The 9/11 Wars (31 page)

Al-Zarqawi’s strategic thinking – inasmuch as there was any – differed profoundly from that of al-Suri. The two had very different personalities and very different experiences of militancy too, and this showed in their vision of how ‘the jihad’ should be fought. Al-Suri’s formative experience was the destruction of his fellow Syrian Islamists after their revolt against the Syrian regime in 1982. President Hafz al-Assad had acted without pity, razing much of the city of Hama, their base, and giving al-Suri an early and profound lesson in what too great an attachment to controlling physical territory might bring. Al-Zarqawi’s formative experiences were the opposite. He had ended up in prison because he had had no base and nowhere to hide when the Jordanian security services came looking for him in the early 1990s. He thus saw the establishment of physical enclaves as the key goal of any militant movement. This was a more traditional vision of guerrilla warfare, involving the creation of secure havens where insurgents could plot, train and rule, preparing for the major conflicts to come but also drawing on a whole range of theological resources such as the concept of the pure ‘Islamic community’, living as an isolated example in a sea of barbaric ignorance,
jahiliya
, that was recurrent in both recent radical Islamic thought, such as the works of thinkers such as Syed Qutb, and in its antecedents stretching back to the righteous community of the Prophet Mohammed himself. This perfect imagined Islamic community could be realized both metaphysically – in terms of a personal spiritual withdrawal – and physically – as militants had done in Egypt in the 1970s. A related concept was that of
takfir.
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Being a
takfiri
meant assuming the right to designate others who called themselves Muslims as
kufr
, or non-believers, and was an integral and controversial part of the ideology of al-Zarqawi, his associates and their spiritual mentors. So, for example, Abu Anas al-Shami, the militant Falluja-based cleric, said in a radio message in July 2004, that anyone collaborating with the coalition in Iraq was an unbeliever and it was permitted, indeed encouraged, to kill them.
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But
takfir
also implied a separation from the corrupt, the hypocritical and the apostate which true believers should attempt to realize in real concrete terms. It was not enough merely to try to engineer a righteous community, but territory needed to be defined, seized, sacralized, Islamicized and purged.

The last decades had seen attempts to do this at all levels within the Islamic militant movement. The history of the 9/11 plot itself was replete with examples. From the Hamburg flat of the hijacker pilots to the Islamic centres where they met and the prayer rooms they established in the universities they attended through to the training camps in Afghanistan and finally the Islamicized Taliban Emirate, purged of impure objects and influences such as the Bamiyan Buddhas, the concept of finding, controlling, defining and occupying space had been key. The aim of al-Zarqawi and his followers was to re-create the Taliban’s Afghanistan in Iraq.
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The ‘home’ that they had said they missed so much, the patch of land where they could unfurl their prayer mats, had to be rigorously policed if it was going to be held against the huge forces ranged against them. So in Falluja, the men of al-Zarqawi’s group spent much of the summer and early autumn of 2004 trying to eradicate everything in the city that contravened this radical vision. In the run-up to the battle of November 2004 the effort they made to enforce a strict code of personal behaviour on local populations who did not share their rigorous interpretation of Islam – in part by subjecting them to the sight (or experience) of spectacular public violence involving torture, beatings and videoed humiliation – was at least as great as the energy they dedicated to constructing bunkers to resist American troops. Al-Shami, head of al-Zarqawi’s
fatwa
committee, declared both equally valid and necessary ways of preparing the defence of the city.

