Authors: Jason Burke
It was at al-Quds mosque, or possibly Hamburg’s Goethe Institute, that Atta met Marwan al-Shehhi, who was to die flying UA175 into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Al-Shehhi had arrived in Germany in 1996, on a military scholarship, worth $10,000 annually, from the United Arab Emirates government. He was the son of an imam in Ras al-Khaimah, one of the poorest and most conservative of the emirates and an area steeped in the Wahhabi tradition. Al-Shehhi was a deeply religious boy who helped his father at the mosque and eventually won a place at a prestigious local religious college, al-Ain University.
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A family dispute led al-Shehhi to travel to Germany to
study. If Atta’s background is close to that of the classic political Islamist activist, then al-Shehhi’s is that of the radical, neo-traditionalist alim. Al-Shehhi had begun attending the al-Quds mosque in mid 1997.
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Ziad Jarrah, who had dreamed of becoming a pilot since childhood, came from a secular, prosperous and prominent family in Lebanon. He had been to a Christian school and had no record of any involvement in any of Lebanon’s internecine strife. In the spring of 1996, aged 20, Jarrah moved to Greifswald, in the former East Germany, to begin college and almost immediately started a relationship with a young female Turkish-born medical student. Jarrah appears to have swiftly started behaving in a devout fashion, possibly as a result of the influence of radical Salafi clerics in Greifswald, well before moving to Hamburg in August 1997 to study aircraft construction at the University of Applied Sciences. He met Atta shortly afterwards.
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Jarrah, with his secular background, is different from both Atta, with his relatively devout petty bourgeois upbringing, and al-Shehhi, with his traditional religious credentials. Nonetheless, the apocalyptic, utopian worldview of bin Laden and Azzam made sense to all three.
Atta had been made redundant by Plankontor and, though he continued to work on his doctorate, he spent lengthy periods away from the university. In early 1998, he is thought to have travelled to Afghanistan, probably to Khaldan camp. Al-Shehhi probably went with him along with a 26-year-old Yemeni former banker called Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who had arrived in Germany around two years earlier and was part of the same circle of friends and activists in Hamburg. Atta and the others were in Afghanistan at an important time. In February 1998, bin Laden had issued his fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Americans, and the embassy bombings were only a few months away. On their return to Germany, Atta and the others moved into a run-down and anonymous flat in a complex near the university. Atta, acquaintances say, seemed more confident and more purposeful. On 1 November 1998, the group moved again. Atta and bin al-Shibh took a flat at 54 Marienstrasse in Harburg; Atta signed the rent payments slips
Dar el Ansar
(‘the house of the supporters of the Prophet’). Jarrah became a frequent visitor and friends noticed that his behaviour became more devout. He told
his girlfriend to wear a veil and, on a visit home, his parents were surprised and concerned to see that he had grown a beard.
There are differing interpretations of how the Hamburg cell was formed and how its involvement with the 11 September attacks evolved. One particular point of difference is over the question of who had the idea for flying planes into the World Trade Center. German investigators, who have a strong interest in emphasizing the agency of the Hamburg cell to help convict those members they have been able to prosecute, maintain that by mid 1998 the cell was fully formed and fully functioning. It comprised, they say, ‘seven Muslim students [who made up]… an outwardly isolated, actively conspiring organization’.
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This group included Atta, Jarrah, al-Shehhi, bin al-Shibh, two other young students at Hamburg-Harburg technical university, both Moroccan-born, Munir Motassadeq and Zacarias Essebar, and a 22-year-old computer buff called Said Bahaji. The German investigators note that it was at this time that the group was granted a Portakabin on the university campus, to use as a ‘prayer room’, in which they installed a telephone and a computer.
Over the next year, the Germans say, a steady radicalization took place as the group socialized, prayed and worked together at odd jobs. In late November 1999, Atta, Jarrah, al-Shehhi and bin al-Shibh followed the well-worn path to the camps in Afghanistan.
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According to the Germans, the idea ‘to commit assassinations by means of aircraft attacks had [already] developed… in October at the latest’. It is here that the Germans depart most radically from the account of events given by their American, British and French counterparts. If the Germans are right, the four young activists made their journey to Afghanistan to get help with plans they had already formulated. The German prosecutors say the cell travelled ‘in order to talk about the details with the persons responsible of the international network and to secure financial and logistic support’.
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The Germans say that their conclusion that the Hamburg cell had the idea of using aircraft for terrorist purposes independently of ‘al-Qaeda’ is supported by internet records that show that, in addition to hardline jihadi websites, the members of the Hamburg cell had been researching flight simulators prior to travelling to Afghanistan. But the German theory, though it fits patterns
of previous militant behaviour, is contradicted by many other investigators, who point out that in fact only a single website, with a page featuring a variety of computer games, was accessed and at a time when most of the cell were out of Germany. They believe that al-Qaeda figures visited Germany and began recruiting there in 1998 or 1999. Some have even claimed that Atta had been a ‘sleeper’ since the early 1990s or that the group had been formed through the agency of radical activists with links to al-Qaeda and was activated by planners in Afghanistan when they decided the time was right. Indeed, senior al-Qaeda figures themselves have claimed all the credit for thinking up the idea of the attack on the Twin Towers and said that they suggested it to Atta and his group on their arrival at the training camps in Afghanistan at the end of 1999.
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Whatever the case, the four men had returned to Hamburg by early spring and set about executing their new mission while Essebar and Motassadeq travelled to Afghanistan themselves. First they obtained fresh passports, thus obscuring the telltale stamps from the Gulf and Pakistan. Then they set about getting American visas while Atta researched flying schools. On 26 March, Jarrah signed up with a flight school in Venice, Florida. By the end of June 2000, Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah had all arrived in America. They were not the first hijackers to arrive in the USA. Al-Midhar and al-Hazmi, the second group I identified above, were already there.
