The 9/11 Wars (111 page)

  
59
.
See Jason Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, pp. 225–7, for further details of Ansar ul Islam. See Linda Robinson,
Masters of Chaos
, Public Affairs, 2005, pp. 296–323, for a detailed account of the operation from the point of view of the American special forces.

  
60
.
See Jason Burke, ‘Theatre of terror’,
Observer
, November 21, 2004.

  
61
.
The video was uploaded by a twenty-three-year-old Moroccan-born student living in Britain. David Pallister, ‘Three plead guilty to inciting murder on Islamist websites’,
Guardian
, July 5, 2007. For the half million reference: Abigail Cutler, ‘Web of terror’,
The Atlantic
, June 5, 2006.

  
62
.
For al-Zarqawi’s ‘snakes’ comment see Anton La Guardia, ‘Zarqawi rails against Shia “snakes” ’,
Telegraph
, June 3, 2006.

  
63
.
Thomas Ricks, ‘U.S. military conducted a PSYOP program “to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq” ’,
Washington Post
, April 11, 2006. Jonathan Finer, ‘Among insurgents in Iraq, few foreigners are found’,
Washington Post
, November 17, 2005. It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if the pan-Arabism of previous decades had still been prevalent in the early twenty-first century. Would the American strategy have failed with its subject seen as a pan-Arab hero? Or would al-Zarqawi’s excesses have alienated local communities nonetheless?

  
64
.
The contemporary understanding of the concept of
takfir
owes much to the writings of Syed Qutb among others.

  
65
.
Jean-Charles Brisard,
Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda
, Policy Press, 2005, p. 135. Al-Shami told listeners: ‘If the infidels take Muslims as protectors and these Muslims refuse to fight, it is permitted to kill these Muslims.’

  
66
.
Audio cassette message from al-Shami, July 2004, author collection. Al-Shami authored the ‘diary of Falluja’.

  
67
.
Author interview, Riyadh, March 2008.

  
68
.
Ruben Paz, ‘Arab Volunteers Killed in Iraq: An Analysis’,
The Project for the Research of Islamist Movements (PRISM)
, vol. 3, no. 1 (March 2005).

  
69
.
Smugglers running people usually take the same paths used for smuggling livestock. Cigarettes or similar goods move on trucks.

  
70
.
Toby Jones, ‘Shifting Sands’,
Foreign Affairs
, March/April 2006; Eric Rouleau, ‘Trouble in the Kingdom’,
Foreign Affairs
, July/August 2002. John C. K. Daly, ‘ “Saudi Black Gold”: Will Terrorism Deny the West Its Fix?’,
Terrorism Monitor
, vol. 1, no. 7 (May 5, 2005). See also Robert Lacey,
Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis
, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

  
71
.
In Saudi Arabia, fully 40 per cent of the population was under fifteen in 2006. RAND Corporation (Christopher G. Pernin et al.),
Unfolding the Future of the Long War: Motivations, Prospects, and Implications for the U.S. Army
, 2008, p. 213. Useful works on Saudi Arabia include Mamoun Fandy,
Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent
, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, and the truly excellent Thomas Hegghammer,
Jihad in Saudi Arabia
, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

  
72
.
See Combating Terrorism Center (Brian Fishman),
Al’Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records
, West Point, December 2007, pp. 12–15, for more detail on groups travelling together from their home towns.

  
73
.
It is interesting to note that Syria featured in the Rand Corporation study of possible future evolutions of the 9/11 Wars as a low probability, medium-risk, medium- to long-term potential danger. Pernin et al.,
Unfolding
, p. 74.

  
74
.
Author interview, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, March 2008. Al-Fawzan had been released from prison eight weeks previously.

  
75
.
Each had a coordinator back home, usually the leader of a mosque or another prominent person who had vouched for him. Abu Thar, arriving on his own, was at first considered suspicious. That was ‘until they called my master in the religious school in Yemen’, he said.

  
76
.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, ‘Seeking salvation in city of insurgents’,
Washington Post
, November 11, 2004.

  
77
.
See CTC (Fishman),
Foreign Fighters in Iraq
, p. 27. Also Combating Terrorism Center,
Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleed Outs: al-Qaida’s Role in and out of Iraq
, West Point, July 2008, pp. 9, 57.

  
78
.
For a description of al-Shami’s death and the reaction of his comrades see the postings ‘The Secrets of History: Zarqawi as I Knew Him’ on the ‘7th Century Generation’ forum,
www.7cgen.com
, especially ‘A Treatise Written by Shaykh Maysarah al-Gharib’. Al-Shami died on September 24.

