ferocity in battle. His name had been invoked by other jihadis, notably in the suicide bombings at the J. W. Marriott hotel in Jakarta in August 2003. On Saturday evening, a television station in Madrid received a call from a man speaking Spanish with a Moroccan accent, who said that a videotape had been placed in a trash bin near the city's main mosque. 'We declare our responsibility for what has occurred in Madrid, exactly two and a half years after the attacks on New York and Washington,' a masked speaker on the videotape said. He identified himself as Abu Dujan al-Afghani, 'the military spokesman for Al Qaeda in Europe.' He continued, 'It is a response to your collaboration with the criminal Bush and his allies. You love life and we love death, which gives an example of what the Prophet
Muhammad said. If you don't stop your injustices, more and more blood will flow.'
Until this tape appeared, even those investigators who were arguing that the train bombings were perpetrated by Islamic terrorists, not ETA, had been troubled by the fact that there were no 'martyrs' in the attacks. It is a trademark of Al Qaeda to sacrifice its killers; this practice has provided a scanty moral cover for what would otherwise be seen simply as mass murder. But, when the investigators saw that the man calling himself Abu Dujan al-Afghani was dressed in white funeral robes, they realized that suicide was on the horizon.
The Al Qaeda cell in Spain is old and well established. Mo-hamed Atta, the commander of the September 11 attacks, came to Spain twice in 2001. The second time was in July, for a meeting in the coastal resort of Salou, which appears to have been arranged as a final go-ahead for the attacks. After September 11, Spanish police estimated that there were three hundred Islamic radicals in the country who might be affiliated with Al Qaeda. Even before then, members of the Spanish cell had been monitored by police agencies, as is evident from the abundant use of wiretaps and surveillance information in indictments that were issued in November 2001, when eleven suspects were charged with being Al Qaeda members-the first of several terrorist roundups. And yet, according to Spanish police officials, at the time of the Madrid attacks there was not a single Arabic-speaking intelligence agent in the country. Al Qaeda was simply not seen as a threat to Spain. 'We never believed we were a real target,' a senior police official said. 'That's the reality.'
At four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, sixty hours after the attacks and the day before the elections, Interior Minister Acebes announced the arrest of Jamal Zougam and two other Moroccans.
Still, he continued to point at ETA. But by now the Socialists were publicly accusing the government of lying about the investigation in order to stay in power.
Polls opened the next morning at nine. Thirty-five million people voted, more than 77 percent of the electorate, 8 percent more than expected. Many were young, first-time voters, and their votes put the Socialists over the top. As Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero declared victory, he again condemned the war in Iraq and reiterated his intention to withdraw troops.
Four days later, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, a group claiming affiliation with Al Qaeda, sent a bombastic message to the London newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, avowing responsibility for the train bombings. 'Whose turn will it be next?' the authors taunt. 'Is it Japan, America, Italy, Britain, Saudi Arabia, or Australia?' The message also addressed the speculation that the terrorists would try to replicate their political success in Spain by disrupting the November U.S. elections. 'We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections,' the authors write. Bush's 'idiocy and religious fanaticism' are useful, the authors contend, for they stir the Islamic world to action.
On April 2, two weeks after the election, a security guard for the AVE, Spain's high-speed train line, discovered a blue plastic bag beside the tracks forty miles south of Madrid. Inside the bag were twenty-six pounds of Goma-2. Four hundred and fifty feet of cable had been draped across the security fence and attached, incorrectly, to the detonator. Had the bomb gone off when the AVE passed by-at a hundred and eighty m.p.h., carrying twelve hundred passengers- the results could have been far more catastrophic than those of March 11. Spanish citizens asked themselves: If the bombings of March 11 had accomplished the goals set by Al Qaeda, what was the point of April 2?
Gustavo de Aristegui is one of the leaders of the Popular Party in Spain's Basque country. For years, he represented Donostio-San Sebastian, the region's capital, in the Spanish congress. A lawyer and former diplomat, Aristegui has been preoccupied for many years with the rise of Islamic terror. His father was Spain's Ambassador to Lebanon and was killed in Beirut in 1989, when Syrian forces shelled his diplomatic residence.
