The 9/11 Wars (30 page)

The reasons for this series of ideological and tactical differences became clear as investigations into the attacks in Madrid progressed. The attackers were not experienced al-Qaeda operatives parachuted in from overseas as initially suspected but were first-generation Moroccan and Tunisian immigrants who had been living in Spain for some time.
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Neither was it directed by some kind of shadowy al-Qaeda ‘head of operations’ from afar. The group had largely formed in 2001 and 2002, drawing on a base established largely by Syrian activists fleeing persecution in their own country who had arrived in the mid-1990s. It had, however, evolved fast as new members were drawn into or left the overlapping networks of friends, family and associates that it comprised. No one recruited its members or brought them deliberately together with the aim of creating a terror cell. They formed like any unorganized social group. A police informer, the cleric at one of the mosques they frequented, described the men meeting at apartments to chant jihadi songs and watch videos of jihadi preaching ‘clandestinely, with no regularity or fixed place, by oral agreement and without any schedule, though usually on Fridays’.
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Soon, most had ‘reached the conclusion that they had to undertake jihad’. If there was a leader it was Abd al-Majid al-Fakhet, an intelligent thirty-five-year-old Tunisian-born economist with Spanish citizenship. His key associate was an energetic and violent BMW-driving drug dealer of Moroccan origin, Jamal Ahmidan, who was known as ‘the Chinaman’ on account of his large oval eyes and diminutive stature. The latter, whose commitment to radical Islam had come after addiction to alcohol and crack, was still involved in the heroin trade, though no longer a user himself, and provided the bulk of €55,000 needed for the attacks. Most of the rest of those in the various sets of social networks – ‘childhood friends, teenage buddies, neighborhood pals, prison cellmates, siblings, cousins’ – that formed the group were poor, ill-educated and marginalized.
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Only one marginal member of the group had ever travelled to Afghanistan, and though the web of connections around the group was vastly complex, touching the UK, Morocco and Italy, no clear direct connection to the al-Qaeda senior leadership has ever emerged. After several years of investigation, Spanish intelligence and police investigators concluded that the bombers were acting largely on their own. There were, officials said, ‘no phone calls to al-Qaeda and no money transfers’ nor any solid evidence of any direction from bin Laden other than the portraits of him some of the bombers had on the screens of their mobile phones.
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One much-debated question has been whether or not the Madrid attacks were timed to achieve the specific short-term political gain of swinging the imminent Spanish election to ensure the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. According to Spanish court documents, the intentions and plans of its leaders only began to become concrete following the invasion of Iraq.
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The earliest ambitions of the group, discussed at length in various apartments or on picnics by the banks of the Navalcarnero river outside Madrid in between games of soccer and while children ran around and wives prepared food, had been to travel to Afghanistan to fight.
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However, by late 2002, a new member of the group, an Egyptian called Rabei Ousmane Sayed, suggested that instead of travelling all the way to Afghanistan or Chechnya they should focus their efforts closer to home. According to the police informer, Sayed told the others: ‘We need martyrs who are ready where they are. If one lives in France, then he’s prepared for France; if one lives in Spain, then he’s prepared for Spain.’ Sayed then asked who was ‘prepared’ for martyrdom. ‘Everybody raised their hand,’ the informer said.
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Yet there was still no focus on who or what to attack or the timing of any strike. In late December 2003, a document entitled ‘Iraqi Jihad, Hopes and Risks’ was circulated on the internet. Of uncertain origin, it nonetheless summed up contemporary thinking in extremist circles about how to force the retreat of Western troops from Iraq by attacking ‘weak links’ in the US-led coalition.
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Spain, where 90 per cent of the population were opposed to the conservative government’s decision to dispatch Spanish troops to Iraq, was designated as vulnerable. The tract gave the key figures in the Madrid group – ‘the Chinaman’ and the Tunisian al-Fakhet – the idea of launching an attack before general elections due in Spain in March 2004. The plot itself was largely organized from a farmhouse outside Madrid that belonged to a relative of one of the group. Explosives were sourced through a Spanish ex-convict working in a quarry whom the Chinaman knew through criminal contacts. The bombs were prepared, placed in bags and dropped off on the trains. If the Atocha train had not been running late, the devices hidden aboard would have exploded in the station itself, killing at least several hundred more.

