The 9/11 Wars (32 page)

Al-Ghatani the shopkeeper had arrived in Baghdad in October, dropped off in a safehouse in the rough Sunni-dominated al-Doura neighbourhood of the city. There he had handed over more cash to another group of militants-cum-criminals – documents later seized by US troops confirmed that $1,000 was more or less what the smugglers to whom insurgents tended to subcontract the task of bringing in recruits charged Saudis – who drove him to the outskirts of Falluja and left him by the roadside.
⁷⁷
Al-Ghatani, who had travelled without any introduction from any known figure in Saudi Arabia, failed to convince the
mujahideen
in the city of his bona fides. He was not discouraged, however, and instead spent the next four months fighting with ‘the tribes’, as he called them, along the short stretch of road between Falluja, Ramadi and Baghdad. ‘They taught me to use an AK-47. I shot at the Americans when they attacked us,’ al-Ghatani said. ‘They would use planes, and I saw old women and children killed, and I buried them myself and I let the anger out by shooting and fighting.’

FALLUJA TWO

The long-awaited American offensive into Falluja started on November 7, 2004. There had been sustained fighting across the Sunni Triangle through most of the summer and early autumn. Weeks of raids, firefights and occasional air strikes were punctuated by more conventional engagements. Several took place around Abu Ghraib, as al-Zarqawi’s fighters from Falluja and local tribes mounted sustained attacks on American positions. ‘I’ve got to tell you, we’ve killed a lot of people carrying weapons this week … I’m talking hundreds,’ Brigadier General Hertling, deputy commander of the 1st US Armoured Division, had told reporters in Baghdad in late September. Among them was Abu Anas al-Shami, the
takfiri
cleric, head of al-Zarqawi’s
fatwa
committee and occasional diarist.
⁷⁸

For the second battle of Falluja, General Mattis deployed 9,000 troops, four times as many as in the first battle seven months before. They included 2,000 Iraqis. In the spring the vast bulk of local troops and police deployed in Falluja had deserted or refused to fight, so this new engagement would be a key test of the US strategy of building up local security forces.
⁷⁹
Eleven million rounds of ammunition had been stockpiled and efforts made to close the Syrian border to halt the flow of foreign militant volunteers.
⁸⁰
The city’s defenders were estimated to number around 2,000, of whom perhaps a quarter were foreign nationals.

This time the American troops pushed right through the city. After ten days of fighting, several hundred insurgents, fifty-four Americans and eight Iraqi soldiers had been killed. The latter had performed marginally better than before, though they were still far from being able to operate independently. The fighting was possibly the most intense seen by American troops in recent decades, a succession of vicious house-to-house fights with tanks firing from a few metres away into buildings, protracted artillery bombardment and air strikes. It was the apogee of the kind of ‘kinetic’ warfare the Marines had originally hoped to avoid. In a sense it was the climactic battle that the initial campaign of March 2003 had lacked.

Though the ‘international’ or ‘foreign’ fighters were outnumbered at least three to one by Iraqi fighters in the opening stages of the battle, many of the latter slipped away as combat intensified, returning to their homes in the farmland around the city or going to ground elsewhere in the country and leaving a higher and higher concentration of foreigners in the city. By the final stages of the battle, American troops fought a heterogeneous force of militants from outside Iraq in the ruins of an Iraqi city largely deserted by the Iraqis themselves.

A month before the battle came, al-Zarqawi had finally pledged allegiance to bin Laden and accepted his role as an ‘al-Qaeda affiliate’, the local representative of the global brand. In so doing he made the second battle of Falluja the only conventional confrontation on such a scale between a force at the very least nominally loyal to al-Qaeda and troops fielded by the US or their allies in the whole of the 9/11 Wars.
⁸¹
What was supposed to be a battle for territory – for the safe haven and few square metres of ground that the militants had said they so desired – had become invested with a new significance. For many of the combatants Falluja – and by extension Iraq – had been reduced simply to a stage on which a titanic struggle between the forces of good and evil, belief and non-belief, would take place. ‘We are not here to liberate Iraq, we’re here to fight the infidels,’ Abu Osama, a Tunisian, told one reporter bluntly days before the fighting began.
⁸²
The people of Falluja – few of whom took part in the actual fighting in the city – had little role in this great imagined drama of cosmic conflict between faiths, cultures and civilizations.

