Al-Qaeda (41 page)

So in its means and its intentions the 11 September attack was part of a process that had been underway for well over a decade. Likewise the hijackers, and those who gave them logistic support and directed their operations, are representative of previous trends within al-Qaeda and within Islamic militancy more generally.

Those involved in the 11 September plots can be divided into four separate groups. Three groups comprise the hijackers, who, though they may look like a homogeneous group at first glance, are in fact divisible into three discrete units with very different characteristics, and a fourth comprising the ‘hardcore’ of ‘al-Qaeda’ elements in Afghanistan who maintained overall control, albeit at some considerable
distance, of the operation. A number of other individuals, in Europe, the Far East and the Arabian Gulf, were instrumental in the formation and execution of the scheme and their stories too are important and illuminating.

To provide anything approaching a comprehensive narrative of the 11 September attacks is difficult. It is an enormously complex story that developed over a decade at least and involved scores of characters and dozens of locations. However, there are certain elements that help make sense of the whole and help place the attacks within the context of broad trends within Islamic militant activity in the 1990s. The three groups of hijackers correspond with the analysis of the structure of the modern Islamic radical movement, and bin Laden’s role within it, that I have developed over the preceding chapters. There is the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ and its experienced, though independent, ‘associate members’; there is the ‘network of networks’, and then there is a group drawn from the broad mass of jihadi sympathizers.

The ‘hardcore’ group comprises the senior aides of bin Laden who were involved in the execution of the strikes from their base in Afghanistan, and Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two young Saudi Arabians who died on Flight AA77. Both were veterans of combat in Bosnia, and possibly in Chechnya as well, and were known to bin Laden and his associates after spending time in camps in Afghanistan during the mid to late 1990s.

The second group consists of those hijackers usually referred to as the ‘Hamburg cell’ and include three of the four pilots, Mohammed Atta, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi. The members of the Hamburg cell all arrived separately in Germany between 1992 and 1996. They came together through mutual friends and social networks, particularly those centring on a particular radical mosque, the al-Quds, in central Hamburg, and became, independently of any contact with bin Laden, committed to violence in the name of radical Islam. Atta, the oldest, was the first member of the group to arrive in Germany. They correspond closely to the networked, though autonomous, groups who allied themselves with bin Laden during the 1990s to access resources to allow them to execute plans that they had developed on their own.

The third group of hijackers had a specific job: to contain passengers
while the trained pilots flew the planes to their targets. They have been dubbed ‘the Muscle’. Of the thirteen, twelve were Saudi Arabian.
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These men had all made their own way to Afghanistan in the hope of receiving training to enable them to go to fight in Chechnya or elsewhere. Some indeed may have done so. Not one ever appears to have entertained any idea of involvement in more sophisticated terrorist operations until it was suggested to them by senior al-Qaeda figures in the training camps in Afghanistan. Indeed, it is far from clear that they had any ambition to be involved in terrorist operations at all until that point. Some were selected by associates of bin Laden in the general camps, such as Khaldan, or from newer establishments set up to deal with the post-1998 influx of volunteers. Others were selected from more specialized camps such as al-Farooq. In this, the senior al-Qaeda men were following a practice nearly 15 years old, often in camps that were as aged. The men they selected for the 11 September operation had volunteered for jihad in a way that tens of thousands of other young Muslims had done over the previous two decades. They may have been diverted by senior al-Qaeda figures to their deaths in America but went without compulsion and without compunction. This group corresponds to the broad mass of radical Islamic activists who, in their mosques, their schools, their homes or their Islamic centres, have their own ambitions to fight in the ‘jihad’ wherever they can find it.

Mohammed Atta was born in 1968 in the sprawling Nile delta town of Kafr el-Sheikh. His father came from a relatively prosperous provincial agricultural family, had got into Cairo University and trained as a lawyer. He was a domineering man who pushed his son hard, forbidding him to play with other children and forcing him to study. When Atta was ten, the family moved to Cairo, taking a large apartment in one of the poorer districts. There is little evidence of political or religious activism in Atta’s childhood and youth though his father was moderately devout. His two sisters went to university and qualified as a doctor and a zoologist respectively. Like their mother, they dressed fashionably and went unveiled. Atta’s father does not appear to have been involved with the Muslim Brotherhood despite fitting the profile – with his provincial background, middle-class profession, disappointed
aspirations of social advancement, resentment of the Egyptian elite and university-level education – of the contemporary political Islamist perfectly. He was, however, prone to rants about the Jews, the Zionists, the excesses of the Cairene elite and the plight of the Palestinians. His son, whom schoolmates remember as a shy and effeminate boy, said he wanted to be an engineer and in 1985 began to study architecture at Cairo University.
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Again, though the Brotherhood and more radical groups, such as al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad, were active on the Cairo campus and especially strong in technical faculties, there is no evidence that father or son was involved in political or religious activism, even during the upsurge of radical Islamic violence in the country that followed the end of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
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Atta senior arranged for his son to pursue doctoral studies in Germany. In July 1992, Atta arrived in Hamburg and, lonely and homesick, appears to have begun following a more rigid, literalist and orthopractic interpretation of Islam, praying regularly, refusing to touch food prepared in pots used to cook anything that was not
halal
and avoiding contact with dogs and women. After disagreements with his first host family, largely caused by his uncompromising new stance, Atta moved into student accommodation near the campus of the Hamburg-Harburg technical university where he was enrolled in a graduate course in urban planning. Students and professors there remember him as withdrawn, meticulous and hardworking. Roommates in the student accommodation where Atta lived until 1998 say he was difficult, overbearing and anti-social.
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The staff of Plankontor, the design company where he started part-time work shortly after arriving in Hamburg, remember an earnest and awkward young man.