In late 1999, the CIA learned that two militants suspected of links with bin Laden, known only as ‘Nawaf’ and ‘Khalid’, were planning to travel to Malaysia.
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The information came from intercepted telephone conversations between senior al-Qaeda figures in Afghanistan and individuals in the Yemen. The telephone number belonged to Ahmed al-Hazza, the former comrade with whom Mohammed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali had stayed on his journey to Nairobi from Pakistan 18 months previously, and was the number he had called when trying to arrange his own escape from Nairobi after the bombing.
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In the first days of 2000, ‘Khalid’ was identified by the CIA as Khalid bin Mohammed bin Abdallah al-Midhar, a father-in-law of al-Hazza. His travelling companion, Nawaf al-Hazmi, was identified later. Little was known about either man. They appeared to have fought in Bosnia
during the mid 1990s and spent a considerable amount of time in Afghan camps. Al-Hazmi is thought to have fought in Chechnya in 1997 and to have taken the bayat to bin Laden in 1998, possibly while in al-Farooq camp. It appears that Nawaf al-Hazmi may have been present at meetings between the first group of hijackers to travel to Afghanistan (led by Atta) and the al-Qaeda leadership in late 1999.
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The presence of both men in the USA by mid 1999 has been confirmed. Both had then travelled to Saudi Arabia or the Gulf, and probably to Afghanistan, towards the end of the year and, when the CIA picked them up, appeared to be heading back to the USA. The pair was watched by Malaysian intelligence when they met several senior local militants, including Hambali, at a flat in Kuala Lumpur in early January 2000. Both al-Midhar and al-Hazmi re-entered the USA on 15 January and based themselves in San Diego where they set about trying to learn to fly.
The third group of men among the hijackers was the Muscle; they arrived in America, in ones and twos, between 23 April and 29 June 2001.
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They were young (the exact ages of many of them are still to be determined), almost all were Saudi Arabian and not one had any previous record of involvement with terrorism. Most of them came from the southwestern Saudi provinces of Asir and al-Baha, which have always been apart from the rest of the kingdom. Asir’s high, rainy coastal mountains are very different from the parched desert of the interior. Despite the burgeoning local tourist industry, Asir is backward economically. It was the last province to come under the rule of the Saud kings in Riyadh and, without oil itself, has been denied many of the financial benefits of other areas. Many of its inhabitants have turned to the government for jobs, seeking employment in the military and security services where they hold lower- and middle-ranking jobs,
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and resentment at the monopolization of power and wealth by the dominant Saudi tribes in the richer provinces has led to a strong local tradition of political opposition. Many of the tribes of Asir are more closely related to those of the Yemen than those of the Saudi Arabian ruling classes and this exacerbates their marginal status within the kingdom. Asir is also a province of profound religious conservatism. It was known as one of the main recruiting grounds during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and received many of the returning veterans.
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And most of the Muscle, though educated and from relatively prosperous backgrounds, appear to have been socially marginalized in some way beyond their more general marginality within Saudi Arabia as Asiri. Two, Wail, 25, and Waleed al-Shehri, 21, came from the Asir town of Khamis Mushayt, where their father was a wealthy car dealer. He lost contact with his sons after they had gone to the holy city of Medina to seek help for the elder’s chronic depression.
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The treatment was to be ‘some verses from the Qur’an’ read by ‘their sheikh’. The two young men rang home only once and were vague about when they would return. According to several accounts, they had already told friends they hoped to travel to Chechnya.
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From Medina, the brothers appear to have travelled to Afghanistan and appear to have followed the standard path, spending time at Khaldan camp and then at al-Farooq.
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Also at al-Farooq was Abdulaziz al-Omari. Al-Omari came from al-Makwah, a town just north of Asir and had studied at Mohammed ibn Saud University in Buraydah, known locally for its radical dissident preachers, notably the charismatic and prolific Salman al-Auda. Buraydah is deeply conservative and one of the poorest areas of Saudi Arabia. Mamoun Fandy calls it ‘fertile ground for the elaboration of a discourse of resistance coloured in religion’.
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Al-Omari was the student of one such radical young alim, Suleiman al-Alwan, and is believed to have acted as imam at the al-Farooq camp.
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There were several other students among the Muscle. Majed Moqed, the son of a tribal headman near Medina who died on flight AA77, had attended Mohammed ibn Saud University in Buraydah too. Ahmed al-Nami, who died on UA93, had been to King Khalid Islamic law school in Abha, the provincial capital of Asir.
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Three other youths from al-Shehri’s hometown, Khamis Mushayt, died on the planes. Two, Ahmed and Hamza al-Ghamdi, were brothers. They had left home in 1999 or 2000 and had told their parents and friends they were going to Chechnya.
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Both were said to be religiously observant.
The exact details of how the Saudi volunteers were inducted into the 11 September plot is unclear. It seems that during 2000 a dozen or so volunteers were picked out from the thousands of recruits in the training camps in Afghanistan at the time by senior figures from
within the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’. Al-Farooq, the camp where the most motivated and capable of the volunteers were sent, would have been an obvious place to look. Saudi citizens were useful because they would be able to exploit the good relations of the kingdom with the USA to easily obtain visas. One obvious place to find Saudis were the guesthouses run specifically for them in Kandahar. There is certainly evidence that, once selected, the recruits for the hijacking were moved to the city and given special training there. One, Ahmed al-Haznawi, the son of a cleric in a mosque in al-Baha, recorded a ‘martyrdom video’ in March 2001. ‘It is time to kill the Americans on their own ground,’ al-Haznawi, wearing combat dress and a black and white headdress, said.