Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (11 page)

On 7 October – the day US cruise missiles were launched against Afghanistan, I was with friends at a house in Sana’a. We saw the battle for Afghanistan in very distinct colours. On one side the Taliban, who for all their faults represented Islam; on the other an unholy alliance of America, communists, Tajik warlords and Shi’ites.

I hated the Salafi scholars who refrained from depicting the conflict with the US as a Holy War of defensive jihad. One of the
hadith
became popular in our circle at the time: ‘When you see that black flags have appeared from Khorasan [Afghanistan] then join them.’ It was as if the Prophet had predicted Operation Enduring Freedom as a war for the future of Islam.

Clifford Newman, my American Salafi friend, felt the same way. In early December he came to my house in an excited state.

‘Murad – have you seen the news?’ he blurted out. ‘The American they captured in Afghanistan who’s all over TV. I was the guy who sent him.’

He was referring to John Walker Lindh, the so-called ‘American Taliban’ who had just been interviewed by CNN in Afghanistan after being captured. Lindh had studied at the CALES language institute in Sana’a the previous year, and flown from there to Pakistan, before travelling into Afghanistan. Newman told me he’d helped Lindh travel
.

As far as I was concerned the attack on our Muslim brothers meant that jihad was now obligatory for every Muslim. To play my part I had begun collecting money for the Taliban and fighters hoping to join them, which attracted the attention of the Yemeni intelligence services. I was summoned to meet the committee that ran the mosque I usually attended in Sana’a.

‘Murad,’ said a frail, elderly man, ‘this is a mosque that welcomes all Muslims, and we have a duty to all our congregation. Some are concerned, as we are, that this holy place is receiving the wrong sort of attention. You may have noticed that there are men standing across the street, watching. And they are watching you. We cannot have members of the congregation using this place to raise money for foreign wars.’

He paused and glanced at the rest of the committee.

‘We have been told it would not be good for you to come here any more, for our sake and for your own sake. I hope you understand.’

I began to glance over my shoulder when walking through the streets. More than once I was sure a man had stopped to study a shop window or turned in a different direction. I even started checking my car, in case someone had tampered with the brakes or planted a device. I imagined strange clicks or interference on my phone. Things were becoming unpleasant. It was time to get out of the capital, so in the dying days of 2001 I took Karima south.

The city of Taiz is one of the most historic in Yemen – sitting amid towering mountain ranges halfway between Sana’a and Aden. In the rainy season electric storms illuminate the peaks. Its inhabitants see Sana’a as lazy and backward, and there is certainly a greater sense of industry in Taiz – none of it very picturesque. The outskirts are scarred with hideous cement plants and ramshackle factories that would be condemned in an instant if sited in the West. But its mosques are glorious. Not a few of its young men had embraced the militancy that I had also seen in Sana’a. I attended a mosque that welcomed combat veterans of Bosnia and Chechnya as well as several who had trained in
bin Laden’s Afghan camps. When they learned that I was being watched by the Yemeni security services they embraced me straight away. Soon I was criss-crossing the city, meeting at the homes of bright-eyed young militants, many of whom were looking for ways to join in the new war.

Among the young men I knew in Taiz were several who would be involved in a suicide attack in October 2002 on a French tanker, the
MV
Limburg
, in the Gulf of Aden.

Karima gave birth a few months after we arrived, in the first week of May 2002; we called our son Osama. When I told my mother of the name she yelled down the phone.

‘No, you cannot give him that name. Are you mad?’

‘Mum,’ I replied, ‘if that’s the case no Western families can call their sons George or Tony. They are the ones who have declared war on Islam.’

We were talking different languages.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Family Feuds

Summer 2002–Spring 2005

Even if my first-born was called Osama, his grandmother had a right to meet him. It was also a good moment to leave Yemen for a while. The security services, no doubt encouraged by the Americans, seemed much more intent on monitoring foreign ‘activists’.

On a balmy late-summer’s day in 2002, a neat suburban house near my home-town of Korsør was decked out incongruously in Moroccan and Danish flags. It was the welcome that my family had prepared for an unlikely couple: the Danish jihadi and his Moroccan bride. Aunts, uncles and new great-grandparents – all were there to greet the first of a new generation, a three-month-old boy with a shock of black hair named Osama.

My stepfather brooded in the background; he had not forgotten that I had put him in hospital. My mother tried to conceal her anger at the choice of Osama as her grandson’s name, just as I tried to suppress my disdain for her as a non-Muslim. I tried (as was my duty) but inevitably failed to persuade her to convert to Islam, and she could never bring herself to call me Murad. But she found some solace in my faith – at least I was now not going to become a criminal. She may not have felt so confident had she known some of the people I counted as friends in Sana’a and Taiz. She had no idea how radical I had become. I think it was partly because she was in denial. She simply didn’t want to know.

The atmosphere in Denmark after 9/11 hardened towards Muslims. Karima wore a niqab in the streets, so only her eyes could be seen. She
wore gloves even on a summer’s day. I wore a traditional, long, flowing
thawb
. Between us we drew plenty of suspicious glances.

After a couple of months my mother’s welcome began to wear out and I found the primness of our surroundings too much to bear. In the wake of the attack on the MV
Limburg
, I had been advised by contacts in Taiz not to return to Yemen yet; the ‘brothers’ were being rounded up in dozens. If I had to stay in Denmark I would rather it be among ‘my own’ – among the grey apartment buildings of the Odense suburb of Vollsmose, where Muslims outnumbered native Danes. Many were Somali, Bosnian and Palestinian immigrants. Stories were beginning to appear in the Danish media about the crime rate in Vollsmose, stories that were meat and drink to the far-right parties.