'Al Qaeda has four different networks,' Aristegui told me in Madrid, the day after the Socialists took power. 'First, there is the original network, the one that committed 9/11, which uses its own resources and people it has recruited and trained. Then, there is the ad-hoc terrorist network, consisting of franchise organizations that Al Qaeda created-often to replace ones that weren't bloody enough- in countries such as the Philippines, Jordan, and Algeria.' The third network, Aristegui said, is more subtle, 'a strategic union of like-minded companies.' Since February 1998, when Osama bin Laden announced the creation of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews-an umbrella organization for Islamist groups from Morocco to China-Al Qaeda has expanded its dominion by making alliances and offering funds. 'Hamas is in, or almost in,' Aristegui said. 'Bin Laden is trying to tempt Hezbollah to join, but they are Shia, and many Sunnis are opposed to them.' Finally, there is the fourth network-'imitators, emulators,' who are ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda but are less tied to it financially. 'These are the ones who committed Madrid,' Aristegui said.
Until the Madrid attacks, the Al Qaeda operations-in Dhahran, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Aden, New York, Washington, Jerba, Karachi, Bali, Mombasa, Riyadh, Casablanca, Jakarta, and Istanbul- had been political failures. These massacres committed in the name of jihad had achieved little except anger, grief, and the deaths of thousands. Soon after September 11, Al Qaeda lost its base in Afghanistan and, along with that, its singular role in the coordination of international terror. New groups, such as the bombers in
Madrid, were acting in the name of Al Qaeda, and although they may well have had the blessings of its leaders, they did not have the training, resources, or international contacts that had bolstered the previous generation of terrorists. Some operations, such as the 2003 attack on Western compounds in Riyadh, which killed mainly Muslims, were such fiascos that it appeared that Al Qaeda was no longer able to exercise control.
'Al Qaeda is not a hierarchical organization, and never was,' Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist, a former CIA case officer, and the author of UnderstandingTerror Networks, told me. 'It was always a social movement.' The latest converts to the cause didn't train in Afghanistan, and they approach jihad differently. 'These local guys are reckless and less well trained, but they are willing to kill themselves, whereas the previous leaders were not,' Sageman said. Moreover, as the Spanish attacks showed, the new generation was more interested in committing violence for the sake of immediate political gain.
The kind of short-term tactical thinking displayed in the 'Jihadi Iraq' document and the March 11 bombings is decidedly out of step with Al Qaeda's traditional world view, in which history is seen as an endless struggle between believers and infidels. It is the mind-set of fundamentalists of all religions. This war is eternal, and is never finally won until the longed-for Day of Judgment. In this contest, the first goal is to provoke conflict. Bold, violent deeds draw the lines and arouse ancient resentments, and are useful even if they have unsought consequences. Polarization is to be encouraged, radical simplicity being essential for religious warfare. An Al Qaeda statement posted on the Internet after the March 11 bombings declared, 'Being targeted by an enemy is what will wake us from our slumber.' Seen in this light, terrorism plays a sacramental role, dramatizing a religious conflict by giving it an apocalyptic backdrop. And Madrid was just another step in the relentless march of radical Islam against the modern, secular world.
Had the Madrid cell rested on its accomplishment after March 11,
Al Qaeda would properly be seen as an organization now being guided by political strategists-as an entity closer in spirit to ETA, with clear tactical objectives. April 2 throws doubt on that perspective. There was little to be gained politically from striking an opponent who was complying with the stated demand: the government had agreed to withdraw troops from Iraq. If the point was merely humiliation or revenge, then April 2 makes more sense; the terrorists wanted more blood, even if a second attack backfired politically. (The Socialists could hardly continue to follow the terrorist agenda with a thousand new corpses along the tracks.) April 2 is comprehensible only if the real goal of the bombers was not Iraq but Spain, where the Islamic empire began its retreat five hundred years ago. 'Spain is a target because we are the historic turning point,' Aristegui said. 'After this, they are going to try to hit Rome, London, Paris, and the United States harder than they did before.'
Juan Aviles, a history professor at Madrid's Autonomous University and an adviser to the Civil Guard, told me, 'From our Western point of view, it doesn't make sense that the killings of Atocha are meaningless. In Spain, we expect ETA to behave in certain ways. With Al Qaeda, the real dimensions of the threat are not known. And that produces uneasiness.'
In the weeks after the March 11 attacks, Spanish police combed the immigrant neighborhoods outside Madrid, carrying photographs of suspects. 'We didn't have them perfectly located, but we knew they were in Leganes,' a police official told me. Leganes is a bland suburb of five-story red brick apartment complexes. The wide streets are lined with evenly spaced, adolescent oaks. In the mornings, the sidewalks are full of commuters rushing for the trains; then the place is vacant, except for grandmothers and strollers. In the evenings, the commuters return and close their doors.