In 1994, Atta visited Aleppo in Syria to do fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation on an old neighbourhood that had been ravaged by intrusive modernization. What he saw made him extremely angry. In 1995, he won a scholarship to return to Cairo and study plans by the Egyptian government to ‘restore’ an area of the old Islamic city by evicting many of its inhabitants, repairing the old buildings and bringing in troupes of actors in ‘traditional dress’ to entertain tourists. Again, Atta was incensed, blaming Westernization and the Egyptian government’s
closeness to America for the plan to create an ‘Islamic Disneyland’ in the heart of one of the Muslim world’s most celebrated cities.

Atta’s profound resentment of such projects is interesting. That they represented, for him at least, the humiliation of what he felt to be his own culture, society and religion is clear. But one of the things that had so angered him in Aleppo was the way taller, newer buildings in the Western style overlooked, and thus invaded, the courtyards of older traditional dwellings.
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As mentioned before, concepts of space, and more particularly, the idea of ‘Islamicized space’, are hugely important to many militant Islamic activists and repeatedly feature in their literature and discourse. For many recent immigrants from Muslim countries living in the West, such locations, whether they be mosques, cultural centres, certain quarters of a city or domestic homes, are often of enormous importance. At their most positive, such spaces can contribute hugely to our multicultural societies. For the homesick or for those who find the challenge of life in the West too much they provide havens of cultural familiarity and affirmation. However, some such spaces perform a more pernicious function, allowing a definite physical and psychological separation from mainstream life and promoting a culture that facilitates both a deliberate rejection of assimilation and its almost inevitable corollary, political and religious radicalization. The Hamburg cell depended on a series of such spaces: the mosque at which the members met, the flat they hired together, the Islamic study room they arranged at their university and finally the discrete Islamicized spaces of the training camps and Afghanistan under the Taliban. Modern Islamic activists have also recognized the importance of establishing religious spaces outside those dominated by establishment ulema or other traditional, and thus often regime-run, places of worship or religious study. Thus the important role that ‘Islamic centres’, places that are new and neither mosque nor medressa, often play for militant groups.

From Cairo, Atta made a pilgrimage to the ultimate Islamicized space, Mecca. On returning to Egypt, he investigated career options but became swiftly disillusioned. Few of the structural problems that had crippled the Egyptian state over the preceding decades had been addressed by President Hosni Mubarak’s government. Without contacts
in the elite, Atta, despite his now impressive qualifications, stood little chance of getting a satisfying job anywhere. His newly grown beard, the mark of a devout believer, was a particular problem. He would, he told friends, be ‘criminalized’ and would be unable to practise his profession without harassment. This, he said, upset him profoundly because it was ‘his dream’ to work in his own country.
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Atta was in Egypt at a time when violence between the Egyptian security forces and the resurgent al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya was reaching a peak. He could not have been oblivious to the brutal struggle taking place around him. The summer of 1995 saw the attempt on Mubarak’s life in Addis Abbaba, masterminded from Khartoum, and a major crack-down on the Muslim Brotherhood, which had won control of several major professional unions in Egypt, in which hundreds of militants were arrested.
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Within two years, the violence was to climax in the massacre of fifty-eight tourists at Luxor by an al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya splinter-group, an act which caused a huge swathe of the Egyptian middle and lower classes to withdraw their support for radical Islam and forced the more moderate elements among the militants to declare a truce, much as had happened in Algeria.

But it was not religious issues that angered Atta most. Acquaintances in Cairo remember him becoming incensed by essentially political concerns that are common among activists of all ideologies throughout the developing world. Underlying them all was, friends said, a powerful sense of ‘social justice’ that underpinned Atta’s anger at the inequities of Egyptian society. He was particularly exercised by the ‘complete ignorance of social problems’ manifested by Egypt’s elite, repeatedly criticizing government officials and politicians for focusing on their careers and the enrichment of their families above all else. This he attributed, at least in part, to American political and cultural influence on the Cairene elite. He resented the fact that the rich preferred the American University in the capital to Cairo’s own university where he had studied. Those who ran Egypt and who enjoyed comfortable lives were ‘alienated’ from their own people and culture, Atta told friends. That the Egyptians grew cash crops such as strawberries for the European market but were forced to import wheat angered him too. On another occasion he criticized the Egyptian government for allowing
industrial waste from developed countries to be dumped in his own country and made a point of describing to Volker Hauth, a fellow student, the problems that had resulted from President Sadat’s neo-liberal financial policies in the 1970s. They had enriched the elite at the expense of the poor, Atta said. The lack of opportunity for young Egyptians was also a constant complaint.
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Atta also profoundly resented the international community’s failure to help Bosnian Muslims and the Palestinians. He contrasted the mobilization of huge forces against Saddam Hussein with the seeming inability to act elsewhere. This was, he felt, indicative of the West’s cynical attitude to the Islamic world.

When Atta returned to Hamburg, he began attending the al-Quds mosque in Steindamm, known locally as a centre for radicalism, and made friends with a number of the young men who worshipped there. In March 1996, two of his new friends witnessed Atta’s will, a bizarre mix of Salafi orthopraxy and personal neuroses which specifies that Atta’s body should be laid on its side facing Mecca, women should be barred from the burial and anyone who prepared his body should wear gloves and avoid touching his genitals. Atta, as far as anyone knows, died a virgin. There is no evidence for any close relationship with any woman outside his family at any stage of his life.
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The will confirms the impression that Atta, despite his intense interest in religion, was far less steeped in the culture, tradition and language of Salafi Islam than many of the activists he was associated with. The will lacks the Qur’anic and exegetical references that one would expect from someone who was genuinely familiar with the holy texts.