Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (23 page)

Finally, the suicide bombers themselves are often young men in transitional stages of life and with unsure futures. In JI-related cases, strong-willed seniors persuade younger men who seem somewhat vulnerable and marginalized that death for a cause bestows on life something sure and good. In the mold of Imam Samudra, commanding and fatherlike, Jaelani mentored a group of young men and took them to a “religious retreat” to decide who among them would become a bridegroom in paradise. He chose eighteen-year old Dani Pertama, who had just graduated high school and whose father, a poor thief, was in jail. (Jaelani also brought in a second suicide bomber, twenty-six-year-old Nana Mualana, from Samudra’s home district of Banten.)

But we’ll see that in other cases around the world today, it is mostly youth in transition who persuade other youth in transition that heaven is built on the foundations of hell.

CHAPTER 11
THE GREAT TRAIN BOMBING: MADRID, MARCH 1 1, 2004

Behold! human beings living in a cave, which has a mouth open towards the light.…. [B]ehind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the [people] there is … a low wall, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show puppets.

—SOCRATES, IN PLATO,
REPUBLIC

“We need to see inside the cave,” said Rogers. “We’re seeing shadows on the wall, but we don’t know whether they are made by a giant or a dwarf.”

“I know what you want,” said Fares. “You want to know who makes the bombs.”

“Yes,” said Rogers. “But I also want to understand why he is doing it.”

—DAVID IGNATIUS,
AGENTS OF INNOCENCE: A SPY STORY

MADRID, MARCH 7–8, 2007

At the Madrid train-bombing trial, the major defendants jabbered and joked inside the glass cage. Strange. This was the biggest trial for mass murder in Western Europe since World War II and the most important trial ever for terrorism up to then. Yet there was almost no one present from the public to watch and learn about what the polls say is the issue the public most fears. Thus Marc Sageman and I pretty much constituted the public (apart from a few journalists and some family members and friends of victims and defendants).

The panel of judges sat in front of us, the defendants’ cage to the right, and three long rows of lawyers were to our left. There were loads of lawyers, for the twenty-nine defendants and also for the victims. One of the victims’ lawyers grilled a police agent on whether the bags that carried the bombs were sports satchels
(bolsas),
as the policeman said, or really backpacks
(mochillas).
The policeman said he wasn’t 100 percent sure. “Aha!” the lawyer exclaimed, pointing out to the court that ETA (Euzkadi Ta Azka-tasuna), the Basque terrorist organization originally accused of the bombing by the Spanish government, habitually uses backpacks. (He was apparently uninformed, or uninterested in the fact that the suicide bombers of the London Underground and many other jihadis also like backpacks for bombs.)

This particular defense lawyer seemed to be just a hack for the center-right Popular Party, which lost the national election to the Socialists three days after the bombing. Now, the lawyer’s job was to discredit the prosecution’s case, and indirectly the Socialist party, and so help the defense. The chief judge, Juan del Olmo, whose shaved head was all that seemed to shine with any intelligence in the courtroom, sliced off the lawyer after half an hour of nonsense. “We’ll solve the mystery of the
mochilla
some other time,” he said. “Let’s get on with the case.”

The star witness for the prosecution, a former police informant called Abdelkader Farssaoui, code-named “Cartagena,” immediately began to recant much of his pretrial testimony as having been coerced. He claimed the police threatened to deport him if he didn’t falsely connect the dots between the plotters through drug deals—connections that he said were far fewer and more sporadic than he had originally let on. The state prosecutor, picked for this trial by routine bureaucratic rotation rather than for any special competence, plowed ahead from a prepared list of questions without looking up from her papers, almost oblivious to the fact that the witness was not cooperating at all. A bit later, another witness was called but no one in the court could understand a word she said. “Could someone get an interpreter in here?” the judge called out. An Arabic speaker was brought in but couldn’t understand anything either: “I think the witness is speaking Berber,” he said, referring to a language of rural Morocco. Witness excused.

One of the cage dwellers—a former bouncer, male stripper, and jewelry thief with a Mussolini-like skull and jutting jaw—flexed his pectorals and beckoned me to the glass partition, against which he’d pasted his notebook, but police waved me away. This guy was fabulously full of himself, and now that he was sort of famous, he’d written to the king of Spain. And to me, so I should be flattered. “He’s got a thing for you,” Marc said to me with a chuckle. He was the only one of the eighteen caged defendants who took notes, and furiously. He’d later be ejected from the court when he punched a fellow defendant for calling him a snitch, which the guy was. Mr. Muscle was accused of linking up his fellow Moroccans with an ex-con, a Spaniard who worked in a mine and pilfered explosives to sell to anybody interested, from fishermen looking to illegally blow fish out of the water to aspiring jihadis looking to blow up people. The prosecution demanded a sentence of 38,958 years for complicity in a murder of 191 people and the wounding of more than 1,800. (He’d get 10 years for trafficking in explosives.)

The Spaniard ex-con sat alone in the front row. He stared blankly for hours, gnawing the fingernails of both hands simultaneously. He said that the dynamite he traded to “the Moors” for hash and cash was supposed to be for robbing jewelry stores. Except he really couldn’t explain why, when “the Moors” were carrying away the dynamite, he had called out, “And don’t forget the nails and the screws!” The prosecution asked for 38,962 years for him; he got 34,715. Both sentences were bizarre, given that 40 years is the maximum that anyone in Spain may serve. The Spaniard’s wife refused to look at her husband. She was also one of the accused: It was her cell phone that was used to seal the deal. But she was sitting outside the cage facing only minor charges, probably for having agreed to rat on her spouse to save herself and her brother, another ex-con who also happened to be the husband’s cousin. She and her brother got off scot-free.

