Referring to the bomb found beside the AVE tracks the day before, the author argues that it failed to explode because 'our objective was only to warn you and show you that we have the power and capacity, with the permission of Allah, to attack you when and how we want.' The letter demanded that Spain withdraw its troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan by the following Sunday. Otherwise, 'we will turn Spain into an inferno and make your blood flow like rivers.' On the surface, the fax represented another turn toward tactical political thinking; more likely, it was an attempt to salvage a bungled operation.
Outside the Leganes apartment, the police attempted to negotiate, but the cornered terrorists cried out, 'We will die killing!' Phone calls that they made to relatives during the siege confirmed their intentions. They also attempted to call Abu Qatada in London's Belmarsh Prison, apparently seeking a fatwa that would morally sanction their suicide.
Instead of turning off the electricity and waiting them out, the police decided to storm the apartment. They ordered the terrorists to come out 'naked and with your hands up.' One of the occupants responded, 'Come in and we'll talk.' At 9:05 p.m., the police blew the lock on the door and fired tear gas into the room. Almost immediately, an explosion shattered the apartment, killing the terrorists and a police officer. The blast was so intense that it took days before the authorities could determine how many people had been in the apartment. The body of Jamal Ahmidan was hurled through the walls and into a swimming pool. One of the seven bodies still has not been identified.
In the ruins, police found twenty-two pounds of Goma-2 and two hundred copper detonators that were similar to those used in the train bombings. They also found the shredded remains of a videotape. These fragments were painstakingly reassembled, to the point where police could view the final statement of Fakhet and two other members of the cell, which called itself 'the brigade situated in Al Andalus.' Unless Spanish troops left Iraq within a week, the men had declared, 'we will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tariq ibn Ziyad.'
Al Andalus is the Arabic name for the portion of Spain that fell to Muslim armies after the invasion by the Berber general Tariq ibn Ziyad in 711. It includes not only the southern region of Andalusia, but most of the Iberian Peninsula. For the next eight hundred years, Al Andalus remained in Islamic hands. 'You know of the Spanish crusade against Muslims, and that not much time has passed since the expulsion from Al Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisition,' Fakhet says on the tape. He is referring to 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella completed the reconquest of Spain, forcing Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism or leave the Iberian Peninsula. 'Blood for blood!' he shouts. 'Destruction for destruction!'
Were these the true goals of Al Qaeda? Were the besieged terrorists in Leganes simply struggling to get Spain out of Iraq, or were they also battling to regain the lost colonies of Islam? In other words, were these terrorists who might respond to negotiation or appeasement, or were they soldiers in a religious fight to the finish that had merely been paused for five hundred years?
Less than a month after 9/11, Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, had appeared on Al Jazeera. 'We will not accept that the tragedy of Al Andalus will be repeated in Palestine,' Zawahiri said, drawing an analogy between the expulsion of the Moors from Iberia and the present-day plight of the Palestinians. The use of the archaic name Al Andalus left most Spaniards nonplussed. 'We took it as a folkloric thing,' Ramon Perez-Maura, an editor at ABC, told me. 'We probably actually laughed.' This January, bin Laden issued a 'Message to the Muslim People,' which was broadcast on Al Jazeera. He lamented the decline of the Islamic world: 'It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had once been part of our world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Al Andalus.'
The Muslims who were expelled from Al Andalus took refuge mainly in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Some families, it is said, still have the keys to their houses in Cordoba and Seville. But the legacy of Al Andalus persisted in Spain as well. Up until the Victorian era, the country was considered to be more a part of the Orient than of Europe. The language, the food, and the architecture were all deeply influenced by the Islamic experience-a rival past that Catholic Spain, in all its splendor, could never bury. 'In modern Arabic literature, Al Andalus is seen as the lost paradise,' Manuela Marin, a professor at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cien-tificas, in Madrid, told me. 'For Spain, the history of Al Andalus has a totally different meaning. After all, what we know as Spain was made in opposition to the Islamic presence on the peninsula. Only recently have people begun to accept that Islam was a part of Spain.'
Although many Spanish historians have painted Moorish Spain as something other than paradise for Jews and Christians, for Muslims it remains not only a symbol of vanished greatness but a kind of alternative vision of Islam-one in which all the ills of present-day Islamic societies are reversed. Muslim tourists, including many heads of state, come to Spain to imagine a time when Islam was at the center of art and learning, not on the fringes. 'The Alhambra is the number one Islamic monument,' Malik A. Ruiz Callejas, the emir of the Islamic community in Spain and the president of Granada's new mosque, told me recently. 'Back when in Paris and London people were being eaten alive by rats, in Cordoba everyone could read and write. The civilization of Al Andalus was probably the most just, most unified, and most tolerant in history, providing the greatest level of security and the highest standard of living.'
