Authors: Jason Burke
The exact mechanics of the role such men play varies. In some instances the older men simply acted as facilitators for people who were already highly motivated. Often it was the stories told by other young men, friends or acquaintances or fellow worshippers at a particular mosque who had themselves returned from ‘jihad’ that were the inspiration, as in the case of Mohammed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali. Sometimes, though more rarely than imagined, a far more proactive recruitment was carried out and young, impressionable individuals, often with significant personal problems, were, if not indoctrinated, then certainly steered, gradually and carefully, towards a particular course of action. Usually the older man who did this had connections, sometimes directly, sometimes through a third party, with senior figures who were close to the leadership of either national or, in the case of bin Laden, transnational, radical Islamic groups. These contacts were forged in the Afghan war, in the camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, Sudan, or in Bosnia earlier in the 1990s.
Abderraouf Hannachi and Fateh Kamel were both connected to the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), though exactly how closely is unclear. The emergence of the GIA as the dominant group in Algeria was far from inevitable. A lengthy hiatus followed the banning of the FIS in
1992 as those moderates who were not interned in the Saharan camps or in prisons tried to organize themselves. It took nearly two years, but by 1994 the Armée Islamique de Salut (AIS) had been formed. Though led by the middle-class intellectuals who had provided the bulk of the FIS’s senior ranks, many fighters were simply shopkeepers or labourers told by their leaders that if they remained at home they would be arrested. The AIS hoped that a discriminate use of violence in the short term would force the regime to make radical changes and allow the FIS back into the political process. At first they were unarmed but as weapons, many seized or sold from army stores, became available, violence became endemic and there was no way they could return to their homes.
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The GIA, by contrast, was composed of scores of ‘groupuscules’ of Afghan Arabs and a number of long-term radical Islamic activists who, following Azzam and Qutb, believed in total war against a kufr and munafiq government. They had been active since 1989 or 1990 and were sufficiently well organized and equipped to exploit the gap left when the FIS cadres were rounded up. The GIA, who were more of an alliance of different factions than a coherent group, were popular among poor, young, urban and rural men and swiftly established themselves in and around Algiers. Led by a series of ‘emirs’, all in their twenties and all killed in swift succession, the GIA’s tactics were horrendously brutal and the group swiftly eclipsed the AIS in efficacy, violence and notoriety. Events in Algeria thus fitted the pattern emerging elsewhere of the more moderate, domestically orientated political Islamism (older both ideologically and in the actual age of its cadres) being supplanted by the newer, younger (in both senses), internationalized, more violent jihadi Salafism.
Between 1994 and 1995, their campaign was exported to France with a series of bombings on the Paris Metro and the hijacking of an Air France airbus, possibly with the intention of flying it into the Eiffel Tower. The former colonial power was a target both according to the new internationalist doctrine and for local domestic reasons, as the French were widely felt to be propping up the corrupt and hated military regime.
There is little evidence that bin Laden was involved in any meaningful way in any of the GIA’s activities. The GIA had an office in Khartoum
and were in contact with bin Laden and his Islamic Jihad associates while in the Sudan.
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Algerian security services insist that bin Laden was instrumental in arming the GIA in its early days. However, this conflicts with accounts from former GIA fighters who say that the GIA leadership asked bin Laden if financial assistance would be possible in 1994 but were unhappy with the degree of ideological and operational control that the Saudi demanded as a condition for any aid.
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One activist in Khartoum at the time says that bin Laden dispatched an emissary to talk to groups within the GIA about a possible alliance at the time. He got a very hostile reception and barely escaped with his life. The activist subsequently witnessed a GIA deputation, led by a Libyan called Abu Basir, arriving at bin Laden’s house and threatening to kill the Saudi if he contacted any of their cadres again.
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However, it is certainly possible that individual activists within individual GIA groups made their own contacts with bin Laden himself or his associates. Tracts published and videos circulated by the GIA or their mouthpieces in London show the similarity of their language and ideas.
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Fateh Kamel appears to have liaised with several significant GIA figures within Algeria. In France, Kamel led a small group of Muslim militants, many of them white French converts who had been radicalized during visits to Bosnia, in a series of violent robberies, used to finance arms purchases and to create false ID documents.
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The documents were needed to facilitate the movement of Islamic militants transiting France and to send new recruits to Afghanistan and Pakistan for training.
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The group’s activities culminated in a bomb plot that was discovered by police in 1996. Kamel, who fled to Canada, had himself fought in Bosnia and had been trained in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, when he met Abu Zubaydah, the young Palestinian aide of bin Laden who had been acting as coordinator and gatekeeper for several of the training camps from a base in Peshawar.
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Abderraouf Hannachi, the other senior activist Ressam knew in Montreal, also knew Abu Zubaydah and was close to senior GIA figures in Algeria. Ressam appears to have been one of those recruits who needed little persuasion. The example of ‘friends’ coming back from Afghanistan with tales of Khaldan motivated him to travel himself, he later told a
court. Hannachi contacted Abu Zubaydah and made the necessary arrangements. Ressam, with several other Canadian recruits, arrived in Peshawar in March 1998 and was sent to Khaldan camp.
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Ressam spent six months in the camp, with around thirty other Algerians as well as Yemenis, Saudis, Swedes, Frenchmen, Turks and Chechens. Each nationality formed its own group, led by an emir, and stuck together for tuition in light weapons, infantry tactics, sabotage, urban warfare, assassination and explosives, all based on the now-familiar syllabus. A fatwa from Abdel Omar Rahman, the Egyptian blind sheikh imprisoned in America, was circulated but bin Laden did not appear. Over the six months of the training, Ressam and his Canadian Algerian friends discussed possible plans. Their ‘emir’ was Haider Abu Doha, an experienced and committed Algerian activist in his mid thirties whose real name is probably Amar Mahklulif. Ressam, his friends and Abu Doha talked about launching an operation in America, possibly against an airport, timed for the turn of the Millennium. Other groups in Khaldan discussed launching operations in Europe, the Gulf and Israel. Funds were a problem and Ressam suggested robbing banks. Abu Doha told him that finances could be arranged.
