport. Later it would become clear that other attacks too had been planned by Islamic militants around the world to coincide with the end of 1999. One, an attempted attack on the USS
The Sullivans
on 3 January off the coast of the Yemen, failed when the bombers loaded the speedboat they hoped to ram into the ship with so many explosives that it sank.

The details of the ‘Millennium plot’ show, as American investigators said at the time, ‘the modern face of global Islamic terrorism and how it functions’.
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In their conception, planning and execution the attacks were very different from the bombings of the eastern African embassies. The attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were directly organized by bin Laden’s close aides using a small number of long-term associates of the group and teams of specialists flown in for the occasion. The ‘hands-on’ involvement of men like Mohammed Atef in Afghanistan and the careful grooming of key individuals like al-Owhali were made necessary by the lack of an operational structure on the ground in east Africa and by the lack of trained volunteers. But the Millennium attacks in Jordan and California reveal a different, and far more dangerous, pattern of operation. Understanding the genesis of the plot and its attempted execution is of enormous importance in understanding the threat posed by modern Islamic terrorist violence today.

Those involved with the plot were acting on their own initiative. They were not even part of established and known local Islamic militant groups. Most importantly, they had initiated the contact with the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’, deciding to approach them for help with training, funding and, as their plans moved towards completion, to ask permission to claim the bombings in bin Laden’s name. Indeed, it appears unlikely that any of the plotters in the American or Jordanian cells ever met bin Laden. They were not acting on the orders of bin Laden or his associates, they were merely using the facilities he was able to provide to execute the plans and projects they themselves had conceived.

Ahmed Ressam was born on 19 May 1967 in the small town of Bou Ismail, on the Mediterranean coast west of Algiers. His father, Belkacem Ressam, had fought in the war of independence against the French from 1954 to 1962 and, as something of a war hero, had been
rewarded with a job as a government driver. The family were not wealthy but did not live in hardship. There was always food on the table, even if they only ate meat once a week.
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Though Belkacem Ressam prayed five times a day and went to the mosque on Friday, he did not demand that his five sons did likewise. His wife and two daughters wore the
hijab
outside the home, but the family’s Islam was cultural and unpoliticized. Belkacem Ressam had seen his fight against the French colonial regime in typical anti-imperialist, Third-Worldist, left-wing terms. The war had involved bombings, assassinations and the systematic terrorizing of civilians by all involved.
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‘We are a revolutionary family,’ said one of Ressam’s brothers when asked by a reporter to explain Ahmed’s involvement in terrorism.
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Belkacem Ressam hoped that his son would be able to take the tough qualifying examinations that would get him a free university education. A college degree would mean entry to Algeria’s small middle class. However, though Ressam was a lively and intelligent boy with a talent for mathematics, ill health held him back at school. He was sent for treatment in Paris, where he read the French books, banned at home, that described how the Algerian military had seized power in the years immediately after independence. On his return, he struggled to catch up at school and failed the university entrance exam. Applications to the police and military security were refused on account of Ressam’s lack of qualifications.
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It was a bad time to be a young man out of a job in Algeria, possibly the worst for 40 years. Since gaining independence in 1962, the leaders of the Front de Libération Nationale and the senior Algerian military command had relied on oil revenues to prop up a Soviet-style one-party state. For the first 15 years, socialist and nationalist rhetoric, combined with the legitimacy earned by key regime figures during the war against the French, kept resentment at the lack of democracy and real development in the country in check. The spike in oil prices in the early 1970s allowed the Algerian government, struggling with a centrally planned economy, to buy cheap commodities from overseas. These, and substantial Soviet aid, bolstered the regime. Fierce state repression also helped. Though a group of Algerian ulema had set up a Salafist group in
1934, Islamic radicalism or revivalism had played only a small role in the war against the French.
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By the mid 1980s, this construct was beginning to fall apart. The collapse of the price of oil in 1986 had a devastating effect on the government’s budget. The profound economic problems of the country, caused and compounded by population increase, a massive influx to the cities, unplanned and inadequate urban development, corruption and unemployment, particularly among the graduates of the newly expanded education system, undercut any faith in the nationalist, socialist ideology of the regime.
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In 1988, Algeria was wracked by huge street protests, which forced the regime to call the first elections since independence. The original impulse of the demonstrators was anger at the manifest failings of the regime and was not articulated in Islamic terms. However, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), formed in 1989 to unite Algeria’s disparate Islamist groups, assumed the leadership of the protesters on the streets.
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Ahmed Ressam had not been out throwing rocks though. His father had used his savings to open a small coffee shop next to the main mosque in Bou Ismail, and Ahmed worked there, getting up at 4.30am, working through to noon and spending his small earnings on designer jeans and visits to nightclubs. He drank, smoked hashish and went to bars. He had long since stopped praying.
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The whole range of modern political Islamic thought was represented in the FIS leadership. There were members from hardline groups who followed Qutb and had waged a desultory terrorist campaign against the regime between 1982 and 1987 alongside moderate political Islamist groups, closer to Maududi, whose aim was to Islamicize the state gradually and without violence. Until the late 1980s, the numbers of Algerian Islamists had been small, the groups had been wracked by infighting and their role in political and cultural life had been limited. However, the internal weaknesses of the FIS were obscured by the huge wave of support they were able to ride. Though the government had copied Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and other states and attempted to build itself a tame, state-sponsored ulema by creating an Islamic university (complete with imported scholars from Egypt’s al-Azhar) in 1985, the Islamists, with a message that was ‘simple, demagogic and powerful’, easily outflanked the regime’s religious
leaders. In 1990, the FIS swept to power in a majority of the country’s local authorities. They were helped by excellent organization and substantial funds from Saudi Arabia.
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The new mayors and municipal councillors were largely Islamist intellectuals, teachers and professors, but they were backed by, in addition to the urban poor who had turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers, shopkeepers and small businessmen.
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But in the aftermath of their victory at the polls, moderate elements within the FIS found it difficult to resist the demands of the more radical elements. Hundreds of Algerians had fought alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan and, with the war against the Soviets over, by 1989 had begun to return to their own country.
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Suddenly, groups of Afghan veterans in combat fatigues, beards and
pakols
, the round woollen hats favoured by some mujahideen groups, began appearing at the head of demonstrations.
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Soon FIS councils had ordered female municipal employees to wear the veil, had shut shops selling alcohol or videos and cafés that allowed gambling, and banned the hugely popular
rai
music which fused local traditions with Western pop. Moves were also made to boost the prestige of Arabic at the expense of French, seen as the language both of colonialism, the disgraced regime and its elite stooges, and of Western cultural and economic neo-imperialism. In Bou Ismail the moderate imam of the main mosque was forced out. Growing confrontations, sparked by the government’s attempts to gerrymander electoral constituencies in the run-up to national elections, led to the army declaring a state of emergency and arresting the senior FIS leadership, virtually decapitating the movement. In fact, the army had merely opened the field for the real militants, convincing moderate Islamists the electoral process was a farce. The Afghan veterans, some of whose travel to Algeria had been paid for by bin Laden, had been against any concession to the kufr regime at all. In November 1991, a group of army conscripts at a remote border post were brutally killed by Afghan veterans. Despite the background of rising violence and their own lack of direction, the FIS won the first round of elections to the national legislative assembly (though with markedly reduced support from a year previously) a month later and looked set to do well in the crucial second round too. The army
promptly cancelled the second round of the ballot and dissolved the FIS entirely. Thousands of militants, activists and elected FIS officials were interned in camps in the Sahara. Over the next five years 100,000 people would die in a civil war of horrific savagery. This was not a war in which neutrality was an option. As bombings, strikes on defence installations and attacks on civilians, journalists and intellectuals multiplied, the security forces retaliated with detentions, executions and widespread torture. On 5 September 1992, 25-year-old Ressam got up at dawn, said goodbye to his brother, sleeping nearby in the room they shared, took a bus to Algiers and then a ferry to Marseilles.
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For the next 18 months, Ressam drifted among the illegal expatriate community in France. When the French authorities caught up with him he fled, with a fake passport, to Canada where he claimed political asylum on the (false) basis that he had been tortured by the Algerian military.
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Though issued with a deportation order, Ressam was able to stay in Canada, supporting himself through petty theft, credit card fraud and welfare payments. Targeting foreigners proved especially lucrative, not least because certain men in the Algerian community in Montreal were willing to pay hundreds of dollars for stolen passports.