We moved into a bare three-bedroom apartment. While Karima felt more comfortable to hear Arabic on the streets and see other veiled women, she did not appreciate our modest surroundings, nor my preference for debating jihad rather than clocking on for some menial job. Vollsmose had plenty of gang-related trouble and occasionally we would be woken by the sound of gunfire.

I soon reconnected with old associates such as Mohammad Zaher, my fishing partner from a couple of years previously. I noticed Zaher had become more militant and now had a recent convert to Islam trailing around as his sidekick.

Abdallah Andersen, who worked as a teaching assistant, was clean-shaven with a mop of dark hair and a fleshy round face. He was insecure and timid, easily led, and looked up to Zaher.

Nothing suggested they would soon plan to bring terror to the streets of Denmark.

In September 2006 Zaher, Andersen and several others would be arrested in Vollsmose after a sting operation by the Danish intelligence agency, PET, involving an informant. Angered by the publication of controversial cartoons in Denmark that lampooned the Prophet, the group had discussed attacking the Danish parliament, Copenhagen town hall square and the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
. Police found fifty grams of detonating explosive in a glass flask in Zaher’s bathroom. He was convicted and sentenced to eleven years. Andersen received a four-year sentence
.

I found that I was something of a celebrity among the more radical in Vollsmose thanks to an interview I had done with a Danish newspaper in which I refused to condemn the 9/11 attacks so long as people in the West declined to condemn the sanctions that had caused the premature deaths of so many Iraqi children. It was a glib comparison, but one that made me plenty of friends in the more radical mosques.
¹

I had no work but was still receiving an allowance from the Danish government for studying in Yemen, even though I was now in my mid-twenties, living in Denmark and not even attending college courses. The income allowed me to spend my days in prayer. I posted on Islamist chat forums and watched the growing archive of jihadist videos. I began to adopt a
takfiri
viewpoint, seeing some other Muslims as
kuffar
– no better than disbelievers because of their views. One of them was Naser Khader, a Syrian-born immigrant and Denmark’s first Muslim MP, who took to the airwaves to argue that Islam and democracy were compatible. Then he began criticizing Sharia law. Seething with anger I wrote on an online Islamic forum: ‘He is a murtad [apostate]. You don’t need a fatwa to kill him.’

My commitment to the cause went beyond words. I joined other would-be jihadis, including Zaher and my Pakistani friend Shiraz Tariq, for training at paintball sites. To us it was not a game; we declined protective gear so that when we were hit by a pellet it hurt. One drill involved a team member charging out in a suicide-style attack to draw fire from the other team. Although I did not know it at the time, my activities, especially online, were being monitored by Danish intelligence. My situation was faintly ridiculous – funded by one Danish ministry, housed by another, watched by a third.

Everywhere I went, militant groups were growing and coalescing – and the intelligence services were struggling to identify those who would cross the line from talk to terrorism.

Karima did not like Odense, nor Denmark, and by early 2003 was pregnant with our second child. I hoped that she might settle better in Britain. For the second time I set off for England to find work and a place to live so that the woman in my life could follow me. And for the second time, the woman had other ideas. When I called home, day after day, there was no answer. I called hospitals, the police, my family; no one had seen Karima. Eventually I found out by calling her brother in Rabat that she had returned to Morocco with Osama.

Our relationship had been struggling. She was still pious but she also seemed to hanker after a life of comfort in Europe. A rundown apartment did not match her expectations, and she had begun berating me for not providing sufficiently. I began to think that her humility and deference years earlier in Rabat had been a well-acted play.

Angry and frustrated, I flew to Morocco. It took a month and a good deal of money to be allowed to see Osama, and Karima also insisted on a private hospital to give birth. With help from friends, I scraped the money together. Our daughter, Sarah, was born in early August.

It was a time of upheaval. The US invasion of Iraq – its ‘shock and awe’ resembling some Hollywood script – had begun in March. I watched videos of US soldiers crossing into Iraq carrying bibles as if to bait Muslims. Neither I nor anyone I knew had any sympathy for a tyrant such as Saddam Hussein, whom we regarded as an atheist. But none of us believed the claims made by President Bush that Saddam’s regime had worked with al-Qaeda or was hiding weapons of mass destruction. We saw the invasion as another declaration of war against Muslims and another reason to embrace jihad.

The humiliation of another Muslim country seemed complete. It had taken days for US tanks to advance on Baghdad. The Iraqi army had crumbled; its leadership surrendered or fled. The Stars and Stripes fluttered across the country. There was an arrogance to the Americans’ war aims. They would make Iraq a beacon of democracy and the rest of the Arab world would follow gratefully. Islam could take a running jump.

For now I had more immediate and personal issues to deal with. If I wanted to repair my marriage, I needed to find work and improve our standard of living. In Denmark my criminal record stalked me, preventing me from getting a job. In England I had a better chance of finding work and someone to stay with – the former prison inmate Suleiman with whom I had arrived on the ferry six years earlier. Karima and I made a pact: if I could find a job in England she would bring the children over.

Suleiman had moved from Milton Keynes to a small ground floor flat in Luton, just north of London. On my return there from Morocco I got work driving a forklift truck in a warehouse in nearby Hemel Hempstead. It was hardly the goal of an aspiring jihadi. But if I wanted to see my children again, it would have to do.

If Vollsmose had been simmering with militancy, Luton was ready to boil over. It had a high concentration of Kashmiri immigrants from Pakistan, and unemployment and discrimination were pervasive. Many of their children had grown disaffected with mainstream British society and rejected their parents’ efforts at assimilation. They had turned to radical Islam and the war in Iraq had added fuel to the fire.