BIN LADEN REDUX

Shortly after the end of the fighting in Falluja, four days before the American presidential elections, a video was released by bin Laden, his first for eighteen months. It directly addressed the ‘People of America’, advising them on ‘how to prevent another [9/11]’.
⁸³
There was little new in bin Laden’s rhetoric, though the careful
mise en scène
– a lectern, no weapon, the robe of a respected statesman and scholar – indicated that the leader of al-Qaeda sought to project a more nuanced image than had hitherto been the case. In the tape, bin Laden suggested that it was what America did, not what it was, that provoked the attacks against it, pointing out that al-Qaeda did not target Sweden.
⁸⁴
Bin Laden almost certainly sought to influence the American poll – or at least exploit the opportunity for further publicity it provided. It is less clear that the forty-seven-year-old fugitive wanted Bush to win, however. In the event, the incumbent was re-elected with ease.

The video dominated headlines and news bulletins on the eve of the elections, a powerful reminder of bin Laden’s ability to project himself globally and of who, after all the interest in al-Zarqawi and others, still remained the pre-eminent leader of the global jihad. It was also a reminder of the very obvious failure of the most expensive manhunt in history to make any evident progress. Since the al-Qaeda senior leadership had disappeared after Tora Bora, Western intelligence services had been unable to obtain any solid lead as to where they might be.
⁸⁵

Most of the militants who had fled Afghanistan had ended up in South Waziristan, the most southerly of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), so the working theory among Western intelligence that bin Laden was there too was, though little more than informed speculation, reasonable. Mahmood Shah, the chief civilian administrator of the FATA from 2001 to 2005, remembered that the foreigners had begun arriving in Shakai, an impoverished area of pine forests, mountains and valleys close to the border, in early 2002.
⁸⁶
Secret American intelligence reports later used in the compilation of dossiers on detainees at Guantanamo Bay contained repeated references to meetings of the al-Qaeda leadership in Shakai in late 2003 and 2004. One report even implied that, after the capture of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi, al-Zawahiri himself had moved to the area from an unspecified urban area.

But it was not actually clear if ‘high value target one’, as the al-Qaeda leader was known to the teams tracking him in Pakistan, Afghanistan and from America, was even in the frontier zone at all. With little fresh human or technical intelligence coming in, the hunters adopted some unusual methods of analysis. In 2003 it was rock types in the background of one video that featured the al-Qaeda leaders that were scrutinized closely. A year later trees pictured in another video led investigators to believe bin Laden might be in the valleys of Chitral, hundreds of miles or more north of Shakai and South Waziristan. But if his references to current events and people showed the fugitive leader had access to some kind of news media, there was little else to go on. Hundreds of leads were being developed by the CIA. There was a particular interest in finding and tracking the couriers bin Laden was known to use. His extensive close family – three current wives, a dozen or more children – was a possible weakness. But beyond that, there was nothing.

Yet, despite the problems of their pursuers, the situation of any senior militants in Pakistan remained precarious. Once the presence of hundreds, possibly thousands, of international militants in South Waziristan had been detected by Western intelligence services, pressure had been put on President Musharraf to launch a series of military offensives to deny al-Qaeda any secure base there.
⁸⁷
A first effort in 2003 had concentrated on a 30 square mile area in South Waziristan under the control of local Pakistani militants suspected of harbouring ‘foreign terrorists’, and, even if this was a bloody fiasco as local and foreign militants ambushed ill-prepared troops and inflicted heavy losses, other offensives had followed.

