The 9/11 Wars (37 page)

Kalam is surrounded by high mountains, difficult terrain where government authority is virtually non-existent. The only roads are dirt tracks. After resting in a cheap hotel, the group of Britons, equipped with only rudimentary hiking gear, set off towards the camp. It was tough going, and, unused to the exercise, the group went so slowly that they had to spend a night in the open. With the altitude and the heat, at least one collapsed. When they reached the camp, it was not quite what they had expected. ‘I was thinking about something with ranges and assault courses, like I’d seen on TV,’ one of the group said later. ‘But it wasn’t that at all.’ Instead, the cash raised by Khyam had bought them two tents – one for the local men who ran the camp and the other for everyone else – and a field. The group had to dig a hole for their own latrine. The first day was spent doing physical exercises, then, on day two, the local men brought out some AK-47s, a light machine gun and a rocket launcher, and the young men, ‘scared but excited’ according to later testimony, took turns to fire the weapons. ‘It was wicked,’ one recalled. Eight days later, the men walked back down to the valley, drove back to Lahore and, apart from Khyam, who remained to continue practising his bomb-making skills in the back garden of a house in the city, flew back to the UK. Though makeshift, the camp was effective. Junaid Babar, one of the group, later told the FBI, ‘After attending the camp … the guys were much more serious. [Before] they were joking around and using slang. After the camp the guys were talking jihad, praying and quoting the Koran. They would say, “One day of jihad is better than eighty days of praying.” By the end of the camp they were saying, “Let’s go kill the non-believer.” ’
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Such episodes were common to almost all plots in the UK at this time. Some went hiking in the Lake District, others went white-water canoeing. As one MI5 analyst commented: ‘The moment when someone put himself in danger for another member of the group or took on an additional burden, when he reached out of a canoe or picked up someone else’s rucksack to help them over the last few miles, was worth more than years of propaganda.’
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But it was not just the new solidarity within a terrorist cell that was important. It was also the way the group began to see others. Ed Husain and Shiraz Maher, the two former members of Hezb-ut-Tahrir, both described how they had been very quickly sucked into a world that was entirely closed off from the rest of society. ‘Almost all my social contacts were within the movement,’ said Maher. For some, Husain said, the group provided ‘an entire existence’: food, lodging, employment and company, even wives or husbands. This phase of ‘isolation’ appears to have been critical. Hardline Islamic websites consulted by British militants in this period were dominated by advice given to those asking about ‘true Muslim practice’ in any given situation. Often the sites quoted the Koran or senior clerics to reinforce the idea of a separation from society more generally, a version of the
takfiri
ideology of al-Zarqawi and his fellow international militants in Iraq. As the groups like the Crevice plotters became more and more bound together the outside world and those who lived in it retreated, merging as they did so into an undistinguishable mass devoid of the characteristics that mark them as living, talking, walking, feeling people. This process of ‘dehumanizing’ potential victims – an integral part of all genocides or massacres over the decades – was key to moving the group to the final stages of radicalization, where preparations for executing acts of extreme violence began. So the end of the Crevice plotters’ summer training camp did not mean that Omar Khyam’s work was finished. The ten-day trip in the Pakistani mountains had been useful to bind the group together, but there was more for its leader to do. A week after the rest of the group had flown home, Khyam set off from his Lahore base once again, this time to meet al-Qaeda.
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AL-QAEDA

