The 9/11 Wars (29 page)

Al-Suri’s argument was radically modern and relatively simple. His motto was ‘
nizam la tanzim
’ or ‘system not organization’, and his vision was of a broad, self-organizing popular uprising that would have no leaders, no organizations but simply like-minded highly motivated activists ‘swarming’ together for specific attacks.
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These would be on targets which, after having consulted his own writings, everybody understood to be legitimate and which would cumulatively, particularly through their propaganda value, advance the overall cause. One of al-Suri’s sources for this vision was his own largely inaccurate reading of the second Palestinian Intifada, still ongoing as he worked on early drafts of his work and receiving easily as much coverage on Arab-language satellite television as anything al-Qaeda was doing. He understood the Intifada to be the sort of ‘strategic phenomenon’, a bottom-up spontaneous mass participation leaderless revolt, which he wanted to see across ‘all corners of the Islamic world’.
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But al-Suri was also a realist. He saw the Islamic militant movement as on the defensive, with huge and potent forces ranged against it. One advantage of al-Suri’s strategy would thus be the increased resilience it would give militant networks, albeit at the cost of their capacity to organize major strikes against distant targets.
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At his Afghan camp, al-Suri had advised his protégés to form no cells bigger than ten members for, ‘if you are caught, they are all caught’.
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Logistics would be dealt with locally and communications kept to a minimum. Autonomous local units would be empowered to act along broad strategic guidelines without seeking further authority, and there would be no oath of allegiance to an
emir
.
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In addition to boosting security, al-Suri hoped to end the ‘disunity’ or
fitna
that he, like bin Laden, saw as the greatest threat to the movement by dissolving all difference in a single, ‘flat’ ideology that took no account of local specificity. There would be an end to the previously incessant arguments about which country would be the base of the new caliphate because no country would be. His book, accessible to everyone via the internet, would provide the guidance formerly provided by a central leadership. Al-Suri’s vision thus combined the local – individuals doing what they could where they could – with the global – a common goal and style of all the combined efforts. Like the 9/11 Wars themselves, al-Suri’s jihad would be composed of an infinitely complex matrix of sub-conflicts the sum of which would be greater than the parts. One thing for al-Suri was certain: open confrontation with superior ‘Crusader-Zionist forces’ must be avoided unless victory was absolutely assured. The 9/11 attacks had been a catastrophic strategic error, he felt, casting ‘jihadists into the fiery furnace … a hellfire which consumed most of their leaders, fighters and bases, leaving only a very few to escape either capture or death’.
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Through 2003 and 2004 more and more evidence began to emerge that something approaching al-Suri’s vision of individual militants acting individually according to a universal template was actually already happening. One area was in the Far East, specifically in Indonesia, where a series of new networks evolved in the immediate aftermath of the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. These successfully launched a series of attacks on Western targets, particularly Australian interests, and on local people or groups associated with the West.
²³
The most shocking and ruthless was the strike on nightclubs in the resort town of Kuta beach in Bali in October 2002 in which more than 200 people, including many tourists, lost their lives. In August 2003, the Marriott hotel was attacked in Jakarta, and just over a year later it was the turn of the Australian embassy in the Indonesian capital.

As ever, the violence in Indonesia had long roots, stretching back to resistance by revivalist Islamic groups to Dutch colonizers and then the various governments that had followed them.
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Local Salafis had also received large amounts of Saudi Arabian money in the 1980s.
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Sectarian unrest in the 1990s and in 2000 had fuelled the growth of radical Islamic ideologies, and by the turn of the millennium Indonesia had developed a thriving and relatively large and heavily politicized extremist Islamist movement, Jemaa Islamiya (JI), which was rooted in an extensive network of religious schools across the country. As elsewhere, the Indonesian government went to some lengths to stress the international connections of many of JI’s senior members and ignored the longer and much darker purely national history that lay behind its emergence.