These made clear that, though the senior al-Qaeda leadership had seen their ideology propagated across the world through spectacular violent acts such as 9/11 or the various strikes it had subsequently inspired, they were still a long way from finding a replacement for the secure base they had once enjoyed in Afghanistan.
⁸⁸
If the attractions of a strategy based on a decentralized ‘global, leaderless jihad’ were strong, the late 1990s had amply proven how useful a genuine safe haven could be. As a result, bin Laden had carefully followed a middle road in strategic terms in his statements over the previous eighteen months, seeing his role as being ‘inciter-in-chief’ along lines closer to the thinking of al-Suri without entirely renouncing al-Zarqawi’s strategy of creating a physical base from which to launch the great campaign to build the new Islamic caliphate.
⁸⁹

If the testing ground for al-Zarqawi’s ideas was to be the campaign in Iraq, the testing ground for al-Suri’s strategy of incitement of a decentralized, leaderless jihad would not be in the traditional lands where Islam has been the dominant religion for centuries, the
dar ul Islam
, the land of peace, however. Instead, it would be in a new zone of conflict: in the
dar ul kufr
, the land of unbelief, and more specifically in Europe, where 20 million Muslims living in the heart of the unbelievers’ societies constituted an immense potential strategic asset for the global militant movement.
⁹⁰

PART THREE

Europe, the Darkest Days: 2005–6

8
The 9/11 Wars Reach Europe

A MURDER IN HOLLAND

Sitting on a sofa upstairs in an open-plan office off a quiet street in an unfashionable part of Amsterdam, Gijs van Westelaaken was talking about his dead friend and business associate, the film-maker and professional controversialist Theo van Gogh. ‘He was provocative but never just for the sake of provocation. He wanted to know what made people tick,’ Westelaaken said. ‘He always said he would go on saying what he wanted to say whatever the threats.’
¹
A few yards away, two tall blonde Dutch women in long denim skirts stood sipping warm white wine out of plastic cups and spoke in low voices. Some children played under desks, between architects’ design tables and coiled cables of state-of-the-art computers. This was van Gogh’s wake. A day earlier, on November 2, 2004, the forty-seven-year-old director had been cycling along Linnaeus Straat a few miles away from where Westelaaken was talking when he was stopped by a young man in a hooded sweater. A brief altercation followed, shots rang out, van Gogh collapsed, his attacker bent over his body, cutting, stabbing, then running. Panicked passers-by crowded round the corpse, a note pinned to its chest by a knife. Van Gogh’s last words were: ‘Surely we can talk about this?’
²

The death of van Gogh, notwithstanding the bombings in Madrid seven months earlier, revealed to a shocked public in Holland, Germany, France, the UK and elsewhere that the 9/11 Wars had reached Europe. The strike in Spain had involved first-generation immigrants, most still barely integrated, many of whom elected to speak Arabic in court as their Spanish was too limited. Mohammed Bouyeri was very different. The 2,000-word note he had left was written in good Dutch, which was unsurprising as its twenty-six-year-old author had been born, raised and educated only a few miles away and at least in legal terms was as Dutch as his victim. It was in fact addressed not to Van Gogh but to Ayaan Hirshi Ali, a Somali-born refugee and member of the Dutch parliament with whom the director had been working on a film about Islam and domestic violence called
Submission
, which featured lines from the Koran projected over a semi-naked woman. The letter was in part a screed of incoherent apocalyptic poetry and in part a distillation of the familiar radical Islamic worldview. Hirshi Ali, who had made a series of controversial and uncompromising public statements criticizing Islam as a backward religion that encouraged violence to women, was an apostate, it said, working for hidden Jewish masters who ran Dutch and global politics. Those to blame for the terrible current situation of the world’s Muslims were all those supposed believers who failed to act in the face of such clear provocation. Bouyeri’s origins, act and views, especially as it became clear that he was connected to a much wider circle of radicalized young Dutch Muslims, thus apparently signalled that the scenario most feared by the counter-terrorist community, policy-makers and the general population – the radicalization and mobilization of the Muslims of Europe – was being realized. For major countries with large Muslim communities such as France, Germany and the UK, the killing of van Gogh meant that the war they had found themselves caught up in since 2001 no longer solely involved battles or bombs in far-off, dusty, hot countries but had reached them, their homes, their places of work, their friends and family.