Authors: Jason Burke
During the mid 1990s, state repression and flagging support among the middle classes had effectively ended the campaign of the more moderate Armée Islamique du Salut and had forced the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) down a path of ever-increasing radicalism. Soon thousands of people, civilians, militants and security officers, were dying each year. The violence reached a peak in 1997 when the GIA, and possibly agents provocateurs from the security services, committed a series of horrendously brutal and seemingly random massacres. GIA cadres were responsible for butchering, literally, entire villages. The GIA leadership justified the acts on the basis that any Algerian who did not join them was ‘takfir’ and thus an unbeliever who should be killed. Unsurprisingly, this extreme position alienated many in Algeria who had previously supported the Islamic groups and the GIA, stripped of any broad social base, imploded in a maelstrom of violent infighting. In 1998, one of the group’s senior cadres, Hassan Hattab, condemned the ‘shedding the blood of innocent people in massacres’, formed the GSPC and announced that his group would exclusively target security forces. The GSPC rose to prominence after President Abdelaziz Boute-flika announced an amnesty for militants in January 2000. Although some 5,000 AIS militants surrendered their weapons, Hattab’s group – the strength of which is estimated at between 500 and 1,500 – refused to give up their arms.
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Several other ‘groupuscules’, whose motivations are often more criminal than religious, also refused to hand in their weapons. The massacre at Hosh el Hadair was probably committed by one of them.
Perhaps predictably, hard evidence of links between the GSPC and bin Laden is difficult to find. Algerian and French security service sources insist that bin Laden provided funds for Hattab to allow him to set up the GSPC.
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It is certainly true that al-Zawahiri condemned the indiscriminate violence of the GIA, issuing a series of statements to that effect. A former GSPC cadre told an Algerian court that he had
overheard a series of conversations between Hattab and bin Laden on a satellite phone in 1998. Bin Laden had ‘urged’ Hattab to set up a group to ‘improve the image of jihad’, he said.
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What is also certain is that between 1996 and mid 2002, bin Laden, in an echo of his activities as a self-appointed mediator in Afghanistan in the 1980s and early 1990s, made a series of attempts to unite the fractious groups in Algeria.
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His motives were not entirely altruistic. Bin Laden, steeped in an archaic and nostalgic sense of Arabic (and Afghan) culture, feels that an ability to solve disputes is an attribute that all ‘sheikhs’ need to display to maintain the respect of their followers and to attract further support. In addition, in a very practical sense, the brokering of a deal increases his own influence over two parties over whom previously he had no authority. In traditional Middle Eastern society, the two elements are related. In June 2001, bin Laden sent Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, alias Abu Mohammed, a trusted 37-year-old Yemeni aide, to Algeria via Ethiopia, the Sudan and Niger. Alwan had developed contacts in the GIA after helping Algerian Islamic militants establish camps in the Yemen in the early 1990s and was tasked by bin Laden with establishing a more solid link with the Algerian groups.
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Bin Laden may also have been motivated by a desire to build a network in Europe. Few militants arrested in Europe in recent years have proved to be simply ‘al-Qaeda’, as commonly designated. Instead the majority of them, at least until 2001–2, were linked to the GIA and the GSPC. Indeed, Hattab’s group effectively inherited the European network that the GIA had built up throughout the 1990s, when the GIA ceased to exist as an effective force around 1998. A press release appearing in the Algerian
al-Youm
daily soon after the attacks of 11 September 2001, allegedly authored by Hattab, revealed the GSPC’s focus. Hattab threatened that the GSPC would ‘strike hard’ at ‘American
and European interests in Algeria
if they implement their threats to attack Arab and Muslim states… [or] if they continue to harass [the] Islamist network in the US,
UK
,
France and Belgium
’ (my emphasis). The careful emphasis on local, post-colonial and international targets is an interesting example of the fusing of different agendas.
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That the GSPC were actively recruiting, and had sympathizers in the UK, was amply demonstrated in January 2002, when
a contact gave me a video made by the group that was being passed around Islamic activists in London and the Midlands. It featured graphic footage of Algerian soldiers having their throats cut after being captured in an ambush near Algiers in 1999, spliced with calls to ‘kill the infidels and sick people’ and pictures of the group’s everyday life in the Algerian maquis. During 2001, scores of GSPC activists were arrested in Europe and dozens of cells uncovered. In Milan, a group of Tunisians and an Egyptian were linked by Italian prosecutors to the GSPC, another in Madrid was composed of six Algerians who were also alleged to be GSPC members.