Imams sometimes invoke the glory of Al Andalus in Friday prayers as a reminder of the price that Muslims paid for turning away from the true faith. When I asked Moneir el-Messery, of the M-30 mosque, if the Madrid bombers could have been motivated by the desire to recapture Al Andalus, he looked up sharply and said, 'I can speak of the feeling of all Muslims. It was a part of history. We were here for eight centuries. You can't forget it, ever.'
The fear that the 'Moors' would one day return and reclaim their lost paradise-through either conquest or immigration-has created a certain paranoia in Spanish politics. Construction of the mosque in Granada was delayed for twenty-two years because of the intense anxiety surrounding the growing Islamic presence. In 1986, Spain joined the European Union; generous EU subsidies ignited an economic boom, drawing thousands of young men from North Africa. 'The Muslims are young, and male, and they come by themselves,' Mohammed el-Afifi, the director of press relations at the M-30 mosque, told me two years ago, when I visited him. 'They don't speak Spanish, and they don't have much information about Spain. And they arrive with a different religion.' At the time, Afifi placed the number of Arab immigrants in Spain at three hundred thousand. Now the number of Arabic-speaking immigrants is five hundred thousand, not including half a million illegals. The
Spanish government has encouraged official immigration from South America at the expense of North Africa, but smugglers in high-speed power boats make nightly drop-offs on the ragged Spanish coastline, and the frequent discovery of corpses washing up on the beaches testifies to the desperation of those who did not quite get to shore.
Muslim immigration is transforming all of Europe. Nearly twenty million people in the European Union identify themselves as Muslim. This population is disproportionately young, male, and unemployed. The societies these men have left are typically poor, religious, conservative, and dictatorial; the ones they enter are rich, secular, liberal, and free. For many, the exchange is invigorating, but for others Europe becomes a prison of alienation. A Muslim's experience of immigration can be explained in part by how he views his adopted homeland. Islamic thought broadly divides civilization into dar al-Islam, the land of the believers, and dar al-Kufr, the land of impiety.
France, for instance, is a secular country, largely Catholic, but it is now home to five million Muslims. Should it therefore be considered part of the Islamic world? This question is central to the debate about whether Muslims in Europe can integrate into their new communities or must stand apart from them. If France can be considered part of dar al-lslam, then Muslims can form alliances and participate in politics; they should have the right to institute Islamic law, and they can send their children to French schools. If it is a part of dar al-Kufr, then strict Muslims must not only keep their distance;
they must fight against their adopted country.
The Internet provides confused young Muslims in Europe with a virtual community. Those who cannot adapt to their new homes discover on the Internet a responsive and compassionate forum. 'The Internet stands in for the idea of the ummah, the mytholo-gized Muslim community,' Marc Sageman, the psychiatrist and former CIA officer, said. 'The Internet makes this ideal community concrete, because one can interact with it.' He compares this virtual ummah to romantic conceptions of nationhood, which inspire people not only to love their country but to die for it.
'The Internet is the key issue,' Gilles Kepel, a prominent Arabist and a professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, in Paris, told me recently. 'It erases the frontiers between the dar al-lslam and the dar al-Kufr. It allows the propagation of a universal norm, with an Internet Sharia and fatwa system.' Kepel was speaking of the Islamic legal code, which is administered by the clergy. Now one doesn't have to be in Saudi Arabia or Egypt to live under the rule of Islamic law. 'Anyone can seek a ruling from his favorite sheikh in Mecca,' Kepel said. 'In the old days, one sought a fatwa from the sheikh who had the best knowledge. Now it is sought from the one with the best Web site.'
To a large extent, Kepel argues, the Internet has replaced the Arabic satellite channels as a conduit of information and communication. 'One can say that this war against the West started on television,' he said, 'but, for instance, with the decapitation of the poor hostages in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, those images were propagated via Webcams and the Internet. A jihadi subculture has been created that didn't exist before 9/11.'
Because the Internet is anonymous, Islamist dissidents are less susceptible to government pressure. 'There is no signature,' Kepel said. 'To some of us who have been trained as classicists, the cyber-world appears very much like the time before Gutenberg. Copyists used to add their own notes into a text, so you never know who was the real author.'