FROM SAUDI TO IRAQ, THE FOREIGNERS ARRIVE

In the early autumn of 2004, as the fighters in Falluja dug in physically and spiritually, Hizam al-Ghatani, a softly spoken twenty-six-year-old shopkeeper from the south-eastern Saudi Arabian port town of Jizan, left his home, his wife and small son and set out for Iraq. No one told him to do so, no one ‘brainwashed him’, he was not ‘recruited’ in the conventional sense of the word. A thin, bespectacled orphan with poor educational qualifications who had scrabbled to support his family, al-Ghatani found his own way into militancy, overcoming significant obstacles to reach his destination. He did not expect any material rewards. Indeed, he was not even sure of what he expected at all. But he travelled willingly, even if anxiously.
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Al-Ghatani was not alone. Many hundreds – possibly many thousands – of volunteers were arriving in Iraq through the late spring, summer and autumn of 2004. Their numbers were often exaggerated as was their importance in what remained a predominantly local insurgency. But that they came is beyond doubt. An analysis in early 2005 of fatal casualties among such
mujahideen
recorded on Arabic-language extremist websites over the previous six months found mentions of 154 non-Iraqi Arabs killed in the country.
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Very few had any combat experience at all.

There was nothing inevitable about al-Ghatani’s transition from shopkeeper to
mujahed
. He had been shocked and upset by the 9/11 attacks. ‘I was not happy because all those people were civilians,’ he remembered, admitting that he ‘was not clear about al-Qaeda or their ideology’. He had also been horrified by the violence in his own country, where returning Afghan veterans had built networks, recruited volunteers and eventually launched a series of increasingly bloody attacks from May 2003. But for al-Ghatani, as for most Saudis, Iraq was different. ‘I saw the TV, al-Jazeera, the internet news websites and I was angry at the aggression against civilians, the children being killed, the air attacks … I wanted to be of service … They were at war, I was at peace. I wanted to do something to help them,’ he said. ‘I knew nothing about the criteria for a jihad. I just thought it was simple: you fought unfair aggression.’

In Mecca in mid 2004, the young man met a band of Iraqis who described the situation in their homeland in graphic terms. Al-Ghatani needed no further convincing. The group put him in touch with a smuggler in Kuwait. He paid the man $1,000, and together they walked and drove across the shifting rock and sand of the desert frontier with Iraq before another car picked him up and drove him to Baghdad.
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The Iraqis he had met in Mecca were waiting for him in a house in the city’s al-Doura district, a stronghold of the insurgency. ‘I was thinking more of being a stretcher bearer or a medic, but they convinced me to become a fighter,’ al-Ghatani said. The young man was told he was going to Falluja. He had never used a gun before and was apprehensive.

The highest proportion of foreign militants in Iraq – up to two-thirds by some estimates – came from Saudi Arabia, and most had reached Iraq not via Kuwait like al-Ghatani but through Syria. This Syria–Saudi nexus was not foreseen by Western pre-war planners but, admittedly with hindsight, seems eminently logical. It evolved organically and rapidly, because it suited ground realities as well as the interests of the individuals and states involved. It is a perfect example of the sort of secondary effects the confident and ambitious American project in Iraq could generate in such a complex region and of the kind of transient phenomenon that characterized much of the continually evolving internal dynamics of the 9/11 Wars.

That a number of Saudi citizens – a small fraction of the Kingdom’s 23 million perhaps but significant nonetheless – would be motivated to fight in Iraq was always probable. Even in 2003 and 2004 the power and legitimacy of the ruling Saudi royal family still rested on two pillars: the pact established with the kingdom’s religious establishment at the foundation of the state more than seventy years before and the generous disbursement of the country’s vast oil revenue via jobs and welfare. Both of those pillars were unsteady. The pact – by which the descendants of Ibn Saud would exercise temporal power and be permitted to appropriate a very large proportion of the kingdom’s immense wealth in return for allowing the clergy control over education, enormous financial resources themselves and relative autonomy – had been strained by the nation’s continuing alliance with the United States and by elements within the royal family’s continued attempts to gradually lead a profoundly conservative society in a more Westernized, less rigorous direction. Simultaneously the buying of social peace was threatened by a whole series of parlous economic indicators: per capita oil revenue was lower than it was in the 1980s, unemployment was up to 20 per cent.
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None of this necessarily guaranteed a flow of militants to Iraq, but against the background of decades of the intense propagation of a particularly conservative strand of Islam and coming on top of almost all the factors seen elsewhere – such as massive rural–urban drift, a huge youth bulge and a powerful narrative of Muslim solidarity in the face of a supposedly belligerent and anti-Islamic West – it did make it much more likely.
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One significant factor which undoubtedly encouraged many to travel to Iraq was the strong support of local clerics. Again, though, along with the macro-factors there were the micro-factors: low-level, ‘flat’ social networks played an important role too, with most volunteers making their way to war in groups of friends, neighbours or worshippers at the same mosque.
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Significantly, the networks through which volunteers came together and then travelled were entirely distinct from those of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. The rapid rise and abrupt fall of ‘Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’ (AQAP) is explored further in later chapters. For the moment, it is simply worth stressing that, however much their ideology and rhetoric may have seemed superficially similar, AQAP remained operationally and organizationally distinct from the much broader movement of volunteers from the kingdom to Iraq.

