The 9/11 Wars (38 page)

The respective journeys into violent radicalism of the four were, as ever, unique to each individual while nonetheless showing elements common to very many radicals in the UK, in the Middle East and elsewhere in areas affected by the 9/11 Wars. The route taken by Mohammed Sidique Khan, the 7/7 leader, showed almost all the factors that were explored in the previous chapter: he faced a variety of problems in his home town of Beeston, itself a community that was physically and culturally isolated from mainstream British social, political and economic life; the conservative, folksy Pakistani religious traditions of his parents were not, he felt, relevant to the present time; Khan had become alienated from his family when he refused a traditional arranged marriage, choosing instead a girl he had met and fallen in love with while studying at the vast Leeds Metropolitan University and turning to more modern and politicized Islamic ideologies at the same time.
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However, Khan’s biography reveals that many of the factors often cited as predictors of violent extremism are only at best indirectly responsible. Khan was not poor, and in no sense can poverty, relative or absolute, been seen as a motivation for his actions. Nor was he badly educated – he was a graduate – nor particularly well educated either – his business studies degree from a far from prestigious establishment was hardly a guarantee of a broad range of opportunities for a fulfilling and satisfying professional career.
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Like so many other radicals too, Khan was a man of projects and action. A professional youth worker, he and other strongly religious individuals in Beeston had once formed a gang called the ‘Mullah Boys’, who took on drug dealers in their neighbourhood and forced addicts in the Pakistani community to go ‘cold turkey’. He was thus in a good position to recruit others when the time came. One of the primary ways he did so was by offering to organize ceremonies for marriages that were outlawed by the traditional community. Married himself with a young child, he was a peer but a peer with standing and confidence.
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He was very much a self-starter.

In the years after 9/11 – which he initially opposed as an unjustified attack on civilians – Khan had come to share the classic ‘single-narrative’ view of the world common to Islamic militants. In a video released after his death, he explained to the people of Britain that, just as their role in voting for governments who ‘perpetuate atrocities against [his] people’ made them ‘directly responsible’, he was ‘directly responsible for protecting and avenging [his] Muslim brothers and sisters’.
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The text, it was later realized, drew heavily on the published will of a young Briton killed at Tora Bora who came from a similar background to Khan.
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Also in the video, in a section that was not broadcast by most mainstream media outlets, Khan criticized ‘corrupt and incompetent’ traditional Muslim clerics in Britain.
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The tape, in a major innovation, had English-language subtitles which emphasized that its key audience was intended to be the UK, the USA and, to an extent, Europe.

As for the three younger men who joined Khan in his scheme to kill and maim hundreds in London, while their own backgrounds show once again the factors seen elsewhere, they equally demonstrate the sheer variety of paths into militancy. All four were young immigrants or the children of immigrants. Germaine Lindsay was a convert, an increasingly present subset of militants through the period. One came from a broken home, one was an under-achiever at school, two appear to have enjoyed happy and relatively stable backgrounds. Typically, too, they were not recruited in mosques but through personal contacts, people they happened to know or happened to meet. There was certainly little in the lives or characters of the 7/7 bombers that made them radically different from hundreds of thousands of young British or European men, Muslim or otherwise.

The four men followed the course of those involved in the Crevice plot, going whitewater rafting together to build solidarity, living in virtual isolation from the
kufr
, ‘who they gradually came to see as less and less human’. Like Khyam, indeed probably with Khyam, Khan had travelled to the tribal areas of Pakistan to meet senior al-Qaeda figures who convinced him to launch attacks in the UK rather than fulfil his own ambition to fight alongside the Taliban.
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The 7/7 plotters showed more professionalism than the Crevice group, however, making technically more complex devices and successfully hiding their preparations from the security services. On the morning of the attacks, they took a train from Luton station, where an image from a surveillance camera shows them walking through the ticket gates in jeans and jackets at 07.21 with the rucksacks containing their bombs, packed with nails, over their shoulders. Commuters on the 07.23 Luton to Brighton train, on which the bombers travelled to London, later described them as ‘smiling, laughing and generally relaxed’.
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What is the significance of the 7/7 attacks in the 9/11 Wars? That the 7/7 attacks showed the polyvalence or multidimensionality so typical of the conflict was evident. They were the result of short-term factors such as the effects of the invasion of Iraq catalysing a whole range of broader trends which have frequently been seen in previous pages. As elsewhere too, the key question was how easily the ideology of contemporary international militancy would be grafted onto a pre-existing local situations of tension, if not open conflict. The project that al-Qaeda had proposed to Khan in the tribal areas of Pakistan had been another perfect example of thinking globally – i.e. in terms of a cosmic struggle between faiths, communities, good and evil – but acting locally. The 7/7 attacks also saw one of the defining tactics of the 9/11 Wars – suicide bombing – extended to an entirely new theatre. Finally, they, or at least their aftermath, provided another example of the politicization of intelligence and debate so characteristic of the conflict so far.
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But the real significance of the 7/7 attacks was not the degree to which they were representative of the various established qualities of the 9/11 Wars but what they threatened for the future. Exactly two weeks after the bombings came another round of attempted attacks on London’s public transport system. Though they were all young Muslim men, the profile of those responsible was different from that of the 7/7 attackers. They were first-generation immigrants of East African origin, most living marginal lives, poorly educated, inadequate, ill-equipped for making their way in London. Their leader, Muktar Said Ibrahim, was the twenty-seven-year-old Eritrean-born son of asylum-seekers with a police record for sexual assault and disorderly conduct. Ibrahim had swapped a life of petty crime for radical Islam while incarcerated in a young offenders institution and, a classic ‘self-starter’, actively sought out training and combat experience on his release. In December 2004, Special Branch officers stopped him at Heathrow and discovered thousands of pounds in cash, cold-weather camping gear, a military first-aid kit and a manual on ballistics in his baggage. Though he was questioned for three hours, Ibrahim had not committed any crime and was thus allowed to board a plane to Islamabad.
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Ibrahim was in Pakistan at around the same time as Mohammed Sidique Khan and Omar Khyam of the Crevice plot and is thought to have received some training there. Indeed, it is possible all three trained together and that the ‘21/7 attacks’ had been planned as a second wave by the al-Qaeda leadership themselves. However, whatever skills Ibrahim had learned were insufficient – another example of poor tradecraft among militants – and the bombs at three London Underground stations and on a bus all failed to explode. Nonetheless, the attempt created panic in the UK and provoked excited reactions from militant leaders and thinkers.