Gabriel Weimann, a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, has been monitoring terrorist Web sites for seven years. 'When we started, there were only twelve sites,' he told me. 'Now there are more than four thousand.' Every known terrorist group maintains more than one Web site, and often the sites are in different languages. 'You can download music, videos, donate money, receive training,' Weimann said. 'It's a virtual training camp.' There are two online magazines associated with Al Qaeda, Sawt al-Jihad (Voice of Jihad) and Muaskar al-Battar (Camp al-Battar), which feature how-to articles on kidnapping, poisoning, and murdering hostages. Specific targets, such as the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, or FedWire, the money-clearing system operated by the Federal Reserve Board, are openly discussed. 'We do see a rising focus on the U.S.,' Weimann told me. 'But some of this talk may be fake-a scare campaign.'
One of the sites has been linked directly to terrorist acts. An editor of Sawt al-Jihad, Issa bin Saad al-Oshan, died in a gun battle with Saudi police on July 21, during a raid on a villa in Riyadh, where the head of Paul M. Johnson, Jr., the American hostage, was discovered in the freezer.
The importance of the Internet in the case of Madrid is disputed among experts. 'Yes, the Internet has created a virtual ummah,' Olivier Roy, an expert on political Islam at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, wrote to me recently. 'The Web sites seem to attract the lonely Muslim cybernaut, who does remain in a virtual world. But Madrid's bombers used the Internet as a tool of communication. Their leaders had personal links with other Al Qaeda members, not virtual ones.'
Thomas Hegghammer, the Norwegian investigator, divides the jihadi Internet community into three categories. 'First, you have the message boards,' he explained in a recent e-mail. 'There you find the political and religious discussions among the sympathizers and potential recruits. The most important message boards for Al Qaeda sympathizers are Al Qal'ah (The Fortress), Al Sahat (The Fields), and Al Islah (Reform).' These boards, Hegghammer wrote, provide links to the 'information hubs,' where new radical-Islamist texts, declarations, and recordings are posted. 'You often find these among the 'communities' at Yahoo, Lycos, and so on,' Hegghammer continued. 'There are many such sites, but the main one is Global Islamic Media.' It was at this site that Hegghammer discovered the 'Jihadi Iraq' document. 'Finally, you have the 'mother sites,' which are run by people who get their material directly from the ideologues or operatives. They must not be confused with the myriad amateur sites (usually in English) set up by random sympathizers or bored kids.'
Hegghammer pointed to several key sites associated with Al Qaeda, including Al Faruq (He Who Distinguishes Truth from Falsehood) and Markaz al-Dirasat wal-Buhuth al-Islamiyyah (Center for Islamic Study and Research). 'Al Faruq is difficult to place geographically and organizationally, but it seems closer to the Afghanistan-based elements of Al Qaeda,' Hegghammer wrote. Markaz al- Dirasat concentrates on Saudi Arabia. These sites move continuously, Hegghammer wrote, sometimes several times a day, to avoid being hacked by intelligence agencies or freelance Internet vigilantes. One of Al Qaeda's first sites, Al Neda, was operating until July 2002, when it was captured by an American who operates pornography sites. The Internet jihadis now cover themselves by stealing unguarded server space. Jihad videos have recently been discovered on servers belonging to George Washington University and the Arkansas Department of Highways and Transportation.
Last March, in Pakistan,Jamal Ismail, a reporter for Abu Dhabi TV showed me how he monitors the Al Faruq site. Each day, he receives an e-mail with a link, which leads him to the new address. Like several other jihadi sites, the Al Faruq site announces itself with a white stallion racing across the screen, which is the Al Qaeda logo. 'Every few days, it announces a new name, but it is the same Web site with a new look,' he told me. 'It concentrates on Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan.' In mid-July, I asked Ismail via e-mail if there was any discussion of the upcoming American Presidential election; the Department of Homeland Security had just announced contingency plans to postpone the election in the event that Al Qaeda attempts to disrupt it. 'There is no new article like the Spanish one, but we are all expecting people to talk about it,' Ismail said. Sageman said that he had seen 'vague statements along the lines of 'We'll do to the U.S. the same as we did to Spain,'' but nothing specific or authoritative.
I went to Yahoo Groups and typed in 'jihad.' There were a hundred and ninety-two chat groups registered under that category. With my Arabic-speaking assistant, Nidal Daraiseh, I checked out