One was a 35-year-old shop owner called Fateh Kamel, who was among a group of Algerian immigrants that congregated at the Assuna Annabawiyah mosque in Montreal. The mosque had been built in 1993 with money raised in the local community and from wealthy donors in the Gulf. Though Algerian Islamic tradition is tolerant and pacifistic, the mosque, owing to the origin of the funds for its construction, tended towards a strongly Salafist brand of Islam. The mosque runs a website which has links to fatwas by senior Saudi clerics and is typical of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of mosques built with Saudi money around the world.
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Its bookstore, like that of many similar establishments, sold tapes and videos of fighting by ‘mujahideen’ and atrocities against Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya and in other theatres of ‘jihad’. Fateh Kamel regularly attended the mosque, and so did an older man in his mid forties called Abderraouf Hannachi. Both Kamel and Hannachi had spent time in Afghanistan. Hannachi told the younger men in the group about fighting the Soviets and described how he had been trained, at Khaldan camp, in light and heavy
weapons and demolition techniques. Kamel had his own stories to tell.

Kamel’s and Hannachi’s relationship with Ressam is archetypal. A brief survey of the process of the induction of young disaffected men into violent Islamic militancy shows that often, though not always, contact with a more senior man at a critical point has acted as a catalyst, turning a vague aspiration towards ‘jihad’ into a definite course of action. Typically such men are in their late thirties or forties and are veterans of the war against the Soviets. Some established themselves, often by gaining political asylum, in the West in the years after the end of that conflict, fleeing the repression of Islamic movements in their own lands, such as Algeria and Egypt, in the early 1990s. Others managed to hold on in their homelands despite the attention of domestic security services. Many went on to be involved in the conflicts in Bosnia or Chechnya. Often such men hold positions of respect within the social groupings centred on the more radical mosques that exist to cater for a minority of expatriate Muslims.