Authors: Jason Burke
On 11 March 2004 ten bombs hidden in rucksacks detonated simultaneously on trains just outside Madrid’s Atocha railway station, killing 191 people and injuring ten times as many. The attacks were very different from previous strikes by ‘al-Qaeda’ or militants acting in their style. The bombers did not die in the attack itself, thus failing to demonstrate the supposed faith of those behind the attack as previous attacks had often sought to do. The Madrid bombers used a large number of relatively small but technically sophisticated devices, detonated by timer, rather than a few huge bombs mounted in trucks or plastic explosive wrapped around someone. Neither, on the whole, had previous strikes been conducted in such a way as to kill and maim hundreds of ordinary people without even the pretence of attacking a military, administrative, political or commercial target. Men like bin Laden have a profound understanding of how such attacks might play in the Middle East where civilian deaths can be justified only if seen as part of a defensive strike against a bigger target, such as Israel or America, and recognize that killing crowds of ordinary commuters on their way to work is far harder to ‘sell’ to potential sympathizers and risks delegitimizing the cause as a whole. All this marked Madrid as a departure from previous practice.
These ideological and tactical differences were confirmed as investigations progressed. Most of the Madrid cell were of Moroccan and Syrian origin, were relatively comfortably off and had been living in Spain for some time. Several of them had loose personal contacts to the broader network of militants who had been active in Europe for many years but, though one may have been a former member of the Algerian GIA, most were new recruits. Interestingly, the plot may have had its origin in the failure of one of the key figures in the early
formation of the group, the Moroccan Mustapha al-Maymouni, to reach Afghanistan in 2002. When his plan to fight the Americans there failed he turned his attention to projects and targets closer to home. When al-Maymouni was arrested in Morocco, he was replaced as operational leader of the group by his brother-in-law, a Tunisian called Serhane bin Abdelmajid Fakhet, an intelligent 35-year-old university-educated economist who had Spanish citizenship. Though the web of connections around the group was vastly complex, touching London, Casablanca and Italy, no clear connection to south-west Asia and the al-Qaeda hardcore has ever emerged. After two years of investigation, Spanish intelligence and police investigators concluded that the bombers, seven of whom blew themselves up when police surrounded their apartment in Madrid three weeks after the attacks, were ‘homegrown radicals acting on their own’. There were, the officials said, ‘no phone calls between the Madrid bombers and al-Qaeda and no money transfers.’ Contrary to hasty conclusions drawn in the immediate aftermath of the blast, the investigators decided, there was no direction from bin Laden or even people close to him either. So if the Madrid attack were placed on our scale, it would be at its furthest end, as autonomous an attack as is possible within today’s globalized Islamic militancy. The progression down the scale, from the tightly organized 1998 attacks on the American embassies in east Africa, through the Millennium plots, the carefully planned 11 September attacks and the dozen or so headline bombings and hundreds of smaller strikes since the war in Afghanistan, to Madrid is thus clear. In the spring of 2004, though united by an ideology and a vision of the world, Islamic militancy was clearly, at least operationally, as fragmented as it had ever been, relying more and more heavily on amorphous, self-forming cells composed of motivated individuals influenced by elements of a common ideology. This made it much harder to fight.
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There was another new factor too. The Madrid bombings came almost exactly a year after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. There is no space in this book for a long examination of the genesis of the Iraq war, nor for an analysis of the reasons for the failure of the US-led coalition to stabilize the country in its aftermath. However, a clear
view of the war in Iraq and its broader effects is naturally essential for a full understanding of Islamic militancy both in the Middle East, ‘the Islamic world’ and beyond it. Much of the discussion about the Madrid attacks has centered on the question of whether or not they were timed to achieve the specific short-term political gain of swinging the Spanish election to ensure the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. This question is yet to be resolved and the fact that the same group appear to have launched an abortive attempt at a second major bombing a few days after the election would seem to argue against such an interpretation. That said, the broad circulation on the internet of contemporary thinking in jihadi circles about how to force the retreat of Western troops from Baghdad, Basra, Falluja and the other cities whose names were becoming so swiftly known to militants and European populations alike by attacking Spain and other ‘weak links’ in the US led coalition appears to make it likely that those who attacked the trains outside the Atocha station were at least influenced by the date of the coming elections. One key jihadi document being circulated at the time explicitly advocates bombing Spain, saying that its population and government were the weak link in the coalition of western powers in Iraq.
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In a sense, the exact reasons for the timing of the attack in Madrid are less relevant than the evidence it provides of the role the ongoing fighting in Iraq clearly played in the radicalization and the mobilization of the bombers. It is clear that the Madrid cell were exposed to significant quantities of propaganda on the internet and in other forms of media as well as information and images they received from mainstream newspapers and television, much of which naturally featured events in Iraq. The report of the Spanish state prosecutor, Olga Sanchez, reiterates that the bombers had no direct links with al-Qaeda but points out that they were inspired by a speech in October 2003 in which bin Laden threatened prompt and severe actions against the countries that participated in the war in Iraq, including Spain and Britain. The critical sentence was: ‘We reserve the right to respond at the opportune time and place in all the countries that are participating in this unjust war, in particular United Kingdom, Spain [and other countries]’.