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In September 1998, Ressam was told by the camp administrator that he had been selected to go to Darunta, the former Hizb-e-Islami camp just east of Jalalabad, for more specialized training. There, in a six-week course, Ressam learned about bomb-making. An exercise book I saw in Darunta and dated 1998 gives an idea of what Ressam learned in the camp. The 100-page book is full of lecture notes by a Turkish recruit and describes various modes of assassination, the use of different types of bullets and silencers, buying and selling arms, injunctions on ‘listening to teachers’, car bombs and truck bombs, intelligence gathering and surveillance discipline. At one point the student had scribbled down ‘important advice’:
1. help each other 2. during lessons listen carefully 3. give the right answer. If we don’t know we say we don’t know 4. don’t be afraid of making mistakes 5. be patient when things get difficult 6. if one person makes a mistake the whole group pays for it.
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Darunta was also known as the base where chemical weapons research was carried out. Ressam watched as one of the instructors, almost certainly an Egyptian called Midhat Mursi, a.k.a. Abu Khabab, experimented with a crude form of cyanide gas, killing a dog in a box.
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In December 1999, talking to the Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, bin Laden would say: ‘Acquiring [chemical] weapons for the defence of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have acquired these weapons I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try and possess weapons that would prevent the infidel front inflicting harm on Muslims.’
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There is no evidence that bin Laden or any of his associates were successful, though their interest in developing chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons is clear and was genuine. In a camp in Khost in November 2001, I found a stack of photocopied manuals on chemical and biological ‘nasties’ that had been downloaded from American right-wing websites. Many other journalists found similar material, some indicating an interest in nuclear armaments. A series of contacts between bin Laden and his aides, particularly Abu Khabab, and Pakistani scientists with nuclear know-how also indicates an effort to develop a capability in radiological devices or ‘dirty bombs’.
In December 1998, as their training neared an end, the Algerian students began discussing how to get back to Canada to put their plan to attack the US into action. Their supervisor, Abu Doha, travelled to Kandahar to meet bin Laden and, in the words of the US government complaint against him, to ‘discuss co-operation and coordination between bin Laden’s terrorist network… and a group of Algerian terrorists whose activities he coordinated and oversaw’.
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The wording here is critical. Abu Doha was seeking out bin Laden to obtain funds or other resources for the plan that the Algerian students had concocted. Though Abu Zubaydah was running the administration of the camps, the plan for the bombing did not originate with him, with bin Laden or with any of bin Laden’s close associates. It was the volunteers’ own. In early 1999, Ressam went to see Abu Zubaydah again and asked him to arrange his return to Canada. Abu Doha, true to his word, had sourced some funds, though hardly a huge sum, probably from bin Laden. Ressam was given $12,000 by an Algerian instructor in
Darunta, a sample of a hexamine booster for explosives, his Western clothes and a ticket home.
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The Jordanian part of the ‘Millennium plot’ demonstrates many of the same elements as the Canadian component. Neither group was aware of the other’s plans. Indeed, the only people who were aware of the various groups’ attacks were bin Laden and a small number of his close associates. Testimony from a variety of sources makes clear that Abu Zubaydah knew of the schemes. It is reasonable to surmise that Mohammed Atef, who ran bin Laden’s ‘military operations’, and Ayman al-Zawahiri knew too.
In part this was due to the nature of the attacks. Of the thousands of volunteers making their way to Khaldan camp, only a few were selected by the camp emir for further training at sites such as Darunta or al-Farooq. Of these ‘graduate students’, even fewer would have their requests for logistical support for the plans they had formulated granted by bin Laden or Atef. As each group made their requests separately, only a handful of individuals were in a position to see the larger picture.
The Jordanian cell’s plans dated back to May 1996, when two Palestinian Islamic activists, both veterans of Afghan training camps, met in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. One, 33-year-old Khadar Abu Hoshar, had fought against the Soviets. In the classic way, he had impressed the younger, Raeed Hijazi, then 26, who, though born in California in relative privilege, had grown up in Saudi Arabia. He later told prosecutors that he had become involved in radical Islam while attending a mosque and cultural body, funded with Gulf money, while studying at university in Sacramento. Through the mosque he had made contacts that had allowed him to travel to Khaldan camp around 1994, where he had had basic training. At the time of their meeting, Abu Hoshar was trying to raise a group of militants in Jordan, where there had been a series of attacks by Islamic radicals since the beginning of the 1990s, who might be willing to carry out attacks on Israeli and American interests in the country. Hijazi had been inducted into the group. However, the pair’s plans hit an early snag, when, at the end of
1996, Abu Hoshar returned to Jordan and was promptly arrested and jailed for 18 months. Hijazi fled back to America where he picked up work as a taxi driver in New York. When Abu Hoshar was released, the pair resurrected their plan and set off through Jordan, Syria and the Lebanon looking for recruits. They found several people willing to take part, including some previous associates from Afghanistan. Many of the new recruits, however, needed tuition. Abu Hoshar asked one of them, an Algerian militant, if he knew anyone who could arrange training for them. The man contacted Abu Zubaydah in Peshawar. This was the first contact between the group and anyone close to bin Laden. Abu Zubaydah responded with a fax outlining his conditions for assisting the Jordanians. Contacts had to be through one person who could vouch for the people being sent, he said, and nobody should be coerced into missions.
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