The 9/11 Wars (35 page)

Many of these global trends have already been explored earlier, when discussing the flow of young volunteers from the Middle East to the militant training camps set up in Afghanistan by bin Laden, al-Zarqawi, al-Suri and others for example. They included a ‘youth bulge’ and immigration from the countryside to the cities or internationally. There was the discrediting of left-wing, nationalist or other ideologies and the subsequent wave of religious revivalism that had swept the Middle East in the 1980s. There was the surge of politics based on religious or sectarian identities around the globe in the 1990s and the construction of a new more global Islamic identity and narrative infused with a strong anti-American or anti-Western sentiment. Looking back, it is clear that Britain and Europe were far from immune to these broad historical trends affecting the Islamic world more generally.
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There was also the impact of events such as the war in the former Yugoslavia, the conflict in Chechnya and the Second Palestinian Intifada. All of these episodes – especially the war in the Balkans – could be portrayed as evidence that Christian Europe did not care about Muslims.

Many felt the tensions coursing underneath. There were clues to what was happening. French authorities began recording a rise in anti-Semitic attacks – after years of decline – that were largely perpetrated by young men from Muslim immigrant communities.
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In the UK, violent riots in Bradford in 2001 had revealed deep social problems. Whereas once young ‘British-Pakistanis’ had experienced outrage at ‘racism’, seeing themselves as ‘black’, many now saw themselves as victims of Islamophobia, defining themselves as Muslims.
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The success of radical Islamist groups such as Hezb-ut-Tahrir and of other similar organizations on university campuses showed how easily such ideologies could attract significant numbers of young people. In October 2001, two young Britons from families of Pakistani origin who had joined the Taliban in Afghanistan were killed in Kabul in a missile strike.
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Two months later, a young British convert tried to blow himself up on a transatlantic jet. In April 2003, two Britons tried to bomb a Tel Aviv nightclub ‘for the sake of Allah and to get revenge against the Jews and Crusaders’, according to a videoed will in a rare example of the 9/11 Wars suddenly surging into the otherwise largely autonomous conflict in Israel-Palestine. One of the pair detonated his device outside the club, killing three and wounding more than fifty.
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The other, whose bomb failed to detonate, turned up dead on a beach ten days later.
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In Holland, ‘a different political wind [had been] blowing since the 9/11 attacks’, Mohammed al-Aissati, of the Dutch Association of Moroccan Immigrants, told the author on the day after van Gogh’s death.
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‘We all had a good feeling about how we were doing here in terms of tolerance but 9/11 changed all that. This murder could not have come at a worse time.’

EUROPEAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES ON THE BACK FOOT

In the early years of the 9/11 Wars, with a poor understanding of the nature of the problem, creaking structures better adapted to Cold War enemies or more traditional terrorist groups and limited resources, intelligence services in Europe rapidly found themselves on the back foot. By early 2004, though it was clear that the conflict would almost inevitably come to the continent, few had grasped the nature or scale of the threat. A series of meetings the author had with senior British security officials at the time was salutary. The officials privately expressed their concern at the lack of ‘handle’ they had on the problem and worried about the possibility both of a major attack and of lower-level violence by ‘self-radicalizing’ freelance militants. They frankly admitted that their knowledge of processes of radicalization and of the workings of modern Islamic militancy was superficial and worried that the terms with which they described their ‘clients’ – their analysis was based on groups, cells, operatives – did not adequately capture the nature of the phenomenon they were trying to grasp. Though some of the discussion was about so-called ‘cleanskins’ – ‘It is not the ones we know about who worry us but the ones we don’t,’ the head of the militant Islam desk of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch said over a drink in one of the pubs around Scotland Yard – the focus was more on ‘sleeper cells’ implanted by al-Qaeda over previous years which could be activated when needed. According to Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, these were ‘networks of individuals … that blend into society … who live normal, routine lives until called upon for specific tasks by another part of the network.’ One of the lessons learned from other modern terrorist conflicts, Rimington explained, was that terrorists aimed ‘to hide in plain sight, to be seen but not noticed and to all intents and purposes to live a law-abiding existence’. One of the key targets of her service’s efforts, she said, were people who might offer logistic help from the UK to overseas militants to strike abroad. In this Rimington revealed quite how far from fully comprehending the nature of the threat she and her service were.
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The biggest danger, as events would shortly reveal, was in fact posed by militants who were very much British
receiving
aid from overseas to strike
locally.
The individuals involved in radical Islamic militancy ‘blended into society’ and ‘lived normal, routine lives’ for the very simple reason that they
were
normal members of society.

