The 9/11 Wars (36 page)

THE SELF-STARTERS

As security services in the UK began to make significant efforts to analyse militants and their behaviour they informally grouped them into various categories.
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There were the ‘followers’ – people who were vulnerable to the right approach from the right person at the right moment, particularly if they were already partly radicalized by a particular event that made them question their identity or their own cultural background for the first time. Then there were the ‘seekers’, those who actively went looking for people with authority, knowledge and the crucial contacts who could help them get to where they wanted to go and often used the internet if there was no other option. One example in 2006 was an eighteen-year-old school boy who became attracted to radical Islam – he was known as ‘the terrorist’ at school because of his frequent statements of support for terrorists and his avowed anti-Semitism – and then got in touch via the internet with a group of students at Bradford university who were themselves planning trips to training camps in Pakistan. He was arrested after his mother called the police after finding a suicide note, a library of extremist videos and a desktop icon that played a song about martyrdom on his computer.
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Another category, however, were the self-starters, the natural leaders, those who were motivated and active and wanted, through their own actions, to change things. Again, many such figures have featured in previous pages: Ali al-Bahlul, for example, the Yemeni who sought out bin Laden and became his media secretary; Abu Thar, who left his family to fight in Iraq was another; Al-Fakhet, the Tunisian-born Spanish immigrant who led the Madrid bombers, was a third; Mohammed Bouyeri, deeply involved in local community work and profoundly frustrated and bitter when his projects did not receive government funding, had the same profile. A classic ‘self-starter’ was Hanif Qadir, a successful British small businessman in his forties who became involved in radical activism in 2002 and who spoke to the author shortly after deciding to end his involvement. Never particularly bothered by politics previously, Qadir had, however, followed the typical path from practising the traditional Barelvi Islam of his Pakistani-born parents to the Saudi-style Salafi rigorous conservatism which had spread from Pakistan into many of Britain’s Pakistani-origin communities in the 1990s.
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As with so many others, the 9/11 attacks were critical in focusing his growing new political and religious consciousness. Qadir began fundraising ‘for the jihad’, as he described it, in 2002.
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‘I had always been involved in charity work, in helping out in the community, in doing stuff, and for me it was just an extension of that,’ he said. ‘It was like stepping in to help someone out who is being beaten up. There was no question in my mind that I was on the right side. I watched the news, saw what was happening over there [in Afghanistan] and got going.’ Qadir started off simply asking friends, relatives and clients for donations for ‘the jihad’. He made little effort to hide what he was doing. The money was passed to an Afghan refugee in London, who sent it via Pakistan to be used to buy weapons and equipment for the Taliban. On one occasion Qadir’s contact presented him with a letter that was said to come from Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, thanking him for his support. ‘I was blown away. I was on cloud nine. I saw what I was doing as my duty, as the only thing I could do in the circumstances, but that was a true reward,’ Qadir said. ‘The fact that I was funding people who were killing British soldiers did not bother me at all.’ Finally, after raising tens of thousands of pounds to help others to fight, Qadir decided to see action himself. Using his fundraising contacts, he travelled to Pakistan and to Peshawar with the aim of joining the Taliban. There, after briefly being vetted, the London-based businessman was packed into a bus with dozens of other volunteers for the journey into Afghanistan. Qadir never reached the frontline. After seeing wounded men coming back from the fighting and experiencing the way local fighters treated the international volunteers as ‘cannon fodder’, Qadir turned back. Many others did not.
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OPERATION CREVICE

On October 22, 2003, a nineteen-year-old British student called Jawad Akbar was talking with an old school friend, a twenty-one-year-old college drop-out called Omar Khyam, at Akbar’s small flat in a university hall of residence in Uxbridge, a nondescript commuter town west of London. The conversation was recorded by MI5 and subsequently produced as evidence in court. ‘You’re thinking airports, yeah, [but] what about easy stuff where you don’t need no experience,’ Akbar said. ‘You could get a job like, for example, [in] the biggest nightclub in central London, where now no one can even turn around and say “Oh, they were innocent, those slags dancing around” … then you will really get the public talking … if you went for where every Tom, Dick and Harry goes on a Saturday night then that would be crazy.’

