Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (18 page)

On a grim afternoon of drizzle and mist, I received a call at my apartment in Aarhus.

‘This is Martin Jensen. I am with PET,’ a voice said flatly.
¹

PET is the Danish security and intelligence service, and in the state apparatus a branch of the police.

‘We need to speak with you. Can we arrange a meeting?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. You are fighting against Islam and we are protecting ourselves. In any case, you could be Mossad, the CIA. I could be just “rendered” somewhere. It’s all the fashion.’

I tried to sound relaxed but my mind was racing. Were my travel plans known? Were my phone and internet monitored? Had one of the Sana’a group identified me as some sort of ringleader? Had the Yemenis given MI6 or the CIA access to their new crop of detainees?

In the end we agreed that I would come to a local police station. But first I called my mother. I had to tell somebody and I didn’t want to alarm my wife.

‘Mum, I can’t go into this on the phone but PET have asked me to go and meet them. I just want to let you know in case anything happens to me.’

She let out a sigh. I imagined her raising her eyebrows and gently
shaking her head, resigned to yet another twist in her wayward son’s life. ‘Okay. Be careful,’ she said.

There were two agents waiting for me in a conference room, including a tall well-built man who introduced himself as Jensen. The other, a paunchy bald guy, was looking out of the window and smoking. Barely forty, he moved with difficulty.

Jensen pushed an open Coke bottle towards me.

‘I don’t drink anything you give me that’s already open. You could have put anything in it,’ I said, being deliberately melodramatic.

He shrugged and went to fetch me a sealed bottle.

So what did I know about Sorensen and the rest of the group detained in Sana’a? I repeated what I had said on television.

Then they turned the screw. Jensen leaned forward across the table. He was handsome, in his late thirties with a carefully maintained suntan and perfectly groomed hair. He could have passed for a Danish George Clooney. And he had the self-assurance of a man who knew he looked the part.

‘We know your wife has outstayed her visa. But that’s fine. We just want to be sure that neither you nor your friends have any violent intentions towards Denmark. Perhaps you could even help us.’

‘I would never help you,’ I shot back. ‘To help the
kuffar
against a Muslim brother is apostasy.’

‘By the way,’ I added as I got up to leave, ‘I want to go to Somalia. Can you check if that is against Danish law?’

They looked taken aback by my chutzpah. In fact it was perfectly legal for me to travel there as the Islamic Courts Union had not been declared a terrorist organization by Denmark or other Western governments.

My connections in Yemen had clearly placed me under suspicion. One of the Sana’a group who had been arrested told me later that he’d been questioned by a Western intelligence agent while he was in prison.

‘They were trying to find out more about you,’ he told me. ‘They said, “We know Storm is behind this.”’

As I left the police station it dawned on me I was a marked man. I realized that very soon I would have to make a choice – to go to
Somalia and invite even greater scrutiny or to retreat from wearing my commitment so plainly on my sleeve. But if anything my encounter with the agents had made me more determined to leave. They knew they were making no progress. Jensen left me his number just in case. For some reason I did not tear up his card in front of him, but tucked it in my pocket as I left.

Soon my mission had a godfather – Abdelghani, a Somali friend from Denmark who had already travelled to join the Islamic Courts militia. On 19 December he emailed me formal permission from the Islamic Courts’ ‘Foreign Affairs Office’ to enter the country.

I felt a surge of adrenalin. It was a religious duty beyond debate – the sort of decisive action that the pitiful preachers in Denmark, the blathering Omar Bakri Mohammed, would talk about endlessly but never carry out.

I bought a plane ticket – one-way to Mogadishu. I would be travelling solo. My Birmingham sidekick Warsame still did not have the funds to travel. I emailed him to tell him I hoped he could join me soon.

A new chapter was about to begin with new comrades, on the newest frontline of a global conflict. But my wife would burst into tears whenever the subject arose.

‘What’s going to happen to me? I will be left here alone in a country I don’t know, with no rights, no money.’

‘Allah will provide and take care of you. And when we’ve pushed out the Ethiopians you’ll be able to join me,’ I told her. It was not exactly reassuring, and at the time less than convincing even for me. But that was the answer for everything.