The Syrian connection owed more to the longstanding poor relations between Damascus and Washington. A brief period of optimism following the accession of Bashar al-Assad as president in July 2000 had been rapidly followed by a new nadir in relations as the Syrian security establishment reasserted its grip on power and continued its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and other Islamic militants across the region. A complicating factor in an already complex situation was that, though they watched over a predominantly Sunni country, the Syrian security establishment was dominated by Shia from the tiny Allawite sect, including the ruling family. Tolerating, if not actively assisting, the passage of volunteers across their territory served several of the Syrian intelligence services’ interests: it fuelled the insurgency in Iraq and therefore made a US intervention against Damascus less likely, it provided a useful card to play in any potential negotiations with Western states or even Israel and, as Saudis and other foreigners paid considerable sums to smugglers and to border tribes who often had connections with the security services, it made them money too. Finally it also diverted the attention of anyone who might otherwise be tempted to take up arms against the Syrian regime, which, as secular Ba’athist and in large part Shia, represented two of contemporary Sunni militancy’s priority targets. The necessity for such a safety valve was shown, not only by the rising number of incidents within Syria, but also by statistics on the origins of the volunteers arriving in Iraq. Up to a fifth were Syrian, their homeland naturally no more immune to the broad currents of radicalization coursing through the Islamic world than anywhere else in the region.
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The journey was not always simple. Mohammed al-Fawzan, a thirty-five-year-old from the wealthy al-Shifa neighbourhood of Riyadh, was an example not just of how any inevitable link between poverty and violent activism is difficult to construct but also of the obstacles those who set out for Iraq had to overcome to reach their goal. Al-Fawzan too blamed al-Jazeera and ‘the TV’ for his decision to try to become a
mujahed
. A self-confessed partygoer more interested in football than religion, al-Fawzan, sixth of nine sons of a rich businessman, said that neither the al-Aqsa Intifada nor the war in Afghanistan had ‘meant much’ to him, but the images from Abu Ghraib in particular and from Iraq more generally, as they had done with al-Ghatani, created ‘a kind of mental shock’. ‘When I saw those pictures, it came into my mind that I had to do something,’ he recalled. Al-Fawzan, who had a secure and relatively well-paid government job in the Transport Ministry, sought out a relative in Mecca who was already sending volunteers to Iraq and was despatched, after some basic training in the Yemen, to Damascus, where he was hidden by a ‘coordinator’, a fellow Saudi, in an apartment and furnished with false ID papers. After a month, however, with no sign of an imminent departure and unable to leave the safehouse, al-Fawzan lost patience, decided to try another way to reach Iraq, returned to Saudi Arabia and was arrested.
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Others, such as Abu Thar, a Yemeni taxi driver and religious student who also said he had left his home after seeing the images from Abu Ghraib, were more determined. Abu Thar described spending weeks moving between cheap hotel rooms, mosques, rooms above religious schools in Damascus, Aleppo and elsewhere as he waited to cross into Iraq from Syria. In each, he said, he found another dozen young volunteers.
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Finally, he was taken to a village on the Syrian side of the border close to a checkpoint where the police had been bribed and, after a frightening trek through the desert, was led into Iraq and to Falluja.
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