matched by actions: 'Al Qaeda has sent a message to the crusading people: do not think that death and fear are only for the weak Muslims… Aznar, the American tail, has lost. And great fear has spread among the people of the countries in alliance with America. They will all be vanquished. Thank God for letting us live this long to see the jihad battalions in Europe. If anyone had predicted this three years ago, one would have said he was dreaming.'
Another site I visited,
Though these sites have become an ideological home for many Muslims, for most Arab immigrants Europe has provided comfort and support, while at the same time allowing them the freedom to maintain their Islamic identities. Three Moroccan immigrants died on the trains on March 11. One was a devout thirteen-year-old girl, Sanae Ben Salah, for whom the M-30 mosque was said to have been her 'second home.' Another, Mohamed Itabien, twentyseven, was an illegal immigrant who taught Arabic classes at a mosque in Guadalajara. He was the sole source of support for his family, including eleven siblings, most of whom lived in a tiny town in Morocco where there were no telephones. The third, Osama el-Amrati, was a builder who was engaged to a Spanish woman. 'Europe has given us opportunities our own countries didn't give us,' Mustapha el-M'Rabet, the head of the Moroccan Workers and Immigrants Association, told me in Madrid. 'Our children are in school, and we are working. Thousands of families in Morocco can live with the money we get here.' When I asked M'Rabet if Al An-dalus was part of the lure for Moroccan immigrants, he said, 'Nobody with common sense could talk about going back to that. It's madness. It's a disease.'
Under Aznar, relations with Morocco deteriorated to the point where, in 2002, the countries broke off diplomatic relations over various problems, including territory disputes, immigration, and the flow of drugs into Europe through Spain (according to the United Nations, Morocco exports twelve billion dollars' worth of marijuana each year). Eventually, the governments returned their ambassadors, without resolving the disputes that had led to the rupture. When twelve suicide bombers struck in Casablanca in May 2003, killing forty-five people, one of their targets was a restaurant called Casa de Espana.
'Spain is the bridge between the Islamic world and the West,' Haizam Amirah Fernandez said, when we met in a conference room at Madrid's Real Instituto Elcano shortly after the train bombings. 'Think of that other bridge to the east, Turkey. Both have been hit by jihadist terrorists-in the same week.' In Istanbul, on March 9, two suicide bombers attacked a Jewish club, killing one person and injuring five others. 'The whole idea is to cut off these bridges,' Amirah said. 'If the goal is to polarize people, Muslims and infidels, that is a way of doing it. Jihadists are the most fervent defenders of the notion of a clash of civilizations.'
One evening, I went to a pub with some Spanish cops. 'There is this legend that Spain and the Arab world were friends,' a senior investigator said. He nodded toward the waitress and the customers at several nearby tables. 'Here in the bar are five Arabs sitting next to you. Nobody used to think it was strange. Now people are reacting differently.' He paused and said, 'They want to smell the jasmine of Al Andalus and pray again in the Granada mosque. Can you imagine the mentality these SOBs have?'
On a splendid April day in Paris, I went to lunch with Gilles Kepel, the Arabist scholar, and Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the doughty French counterterrorism judge. Despite the beautiful weather, the men were in a gloomy frame of mind. 'I am seriously concerned about the future,' Bruguiere said, as we sat at a corner table under an arbor of lilacs that shed blossoms onto his jacket. His armor-plated Peugeot was parked on the street and his bodyguards were discreetly arrayed in the restaurant. 'I began work on this in 1991, against the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria. These groups were well known and each had an understandable structure. The majority were sponsored by states-Syria, Libya, Iraq. Now we have to face a new and largely unknown organization, with a loose system and hidden connections, so it is not easy to understand its internal functioning. It appears to be composed of cells and networks that are scattered all over the world and changing shape constantly.'
Bruguiere pointed to the Istanbul bombings in November 2003, and the March 11 bombings in Madrid as being the opening salvos in a new attack on Europe. 'They have struck in the east and in the south,' he said. 'I think the next stop will be in the north.'
'London or Paris,' Kepel suggested.
'The principal target is London,' Bruguiere declared.