Khyam had met senior al-Qaeda figures before. When he had arrived in Pakistan in the spring of 2003, a few months before organizing the summer training camp, he had apparently hoped to join the Taliban to fight against allied troops in Afghanistan. He was not, his lawyers said later, planning attacks on the UK at that stage. However, when friends in Lahore, part of the loose network of British militants linking Pakistan and the UK, put the twenty-one-year-old in touch with contacts in Pakistani extremist groups who themselves would lead him to the Taliban, his plans started to change. One of the ‘British brothers’ in Lahore had already established contact with Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, al-Qaeda’s ‘number three’ or ‘director of external operations’ at the time. Al-Iraqi’s role was to do what bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and others had done in the late 1990s in Afghanistan: to receive the delegations from overseas coming to request logistical aid with a variety of projects as well as the young volunteers arriving in search of assistance or direction.
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Despite the limited facilities available at the time – only the most makeshift of training camps could be set up, and many of the best instructors had been killed – the al-Qaeda senior leadership could still try to exploit the raw material that reached them. The primary attribute young Europeans had for the group was not their ardent if unfocused desire for ‘action’ in Afghanistan or any other theatre of jihad – a relatively mundane contribution to the cause – but their passports and lack of criminal records. These made them ideal candidates for much more valuable projects. When al-Iraqi met Khyam he apparently told the young Briton that, praiseworthy though his ambition to fight for the Taliban was, ‘if he was serious’, he should ‘do something’ back home.
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This marked a turning point in the Crevice conspiracy. Rather than introduce Khyam to the Taliban, al-Iraqi arranged for him to spend a weekend in a house in the dusty western Pakistani town of Kohat learning more about bomb-making. The al-Qaeda militants’ suggestion to strike at home had apparently fallen on fertile ground. One witness described how Khyam came back from the Kohat camp convinced that ‘the UK should be hit because of its support for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq and because, [as] nothing has ever happened in the UK, the UK is unscathed’. Previously he had expressed the view that the coalition campaign in Afghanistan had been ‘more or less’ justified. Now his views had hardened considerably. ‘Khyam said we need to do more, we should hit … pubs, trains and nightclubs,’ the witness continued. ‘[Khyam said] targets in the UK are legitimate because British soldiers are killing Muslims and because military targets are too difficult to hit.’
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This was the critical contribution that, from the autumn of 2002 on, al-Qaeda was in a position to make. The hardcore leadership clustered around bin Laden in the zone along the Afghan–Pakistani frontier gave the volunteers who sought them out crucial direction, focusing their violent ambitions to fit in with the broader global strategy the al-Qaeda senior leadership were trying, not without some difficulty, to orchestrate. This was neither ‘top-down’ nor ‘bottom-up’ activism, neither vertical nor horizontal models of militancy. Instead it was hybrid, a mixture of both. Young men who had by themselves formed a group set on violence and who were convinced that they were to be soldiers in a global war in defence of Islam were taken a few vital steps further down that path by senior militants with prestige and authority. Men like Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi used a carefully honed message that exploited key elements in Islam – such as concepts of an enlightened and embattled elite, the idea of a world split into a domain of faith and peace and a domain of war and unbelief or a particular interpretation of jihad – to harden the resolve of the young volunteers. The ‘who’ and the ‘why’ were important in bringing them this far. The ‘how’ – the dynamics within the groups of extremists and the inputs from outside – was crucial in taking the next step.

There was another crucial dynamic at work. The recruits had come seeking to participate in the international jihad with their heads full of rhetoric about pan-Islamic solidarity. Their missions, however, were to be local, using their local knowledge, difference and cultural specificity as British or German or Belgian or other Muslims to successfully execute attacks that would take place at most a few hours’ travelling from their homes or even where they were born. The global was fused with the local with devastating efficacy.

There were three other contributions – more practical – that al-Qaeda could make to a homegrown plot between 2002 and 2005. There was guidance on the nature of the strike: Khyam also apparently came back from that meeting saying that his instructions were to work towards ‘multiple, simultaneous’ attacks, an al-Qaeda hallmark.
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There was technical assistance. And finally there was help in turning volunteers into the weapon so characteristic of the 9/11 Wars: suicide bombers.