This, of course, meant that a preventive strategy based on the idea that it was possible to find potentially dangerous individuals through ‘profiling’, i.e. seeking those whose qualities might indicate a vulnerability or a tendency towards violent militancy, was unlikely to meet with much success. It was swiftly clear that being young, male, Muslim, anti-Semitic, pro-Palestinian, anti-American, of immigrant background, with conflicted identity issues and poor relations with one’s parents in, say, late 2003 was not particularly useful as a predictor of any terrorist activity. The sheer number of those sharing some or all of those qualities was in the hundreds of thousands in Britain alone. A government report later found that during 2004, MI5, though one of the better resourced European intelligence services, was unable to watch even the fifty-two suspects classed as ‘essential targets’ and could only provide ‘reasonable’ surveillance coverage of about one in twenty terror suspects.
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Outgoing Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir John Stevens spoke of 2,000 ‘al-Qaeda-trained’ militants stalking British streets only a few months after the killing in Amsterdam, clumsily ratcheting tensions higher for little obvious purpose.
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In Germany, local services found 31,000 individuals who they believed posed a significant security risk.
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One potential solution suggested in the UK was the introduction of identity cards. That classic visual symbol of the 9/11 Wars – the concrete barrier – began to appear outside key London sites such as the Houses of Parliament and the American embassy like outriders of the coming storm.

In Holland, local authorities had been wrestling with the same issues. In late 2001 and early 2002 Dutch security services had begun monitoring Salafist mosques and prayer halls suspected of acting as centres of recruitment and logistics hubs for young Muslims hoping to travel to a variety of ‘theatres of jihad’. One criterion for focusing their efforts was whether a given institution had financial links to Saudi religious foundations such as al-Haramain International, which had been blacklisted for its links to militant Islam. This led them to the al-Tauheed mosque in the north of Eindhoven, where they identified a group of young Dutch Muslims, largely the children of immigrants of Moroccan origin, who had gathered around a Syrian-born cleric. One, a seventeen-year-old still at school, set off for Chechnya in January 2003. He was arrested. Another travelled to Spain to seek out a radical cleric tangentially connected to the Casablanca bombings which had occurred a few months before.
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Two or three others actually made it to Pakistan. Another had discussed jihad and training with al-Qaeda sympathizers on the internet. A fifth is believed to have been in the process of making multiple plans for terrorist attacks in Holland. But the Dutch services had failed to pay any serious attention to the group’s self-appointed ‘media coordinator’, apparently only a peripheral member who after the 9/11 attacks had been making public pleas for intercultural dialogue and tolerance.
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He was deemed to be relatively harmless. This was Mohammed Bouyeri, the killer of van Gogh.

THE PROCESS

The various factors described above are important but can only be a part of any explanation of what lay behind Islamic militancy in Europe or indeed elsewhere in this period. One problem with the classic approach employed by security services in the early years of the conflict was that it was based on seeing radicalization as a consequence of an accumulation of the right elements at the right time. In fact, it is also possible to see radicalization as a process which itself often generated the conditions or qualities that led an individual to extremism and eventually violence. The key was not necessarily in the ‘who’ – essential character traits or profile of an individual – nor even in the ‘why’ – the sense of injustice or the attraction of a cause – but was to be found very often in the ‘how’. It is this dynamic, complex and often chaotic interplay of environment and agency that, through the stories of a range of British militants of varying extremism who were active in the UK between the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 bombings of 2005, the rest of this chapter sets out to explore.

