Al-Qaeda (48 page)

The two other major interventions made by bin Laden in this period were more interesting. The most spectacular was his appearance on screens around the world on the eve of the American presidential election in November. This unparalleled media coup was perfectly timed for blanket coverage and may indeed have swayed the American electorate. In the video, bin Laden, dressed in very non-military robes, appeared behind a lectern, a deliberate counterpart to that behind
which the US president often stands. His customary short-barrelled Kalashnikov was nowhere to be seen. Instead of the hunted messianic warlord speaking from the hills, bin Laden was projecting himself as a politician, a statesman and a man of wisdom, experience and knowledge. His message was addressed directly to the American people. Contrary to the claim that the militants ‘hate freedom’, bin Laden said he and his followers were fighting ‘because we are free men who cannot acquiesce in injustice’. He went on to reproach his target audience for failing to look for the reasons for the ‘disasters’ that have befallen them. Using far plainer language than usual, bin Laden explained how Americans should remember that ‘every action has a reaction’ and that their security lay in their own hands. Bin Laden said that he was not hostile to ‘freedom’ in itself, pointing out Sweden had not been attacked, and said that it was the American policy in the Middle East that was causing the problems. Change the policy, he said, and the threat of another 11 September would disappear.

The statement reiterated a series of points made in a shorter communication broadcast in April and directed at European governments and populations, described as ‘our neigh-bours north of the Mediter-ranean’, itself a deliberate reference typically loaded with historical and cultural baggage. The first line of the statement cited a line of poetry, ‘Evil kills its perpetrators and oppression’s pastures are fatal’. ‘Security is a vital necessity for every human being and we will not let you monopolize it,’ bin Laden argued. ‘Our actions are but a reaction to yours – your destruction and murder of our people, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine.’ Bin Laden then went on to propose a peace proposal, a truce that would come into effect when ‘the last [European] soldier has left ‘our lands’. Interestingly, a key demand was that ‘just men… form a permanent commission to raise awareness among Europeans of the justice of our causes, primarily Palestine, making use of the enormous potential of the media’.
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The statement to ‘the peoples of Europe’ was extremely significant. It came a month after the Madrid bombings and underlined an obvious trend. Throughout the 1990s bin Laden had concentrated his propaganda on the populations of the core Arab world with occasional appeals to Muslims elsewhere. Since 2001, his target audience had
steadily broadened. In 2004 he addressed populations, Muslim and non-Muslim, from the West coast of America to the easternmost tip of Indonesia. And in this vast space it was clear that Europe was featuring in a more important way than ever before. The bombings in Madrid had their roots in a radicalization process of Muslims in Europe that had begun long before 11 September. However, what was clear to bin Laden – as well as to Western intelligence agencies – was that the process of mobilization of Europe’s very significant Muslim population had accelerated rapidly under the impact of the highly controversial War on Terror.

Much was made of the stream of volunteers from countries such as France and Britain to Iraq. In fact, though the phenomenon received massive media attention, the number of young Western European Muslims heading to the Middle East was extremely small. For example, only a few dozen young French men – out of a Muslim community of around five million – made their way via Syria and a support network based in Italy to Iraq. British suicide bombers in Iraq and in Israel (in Tel Aviv in April 2003) underlined the growing radicalization and internationalization of many British Muslims but could still be counted on the fingers of one hand.
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Yet, as the Madrid bombing showed, something was clearly happening. The regular communications from bin Laden reinforced the fact that, though down, the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ was far from knocked out. But a series of other incidents underlined the continuing spread of ‘al-Qaeda-ism’ without direct input.

