Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (37 page)

Less harebrained, but still far from execution, was a September 2009 plot by Najibullah Zazi, an airport bus driver, and Zarein Ahmedzay, a New York City cabbie, to bomb the New York subway. They trained in Pakistan with another accomplice to fight Americans in Afghanistan, but Qaeda operatives, including Rashid Rauf, a planner of the 2006 plot to blow up U.S.-bound planes with liquid explosives, convinced them to return home to do something, as the 2005 London Underground bombers had done. On May 1, 2010, Faisal Shahzad bungled the execution of a car bomb in Times Square. The son of a former Pakistani air force general, Shahzad became an American-educated MBA and naturalized citizen. But by summer 2009 he had lost his Connecticut home to the bank, left his job, and seemed estranged from his wife. He found solace in a militant religious rebirth, went to see family in Pakistan and “find himself” again, wanted to fight Americans in Afghanistan (his father was against it), and found jihad when a militant friend apparently steered him to Pakistani Taliban leaders. After a primer in bomb making in Waziristan, Shahzad returned to avenge America’s assault on fellow Muslims and his own aspirations.

“No one wants to believe that the threat inside our country comes mainly from disaffected young men,” one top FBI official told me, “and it rarely goes beyond fantasy, although if somebody did manage to do something, and we were caught with our pants down, Congress and the public would go bananas.” When sleepers have been brought up in public as a “near certainty,”
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including by former CIA director George Tenet,
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those in the know just grit their teeth in silence.

Matters remain worse in Britain and other parts of western Europe, where even middle-class Muslim youth often feel socially marginalized and liable to seek universal meaning for frustrated personal aspirations in a violent mass movement. Consider the train bombings in Madrid (2004) and London (2005) and a foiled series of independent plots to blow up planes out of Heathrow Airport (summer 2006), to car-bomb London landmarks (summer 2007), to attack targets in Denmark and Germany (fall 2007), and to hit Barcelona’s subway (winter 2008).

European governments have begun developing culturally smart outreach programs for marginalized Muslim youth. But the continued focus on cultivating moderate imams remains pretty irrelevant. In fact, very few people ever become terrorists in mosques. They may gather and plan outside some mosques, as did the 9/11 plotters from Hamburg and the Madrid train bombers, but even they did most of their plotting hanging out together in neighborhood restaurants and barbershops, playing sports, and in their friends’ homes.

These young people self-mobilize to the tune of a simple, superficial, but broadly appealing
takfiri
message of withdrawal from impure mainstream society and of a need for violent action to cleanse it. It is a surprisingly flat but fluid message preadapted to any new event in the world, and it is readily shared by young people I have interviewed across Eurasia and North Africa.

One telltale sign of radicalization in the move to Takfirism is when members of a neighborhood mosque or cultural center (or just an informal discussion group that meets at a bookstore or at picnics) gel into a militant faction. This is what happened, for example, when the soccer-playing Salafi imam at the M-30 mosque in Madrid expelled Serhane Fakhet, the Tunisian, and friends (who continued to self-radicalize, playing soccer and picnicking together in the lead-up to the Madrid train bombings) or when Ali al-Timimi and his group of paintball buddies were ejected from the Dar al-Arqam Cultural Center in Falls Church, Virginia, after praising the 9/11 attack (twelve members were later convicted of aiding the Pakistani jihadi group Lashkar-e-Taiba).

Western politicians, pundits, and publics generally do not understand that the strict Salafi schools in Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and elsewhere are the most vociferous and effective opponents of violent jihad. Salafi Islam is the host on which this viral Takfiri movement rides, not unlike the relationship between Christian fundamentalism and white supremacism. The host itself is not the cause of the virus and is, indeed, a primary victim. As one senior Saudi intelligence officer recently told me, “Often the first signs of someone becoming a Takfiri is that he stops praying where his family and tribe pray. He leaves the mosque and turns against his family, tribe, and our Salafi way.” Most present-day Takfiris are “born again” in their late teens and early twenties and have little knowledge of religion beyond the fact that they consider themselves true Muslims who must fight enemies near and far to defend their friends and the faith that makes their friendship meaningful and enduring. Enlistment into training and actions can come via any number of routes: most often through friends or relatives or fellow travelers one happens to meet looking for ways to join the jihad.