At three o'clock on the afternoon of April 3, the day after the discovery of the bomb on the AVE tracks, police approached an apartment building on Calle Carmen Martin Gaite. They saw a young Moroccan man with a baseball cap on backward who was taking out trash. He yelled something in Arabic, then ran away at an impressive pace. (He turned out to be a track champion; the police did not catch him, and he remains at large.) A moment later, voices cried out, 'Allabu Akhbar,' and machine-gun fire from the second floor of the apartment house raked the street, scattering the cops. Over the next few hours, the police tactical unit, Grupo Especial de Operaciones, evacuated the residents of nearby apartments. Tanks and helicopters moved in, and the siege of Leganes began.
Inside the apartment were seven young men. Most of them were Moroccan immigrants who had come to Europe seeking economic opportunity. They had gone through a period of becoming 'Westernized'-that is to say, they had been drinkers, drug dealers, womanizers. They hung out in cybercafes. They folded into the ethnic mix of urban Madrid. But they also lived in the European underground of Islamic radicalism, whose members were recruited more often in prison than in the training camps of Afghanistan.
Their leader was Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, who was thirty-five years old and had a round, fleshy face and a patchy beard. He was a real-estate agent who had come to Madrid eight years earlier on a scholarship to study economics. His boss told the Spanish press that Fakhet was 'a wonderful salesman,' who held the record for the number of apartments sold in a month. Yet he did not talk to his coworkers or make friends with other Spaniards; he remained sequestered in his Muslim world.
'He was very soft and well educated,' Moneir Mahmoud Aly el-Messery, the imam at the principal mosque in Madrid, told me. The mosque-a massive marble structure, built with Saudi money-is the center of Muslim cultural life in the Spanish capital. It overlooks the M-30, one of the main freeways feeding into Madrid. When Fakhet was a student, he worked in the restaurant that is attached to the mosque, and he sometimes came to Messery's weekly religion class. In the beginning, the imam noticed that
Fakhet spoke familiarly to women as well as to men. 'Then, for three or four years, I sensed that he had some extremist thoughts,' Messery recalled. After class, Fakhet would ask telling questions, such as whether the imam believed that the leaders of the Arab countries were true believers, or if Islam authorized the use of force to spread the religion. Last year, he married a sixteen- year-old Moroccan girl who veiled her face and dressed entirely in black, including gloves. His performance at work declined, and he eventually stopped showing up altogether. According to police, he attended meetings with a small group of fellow Muslims at a barbershop in Madrid, where the men would drink holy water from Mecca. Police believe that this ritual was aimed at absolving the men of the sin of suicide, which is condemned by Islam.
Soon after the attacks of September 11, the imam had a dream about Fakhet. 'Sarhane was in his kitchen, cooking on the stove,' he recalled. 'I saw what he was cooking was a big pot of worms. He tried to give me a plate of the food to eat. I said no. I said, 'Please clean the kitchen!' ' Days later, the imam confronted Fakhet. 'This is a message from God!' the imam said to him. 'The kitchen is the thought, and the thought is dirty.' Fakhet didn't respond. 'He's a very cold person,' the imam told me.
Fakhet was not the only young man in the M-30 mosque who had taken a turn toward extremism. Amer Azizi, a thirty-six-year-old Moroccan who was a veteran of jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan, had been indicted in Spain for helping to plan the September 11 attacks. (He was accused of setting up the July 2001 meeting between Atta and other conspirators in Salou.) Among people who frequented the mosque, Azizi had the reputation of being a drug addict, although he attended some classes on Islam along with Fakhet. In June 2000, when the Arab countries' ambassadors to Spain came to the mosque to mourn the death of the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, Azizi insulted them, yelling, 'Why do you come to pray for an infidel?' Police charge him with being a senior member of Al Qaeda and the leader of the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which was responsible for five bombings in Casablanca in May 2003. He fled Spain just before his indictment.
Another of Fakhet's friends was Jamal Ahmidan, a drug dealer who police say financed the March 11 bombings with seventy pounds of hashish. Messery blamed an Islamist cleric in London,Abu Qatada, a radical Palestinian from Jordan who emigrated to Britain as a refugee in 1994. After September 11, police in Hamburg found eighteen tapes of Abu Qatada's sermons in Mohamed Atta's apartment there. British authorities arrested him in October 2002, but he still wields great authority among Islamists around the world. The imam told me, 'It was as if there were black hands behind a curtain pushing these young men.'
At six o'clock in the evening on April 3, three hours after the start of the Leganes siege, a handwritten fax in Arabic, signed by Abu Dujan al-Afghani, arrived at ABC, a conservative daily in Madrid.