  
79
.
‘The progress we had hoped to make with Iraqi security forces is not as was expected … A large number of police did not stand up when their country called,’ General Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, had been forced to admit after the first battle.

  
80
.
Ricks,
Fiasco
, p. 399.

  
81
.
At least to the time of writing in December 2010. The battle of Shah-e-Kot in March 2002 in Afghanistan had seen far fewer US troops deployed and a much smaller number of militants.

  
82
.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, ‘We are not here to liberate Iraq, we’re here to fight the infidels,’
Guardian
, November 9, 2004.

  
83
.
Full transcript of bin Laden’s speech, Al Jazeera Archive,
Aljazeera.net
, November 1, 2004.

  
84
.
Ibid.

  
85
.
Author interview with Nigel Inkster, deputy director MI6 until 2004, London, February 2009.

  
86
.
Author interview with Mahmood Shah, Peshawar, November 2008.

  
87
.
Author telephone interview with Grenier, January 2009. Pervez Musharraf wrote: ‘When we received initial reports of al-Qaeda’s presence [in South Waziristan] we did not take them very seriously.’ Musharraf,
In the Line of Fire
, p. 264.

  
88
.
On reports of presence in Shakai, see Memorandum for Commander, US Southern Command, CSRT Input for Guantanamo Detainee, US9LY-010017DP, Farraj al-Libby, September 10, 2008, US9AF-003148DP, Harun al-Afghani, August 2, 2007, secret, author collection. A key influence here was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, with his own practical experience of the difficulties of fighting a militant campaign in Egypt, balanced the tendency of bin Laden, who had always been a propagandist more than a fighter, to tilt towards al-Suri’s views. Al-Zawahiri stressed repeatedly that the establishment of a secure haven from which to plan and organize should be one of the priorities of the jihadist movement.

  
89
.
The useful term ‘inciter-in-chief’ comes from Michael Scheuer. Author interview, September 2006.

  
90
.
The
dar ul kufr
itself is subdivided into the lands of war,
dar ul harb
, and the lands where a covenant had been concluded between the Muslims who lived there and the infidel authorities which tolerated their presence and to some extent protected them. These latter zones comprised what was known as the
dar ul ahd
. See discussion in Kepel,
Jihad
, p. 197.

CHAPTER 8: THE 9/11 WARS REACH EUROPE

    
1
.
Author interview, Amsterdam, November 2004.

    
2
.
Ian Buruma, ‘Letter from Amsterdam, final cut: after a filmmaker’s murder, the Dutch creed of tolerance has come under siege’,
New Yorker
, January 3, 2005.

    
3
.
See David Levering Lewis,
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe 570 to 1215
, Norton, 2008, pp. 160–76. Some argue that Poitiers actually occurred in 733; see J. H. Roy and J. Deviosse,
La Bataille de Poitiers, Octobre 733
, Paris, Gallimard, 1966.

    
4
.
In fact, the Ottomans signed a peace treaty with Spain. Equally, as Professor Efraim Karsh, head of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, London, pointed out in an editorial in the
New York Times
in February 2010: ‘Even during the Crusades, the supposed height of the “clash of civilizations”, Christian and Muslim rulers freely collaborated across the religious divide, often finding themselves aligned with members of the rival religion against their co-religionists. While the legendary Saladin himself was busy eradicating the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, for example, he was closely aligned with the Byzantine Empire, the foremost representative of Christendom’s claim to universalism.’ ‘Muslims won’t play together’,
New York Times
, February 28, 2010.

    
5
.
The terms above are clearly both ethnic and religious, and the emphasis on which quality is seen as definitive has also evolved.

    
6
.
Shakespeare’s depiction of the ‘Moor’, like his depiction of the Jew, tends to be complex, sensitive and often, for the period, sympathetic.

    
7
.
Orlando Figes,
Crimea: The Last Crusade
, Allen Lane, 2010.

    
8
.
Clearly the Asian subcontinent at the time was home to followers of many faiths, but much of the Indo-Gangetic plains as well as the Indus valley and the uplands to its west were dominated by Islam, and the ruling power over much of the region was Muslim.

    
9
.
Jean-Léon Gerome, painting around a time of extreme violence as an uprising led by clerics and tribal chiefs shook Algeria, avoided the new French colony as a setting for mosque paintings for the period of the disturbances, preferring Egypt. Rather than show violence to Westerners, Orientalist art largely showed violence to other ‘Orientals’, as well of course as the saccharine, the picturesque and often the erotic. Linda Nochlin,
The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society
, Westview Press, 1991, pp. 51–52, 59. See also Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, in Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds.,
The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader
, Routledge, 2004, p. 296. Delacroix’s earlier canvases had shown vengeful Ottoman hordes massacring Grecian peasants.