The Longest War (36 page)

God has bestowed
on our beloved emir Sheikh Osama bin Laden and his brothers the mujahideen what they wished for—and that is the globalization of the concept of jihad.

—Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda’s commander in Afghanistan,
in a video released to Al Jazeera in 2007

We are at war
and I am a soldier.

—Mohammed Siddique Khan, a British primary school teacher,
who blew himself up on the London Underground, speaking on his
al-Qaeda “martyrdom” videotape in 2005

The plague bacillus
never dies or vanishes entirely … it can remain dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests … it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves and … perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats again and send them forth to die in a well-contented city.

—Albert Camus

O
n the morning of July 7, 2005, at around eight-thirty, four men hugged each other at Kings Cross railway station in London, a moment that was caught on one of the capital’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras. The men appeared to be
happy, even euphoric
before they separated
to board three trains on the Underground and a double-decker bus. Within the next hour and a half the men detonated bombs that killed themselves and fifty-two commuters and maimed hundreds more. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in British history and the first time that British citizens had conducted suicide operations in their own country. The attacks took place as Prime Minister Tony Blair was hosting the G-8 meeting of world leaders in Scotland and appeared to be timed for maximum embarrassment to the government.

A few days after the bombings, police identified all four of the suicide attackers from surveillance camera footage. The bombers were relatively easy to spot because three were of Pakistani descent and all of them were carrying large backpacks inside which were packed their bombs. They were
an unremarkable bunch
of blokes. Ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan, known widely as “Sid,” was a beloved teacher at a primary school in the northern city of Leeds, teaching handicapped children, and the happily married thirty-year-old father of a baby daughter, with another kid on the way. Shehzad Tanweer, a keen cricketer, was the twenty-two-year-old son of a relatively prosperous businessman who owned a slaughterhouse and fish-and-chips shop in Leeds. Tanweer, a fastidious dresser, tooled around town in a red Mercedes that his father had given him. Eighteen-year-old Hasib Hussain was faring poorly at school and drifting in life, while Germaine Lindsay was an unemployed, nineteen-year-old Jamaican-British convert to Islam.

While all the London bombers were known for their strict religious observance, none was regarded by their friends and families as a militant.
They seemed utterly ordinary
, their leisure time made up of cricket and soccer practice, working out together and going on paintballing trips. But there was another hidden dimension to their lives that centered on an Islamic bookshop in the bleak Leeds suburb of Beeston where they would go to buy jihadi videos. The Beeston cell bonded around watching videos of atrocities against Muslims in Iraq, Palestine, and Chechnya.

Once radicalized in Britain, the two ringleaders, Khan and Tanweer, traveled to Pakistan to
link up there with militant groups
. Before making what would be his final trip to Pakistan in the winter of 2004, Khan made
a farewell video
of himself in his Leeds home. On the tape Khan addressed his baby daughter cradled in his arms and said, “Not too long to go now and I’m going to really miss you.” Khan, it seems, expected to die on his last trip to Pakistan,
but something changed for him there, and instead he returned to his native land with plans to wreak mayhem in London.

Once they got over the shock of the fact that the London attacks were conducted by their own citizens, the British press and government initially portrayed the bombings as an entirely “homegrown” plot with no links to an overseas group, carried out by “self-starting” militants who had radicalized themselves in their hometown of Leeds.
Typical of this view
was a report in the well-sourced
Sunday Times
newspaper, which said that British authorities had found no evidence linking the bombers to al-Qaeda and they were instead a new breed of “unaffiliated” militants. But while the London bombings were certainly implemented by homegrown terrorists, what had in fact turned them from a group of angry young men into an effective terrorist cell was the training and direction that the leader of the group had received from al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

Two months after the London bombings, a
videotape of Khan
, the lead suicide attacker, appeared on Al Jazeera branded with the distinctive, golden Arabic logo of al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based media arm,
Al-Sahab
(“the Clouds”). On his “martyrdom” videotape—a standard accoutrement of al-Qaeda attackers since 9/11—Khan addressed his audience in the broad accent of his native Yorkshire, saying softly, “I’m going to talk to you in a language that you understand. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.” Khan, wearing a Palestinian-style red and white checkered head scarf, went on to describe bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri as “today’s heroes.”

On the same videotape
Zawahiri himself made an appearance
, explaining that the London bombings were revenge for Britain’s participation in the war in Iraq, and came as a result of ignoring bin Laden’s earlier offer of a “truce” with those European nations participating in the coalition in Iraq that were willing to pull out of the country. That truce offer expired on July 15, 2004, almost exactly a year before the London attacks took place. (In 2006 a
martyrdom video
of bomber Shehzad Tanweer appeared; this one was also made by Al-Sahab, further evidence of al-Qaeda’s role in the bombings.)

Khan returned to England
in February 2005 and made his first purchase of hydrogen peroxide chemicals with which to build bombs. In an apartment in Leeds that Khan and his fellow plotters rented to serve as their bomb factory, they mixed the chemicals, which were so noxious that neighbors noticed that their plants were wilting. As they brewed up the batches of chemicals, the bombers wore disposable masks because of the high toxicity of the materials,
which bleached their dark hair a noticeably lighter color. They also installed a commercial-grade refrigerator in the apartment to keep the highly unstable bomb ingredients cold. The four bombs that detonated in London on July 7, 2005, were all hydrogen-peroxide-based devices, a signature of plots that have had a connection to al-Qaeda’s Pakistani training camps since 9/11.