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They were in possession of false passports and sophisticated forgery equipment and were thought to be responsible for sending scores of recruits to Afghanistan and, bizarrely, Indonesia for training. Wiretaps placed by Italian authorities revealed discussions of attacks on American targets being planned in the hope that they might find backers in Afghanistan prepared to fund them.
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Another well-organized GSPC cell, comprising three Algerians, was discovered plotting to bomb a Christmas market in Strasbourg. Following the techniques taught them in the Afghan camps, they had videoed their target. They raised some funds from drug-dealing but needed more and were caught when a call they made to Abu Doha, the Algerian activist in London who had arranged cash for Ahmed Ressam, was intercepted by MI5, the British domestic intelligence service.
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In Belgium, two French converts from Catholicism, associates of GIA/GSPC activists, were making up false passports. They provided those carried by the two Tunisians who killed Massoud. Many of these men appear to have considered themselves to be members of the GSPC and were in touch with GSPC leaders. However, as well as GSPC-linked material (such as the recruiting video referred to above), their flats were full of jihadi Salafi literature of a more international nature, their conversations included references to ‘the sheikh’ or ‘the emir’, presumed to be bin Laden, and to travel to Afghanistan. They saw no conflict of interest or loyalty between the two. Again, this growing convergence is worth noting.
Bin Laden’s ability to penetrate and appropriate the networks built up by the Algerian groups was due to his own increasing profile and to the training facilities he could offer. The practice of training volunteers
recruited by the GSPC in Afghan camps linked to bin Laden resulted in a subtle form of entryism. By the time the volunteers returned to Algeria or to Europe to join the GIA or GSPC from Afghan camps, they were as much bin Laden’s operatives as they were Hattab’s or any other group’s. Over time, with combat, surrender and infighting killing more senior men, the proportion of ‘bin Laden-linked’ operatives in any group became higher and his influence increased commensurately. Such relationships were reinforced by the grant of substantial funds to older and more established activists, particularly the men who recruited the new volunteers and arranged their travel and training. These men too developed ‘dual loyalties’ to bin Laden and to their own domestic groups, the GIA, the GSPC, Egyptian Islamic Jihad or whoever. It is in this context that key international figures like Abu Qutada, the Palestinian–Jordanian cleric living in London, were critical.
The case of Djamal Beghal, an Algerian-born French recruit, arrested at Dubai airport on his way from Afghanistan to France in August 2001, is revealing. Beghal, 36, presented himself to his interrogators as a dupe of bin Laden. He said that he had only ever been involved in moderate political Islamism and some proselytizing before going to Afghanistan in 2000. In fact, it appears that Beghal had been involved with Algerian terrorist groups by the beginning of the 1990s and, like so many activists, had made his way to Afghanistan to seek help with projects he had already formulated.
Beghal had come to France in the mid 1980s, married a French woman, gained citizenship and lived in a rundown tower block on the outskirts of Paris for over a decade, during which time he had been active in militant circles. In 1997, he and his family moved to Britain, settling in the nondescript city of Leicester, 100 miles northwest of London. Beghal told his interrogators that his aim was merely to study with Abu Qutada, whose taped lectures he had frequently heard in France. After some time, Abu Qutada encouraged his admirer to commute across the channel to distribute texts and tapes of his speeches in France. ‘Abu Qutada never asked me to set up a network for him in France but just to spread his message,’ Beghal said in his interrogation. French investigators do not believe this is the truth.
In 1998, Beghal and his spiritual mentor discussed the duty of hijra, the flight of the faithful from impious lands. Afghanistan was mentioned as a possible destination. In the autumn of 2000, after some time in France, Beghal and his family travelled to Afghanistan where he underwent basic training at a camp run by bin Laden’s associates near Kabul. This was his first contact with bin Laden’s group. In the spring of 2001, he asked to return home. ‘I was called in by Abu Zubaydah,’ Beghal told his interrogators:
He told me that the time for action had come and asked me if I was ready. I said I was and he said that the plan was to blow up the US embassy in Paris. He gave me three presents: a stick of
niswak
, a bottle of perfume and a prayer cap. He said they were from bin Laden. He told me that 350,000 Francs ($55,000) had been placed in a bank account in Morocco for me.