Many academic and counterterrorism experts refer to predictive factors in “recruitment.” In its heyday, Al Qaeda operated more like a funding agency than a military organization. People would come to Al Qaeda with proposals for plots. Al Qaeda would accept some 10 percent to 20 percent.
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As we’ve seen, even the 9/11 suicide pilots were not “recruited” into Al Qaeda. There’s no clear evidence that Al Qaeda ever had a recruiting or training infrastructure in Europe, although there is evidence that Al Qaeda and Qaeda-related groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas maintain some communication with Europeans after they train in Pakistan, especially those implicated in post-9/11 plots involving the United Kingdom and United States.

Generally, however, people go looking for Al Qaeda, not the other way around. Because there’s very little of the old Al Qaeda left, many who go seeking Al Qaeda are caught. Those who seek out Al Qaeda usually do so in small groups of friends and occasionally through kin. Most are schoolmates or workmates via camp or soccer or paintball, or friends who share some other study or sports activity. Some have steady jobs and family, some have only intermittent jobs and no families of their own. All have self-radicalized to some degree before they go for Al Qaeda, although an encounter with someone who has been to a Qaeda-friendly training camp in Afghanistan is occasionally an added stimulant. The overwhelming majority have not had sustained prior religious education but have become “born again” into radical Islam in their late teens and early twenties. A small percentage are Christian converts.
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For example, in the wake of the Iraq invasion in April 2003, a disciple of the radical Islamist preacher Sheikh Omar Bakri organized a barbecue in a London suburb for about a hundred people, most from the immigrant Pakistani community. Guests were asked for donations to help send a few volunteers to Pakistan to train for jihad. Among those who used some of the 3,500 pounds collected to pay their way to Pakistan were Mohammed Sidique Khan, one of the four suicide bombers in the July 2005 London Underground attack, and Omar Khyam, one of the conspirators convicted in the 2005 “Crevice” plot to plant fertilizer bombs around London. Their original intention was to do jihad in Kashmir, but after a quick course in bomb making, they were told to “go home” and do something there. Each joined up with a few friends to concoct a plot. Interviews by journalist Jason Burke with friends of the Crevice conspirators suggest that ten days of arduous hiking, camping, and training in Pakistan cemented commitment among buddies.
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White-water rafting seems to have played a role in bonding the London Underground plotters (although training in a Qaeda-affiliated camp also played a role in this case). One of the four London suicide bombers was a Jamaican Christian convert and pinball buddy of others in the plot.

The boundaries of the newer-wave networks are very loose, and the Internet now allows anyone who wishes to become a terrorist to become one, anywhere, anytime. For example, the “Al Ansar” chat-room network involved plotting in half a dozen countries (United States, Britain, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Bosnia) by young men, many of whom had never physically met. They would hack into media sites in the American Midwest to post jihadi videos, like Zarqawi’s beheading of Nick Berg, and post recipes for making car bombs and suicide vests. From a basement apartment in Britain, a self-styled Irhabi 007 (Terrorist 007) helped in his spare time to coordinate plots with some high school chums in Toronto to blow up the Canadian parliament, and with others to attack the U.S. embassy in Bosnia (three conspirators who did meet physically in Bosnia were arrested with AK-47 rifles, suicide belts, and thousands of rounds of ammunition).

PUBLICITY IS THE OXYGEN OF TERRORISM

“The media are coming to the Taj!”