The bombings were largely financed by Khan using credit cards and a personal loan from a bank. (Much of the hysterical analysis about “Saudi funding” for terrorism, which was pervasive after 9/11, fell apart when you looked at particular terrorism cases in any detail; the plots were often self-financed and, in any event, generally didn’t cost much money.) Underlining the fact that terrorism is a cheap form of warfare, the British government found that the entire London operation
cost around £8,000
($14,000), including airfares to Pakistan and the chemicals to make the bombs.

Two weeks after the 7/7 attacks, on July 21, 2005, a second wave of hydrogen-peroxide-based bombs was set off in London, this one organized by a cell of Somali and Eritrean men who were first-generation immigrants. Like the 7/7 bombers, the 7/21 cell members would gather in each other’s flats
to watch videos
of the Iraq War and the beheadings of “infidels.” Fortunately, while four bombs were set to detonate on 7/21—three on the London Underground and one on a bus, mimicking the attacks two weeks earlier—their faulty construction rendered them harmless. One of the conspirators fled London wearing an all-enveloping
black burqa
, accessorized with a handbag, and was recorded by surveillance cameras in Birmingham a day after the failed bombings. With the July 21 bombing attempts, Londoners, who had taken the 7/7 attacks somewhat in their stride, were now facing the unnerving possibility that there would be a sustained campaign of suicide attacks in the capital.

At the trial of the would-be bombers, a scientist testified that the explosive devices they had used were similar to the bombs used on 7/7.
Prosecutors said
Mukhtar Ibrahim, the leader of the July 21 group, had traveled to Pakistan in 2005 around the time that the 7/7 cell leader, Mohammed Siddique Khan, was there. Ibrahim denied this, but a year before the attacks, he had been searched by British authorities on his way to Pakistan and was found to be carrying camping equipment, cold weather gear, three thousand pounds in cash, and pages from a first-aid manual about how to treat ballistic injuries, suggesting that he was not embarking on a conventional vacation. Ibrahim had also previously traveled to Sudan “
to do jihad
.” Jurors convicted Ibrahim
and three of his sidekicks of conspiracy to murder despite their claims that they had designed their bombs only to make a symbolic noise and had no intention to harm anyone.

The grim lesson of the London 7/7 attacks was that al-Qaeda was still able to inspire and direct simultaneous bombings in a major European capital, thousands of miles from its base on the Afghan-Pakistan border. By the summer of 2005, al-Qaeda had recovered sufficient strength that it could now undertake multiple, successful bombings aimed at targets in the West. And the London bombings underlined the fact that no Western country was more affected by Pakistan’s jihadist culture than the United Kingdom, because many British terrorists are either second-generation Pakistanis or have trained with militant groups in Pakistan.

Despite the success of the London bombings, as the 9/11 attacks faded into history, some believed that al-Qaeda’s leader and the organization he headed had largely faded into irrelevance, not able to carry out an attack on the United States and seemingly able only to threaten Americans with video- and audiotapes that occasionally
popped up
on the Internet. At a press conference in 2006, President Bush asserted, “Absolutely, we’re winning. Al-Qaeda is
on the run
.” American officials weren’t the only ones who believed this. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the
Atlantic
ran a cover story headlined simply “
We Won
.”

The most prominent exponent of the view that al-Qaeda was largely out of business was Dr. Marc Sageman, a sociologist and former CIA case officer who in 2004 had published an influential study of jihadist terrorists titled
Understanding Terror Networks
. A year later he told PBS that “
Al-Qaeda is operationally dead
.” And in early 2008 Sageman published another book,
Leaderless Jihad,
which claimed that “
the present threat
has evolved from a structured group of al-Qaeda masterminds controlling vast resources and issuing commands, to a multitude of informal groups trying to emulate their predecessors by conceiving and executing plans from the bottom up. These ‘homegrown’ wannabes form a scattered global network, a leaderless jihad.” In the
Washington Post
Sageman further argued that these homegrown militants “must now be seen as the
main terrorist threat
to the West.”

In the spring of 2008, Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who had worked at the CIA after the 9/11 attacks and was the author of the standard text
Inside Terrorism
, launched a blistering critique of Sageman’s
claim that “leaderless” jihadis unconnected to a formal terror group were now the main threat to the West. Hoffman wrote in
Foreign Affairs
that this was “
a fundamental misreading
of the al-Qaeda threat,” pointing out that the terrorist group had reorganized and reinvigorated itself in the years following the fall of the Taliban. Sageman, a frequent consultant to government agencies, and the New York Police Department’s freshly minted first scholar-in-residence, fired back at Hoffman in the
New York Times
, saying “maybe he’s mad that I’m
the go-to guy
now.”

Henry Kissinger is supposed to have quipped that “the reason why academic quarrels are so nasty is that the stakes are so small.” But in the case of the Sageman-Hoffman spat the stakes were enormously high; if indeed Sageman was correct that the West was threatened largely by “self-starting” home-grown militants, then why spend hundreds of billions of dollars in a “Global War on Terror” in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen, where al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups were headquartered? If Hoffman was correct, then the course that the Bush administration had followed, of taking the war to wherever al-Qaeda and its allies had found sanctuary, made a great deal of sense.

The idea of a “leaderless jihad” was not a new one. In a different context, Louis Beam, a prominent American racist, advocated the idea of “leaderless resistance” during the 1980s as a technique for his fellow racists to struggle successfully against the American government without fear of being penetrated by law enforcement agencies. Beam explained: “Utilizing the Leaderless Resistance concept, all individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to
a typical pyramid organization
.” Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, the deadliest terrorist attack on the American homeland hitherto, carried out this attack largely as an independent operator functioning with no support from any formal organization, which demonstrated that the “leaderless resistance” model really worked.