She told me she would return to Yemen if I was gone for long.

As the first snowflakes of an early winter storm drifted down, I drove to a military surplus store in Copenhagen to buy the supplies Abdelghani had requested: camouflage gear, water bottles and Swiss army knives. Hardly lethal weapons, and easy enough to take without raising suspicion.

Getting to the frontline in Somalia seemed more necessary than ever. Ethiopian forces were closing in on Mogadishu. Some of my friends had already retreated with other fighters south towards Kismayo, a port city south of Mogadishu. In a few days I was due to leave.

As I went around the shop, I had a call from Somalia. It was from Ali, the Danish member of the Sana’a study circle. He told me excitedly that he had just beheaded a Somali spy the group had discovered near Kismayo.

Setting aside his naivety in calling me on a mobile phone, I congratulated him loudly in Arabic. The shopkeeper looked at me with a hint of suspicion.

On the drive back from the store Abdelghani called. I started telling him about all the supplies I had bought, but he cut me off.

‘You must not fly down here now. It’s too dangerous. Ethiopians have surrounded the airport and are arresting all holy warriors who have come to the country to fight alongside the Islamic Courts. Stay away!’

I was stunned, and infuriated by Abdelghani’s defeatism.

A question started ringing in my ears, one directed to Allah: ‘Why won’t You let me go? Why am I being prevented from serving You?’

It was – after all – His decision. Allah was all-knowing; as mere mortals we had no influence over our destinies.

And then another question: ‘Why have You let the mujahideen lose – yet again?’

My wife was waiting for me when I returned home.

‘They lost,’ I mumbled, my eyes averting her gaze. ‘They lost the fight.’

I dragged the equipment up the stairs and discarded it in the bedroom. I was quiet, brooding, defeated – and reminded of the time I sat in the police car on my way to prison in Denmark, vowing somehow to change course. I needed answers.

Dejection soon became anger, and anger began to ask some difficult questions. At every turn I had been stopped; every plan had disintegrated. I had spent a decade – what should have been the best years of my life – devoted to a cause, sacrificing my relationships and any potential I might have had as a boxer. And that cause now seemed so distant.

I sat in the darkened bedroom, the silence interrupted only by the purr of cars passing through the snow. I was days away from my thirty-first birthday, but my future seemed empty. My children were in a
different country, my friends in Sana’a scattered, my wife baffled by my mood swings. I had spent the last of what I had earned working at the construction site on supplies that now sat unopened beside me, mocking my failure.

I had been driven on in my quest to fight for the underdog. Years earlier I had come to the aid of my Muslim friends on the streets of Korsør when they were picked on by bullies. I had sat in the library, transfixed by the story of the Prophet’s battles against far greater forces in Mecca. I had dreamt of going to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen, and of helping build a beacon of true Islam in Somalia. Everything had turned to dust.

I thought of the bluster of Omar Bakri Mohammed, of the mealy-mouthed preachers in Brixton, the fair-weather protesters outside the US embassy, the cowardice of the Sheikhs all too ready to send ignorant, gullible men to their deaths. Perhaps my devotion to the cause had stifled all sorts of unresolved questions. Perhaps my embrace of Islam was only a way of lashing out at the world and my real inspiration – even if I did not fully understand it – was not doctrinaire Salafism but to fight injustice.

And then the unthinkable began to seep into my mind. Was my understanding of Islam flawed? Was the faith being distorted by men like Awlaki? Or was Islam itself riddled with inconsistencies to which I had been blind?

I had already begun questioning the concept of predestination –
Qadar
– one of the articles of the faith. I had been taught that it held that Allah had decided everything, both in the past and in the future.

In the words of the Koran,
‘Allah is the Creator of all things, and He is the Guardian over all things … He has created everything, and has measured it exactly according to its due measurements.’

So what was the place of free will, where was the capacity to make a difference? It seemed that none of the scholars I had talked to could explain how
Qadar
fitted with the obligation of jihad, nor why Allah would create a man He had already condemned to hellfire. Even Anwar al-Awlaki had skirted around the subject.