²⁶

The JI organization became the focus of attention following the Bali attacks and their successors. It had certainly provided the organizers of the strikes with a reservoir of manpower for the recruitment of many of those involved. Yet organizationally it was not linked to al-Qaeda. The leading players in the Bali plot had been in Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had attended what were effectively terrorist training camps, but the facilities where they had learned about bombing, counter-surveillance and so on had been run by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan cleric with strong Saudi connections who led his own ‘
mujahideen
faction’ and who was a rival of bin Laden rather than an associate. Ten of the score or so individuals closely involved with the Bali bombing were alumni of Sayyaf’s Sadda camp near Peshawar.
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There were a handful of key individuals, often operating outside the structure of JI, who acted as go betweens with al-Qaeda at the time of the Bali plot. They exploited personal relationships with al-Qaeda leaders established before 9/11 during the period when the group was fully established and operational in Afghanistan to source some assistance for their campaign. But their role was less than has often been said. The test came following the arrest of Riduan Isamuddin, aka Hambali, in Thailand in August 2003, the man said to be key link between al-Qaeda and operational groups in south-east Asia, who had, according to local and American intelligence, brought cash from bin Laden as one-off funding for the Bali attack.
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Despite his removal from the scene, the bombs continued. The man behind them, Noordin Top, had never travelled to Afghanistan and was not in contact with the al-Qaeda leadership – though he nonetheless called his group Tanzim Qaidat ul Jihad. He also translated documents from al-Qaeda’s online magazines and took the
nom de guerre
of ‘Ayman’, almost certainly after Ayman al-Zawahiri, whom he had never met. Top, an extremely effective, ruthless and dedicated operator who would continue to launch a series of attacks throughout much of the decade, was an example of how al-Suri’s vision was already being realized by the time the Syrian strategist was putting pen to paper in his mountain hide-out.
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Other attacks provided further apparent proof. Many occurred on the other side of the world, testament itself to the apparently global relevance of al-Suri’s strategy. Three in particular – in Casablanca, Morocco, in March 2003, in Istanbul eight months later and in Madrid in March 2004 – showed this very clearly. The Casablanca attacks, which killed twenty-nine people, were organized by two men who had recently been in training camps in Afghanistan but were carried out by fourteen suicide bombers recruited locally. All were young men, all aged between twenty and twenty-four, from the sprawling Casablanca slum of Sidi Moumin. For several years radical preachers in these slums, often educated in, or influenced by, Saudi Arabian religious schools and foundations, had been attracting a growing following among the offspring of immigrants who had arrived from poor rural communities over the previous three decades.
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Such groups tapped into similar local conditions to those that were leading to the growth of al-Sadr’s militia in Iraq and, like the al-Mahdi Army, provided a coherent set of values, aspirations, explanations and an identity to young men growing up in communities largely marginalized from mainstream social, cultural and political life in Morocco, including from the officially sanctioned Islamist parties.
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Also like in Iraq, they formed semi-criminal gangs, enforcing their own law and even carrying out scores, possibly hundreds, of executions. Almost all those who killed themselves in the Casablanca bombing were unmarried, unemployed, poorly educated and so unworldly that their failure to find the targets they were aiming for in the centre of the city revealed not just their amateurism but the fact that many had barely travelled further than the edge of the violent slum that was home. Only one, a substitute teacher, had graduated from high school and been to college. None were previously known to the authorities, none had any previous known involvement in Islamic activism, and all were recruited during the four months it took one or two senior activists to plan the attack. The attacks came two months after the invasion of Iraq, an event cited as critical in almost all the interrogations of the survivors of the cell once they were rounded up by Moroccan security services. They had no connection to anyone among the senior leaders of al-Qaeda.
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The bombings in Istanbul in November 2003 came against a similarly febrile background. In few places was the radicalization and the concomitant aggravation of anti-Americanism caused by the Iraq war more evident than in Turkey, a majority Muslim nation but a secular, historically pro-Western state. Though bin Laden remained deeply unpopular, not least because he was an Arab, as many as 31 per cent of Turks nonetheless said that suicide attacks against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq were justified, a sentiment that undoubtedly encouraged domestic militants to see bombing campaigns as likely to be approved by a significant proportion of their own community.