Taken together, the two attacks in London seemed to indicate that the strategy of Abu Musab al-Suri might be succeeding. Five years previously no one would have dreamed that a strike on the London Underground could be successful, let alone one followed up by a separate wave of attempted bombings. Now it appeared a fire had been lit in Western Europe that would be hard to extinguish. Al-Suri, whose name had been mentioned as a possible ‘mastermind’ of the London attack, posted a long statement on the internet immediately after the bombings in which he described how, ‘when the attacks on the historic stronghold of oppression and darkness [London] took place’, he had been among ‘the hundreds of millions of Muslims who joyfully watched the events unfold’. Al-Suri denied any personal connection to the attacks and called ‘upon the
mujahideen
in Europe … to act quickly and strike’. His strategy of provoking a global ‘leaderless jihad’ was bearing fruit, and victory, he clearly believed, was at hand. ‘We are at the height of the war, and the enemy is on the verge of defeat, as many signs clearly indicate,’ he boasted. ‘Whoever stays asleep now might not be able to participate upon finally waking up.’
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In the event, al-Suri’s own participation was cut short not long after he posted his ‘message to the British and the Europeans’ when he was captured after a shoot-out with local security forces near the Pakistani city of Quetta.
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But though al-Suri had been permanently removed from the scene – the Pakistanis had handed him over to the Americans by the end of 2005 – the fear that he had correctly read the broad strategic situation remained.

THE AFTERMATH

On the afternoon of the 7/7 attacks, in the perfect summer sunshine, Londoners stood in long queues for telephone boxes because their mobile phones had been rendered useless by the overloaded networks, sat on the grass in parks, drank on benches outside pubs, waited to go back to their homes. ‘What do you feel about those who did this?’ one television reporter asked a wounded survivor. ‘Contempt. No anger. Just contempt,’ he replied. Down below, in the shattered wreck of the three tube trains, rescue teams worked among the twisted metal, charred corpses and body parts. The attack, said Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, was ‘not … against the mighty and the powerful’, not ‘aimed at presidents or prime ministers’ but at ‘ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old’. Livingstone, himself a controversial figure criticized for talking a soft line with Islamists and accused of anti-Semitism, had caught the mood of the city. One blogger posted that, whatever Londoners might think of the government’s policy in Iraq or elsewhere, as a community they had their own ways of dealing with things, and these did not include blowing people up. Livingstone said that the strikes were not ‘just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder’. Their objectives were instead ‘to divide Londoners … to turn Londoners against each other’.
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In fact, the exact objectives of the 7/7 bombers have never been made entirely clear. The videoed testaments broadcast after the attack revealed why, in their own minds, Khan and Tanweer felt such an act was necessary and justified but not what they hoped to achieve by it. Nor has the targeting of the strikes ever been satisfactorily explained – though the timing was probably determined by a desire to coincide with the summit of the G8 nations – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK and the US – in Scotland. No one knew where Hasib Hussain, the bus bomber, was actually meant to detonate his device. All that was obvious was that the three locations hit had no evident political, military or broader symbolic importance. It may be that they were determined simply by timing, and the three bombers had set out in different directions from King’s Cross itself to blow themselves up at exactly the same moment wherever they might have been. It may be that to search for overt symbolism in the targets would be wrong. For many such attackers it is after all simply their violent suicide that, as a statement of will and faith, is as important as any direct consequence of an attack. One quality that did link the sites of the explosions was that each one was strongly representative of the cosmopolitan nature of the UK’s capital city. Tanweer detonated his bomb at Aldgate East, the historic heart of successive waves of immigration to the city including, most recently, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. Khan detonated his device at Edgware Road, centre of one of London’s major Middle Eastern Arab communities, and King’s Cross itself, as the casualty lists showed, is one of the most cosmopolitan places in one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the planet. In 2005, a third of Londoners had been born outside the UK, and some 300 languages were regularly spoken in the city.
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Those who died in the explosions included Ojara Ikeagwu, Shahara Islam, Anat Rosenberg, Karolina Gluck, Ciaran Cassidy, Rachelle Chung For Yuen and Benedetta Ciaccia, who, from a distinguished Italian family, had come to London to work as an au pair ten years before and, engaged to a Muslim, was preparing for a wedding ceremony in Rome which would have united Catholic and Islamic rites.
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Even the upmarket Tavistock Square, where Hasib had detonated his device, is a neighbourhood given a distinctly international character by high numbers of foreign students and tourists. Consciously or otherwise, it seems likely that, as Livingstone suspected, the 7/7 bombings were an attack on the ideas of integration and assimilation as much as anything else. The last thing the bombers would have seen before exploding their devices would have been a crowded tube train or a bus full of scores of people of all races, colours and creeds coexisting in relative harmony as they started another day.