—PHONE CALL FROM ALLEGED LASHKAR-E-TAYIBAH
HANDLER “BROTHER WASI” IN PAKISTAN TO THE SUICIDE
SQUAD AT THE MUMBAI TAJ HOTEL SUGGESTING THAT NOW
WAS THE TIME TO KILL AS MANY GUESTS AS POSSIBLE,
THEN DIE.

Because terrorists thrive in small groups and among networks of family and friends, their threat is fueled way beyond their actual strength by publicity.

In the past, spectacular killings were common both to small tribes and great empires. Nearly three millennia ago, Moses commanded the Israelites after defeating the Midianites to “Kill all the boys, and kill every woman who has slept with a man. But save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man” (Numbers 31:17–18). Genghis Khan, the legendary Mongol conqueror, reportedly said: “The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see their near and dear bathed in tears, to ride their horses and sleep on the bellies of their wives and daughters.”
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Today, whereas most nations tend to avoid publicizing their more wanton killings—including most killings that might be labeled state terrorism—publicity is the oxygen that fires modern terrorism.

Witness, for example, the reaction to the failed “Christmas Day Plot” in 2009. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a baby-faced twenty-three-year-old British-educated engineering student and son of a prominent Nigerian banker, attempted to blow up Northwest Flight 253 out of Amsterdam as it was about to land in Detroit. Although Abdulmutallab’s father had warned the American embassy in Nigeria that his son was spouting dangerous ideas, and his name was placed on a list of people to watch for, the young man managed to board the plane with a pack of explosives and a detonating syringe strapped to his body. His case has two antecedents. The obvious one is that of Richard Reid, who eight years before had tried to bring down American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with a shoe bomb containing the same plastic explosive that Umar had packed in his underwear; execution of the plot was clumsy and amateurish, and it failed. The other is the case of five Virginia men, ages nineteen to twenty-five, who were arrested in Pakistan in December 2009 at the home of an activist from Jaish-e-Mohammed, the group that had helped to kidnap and kill
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl. According to Pakistani interrogators, the American buddies—two of Pakistani ancestry, one of Egyptian, one of Yemeni, and one of Eritrean—had used Internet sites to try to contact militants in Pakistan before traveling there from the United States in late November. After making a “farewell video” with the message that Muslims must be defended, they went overseas without telling their families. Like Abdulmutallab’s father, the young men’s concerned families notified American authorities, who in that instance warned their Pakistani counterparts. E-mails and maps found in the band’s possession indicate that they planned to travel to the Chashma Nuclear Plant in northwest Pakistan and on to a Qaeda-linked Taliban training facility.
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Umar’s path to radicalization started out a bit lonelier, but the trajectory is pretty familiar. Like “the Tunisian,” Serhane Fakhet, a key player in the Madrid train bombings, Umar was a gifted student from a well-off family who felt constantly lonely and out of place in foreign schools. He went to an English boarding school in Togo, studied Arabic in Yemen, and attended mechanical engineering classes at the elite University College, London, where he became president of the Student Islamic Society and said he found contentment and companionship. But he seems to have mainly sought friendship and solutions to personal conflicts through Internet contacts. On Facebook, he frequently mused about loneliness and love, his sexual frustrations, and his need to marry soon because “the hair of a woman can easily arouse a man.” “My name is Umar but you can call me Farouk,” he wrote on the Islamic Forum Web site. “May Allah reward you for reading and reward you more for helping.”
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The Islamic Society brought him into the counterculture against “the war on terror”: “I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the muslims will win,
insha Allah
[God willing], and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!” reads one post from 2005. But only after leaving London did he become truly radicalized away from merely belonging to a counterculture that includes millions of young Muslims, and into a universe of violent extremism that draws forth few. Returning to Yemen, he connected with the so-called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and its American-born imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, may have blessed Umar’s suicide mission.
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Awlaki, a former preacher at a Northern Virginia mosque, gained notoriety for Facebook communications with Major Malik Nadal Hasan, an American-born Muslim psychiatrist who killed thirteen fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, and for “inspiring” would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.