The 9/11 Wars (9 page)

The second macro-factor evident was that a very large number of the volunteers making their way to Afghanistan in the late 1990s were either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. This immigration might be international, in the case of Ziad Samir Jarrah, Atta and the rest of the ‘Hamburg cell’ who led the 9/11 hijackers, or internal, from rural areas to urban areas. The family of al-Bahlul, the young man who had struggled to set up the television for bin Laden to watch the 9/11 attacks live, had, like tens of millions of others in the Islamic world over previous decades, made the transition from the countryside to the town, in its case from a small village in the Yemen to Sana’a, the capital, before subsequently living in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden’s father had made a similar journey, leaving the Hadramawt region of Yemen for Saudi Arabia’s most cosmopolitan city, Jeddah. Three of the 9/11 pilots had emigrated from their homeland to the West. There were myriad other examples. In every case, such displacement implied a significant change in terms of environment and of social codes and traditions and the necessity of finding a new set of values and modes of behaviour and of integration.

The third obvious macro-factor was the new wave of anti-Americanism that coursed through the Islamic world in the 1990s. There had been previous such waves, of course, but post-Cold-War American hegemony had focused resentment on the new ‘hyper-power’ in a new and urgent way, sharpening the two-centuries-old dilemma in the Islamic world of how to confront, deal with, profit from, learn from or indeed influence the West. This anti-Western sentiment, which had often provoked a variety of revivalist religious sentiments, was reinforced by the new media technology emerging in the 1990s which allowed someone like bin Laden to reach an audience directly without risking years of dangerous activism on the ground. It also accelerated a process, seen outside the Islamic world too, of the construction and consolidation of new, often deeply conservative, communal and sectarian identities, in this case an unprecedented sense of solidarity with Muslims elsewhere in the world.

Al-Jazeera, the feisty satellite TV channel launched from the gas-rich Gulf emirate of Qatar in 1996, played a part in this, along with its many emulators. The channel pioneered a new, sharper style that broke with the stolid traditions of heavily censored state broadcasters in the Middle East and tried to represent the views and interests of ordinary people. This, however, meant that the channel’s programming often reflected and reinforced prejudices rather than challenging them. News bulletins from Gaza, southern Lebanon, Chechnya, Kashmir or elsewhere played into a generalized narrative of victimhood. Simultaneously Western soap operas and documentaries, beamed directly into tens of millions of homes, raised expectations and aspirations as well as resentment at the economic success of the West and the Far East. The internet, which more than any other medium allows individuals to construct their own personal worlds of information without being challenged, also spread rapidly despite many governments’ attempts to control its use. By 2001, even Saudi Arabia with its then restrictive media regulations had 100,000 net subscribers.
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Exacerbating this, of course, was Western policy. By omission as much as commission, successive American and European governments through the mid and late 1990s failed to engage with the tough core issues that had long troubled their relations with the multiple communities and countries that constitute the Islamic world. The Arab–Israeli peace process, so promising at the beginning of the decade, was allowed to fail, and longstanding strategies to secure the stable flow of strategic resources such as oil to world markets and key short-term domestic factors were allowed to continue to determine policy. European powers and Washington appeared to be, at the very least, insensitive to the plight of Muslim communities during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. A Cold War legacy of support for repressive regimes was continued with the new enemy becoming the Islamists rather than the Communists. The bulk of the volunteers flowing into Afghanistan came from countries – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria – whose governments received significant support from the West. Even if the West was by no means at the root of all troubles, as often argued, the policies and language of Western countries did help militants ‘frame’ the world’s problems and their own grievances within a simple and persuasive single narrative of Muslims suffering at the hands of a belligerent, rapacious America and, to a lesser extent, its allies. This may not have been true but was nonetheless convincing to many.

The volunteers making their way to Afghanistan were, however, a minority of a minority. Of a global population of around 1.2 billion Muslims and a population of perhaps 300 million in the Arab world, perhaps between 10,000 and 20,000 individuals travelled to Afghanistan through the 1990s and underwent some kind of militant training or experience of combat there.
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One thing that is certain is that they were not mad, poverty-stricken or stupid. There is no evidence that levels of mental illness exceeded those of the population in general. Also, though volunteers from central Asia were often much less well off, the vast bulk of those from the Middle East, and indeed the handful from the West, were from families that were, if not wealthy, then far from poor.
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Any link with poverty was thus indirect. As was to be seen again throughout the course of the 9/11 Wars, a lack of means was a poor predictor of radicalism. Equally, though some were of below-average education, particularly in terms of their theological knowledge, most were of a normal or often superior intellectual capacity. Those in the camps had travelled for a wide variety of reasons: political, religious and personal. Though some were motivated by a specific desire to meet Osama bin Laden, the main aim of most was to get training to fight in Kashmir (especially for those from the British Pakistani community), Chechnya (for Saudi Arabians, Algerians and Egyptians) or in Afghanistan itself against the Northern Alliance, who were seen as enemies of Islam.
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Some were outraged at the second Chechen war of 1999 or events in Israel-Palestine. Some travelled for religious reasons stemming from genuine conviction: to fulfil a religious duty of jihad and potentially to achieve martyrdom without the political context being particularly important. Many were motivated by more personal factors: a genuine desire for adventure, to flee ‘family problems’ or to go in the footsteps of relatives or friends who had previously travelled. A relatively high number had suffered educational or business failures. Some came from jihadi families with numerous examples of volunteers. Fathers of others had fought in wars of independence against Western colonizers in Algeria, Libya or elsewhere.
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Often motives were mixed within the groups who set off. There were even brothers who travelled together but for different reasons – one out of a genuine sense of religious duty, the other almost as a ‘lifestyle choice’.
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Those who facilitated the passage of the young men to Afghanistan tended to be older, part of the generation of militants formed during the 1980s. There is no evidence to suggest anyone was ‘brainwashed’, however. A few were genuinely ‘groomed’ to travel by recruiters who carefully targeted vulnerable and suggestible individuals and drew them into activities that they appear never to have fully understood. To the unskilled and jobless, jihad was presented as an alternative employment, an extension of the charity work at home that many were already involved in.
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But the vast proportion actively sought out the networks which could help them fulfil a relatively mature ambition. Certainly few hid their destinations or ambitions from friends, families or even their governments. As during the war against the Soviets, videos of ‘atrocities’ and feats of arms were effective means of sensitizing, mobilizing and radicalizing individuals already rendered receptive by other factors.