Chechnya is playing a larger and more disturbing role in the worldwide jihad, Bruguiere said. At present, Al Qaeda and its affiliates operate on a rather low-tech level, but in Chechnya many recruits are being trained to exploit the technical advantages of developed countries. 'Some of these groups have the capacity for hijacking satellites,' he told me. Capturing signals beamed from space, terrorists could devastate the communications industry, shut down power grids, and paralyze the ability of developed countries to defend themselves.
'In 2001, all the Islamist actors in Madrid were identified,' Bruguiere said. His own investigations had led him to the Spanish capital that June. He quickly informed the Spanish police that Jamal Zougam, the owner of the phone shop, was a major contact for jihad recruits in Europe and Morocco. But Zougam was not apprehended. French and Spanish authorities have a long history of disagreement over the handling of terrorism, with the Spanish accusing the French of giving sanctuary to ETA terrorists. Bruguiere said that when he arrived in Madrid he found that 'the Islamic threat was underassessed.' The Spanish police had made him wait a year before allowing him to interview Zougam. After Bruguiere went back to Paris, the Spanish police put Zougam under surveillance and searched his apartment, finding jihadi tapes and videos. The authorities briefly renewed their interest in him after the 2003 Casablanca bombings, but once again there was insufficient evidence to arrest him.
I asked Bruguiere if he thought that the Madrid attacks represented an evolution in Al Qaeda's operational ability, or suggested that the organization had lost control. He said that Al Qaeda was now little more than 'a brand, a trademark,' but he admitted that he had been surprised. 'It was a good example of the capacity and the will of these groups to adopt a political agenda. The defeat of the late government and the agreement of the new government to withdraw troops-it was a terrorist success, the first time we have had such a result.'
Later, Kepel and I discussed the reason that Europe was under attack. 'The future of Islam is in Europe,' he said. 'It has a huge Muslim population. Either we train our Muslims to become modern global citizens, who live in a democratic, pluralistic society, or, on the contrary, the Islamists win, and take over those Muslim European constituencies. Then we're in serious trouble.'
'I doubt whether anyone can seriously suggest that Spain has not acted in a way that suggests appeasement,' Ramon Perez-Maura, the editor at ABC, told me shortly after Zapatero had announced plans to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq in May, without waiting to see if U.N. peacekeeping troops would become involved. Perez-Maura recalled a recent lunch he had had with the Iranian ambassador to Spain, Mortez Alviri. According to Perez-Maura, Alviri said that Miguel Angel Moratinos-Zapatero's pick for foreign minister-had approached the Iranians to negotiate with Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric, whose militia was engaged in savage urban warfare with Coalition troops. (Moratinos has denied this.) According to Perez-Maura, Alviri passed Morati-nos's message along, and, less than a day after Zapatero announced the withdrawal, Sadr said from Najaf that Spanish troops would be allowed to leave Iraq unmolested. That was a false promise. American and Spanish forces had to shoot a path through Sadr's militia in Najaf, which repeatedly attacked them.
On April 15, the voice of Osama bin Laden spoke again. 'This is a message to our neighbors north of the Mediterranean, containing a reconciliation initiative as a response to their positive reactions,' bin Laden said on the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya. Now it was the Al Qaeda leader who cast himself in the role of a rational political actor. 'It is in both sides' interest to curb the plans of those who shed the blood of peoples for their narrow personal interest and subservience to the White House gang.' He proposed a European committee to study 'the justice' of the Islamic causes, especially Palestine. 'The reconciliation will start with the departure of its last soldier from our country,' bin Laden said-not indicating if he was referring to Iraq, Afghanistan, or the entire Muslim world. 'The door of reconciliation is open for three months from the date of announcing this statement…For those who want reconciliation, we have given them a chance. Stop shedding our blood so as to preserve your blood. It is in your hands to apply this easy, yet difficult, formula. You know that the situation will expand and increase ifyou delay things Peace beupon those who follow guidance.'
From bin Laden's perspective, he was offering to bring Europe into an unsettled middle ground called the dar al-Sulh. This is the land of the treaty, where Muslims live as a peaceful minority. European leaders rejected bin Laden's proposal almost immediately, seeing it as a ploy to aggravate the tensions in the Western alliance. 'It's the weirdest thing in the world,' a senior FBI official told me. 'It shows he's on the ropes, desperate.'