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Beghal told the interrogators that he had been radicalized in the Afghan camps and then been given a mission by the al-Qaeda ‘higher command’. Before that, he said, he had shunned violence. However, there is plenty of evidence that he was lying. For one thing, he told his interrogators that he had known the man who had received the $55,000 allocated by the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ for the attack, since June 2000.
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In addition, Beghal admitted meeting the man who was to be the suicide bomber in the attack in London during Friday prayers at Abu Qutada’s mosque in west London long before coming to Afghanistan. This was a Tunisian former footballer and drug addict who lived in Belgium.
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In addition, before leaving for Afghanistan, Beghal had shared a flat with an Algerian computer expert who had already been to Afghanistan and was suspected of a longstanding involvement in Islamic militancy.
French and British intelligence believe that Beghal and others had formulated a plan to attack the US embassy in Paris well before travelling to Afghanistan.
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This would fit with the pattern of individuals such as Ressam or Hijazi, taking plans to al-Qaeda for approval and resources. Under interrogation, Beghal was careful to minimize his own role and to stress that he was ‘only following orders’. However, the evidence suggests otherwise.
The shooting began to lessen by the late evening. Our commander had his handgun on the table next to a bottle of cheap Turkish whiskey, and the rest of our weapons were piled around us. No one cared about the odd burst of automatic fire a few blocks away. There was supposed to be a truce, and the men, who had been fighting all summer, were planning on getting drunk.
It was August 1991 and I was in the northeastern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah with Peshmerga fighters (the name means ‘those who face death’) of the Kurdish Democratic Party. I was 21 and had joined the group during a university summer vacation. I was young, idealistic and wanted an adventure and a cause. The Peshmerga taught me how to use a Kalashnikov and took me with them across northern Iraq. The first Gulf War was over and, with belated assistance from allied airpower, the Kurdish tribes were consolidating their control of a sizeable slice of northern Iraq. Burnt-out Iraqi army vehicles littered the roads, Saddam Hussein’s jets flew overhead and skirmishes between his troops and the Kurdish fighters were still common. That was the adventure. The national struggle of the Kurds was the cause.
The Peshmerga I had been with had been aggressively secular. They had drunk, smoked, sworn and I had never seen them pray. Their slogans were all about liberation and self-determination, about rights and democracy. When I told them I was studying ‘nationalism’ at university they were pleased. When I told them I was a student at Oxford, they were even happier. The idea of any of them mentioning a ‘jihad’ was almost risible. Though angry and resentful at what they felt, with some justification, to be the West’s repeated betrayals, they were still vociferously pro-Western. Despite living with them for weeks on end, I had been barely aware that the men I was with were Muslims. Yet by 2001 an aggressive and militant hardline Islamic movement had emerged in Iraqi Kurdistan with, so Washington claimed, links with bin Laden. They were strongest in the hills east of Sulaimaniyah.
The Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK) has its roots in the Iran–Iraq war and in the Iranian Revolution. Until the 1980s, political Islamic activism in northern Iraq was limited to a small number of members of a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that was almost entirely restricted to the major cities. More radical strains of Islam
were unheard of among the Kurds, particularly in the rural areas, among whom a tolerant Sufi-infused Sunni Islam similar to that of Afghanistan and rural Pakistan was prevalent. Decades of secular policies and an enormously successful literacy drive in the 1970s had diluted Islamic observance still further. Radical Salafi- or Wahhabi-style Islam was extremely rare. During the Iran–Iraq war, Tehran worked to unite and strengthen the various disparate Islamist groups emerging in northern Iraq, with the aim of bolstering the Kurdish opposition forces against Saddam Hussein. The groups eventually united, with prodding from Tehran, under the umbrella of the IMK, between 1989 and 1991. The leader of the IMK was Mullah Uthman Ali Aziz, a senior cleric from an established religious family near the eastern town of Halabja.
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