One of the most notable was the killing of Theo van Gogh, a controversial Dutch filmmaker, by a young Dutch-born Muslim in Amsterdam in November 2004. Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old son of Moroccan immigrants, shot van Gogh several times, cut his throat and then drove the knife deep into his victim’s chest, pinning a statement to the corpse. The note was written in good if stilted Dutch and was in fact a letter to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch MP and campaigner, who had made a film with van Gogh denouncing violence to women in Islam by projecting quotes from the Koran across a naked woman’s body. Bouyeri, educated in the Dutch public system and from a hardworking, moderately observant family, called her a
‘soldier of Evil’ and said that she, Holland, Europe and the USA would ‘break themselves into a million pieces against Islam’. Echoing the standard violent anti-Semitism present in so many jihadi texts Bouyeri said that the politician was ‘the servant of Jewish masters… products of the Talmud’ who ‘dominate Dutch politics’. Bouyeri had only tenuous connections with radical militants in Holland. Though the murder of van Gogh was clearly designed to communicate through violence and thus was squarely within the strategic and tactical thinking of men like bin Laden, Bouyeri was a self-starter, a home-grown activist, a man who had answered the call of bin Laden. And he was far from alone.
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On 7 July 2005 four bombs exploded in London, three on tube trains at 8.50am, one on the top floor of a crowded double-decker bus 57 minutes later. Fifty-two people were killed, plus the four bombers, and several hundred injured. The attack was timed for rush-hour to inflict maximum carnage.

There are five key questions relating to the London attacks: How do they fit into the context of radicalism in the UK since the early 1990s? Who actually committed the attack? How were the bombers radicalized? What was their relationship to the ‘al-Qaeda’ structure? And what motivated them?

We have already come across some of the first wave of militants – such as Abu Qutada – who came to the UK in the early 1990s fleeing government action against their activities in homelands in the Middle East. Most were political Islamists but some were committed to a harder, more jihadi-Salafi strand of activism. Almost all saw London as a base for operations in the native lands and were not very interested in the UK itself.
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As such they were, to the great frustration of many Middle Eastern governments, of no real concern to British security services and police. By the end of the 1990s, reflecting trends elsewhere, such men, joined by new activists coming from overseas, had begun working in a far more internationalized fashion, co-ordinating operations, largely recruitment and fundraising linked to the militants in southwest Asia or the Middle East who saw ‘the West’ generally and the USA specifically as the biggest threat to Islam.

Alongside these militants, it is important to remember, there was a second form of activism which, though it received far less media attention, was much more widespread. Starting from around 1990, large numbers of young British Muslims of Pakistani origin became involved with militancy in Kashmir in a variety of capacities. Given that a very high proportion of Pakistani immigrants to the UK come from areas such as Mirpur and are thus in effect of ‘Kashmiri’ descent this is hardly surprising.
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Again, in almost all their cases, the men’s interest was restricted to the specific ‘theatre of jihad’ that the disputed Himalayan former kingdom represented. At least one Briton died, possibly in a suicide attack, in Kashmir in the late 1990s.

Contrary to what is often said, British policy towards the activists began to change well before 2001. Investigations into the background to the 1998 bombings in east Africa revealed the presence of militants connected to bin Laden’s propaganda operations in the UK and led to the discovery of a copy of the famous ‘manual for Jihad’ in a flat in Manchester.
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The arrest of Ahmar Makhklulif, ‘Abu Doha’ at Heathrow airport in February of 2001 indicated a new focus on international terrorism. Of course 11 September had a major impact too.