‘If you got a job in a bar or club, say the Ministry of Sound,’ said Khyam. ‘What are you planning to do then?’

‘Blow the whole thing up,’ said Akbar. ‘The best thing you can do is put terror in their hearts. There is no doubt, that is the best thing, there is nothing better than that.’
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The conversation could have been dismissed as youthful bravado were it not for the fact that the men had recently spent time in a training camp in Pakistan, at least one of the pair had met senior militants of al-Qaeda, and both were involved in the purchase of 600 kg of ingredients for rudimentary if powerful explosives less than a month after their talk about potential targets.
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In April 2004, Akbar and Khyam were both arrested along with five other men aged between nineteen and thirty-five from south and west London and charged with being the ringleaders of the so-called ‘Operation Crevice’ plot, one of the biggest terrorist conspiracies uncovered in the UK in the years following 9/11. Named after the law-enforcement operation which foiled it, the plot involved a complex network of dozens of individuals, many of whom were dedicated to committing a string of violent attacks in the UK. Their trial revealed an enormous amount about the way those involved in the plot were drawn into violent extremism and how they changed from angry young men into potential mass murderers.

The five men eventually convicted for their roles in the plot were as representative as anyone else of the young men who were becoming radicalized in the UK at the time. Four were of Pakistani origin, either first- or second-generation immigrants, one was born in Algeria but raised in Britain. The average age of those in the group when they were sentenced was 28.4, almost the exact average of British militants.
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The sprawling nature of the cell, with its multiple links and indistinct hierarchy, was also typical. A chart drawn of the links between the terrorists was an astonishingly complex maze of common connections – a far cry from the clear organogrammes traditionally used to depict the structure of militant groups and movements. In more general terms, ‘Operation Crevice’ also revealed the degree to which, even by 2003, Western Muslim populations had begun to produce violent radicals whose major drawback, much to the authorities’ relief, was their glaring lack of technical skill and inexperience, not a lack of commitment.

Those involved had met each other at school or socially: through mutual friends, through relatives, at Luton mosque, at an Islamic fair at the University of East London or at religious discussion groups. These ‘horizontal’ patterns of recruitment have often featured in previous chapters – in the bombings in Madrid and Casablanca, to take just two examples. The backgrounds of the men were entirely familiar too. A couple came from broken homes. Some came from observant families, the others were raised in homes where the family Koran literally gathered dust on a shelf. Few were religiously observant as teenagers. None came from genuinely deprived backgrounds, most had got GCSEs or ‘A’ levels. Though at least one was an academic high-achiever, several were college drop-outs, and at least two could be described as disappointments to families with high aspirations. Some enjoyed sport, others preferred nightclubbing. The ‘Crevice’ plotters also showed evidence of profound identity issues, with surveillance tapes revealing them insulting Pakistan and ‘Pakis’ and referring appreciatively to ‘the good old British police’ while simultaneously talking about blowing up a British Airways jet or a shopping centre. One of the defendants, the Algerian-born Anthony Garcia, had anglicized his real name, Rahman Benouis, to give it a ‘better ring’ in the modelling business where he hoped to make money, some of which he planned to use to finance ‘the jihad’. None showed any evidence of mental illness. As with so many militants, none had anything but the most superficial knowledge of Islamic theology or, for that matter, of world politics.
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The men were recorded arguing over whether Chad and the Sudan were Muslim-majority countries. They decided they were not. They are.