Bin Laden's truce offer immediately became a topic of discussion on the Islamist Web sites. 'This initiative should be considered a golden opportunity to the people of Europe,' read a posting by Global Islamic Media on
On another site, islah.tv, a writer calling himself 'Ya Rab Sha-hada' (Oh God, Martyrdom) picked up on the theme: 'The Sheikh speaks these words as the Caliph of the Muslims and not as a wanted man…This is the sign to begin the big strike onAmerica.' An-otherwritersaid, 'Herewehavethe landsof Al Andalus wherethe trains were struck. The Sheikh is isolating America now…and it will be seen who will choose peace from those who chose suicide.' A writer calling himself '@adlomari@' added, 'The Sheikh has… proved to the world that Europe does not want peace with Muslims, and that it wants to be a partner in the Crusader crimes against Muslims. The coming days will show that events in Europe are coming if it does not respond to the Sheikh's initiative. Tomorrow is near.'
The fact that bin Laden was addressing nations as an equal showed a new confidence in Al Qaeda's ability to manipulate the political future. Exploiting this power will depend, in part, on convincing the West that Al Qaeda and bin Laden remain in control of the worldwide Islamist jihad. As long as Al Qaeda is seen as being an irrational, unyielding death cult, the only response is to destroy it. But if Al Qaeda-amorphous as that entity has become-has evolved into something like a virtual Islamist state that is trying to find a permanent place for itself in the actual world, then the prospect of future negotiations is not out of the question, however unlikely or repellent that may sound to Americans. After all, the Spanish government has brokered truces with ETA, which has killed four times as many people in Spain as Al Qaeda has, and the accelerated withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq following the train bombings has already set a precedent for accommodation, which was quickly followed by the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Last year, Germany paid a six-million-dollar ransom to Algerian terrorists, and the Philippines recently pulled its fifty troops out of Iraq in order to save a hostage from being beheaded.
On July 21, immediately after the Philippine hostage was freed, new warnings appeared on the Internet, from a body called the Tawhid Islamic Group, promising terror attacks against Poland and Bulgaria unless they withdrew their troops from Iraq. Although leaders of both countries immediately rejected the demands, opinion polls showed that popular sentiment was turning against the countries' presence in Iraq. Another threat, allegedly from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, Tawhid and Jihad, warned Japan that 'queues of cars laden with explosives' were waiting, unless Japanese humanitarian troops left Iraq. Also in July, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades posted a communique on the Internet ordering Italians to overthrow their Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. 'We are in Italy, and not one of you is safe so long as you refuse our Sheikh's offer,' the message said. 'Get rid of the incompetent
Berlusconi or we will truly burn Italy.' The Internet warriors have been emboldened, although it is impossible to know how seriously to take their threats.
Appeasement is a foolish strategy for dealing with Al Qaeda. Last year, many Saudis were stunned when the terrorist group struck Western compounds in Riyadh-shortly after the United States had announced that it would withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia, fulfilling one of bin Laden's primary demands. The Saudis now realize that Al Qaeda won't be assuaged until all foreigners are expelled from the Arabian Peninsula and a rigid theocracy has been imposed. Yet some of the countries on Al Qaeda's hit list will no doubt seek to appease terrorists as a quick solution to a crisis.
Intelligence officials are now trying to determine who is the next target, and are sifting through 'chatter' in search of a genuine threat. 'We see people getting on the Internet and then they get on their phones and talk about it,' a senior FBI official told me. 'We are now responding to the threat to the U.S. elections.' The idea of attacking before Election Day, the official said, 'was born out of Madrid.' Earlier this year, an international task force dubbed Operation Crevice arrested members of a bomb-making ring in London. During the investigation, officials overheard statements that there were jihadis in Mexico awaiting entry into the United States. That coincided with vague warnings from European imams about attacks before the elections. As a result of this intelligence, surveillance of border traffic from Mexico has been increased.
Even though Al Qaeda has been weakened by the capture of key operatives, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, it is hardly defunct. 'There is a replacement for Mohammed named Abu Faraj,' the FBI official said. 'If there is an attack on the United States, his deputy, Hamza Rabia, will be responsible. He's head of external operations for Al Qaeda-an arrogant, nasty guy.' The official continued, 'The most dangerous thing now is that no one is in control. These guys don't have to go back to bin Laden or Zawahiri for approval.'