If the process started anywhere it started not in the backroom of a radical-run mosque but in the frontroom of a family home. Ed Husain, who once held a senior position in Hezb-ut-Tahrir, the international Islamist organization that aims to overturn the alleged Western dominance of Muslims by forming Islamic states in what are seen as historically Muslim countries and is banned in many countries, remembered how as a teenager, despite years spent intensively studying with a traditional Pakistani Islamic spiritual leader, he had become increasingly distant from his conservative family.
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They were steeped in the religious and social customs of Pakistan, which no longer interested him. A self-confessed ‘misfit’ at school, Husain soon found himself at the centre of the tension between the old systems of religious observance imported by first-generation migrants, which saw politics as something to be shunned, and newer styles of worship, often heavily influenced by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which adopted an aggressively political stance and were boosted by a massive, well-funded propaganda campaign. The latter had a strong appeal for Husain. ‘What they [Hezb-ut-Tahrir] were saying seemed more relevant, more contemporary,’ he said. ‘They answered my questions.’
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Other catalysts for a shift towards involvement in radical organizations or towards an interest in more extreme strands of Islam were arguments over choices of sexual or marital partner, going out late at night, drinking, using soft drugs. Most of these would be familiar to many teenagers but were exacerbated in the context of the British Pakistani community by a deep cultural generation gap which extended to almost all aspects of social relations within Britain’s Muslim communities, from education to employment. The
biraderi
social system of north-eastern Pakistan, by which the interests of the individual are always subordinated to those of the extended family and broader social group or tribe, was difficult to reconcile with Western and urban values of individualism and personal empowerment. Under the system, communities were informally run by elders whose authority could not be challenged without risking total ostracism.
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One response to this was radical secularism and rejection, another extreme religiosity.
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But the paths into radicalization were as many and varied as the responses to such tensions. Minor events such as incidents of racism or petty humiliations played a role. Major events could create the critical ‘cognitive opening’ that could lead to a radical change of direction. Shiraz Maher, then a history student at Leeds University, had never been attracted to any kind of activism before 9/11. His family had never been observant, he drank, smoked and ‘was a normal first-year student’. And though in the summer of 2001 Maher had started seeing a more observant Muslim girl who had encouraged him to go to mosque more often and chided him for his lack of religious rigour, he was still far from any form of extremism. The 9/11 attacks, however, ‘forced a choice’, Maher said.
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‘The rules of the game were clearly changing. You had to decide where you stood. I suddenly started asking questions that I had never asked before about Islam, about my identity, about the world.’ A few days after the attacks in New York and Washington, outside the mosque where he prayed, Maher was approached by a Hezb-ut-Tahrir activist. The man, an Arabic and politics graduate from Maher’s own university, was just a few years older, knew the Koran by heart but wore a suit and was clean-shaven. He ‘seemed to have the answers’ to the questions that Maher was now asking and was convincing too. ‘I thought, here is someone who is successful and who talks my language,’ Maher said. Within months Maher was meeting his mentor two or three times a week. The older man suggested ideas, leading rather than dragging his target in a certain direction. ‘I felt he understood me,’ said Maher. ‘When I said, “I’ve been clubbing, I’ve smoked some weed,” he was cool. At a traditional mosque in the Pakistani community [in Britain] they would have told me I was going to Hell, but he just said, “If it wasn’t fun people wouldn’t do it,” and suggested that there were more rewarding and important things in life.’ None of the conversations between Maher and his recruiter took place in mosques, which after 9/11 were under close scrutiny either by the security services or by local communities. This was typical. Apart from during the earliest years after 9/11, recruitment and the subsequent activism in the UK took place in independent Islamic centres, in private homes, in cafés, not in obvious locations such as the infamous mosque at Finsbury Park in north London. All the major terrorist plots in the UK in this period took shape in zones that are outside traditional established authority, religious or secular. Typically too, Maher was profoundly ignorant of Islam at the time of his recruitment. In this he was similar to the bombers in Madrid and to Bouyeri, all of whom had relatively poor and superficial understandings of the faith’s teachings and doctrines. Maher went on to spend four years in the Hezb-ut-Tahrir group, rising up the ranks and recruiting scores of new activists himself.
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Maher and Husain’s respective routes into radical activism show many common elements found elsewhere but were atypical in one important aspect: both men were, at least in part, radicalized within a large organization. Most militants in the UK – or for that matter France, Holland, Germany or elsewhere – had never been part of any other group but were ‘self-starters’.