Yet though the police and intelligence services successfully followed the first evolution of the threat posed by militants in the UK, recognizing that men like Makhlulif posed a threat to Britain itself, they failed to follow the next evolution. Despite the growing evidence of ‘home grown’ radicalization, police and security services continued to concentrate on populations of recent immigrants, asylum seekers and other new arrivals rather than more established communities. The arrest of Richard Reid, the ‘shoe bomber’, in December 2001, continued indications of growing anger and radicalization among British Muslims through 2002 (such as increased anti-semitic attacks and the British suicide bombers turning up in the Middle East in 2003) still did not alter this fundamental perception of the threat. The idea of ‘sleeper cells’, activated by radio control by bin Laden or a similar ‘senior activist’ continued to hold sway. Intelligence analyses from this period are somewhat incoherent, uneasily trying to marry the idea of ‘home grown’ with external threats. So in 2003, Elizabeth Manningham-Buller,
the then director-general of MI5, said that ‘Western security services have uncovered networks of individuals, sympathetic to the aims of al-Qaeda, that blend into society, individuals who live normal, routine lives
until called upon for specific tasks by another part of the network. Some of these individuals are in the UK
’ (my italics). Not all of them, she added, fitted ‘the stereotypical profile of a terrorist sometimes portrayed in the media,’ stressing that ‘one of the lessons learned… is the ability of the terrorist to hide in plain sight, to be seen but not noticed and to all intents and purposes to live a law-abiding existence.’ Given that the terrorists were otherwise law-abiding British citizens none of this should have been surprising.
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Analysis was not assisted by a series of sensational claims that proved unfounded and court cases that either collapsed or resulted in grave disappointment for the police. One of the most spectacular examples of the former was the supposed plot to bomb Manchester United Football Club’s Old Trafford stadium and a good example of the latter was the much-reported ‘ricin’ plot which involved an alleged plan to manufacture a biological poison in a flat in north London. After a long trial defendants were acquitted of all terrorism-linked charges.
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All this obscured the very real threats that were developing. The police and MI5 successfully broke up one group who had got as far as buying large quantities of ammonium nitrate, a fundamental ingredient of explosives. They also arrested a British-born Hindu convert to Islam, Dhiren Barot, who had been on the periphery of international militant circles for over a decade, after an initiation into radicalism in Kashmir, and who was accused of planning a series of devastating attacks on British soil.
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The leader of the July 2005 London bombers was Mohammed Sidique Khan, the youngest of six children of respectable, moderately devout Pakistani parents from the Punjab. Born in 1974 and raised in a working-class quarter of Beeston, a post-industrial city in northern England, he was by all accounts a quiet, studious and well-behaved boy, sometimes bullied at school. After working as a low-level government administrative assistant, Sidique Khan got a university degree in business studies, marrying a British Muslim social worker of Indian origin – a match apparently disapproved of by both families. In 2001
the part-time youth worker took up a job at a local primary school as a ‘learning mentor’, working with special needs children. Though initially seen as a ‘role model’, who was good at empathizing with difficult children and thus highly regarded by parents and teachers, a year after starting work he apparently became ‘less talkative and more introverted’ as well as more ‘intolerant’ and was sacked after taking two months off sick in 2004. However, except for a four-month break between November 2004 and February 2005, when he made a trip to Pakistan, he continued his youth work, particularly with children excluded from school. He blew himself up at Edgware Road station in July 2005.

Sidique Khan was accompanied on his trip to Pakistan by Shehzad Tanweer (22 when he died), the son of a prominent Leeds businessman. Calm, mature, sociable, known for his taste for fashionable haircuts and designer clothes, Tanweer was popular and did well at school. A ‘gifted sportsman’, he excelled at athletics, played for a local cricket team and studied sports science at Leeds Metropolitan University. In around 2001, friends began noticing a change in his behaviour and by mid 2002, religion is said to have become a key focus of his life. A childhood friend of Sidique Khan, the two men had lost touch until Tanweer turned up at the local gym where the older man sometimes ran discussion groups at the end of 2002. They began to spend a considerable amount of time in each others company. Together they were the key driving force of the group that bombed the tube trains.

The other two members of the group were Hasib Mir Hussain, 18, and Jermain Lindsay, 19. Hussain, also from near Leeds, had begun wearing traditional clothing and a prayer cap after a family pilgrimage to Mecca when he was 15. Sometime after the visit, the young man, habitually quiet and something of a loner, told schoolfriends he considered the 11 September hijackers martyrs and informed teachers that he wanted to be a cleric when he left school. A handful of GCSEs got him into a local college for an ‘advanced business programme’ where his attendance was described as ‘patchy’. He nonetheless stayed until the end of the course in June 2005, a month before his death.