Most of the others in the cage were part-time petty criminals, but also would-be Soldiers of God. My eyes fixed on the one in the crowd who wore a tie. Not just any tie, but carefully matched to his other clothes, a clear statement of his exception from the common lot around him. He listened to everything stone-faced, smiling only when the state prosecutor fumbled with a witness. In pretrial testimony, his wife had described how he kicked her in the stomach while she was pregnant with twins, saying he hoped to have the same luck with their unborn as Bin Laden had with the Twin Towers. He got the twelve years the prosecution requested for having provided an apartment and video propaganda to some of the plotters.

A young man in sweats with a middleweight’s gait sat giggling with another in the back row. This former track star and soccer fiend was taking out the garbage when he overheard the police radio, cried a warning to his friends, and sprinted to temporary safety as the police surrounded the apartment where the main plotters were holed up. He got 18 years instead of the 38,950 sought. His less lucky friends—a Tunisian, an Algerian, and five Moroccans who grew up in the same neighborhood—cried out,
“Mamones entren!”
(Cock-suckers, come on in!) and blew themselves to bits that went through the apartment walls into the outdoor swimming pool below.

Then there was the weaselly guy from Egypt who sat silent in the corner. He used to brag to all his fellow jihadi wannabes that Madrid was his idea. “This project took me a lot of study and a lot of patience; it took me two and a half years,” he was heard to say in a wiretap but now said, My goodness I had no idea at all. He was acquitted; in fact, his alibi was that he was in Milan at the time, where Italian police had recorded him narrating the decapitation of American Nick Berg in order to excite another young Egyptian into becoming a suicide bomber.

THE EGYPTIAN: “Kill him! Kill him! Yes, like that! Cut his throat properly. Cut his head off! If I had been there, I would have burned him to make him already feel what hell was like. Cut off his head! God is great! God is great!”

YOUNG MAN: “Isn’t it a sin?”

THE EGYPTIAN: “It’s never a sin! We hope that even their parents will come to the same end. Dogs, all of them, all of them. You simply need to be convinced when you make the decision.”

But to tell the truth, this guy and most of the others look, talk, and act like a bunch of nondescript nobodies who fancied being somebodies. That’s not to say that all would-be jihadis are like these knuckleheads, who make the JI radicals seem like seasoned professionals. Many surely are not. Seems it takes all kinds to make any mass movement.

“BUT I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND, WHERE’S AL QAEDA?”

On March 7, 2007, the prosecution called to the stand the informant Abdelkader el Farssaoui, aka Cartagena, who had been the substitute imam of the Takouma mosque, where some of the plotters prayed in the Villaverde neighborhood of Madrid. Cartagena tried to warn Spanish authorities that something dangerous might be up. He was ignored:

PROSECUTION: In the meeting when they told you that they weren’t looking for mujahedin so much as martyrs, didn’t you suspect from this that an attack could be committed in Spain?

CARTAGENA: Yes, I suspected, I suspected even more, I suspected that they would die in the first attack that they could carry out … perhaps with a [suicide] belt they would come into a place and die. And I raised my hand [when all were asked “Who is prepared” to be a martyr?], but I didn’t want to be a martyr at that moment, no, no, I didn’t like that, it scared me….

PROSECUTION: You communicated with the police about the content of this meeting [which Cartagena called “the last supper”].

CARTAGENA: This was the first time that I realized that … UCIE [police] agents, something’s wrong with them, something’s failed, because when the supper was over I called them on Friday and they didn’t like that. I told them, “it’s very important,” and they said that they don’t work on Saturday or Sunday and so “until Monday, we’re with our families….” I tell them everything, and they say, “Listen, go home, don’t hook up again with that group until you get the order.”

The bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004, killed nearly two hundred people and injured almost two thousand. Almost immediately José Maria Aznar, the conservative prime minister from Spain’s Popular Party, declared it the work of ETA. Three days later, Spain’s Socialist Party won a shock election victory over Aznar’s Popular Party after voters appeared to turn on the government over its handling of the Madrid bombings, especially its continued insistence that ETA was responsible despite repeated denials from ETA and mounting evidence that the bombings were jihad-inspired. Well into the trial, about a quarter of the Spanish public continued to believe the fish story that ETA was involved, despite all evidence to the contrary.
¹

As the defendants in the Madrid train bombing trial delivered their final statements, the Paris daily
Le Monde
gave one oft-quoted expert’s prevailing wisdom on how Al Qaeda managed the Madrid attack and still managed global jihad: “Al-Qaeda designates a target, in this case Spain; allied groups—here the Moroccan Fighting Islamic Group—act as facilitators and support local cells, which are then activated.”
²

“But I just don’t understand,” said a person in my research group, after helping to translate nearly 1,500 pages of the Spanish government’s indictment against the Madrid bomb plotters, and after watching and transcribing months of videos from the trials. “Where’s Al Qaeda?” Indeed.

PRELUDE TO THE PLOT

A small number of Muslim migrants in the early 1980s came to Spain from Syria, fleeing from Syrian president Hafez al-Assad’s assault against the Muslim Brotherhood in his country. This violent repression culminated in the massacre of Homs in 1982, which killed at least 38,000 people and razed the city, according to President Assad’s own brother. Some of these Syrian immigrants were Salafi militants seeking refuge, mostly in Madrid. They married one another’s sisters or Spanish women who converted to Islam. Among those who arrived during that period were Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas (aka Abu Dahdah), who married a Spanish actress and converted to Islam; Tayssir Alouni, who later became a journalist for Al Jazeera and interviewed Bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks; and Mustafa Setmarian Nasar (aka Abu Musa al-Suri), who became the jihadi movement’s Internet guru before his capture in Pakistan in the fall of 2005.