THE MARTYRS

Personal accounts from successful suicide bombers that go beyond banal propaganda are rare – for obvious reasons. Statements by failed suicide bombers elsewhere – such as in Israel or Afghanistan – are often highly unreliable. However, they do exist, and suicide bombers who at the last minute decided not to blow themselves up interviewed by the author in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan give some indication of the state of mind of individuals on the point of killing themselves and dozens of others. The process of radicalization that most described was typically gradual. In the case of the Iraqi it started with prayer meetings at a mosque and then moved deeper into radical militancy. It took many months before the young man, aged nineteen, began contemplating a suicide attack.
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He was a ‘follower’ rather than a ‘self-starter’, deeply admiring of a more confident and more radical friend, and was susceptible to suggestion. ‘Martyrdom operations’ were introduced as an idea after many months of discussion and only raised seriously when the young man had made his way to a remote training camp far from his hometown. There, along with the physical exercise and small-arms training, he was exposed to hours of videos showing Muslims as victims of violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir or elsewhere and to lectures from senior clerics on the rewards of martyrdom in the afterlife and the fame and glory such a sacrifice would attract. The friend said he would conduct a similar attack simultaneously. A critical element, the young man said, was that he was absolutely convinced that his action would be seen as praiseworthy by his family, his peers and the community as a whole. So much so, that when his mother located him and came to get him at the camp, he turned her away in tears. What was most important, he stressed, was the gradual way in which he had been led down the path towards ‘martyrdom’. ‘Each step logically seemed to follow from the next one,’ he said. ‘I ended up somewhere I had no intention to go without really knowing how I had got there.’ He also, he added, did not want to let his friend down. The Pakistani interviewees described similar experiences. One had been recruited through ‘friends’, another through the militant organization that he belonged to. Both had then been isolated for long months and exposed to long hours of heavily slanted religious instruction interspersed with emotive videos before finally being judged ready to carry out their tasks.
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Before the actual attack, the young Iraqi spoke of being ‘calm’, of ‘thinking about nothing’, and of ‘not wanting to fail’ by refusing to go through with the bombing. The youngest of the Pakistanis, twenty-one at the time of the attack, spoke of a ‘numbness’ as he drove his heavily loaded truck towards its target listening to Koranic chants on the stereo. He gave himself up when he saw there were no Americans at the checkpoint he was supposed to attack. The Iraqi only decided not to detonate his device when, in the seconds before he flicked the switch around his belt, he heard his potential victims talking with the accent of his hometown. In that instant, those he was about to kill became human once again, he said, and he could go no further and surrendered. Again, however, though many chose not to make the ultimate gesture and chose another path, others continued, right to the bitter end.

9
Bombs, Riots and Cartoons

7/7

At 8.24 on the morning of July 7, 2005, four men had said goodbye in front of the Boots chemist’s shop at King’s Cross station. They had huddled for a moment, hugged each other, and then, ‘euphoric, as if they were celebrating something’, had split up.
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At 8.50 three set off simultaneous bombs, killing themselves and thirty-nine others, on the London Underground. At 9.27 the fourth, delayed by a defective battery on his bomb, had boarded a number 30 bus outside King’s Cross station and taken a seat on the top deck. He sat there for twenty minutes as the bus edged its way through the chaotic London traffic, nervously fiddling with a rucksack at his feet.
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Earlier he had called the phones of the three others, who he must have suspected were already dead, leaving the message ‘I can’t get on the Northern Line’ and asking what he should do. It is unclear whether he meant that his resolve had failed – at the time of the call much of the Northern Line was in fact still open – or whether he was merely looking for last-minute instructions.
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At 9.47, when the bus reached Tavistock Square, possibly because he mistook a traffic warden talking to the bus driver for a policeman, he set the fourth bomb off. It killed him and thirteen others and injured dozens more. The total dead in the 7/7 bombings eventually reached fifty-six, counting the bombers, with around 700 wounded. The four bombers were rapidly identified. They were: Mohammed Sidique Khan, a thirty-one-year-old former social worker who grew up in the midlands English town of Beeston; Shehzad Tanweer, also from Beeston, and the twenty-two-year-old son of a local businessman; Germaine Lindsay, a nineteen-year-old Jamaican-born convert raised by his mother in Huddersfield, a grim northern British town with deep social and economic problems and a large population of Pakistani immigrant origin;
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and Hasib Hussain, the bomber on the bus, an eighteen-year-old from Leeds.