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In spring of 2003, the Americans had made huge efforts to negotiate passage for 15,000 crucial troops across the territory of their NATO ally into northern Iraq for the invasion of Iraq, sending Zalmay Khalilzad, the urbane Afghan-born special emissary of the White House, to spend days in Ankara negotiating with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). Erdogan, who had just been appointed prime minister after clearing legal hardles following a landslide victory in 2002, got the consent of his cabinet to a deal worth $6 billion in grants and $20 billion in credit guarantees but ultimately failed to convince parliament.
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The rejection of the American offer was acclaimed almost unanimously by a Turkish public which polls said was 94 per cent against the US invasion plan.
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Of a very similar nature to those in Casablanca, the Istanbul bombings too revealed both the impact of the new diaspora of Afghan veterans and the ease with which they recruited new volunteers for the cause. One of bin Laden’s last acts before 9/11 had been to receive a deputation of Turkish militants and approve their request for $10,000 to fund operations in their homeland.
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The attacks, which targeted two synagogues, a British-owned bank and the British consulate, left fifty-eight people dead, generated worldwide media coverage and were considered a success. Though two of the most senior militants involved escaped to Iraq, most of those they had recruited were rounded up. One explained his vision of the group’s activity to Turkish police. ‘We are different from al-Qaeda in terms of structure,’ said Yusuf Polat, who admitted serving as a lookout for the bombers. ‘But our views and our actions are in harmony.’ The quote summed up al-Suri’s vision of militant activism perfectly. The passive acquiescence of the 400 people who investigators calculated knew something about the planned strike but had said nothing indicated the degree to which, by the end of 2003, many of the precepts underpinning the extremists’ worldview were taking hold on a much wider population.
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That the violence was going to spill over into mainland Europe was probably always inevitable, though few anticipated quite how spectacular the first attacks on European soil would be. They came on March 11, 2004 between 7.38 and 7.43 in the morning when eleven bombs detonated almost simultaneously on commuter trains pulling into Madrid’s Atocha station and two suburban stations. The death toll eventually reached 191 and one of the most appalling scenes of the 9/11 Wars must be the shattered trains with, as rescue workers fought to free casualties and corpses, the constant ringing of mobile phones called by anxious relatives who had heard the news of the blasts and whose loved ones would never answer. About a third of the dead were immigrants from eleven different countries.
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Once again these attacks seemed to show that al-Suri’s vision of a genuine popular uprising spearheaded by self-radicalizing militants was being realized.

The Madrid strikes were very different from many previous such actions. The bombers did not die in the attack itself, thus failing to demonstrate the supposed faith of those behind the attack as the attacks over previous years had so often sought to do. Martyrdom or
shahadhah
, as the etymology of the word in both English and in Arabic implies, involves the act of bearing witness by one’s voluntary death before a real or imagined audience, and this, contrary to standard al-Qaeda practice, the Madrid bombers did not do.
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Neither, on the whole, had previous strikes been conducted in such a way as to kill and maim hundreds of ordinary people without even the pretence of attacking a military, administrative, political or commercial target. The targets in Casablanca – a restaurant frequented by tourists and the elite, a Jewish-owned hotel, a synagogue – had been at least representative of the standard enemies of radical Islamists. The same was true of the bombings in Istanbul. Bin Laden, al-Suri and others understood that they needed to justify civilian deaths as part of a broader defensive effort against a bigger target, such as Israel or America. Even tourists could, at a push, be portrayed as ‘ambassadors of depravity, corruption, immorality and decadence’, in al-Suri’s words. But killing crowds of ordinary commuters on their way to work was far harder to ‘sell’ to potential sympathizers and thus risked delegitimizing the cause as a whole.