The influence of Iraq rapidly became very clear. On the day of the bombing, with the government still insisting the attack was the work of ETA, the Basque separatist organization, a Madrid television station received an anonymous statement from a man speaking Arabic with a Moroccan accent who said the attacks were revenge for Spain’s ‘collaboration with the criminal Bush and his allies’. More attacks would follow if the injustices did not end, the man, later identified as the Chinaman, said. ‘You want life and we want death,’ he added, echoing a phrase bin Laden and other radical propagandists had used repeatedly.
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One key element that the invasion of Iraq provided in the eyes of the extremists was a justification for such an attack on ordinary commuters. The support of the Spanish administration for the invasion had strengthened the Islamic militant argument that the group’s proposed victims were not mere civilians but, because they had voted at elections for those who had dispatched the Spanish troops, complicit in military attacks on Muslims. The war in Iraq, like the broader ‘War on Terror’, also allowed the militants to imagine themselves as glorious defenders of the Islamic faith, tapping into the powerful psychological resources of a highly selective and martial version of Islamic history. One of the videos found in the ruins of the apartment in a suburb of Madrid where seven of the group blew themselves up when surrounded by police three weeks after the attacks refers to ‘the Spanish Crusade against the Muslims … the expulsion [of the Muslims] from Andalusia and the tribunals of the Inquisition’.
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Such arguments, though theologically weak and morally repugnant, were emotionally very powerful and by the spring of 2004 attractive not just to a handful of young alienated immigrants in a run-down inner-city district of Madrid but to many other young men among Muslim communities elsewhere in Europe and elsewhere in the Islamic world. As every month passed and 24 million Iraqis, through little fault of their own, lurched further away from the path towards stability, prosperity and democracy that the White House had hoped they would pursue and further towards a grim future on what was now dubbed ‘the central front of the War on Terror’, they grew that much more convincing.
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If there was no sign yet of a generalized ‘Intifada’ across the entire Islamic world and among European Muslims as al-Suri had hoped, the appalling events in Madrid showed the trend was very clearly towards greater radicalization, a greater degree of autonomy on the part of individual militants, greater resilience of terrorist networks and, almost inevitably, a greater extent of violence as a consequence.

AL-ZARQAWI AND ANOTHER VIEW OF VIOLENCE

Of course, al-Suri was not formulating his theories in a vacuum. He was attempting to explain and guide fast-moving events on the ground. He was doing so from some distance. Others were much closer to the gritty reality of ‘the struggle’ and held rather different views. So when, ten days before the first battle of Falluja in April 2004, a group of senior militants had met in the western Iraqi city ‘to review the situation’, they had little time for any strategy of ‘leaderless jihad’ as advocated by al-Suri. Their priorities and interests were much more concrete. Settling down to ‘study recent accomplishments’, their conclusions were far from edifying, recorded Abu Anas al-Shami, a Jordanian Palestinian cleric who was the group’s religious adviser and a fighter and present at the meeting. ‘We realized that after a year of jihad we still had achieved nothing on the ground,’ Abu Anas wrote in a diary published on the internet a few months later. ‘None of us had even a palm-sized lot of earth on which to reside, no place to find a refuge at home in peace amongst his own … We had all abandoned our homes, our families, to become wanderers.’
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The outlook, the militant leaders unanimously agreed, was bleak. All felt they had ‘failed resoundingly’ and that a change of plan was needed. The new approach would involve a reaffirmation of a familiar strategy. What was needed was territory, fortifications, bunkers, a physical front; in short, a base that would be a home, a haven and, of course, a springboard for further expansion once the immediate defensive phase of fighting, so like the early trials faced by the Prophet himself with his small band of followers, was over. ‘So we decided to make Falluja a safe and impregnable refuge for Muslims and an inviolable and dangerous territory for the Americans, which they would enter in fear and leave in shock, burdened by their dead and wounded,’ Abu Anas wrote.
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If Falluja came to be the city which embodied the insurgency, then the individual who became the face of the violence in Iraq in 2004 and on into 2005 was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Born, as his
kunya
suggested, in the rough industrial city of Zarqa in Jordan in 1966, al-Zarqawi had grown up in relative poverty. A violent petty criminal as a youth, he travelled to Afghanistan around 1989, probably influenced by propaganda videos and stories of glorious battles retold in his local mosque. He had, however, at least according to some reports, arrived too late for the fighting against the Soviets and became a reporter for a Pakistan-based radical newspaper instead.