One
hadith
seemed to me to render the individual as a helpless puppet: ‘Allah, the Exalted and Glorious, has ordained for every servant
amongst His creation five things: his death, his action, his abode, the places of his moving about and his means of sustenance.’

Eventually I roused myself and went downstairs to the kitchen. Fadia looked worried.

‘What has happened to you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I just feel that there is no point to anything any more.’

I made myself a coffee and sat down in front of my laptop at the kitchen table. Impulsively my fingers typed: ‘Contradictions in the Koran.’

There were more than a million hits. Plenty of entries were just anti-Islamic diatribes, frequently on Christian Evangelical websites that were less than coherent. But in other places I read commentaries that revived long-held but suppressed questions in my head. The words I had once shouted in Hyde Park came back to me: ‘Had it issued from any but God, they would surely have found in it many a contradiction.’

The whole construction of my faith was a house of cards built one layer upon the next. Remove one, and all the others would collapse. It had relied on a sense of momentum – a journey from finding Islam to becoming a Salafi to taking up jihad in spirit and action. My reading of the holy texts had been clear. Waging jihad to protect the faith was ordained. But somehow I had been prevented from carrying out my religious duty, while other Muslims evaded or denied it.

I also began to reconsider some of the justifications made for the murder and maiming of civilians. I had accepted such prescriptions in my obedience to the Salafist creed. I had lapped up the words of scholars who had found vindication for the events of 9/11 in scripture. But now I thought of the Twin Towers, the Bali bombings, Madrid in 2004, London in 2005. These were acts of violence targeting ordinary people. If they were part of Allah’s preordained plan, I now wanted no part of it.

The words of my bouncer friend Tony replayed in my mind: ‘Why does Allah want people to kill other people? Don’t you think, Murad, Allah would prefer you to teach people to read?’

My loss of faith was as frightening as it was sudden. I was staring into a void, and knew that should I desert the faith I would soon be a
target for many of my former ‘brothers’. I knew so much about them and their plans. At least half the Sana’a circle alone had joined terror groups. To them I would be the worst of all: the convert who had given up and become an atheist, the foulest of hypocrites. Just as the convert had been promised a double reward in paradise, so the convert who recanted must be doubly punished.

The questions that crowded in on me made me withdrawn at home and prone to anger. My wife seemed worried that I was slipping away from her. Her EU entry visa had expired and, now living in Denmark illegally, she was afraid of being marooned. The atmosphere at home was toxic.

I had to get out, to find time and space to think. On a bitter March morning, I set out to do some fishing in Braband Lake on the outskirts of Aarhus. Winter was clinging on. The reeds along the fringe of the lake were brown and crackled in the breeze, and there were still patches of ice in inlets. The path around the lake was deserted.

I sat down and cast my line, but my mind was elsewhere. For nearly three months, I had prayed without conviction. I had read the Koran again but kept seeing new inconsistencies and contradictions. I had listened to preachers in Aarhus mosques but none had revived my spirits. And all the while the drumbeat of jihadism was intensifying, moving on from the defence of Muslim lands towards a declaration of war against all disbelievers, the meek as well as the mighty.

Out of nowhere, the volcano inside me erupted. Throwing my fishing rod into the lake, I shouted into the water.

‘Fuck Allah, and fuck the Prophet Mohammed. Why should my family go to hellfire just because they are not Muslims?’

I thought of my mother and grandparents. We had had our issues but they were decent people who had no malice.

‘What if Zaher and Andersen had not been uncovered and my mum or Vibeke had been in the way when they detonated their bomb?’

There were more men in Denmark with their mindset – perhaps dozens within 100 miles of where I lived. Some of them had the potential to bring terror to my country; but how could I help prevent them from taking the lives of innocents?

I reached the car.

‘I wasted ten years of my life,’ I said, as I gripped the steering wheel and stared through the mist at the outline of pine trees. ‘I gave myself to Allah. I believed in the justice of the struggle. But I deceived myself, and I allowed others to deceive me. I could have been a sportsman, I could have enjoyed life, kept my children, made something of myself.’