The paths taken to radicalization by the dozens of men involved in the Crevice plot had been typically varied too. For some, the process took years, for others just months. In some instances, videos – including one of attacks on Muslims in India and others of Taliban or Kashmiri fighters in action – played a key part. For others, the court heard, it was taped sermons by extremist clerics or television images of ‘Muslims suffering’ that had played an important role. At least two involved had had contact with an extremist breakaway faction of Hezb-ut-Tahrir. One senior policeman described them as ‘a pretty fair broad cross-section of young British working-class Muslim males’, adding that ‘there was nothing particularly noteworthy about any of them’.
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The first stage of almost all the plots featured in the previous chapters had involved a loose group of individuals with a strong interest in becoming involved in jihad coalescing around an individual with a degree of authority and leadership capacity, a ‘self-starter’. Khyam had credibility because in 2000 he had travelled to Pakistan to train in a militant camp in Kashmir and had made a second journey, this time into Afghanistan, a year later. By the time the group began coming together in Luton, Uxbridge and south-west London he had spent many years fundraising for fighters both in Kashmir and in Afghanistan and thus had connections and kudos. The next stage, once a group has formed, is the hardening of the bonds that bind together its members and the focusing of their resolve to act. Social workers in east London pointed out the parallels between local radical extremists and criminal or teenage gangs they saw on a daily basis.
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The clusters the militants formed often showed the same structure as gangs, the social workers said, with a leader, his close circle, the one who does the finance, the ‘one who makes them all laugh, the hangers-on who don’t really know what to do or why they are there’. Then there are rituals and coded jargon. Ed Husain recalled how the first Islamist organization he had joined – the Young Muslim Organization based at the East London Mosque – had a reputation of being ‘tougher than the toughest gangsters … They were as bad and cool as the other street gangs, just without the drugs, drinking and womanizing.’
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The Crevice defendants spoke to each other of ‘the cause’ or ‘the thing’, meaning militant Islam, of Israel as ‘Yahudi land’, using the Arabic for Jews, and of non-believers as ‘kuffs’, short for
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, or unbelief. They also revealed deep rivalry between different groups of militants, who referred to each other as ‘crews’, as do British gangs. Members of both gangs and militant Islamic organizations and groups referred to each other as ‘brother’ too. A fairly well-defined sartorial code became current for young ‘Islamic militants’, a mixture of military-style Western gear, Pakistani traditional clothing and ‘streetwear’.
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‘Jihad’ had also become a relatively glamorous alternative lifestyle choice for some young men, symbolizing adventure, rebellion, clandestinity, and this was reflected in their ‘jihadic chic’.
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Several militants in this period indiscreetly boasted of their exploits to women they were seeking to impress, in one instance an undercover female police officer. Others recorded raps. But gangs, groups and even families need to be tightly bonded together and, as any army drill sergeant knows, the best way to develop solidarity is through shared pain, adventure, fear and fun.

SUMMER CAMP

Three months before the conversation about potential targets that had been recorded by MI5, a small minivan had pulled out from in front of the Avari hotel in the centre of the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore and headed off into the choking traffic. In it were all the key Crevice plotters – Omar Khyam, Jawad Akbar, Anthony Garcia – and a handful of others. Posing as tourists, they broke up the seventeen-hour drive into the mountains along Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan with stops to photograph each other. Instead of heading into the rugged tribal areas south of Peshawar, where Osama bin Laden was hiding and where al-Qaeda fugitives had been able to set up makeshift training camps since fleeing Afghanistan just over eighteen months earlier, the group turned north as they approached the Afghan frontier, heading up into the picturesque Swat valley, a jumble of high valleys and pine forests which was then still a major tourist destination for wealthy Pakistanis and an area renowned for its natural beauty. Khyam had organized the trip after raising £3,500 through collections among sympathizers in the UK. Most of the money was to pay a local tribal leader and businessman to run a training camp for him and his band of friends. Khyam’s aim was not to teach Akbar, Garcia and the others how to make bombs but to draw them together as a unit. The minivan dropped them at Kalam, a trekking and trout-fishing resort at the northern end of the valley.
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