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On his return to Jordan, al-Zarqawi became involved in a militant plot, was arrested, imprisoned and then released in an amnesty in 1999. Free again, he returned to Pakistan and then crossed into Afghanistan, where he established his own very basic training camp in the west of the country near to Herat. Despite his lack of facilities and funds, al-Zarqawi rejected the patronage of bin Laden after a meeting with the Saudi in mid 2000. Like al-Suri he was unaware of the September 11 attacks before they occurred but nonetheless was able to successfully evacuate his camp and the families of his followers to Iran in their aftermath, a feat which, though he still remained little known outside certain tight circles of Jordanian militants, undoubtedly added to his status.
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It is likely that al-Zarqawi reached northern Iraq towards the end of 2002, probably passing through Iran clandestinely, and established himself in an enclave in the hills of the north-east corner of the Kurdish-ruled autonomous parts of northern Iraq held at the time by Ansar ul Islam, the group of local and international militants who had succeeded over the previous decade in securing themselves a chunk of mountainous territory and who had developed some links with al-Qaeda itself in the year or so before the 9/11 attacks.
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Al-Zarqawi’s entry into the lists of top wanted militants came a month before the 2003 invasion, when he played a starring role in US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations setting out the American case for attacking Iraq. In the speech al-Zarqawi was described as an ‘associated collaborator’ of bin Laden and blamed for a range of attacks – including the supposed ‘ricin’ plots in the UK. This was simply untrue. Like al-Suri, al-Zarqawi saw himself as a rival of bin Laden and had never made any formal alliance with bin Laden or any of his close associates.
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Obviously, Powell also failed to make clear that al-Zarqawi, if present in Iraq at all, was one of those militants based in a zone outside Baghdad’s control, telling the Security Council simply that Iraq ‘harbours a deadly terrorist network’ that al-Zarqawi ‘headed’, which may have been a factually accurate statement but was grossly misleading.
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Claims that al-Zarqawi had visited Baghdad for medical treatment after losing a leg fighting in Afghanistan were also tendentious in the extreme, as was amply demonstrated when he eventually surfaced with both lower limbs very much intact.
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As the American tank columns advanced from Kuwait in the south, US special forces and Kurdish
peshmerga
irregulars had flushed out the Ansar al Islam fighters from their bases in eastern Iraqi Kurdistan. The militants had then dispersed.
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Some had headed into Iran, others set off south. Having escaped the bombing and the dragnet, al-Zarqawi worked his way down into the heartlands of the Sunni insurgency. Over the months to come he was joined there by hundreds of other fighters. Some were fleeing the north like him, others were fugitives direct from Afghanistan, many were from core Middle Eastern countries and had come to Iraq to fight as
fedayeen
irregulars during the fighting in the spring and had stayed on. Renaming his group Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Jihad), al-Zarqawi showed both extreme brutality – himself executing by knife several hostages – and a talent for media manipulation – rapidly and effectively ensuring the broadcast of the atrocious images of the executions by internet and video. Some of these videos were produced in terrible makeshift studios-cum-torture chambers in Falluja and elsewhere and were thick with instinctively but adeptly chosen symbolic touches such as dressing prisoners in orange overalls like those worn by detainees in Guantanamo Bay.
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They were viewed by extraordinary numbers of people across the Middle East and the world – the video showing the beheading of the kidnapped American contractor Nicholas Berg was downloaded half a million times in the first twenty-four hours it was online – and together with the continuing bomb attacks he was able to launch both against American troops and Iraqi government forces rapidly made him by far the best-known foreign Islamic militant fighting in Iraq.
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It was also al-Zarqawi who had been responsible for many of the attacks on Shia in the summer and autumn of 2003. At the time the identity of those behind the growing carnage among the Iraqi Shia population had been unclear. Al-Zarqawi, however, had made little secret of his hatred for those he called ‘snakes’, and the attacks escalated through the early months of 2004, becoming a new bloody strand of the violence seizing Iraq.
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Another reason for the extraordinary profile that al-Zarqawi enjoyed as the first anniversary of the invasion approached was the concerted effort by the American military to focus media attention on him in the hope that projecting the Jordanian extremist as the leader of ‘the resistance’ would provoke a xenophobic reaction from Iraqis, splitting the insurgents. In weekly briefings for reporters in Baghdad, US spokesmen regularly displayed slides showing his face, generals mentioned him as often as possible in public, and a variety of steps were taken to ‘boost the Zarqawi factor’ in local coverage of any violence whether directed against American or local forces. This effort was, one of its instigators was later reported to have said, extremely effective.
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