In Afghanistan, separated from their home environment, their radicalization accelerated. A whole range of key concepts embodied in Islamic history and holy texts were deployed in the camps to reinforce the sense that the volunteers were engaged on a righteous, rational path. Often early weeks of instruction were dominated by lessons in theology. The idea of
hijra
, the flight from an unholy, ignorant and barbaric environment to a remote place where a true community of believers, the
jemaa islamiya
, could be constituted before returning to establish a new golden age convincingly reformulated the story of the Prophet Mohammed to better fit it to the ‘reality’ of the current situation of Muslims. The cosmic single narrative of the age-old war between good and evil, belief and unbelief could be further embedded, the ‘enemy’ could be dehumanized, fellow Muslims of insufficient piety deemed unworthy of the faith, an extreme and minority interpretation of jihad could be reinforced, and a powerful sentiment of belonging to an elite vanguard encouraged. The theological and psychological indoctrination was, of course, backed up by the practical excitement of weapons training and the team-building effect of physical hardship.
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The process was far from universally effective. Letters from volunteers and later testimony speaks of disappointment at the quality of teaching, at the lack of solidarity between groups of students (who were taught according to language or nationality) and at the food.
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Around a quarter to a third of volunteers, few of whom had ever travelled before, suffered gastro-intestinal problems or other illnesses, and few camps had even rudimentary medical facilities.
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But volunteers were never prevented from leaving, and many dropped out, returning home or simply hanging around in Jalalabad or Kabul, living in the many guesthouses established by the various groups or funded by the major Islamic NGOs or missionaries in Afghanistan at the time. ‘I never at any moment felt I couldn’t leave. It was all very casual. You could walk in and walk out,’ David Hicks, the Australian convert who ended up in al-Farooq camp in 2001 after fighting in Kashmir, said.
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Nonetheless, as the 9/11 attacks revealed, the system, if more chaotic and ramshackle than often thought, worked. And not just for al-Qaeda either. By the late years of the decade, militant organizations ranging from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan through to fragmented groups such as the Jordanians who had established camps in the west of Afghanistan to the Algerians who had their guesthouses in Jalalabad were all receiving more recruits that ever before. There were so many that those trying to administrate the scores of guesthouses, camps and training centres in Afghanistan frequently complained of the sheer numbers.
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LONDONISTAN

The final problem for those seeking to protect the West against the new threat that radical Islam posed was thus one of imagination: the failure of so many, particularly in America, to understand what globalization actually meant and what kind of new menace it could generate.
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This failure was not restricted to the US. It was certainly evident in the UK, where the true role of key individuals based in London through the late 1990s almost entirely escaped British security services.
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The importance of the city as a secure base from which to organize fundraising, propaganda and recruitment for the international militant movement was consistently missed by officers from Special Branch and MI5, who were more used to dealing with Irish republican terrorism. Hundreds of militants wanted in their own countries for a range of activities had arrived in the UK in two broad waves between the end of the 1980s and the mid 1990s. Some were relatively harmless, relatively moderate political Islamists. But others posed a much more serious risk to Britain and its allies which was seriously underestimated.

Nothing shows the confusion of this period clearly more than the question of a ‘Londonistan deal’ by which militants were allegedly allowed to stay in the UK as long as they refrained from targeting British interests. For many militants, such a pact undoubtedly existed. Omar Mahmoud Othman, better known as Abu Qutada, a Jordanian Palestinian and radical scholar who was both a key ideological reference and a key organizer for al-Qaeda, had several meetings with MI5 soon after his arrival in the UK during which he offered to report on anyone harming
British
interests.
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Other key militants in the UK at the time later spoke of how British security services had told them that they would be guaranteed the rights of the ‘British constitution’ as long as they refrained from fighting each other on UK soil, from targeting the UK itself or from using UK territory as a base from which to attack other countries.
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A third militant activist later linked to the radicalization of perpetrators of terrorist attacks, a Syrian-born preacher based in north London called Omar Mohammed Bakri Fostok, frequently told prayer meetings that the Koran teaches that covenants exist between believers and non-Muslim authorities who give them shelter. He even on one occasion made the argument to British viewers of a middlebrow afternoon television show.
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When Algerian militants in London passed a message to operational commanders waging a vicious war in their home country that their presence would be tolerated in the UK provided they did not break any laws, the then leader of the main militant group in Algeria, Djamel Zitouni of the Groupe Islamique Armée, responded by offering not to harm Britons anywhere.
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British officials and politicians have always denied coming to any arrangement with any activists. ‘They were told their rights and the legal position was explained, nothing more,’ said one senior British police officer.
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The likelihood is thus that the ‘deal’ was more a product of cultural misunderstanding than any conspiracy. The militants, coming from repressive states of the Middle East, naturally saw things differently from the British police, whose legalistic position – if you break no laws we can’t touch you – would have seemed nonsensical unless part of a bargain. That the anti-terrorism laws in effect at the time in the UK did not cover conspiracies to attack overseas must also have escaped the comprehension of the new arrivals – as they escaped that even of close allies like the French.