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As ever, for propaganda to work it has to make sense and, whether
or not their bombs were a deliberate attempt to oust the ruling government, the support of the Spanish conservative administration for the invasion of Iraq made the radical Islamic militant argument that their proposed victims were not mere civilians but, because they had voted for those who had dispatched the Spanish troops, were complicit in the repression of Muslims and thus criminal aggressors themselves much easier to accept. The war in Iraq, like the broader ‘War on Terror’, also allowed the militants to imagine themselves as glorious defenders of the Islamic faith, tapping into the powerful psychological resources of a highly selective version of Islamic history. Such arguments, though theologically weak and morally repugnant, were, by the spring of 2004, not just convincing to the Madrid bombers, but to many other young men among Muslim communities in Europe and in the Islamic world more generally. And as every month passed and 24 million Iraqis, through little fault of their own, lurched further and further away from the path towards stability, prosperity and democracy that the White House had hoped they would pursue and further towards a grim future on what was now dubbed ‘the central front of the War on Terror’, that argument grew that more convincing.
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Iraq and London
We had arrived in the early evening, lying our way through the peshmerga checkpoints set up to keep journalists away from the battle. From our vantage point on the roof of a commander’s house we could see the last stand of the Ansar ul Islam militant group in the mountains above us. They had been battling all day, the peshmerga and American special forces troops pushing up the lower slopes, the extremist fighters pulling back in front of them to prepared positions among the rock and scree. In the fading light we watched as tracer fire flicked onto the crags, probing the dark hillsides, picking out the caves and outcrops where militants were fighting to the death. Orange bursts of fire marked where American bombs were falling. For several hours one particular summit, an abrupt spike of rock on the spur of a ridge, was laced with fire, incoming and outgoing, until it was lit by a series of explosions and was silent.
By dawn all resistance was over. We followed the peshmerga up into the villages that had been the base of the militants. In Biyara, where the corpse of an alleged spy executed by the radicals still lay by the roadside, a medressa had been reduced to rubble by a missile. Though fighting had only just ended local people were arriving to see what had happened to their homes. We found letters from volunteers asking their families to settle their debts before they were martyred and notebooks with evidence of an amateurish interest in chemicals. Around us, in the warm spring sunlight, the peshmerga fighters relaxed on the grass, resting their heads on blankets and talking and smoking.
It was the end of March 2003. A few hundred miles to the south American tank columns were racing towards Baghdad. The action
against Ansar ul Islam was a sideshow and no one pretended that the annihilation of the group was of any major strategic importance. Nonetheless, the Kurdish leaders and the American military officers on the ground were so pleased by the way the battle had gone they held a press conference to publicize their success. The Kurds claimed to have killed 300 of the 600 to 900 Ansar ul Islam militants who were thought to be in the hills above Halabjah. Most of the bodies, we were told, were in caves or buried under rubble, which explained why no journalist ever saw more than a few dozen corpses.
The truth was that, as had happened with the militants trapped at Tora Bora, the bulk of the fighters under attack in the hills above Halabjah had escaped. The military superiority of the US had been cancelled out by a failure to evaluate the broader political situation successfully. In Afghanistan the militants had been able to flee into the tribal areas and into Pakistan. From Iraq several hundred Ansar fighters had crossed into Iran. Many more had simply slipped away, disappearing into the chaos of a country at war. Like the al-Qaeda hardcore in the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan, Ansar ul Islam had been shattered and scattered but, as rapidly became very obvious, its capacity to cause trouble was far from over.
It is possible to argue that a book on ‘al-Qaeda’ should not include the jihadi activism in Iraq which commenced a few months after the invasion of March 2003 and is continuing with little sign of abating at the time of writing. After all, the involvement of the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ in any of the activities of Muslim radicals in the country was negligible before the war (as we saw in Chapter 14), and has barely increased since. However, in Iraq in the years after 2003 we find many of the features that defined the new phase of Islamic militancy that was becoming dominant outside the country and for this reason alone, quite apart from the obvious fact that the struggle in Iraq will become for militants of the coming generations what Afghanistan was for previous generations, the conflict must feature in any serious analysis of ‘al-Qaeda’, however defined.
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What we see in Iraq, instead of operations masterminded by one individual or one organization, is a whole complex array of different groups, of all sizes, loyal to different leaders and often linked to
different, if overlapping, networks inside and outside the country, sometimes working together for a roughly common cause (though with widely different priorities and tactics), sometimes actively competing. We also see a shifting relationship between local and international scales of activism and thinking, a complex and dynamic relationship with public opinion (again on a national and international scale) and continuing problems of analysis among Western military and political planners.
Between 2003 and 2006 Western, and particularly American, analysis of the continuing violence in Iraq focused on one individual. In this, it committed, in microcosm, the same error made in the analysis of ‘al-Qaeda’ and Islamic militancy more broadly in the Muslim world. The focus on the famous ‘foreign fighters’, a label given to international militants who found their way to Iraq to fight, was also a reproduction of the same ‘fundamental attribution error’ which had undervalued local conditions and grievances in the development of the insurgency and had led to so many strategic errors in the fight against Islamic militancy over previous years.
The individual who rapidly became internationally known – even before the invasion of 2003 – was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant who had been active since the mid 1980s in various theatres. Zarqawi, whose real name was Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh, was born in 1966 in Zarqa, a rough industrial city in Jordan, known as an Islamist centre. A violent petty criminal as a youth, he grew up in relative poverty. He travelled to Afghanistan around 1989, probably influenced by propaganda videos made by Abdallah Azzam and stories of glorious battles retold in his local mosque. He arrived too late for the fighting against the Soviets (though he did spend some time in the training camp run by Abd al’Rab al’Rasul Sayyaf outside Peshawar) and became a reporter for a Pakistan-based radical newspaper instead. On his return to Jordan, al-Zarqawi became involved in a militant plot, was arrested in 1994, imprisoned and then released in an amnesty in 1999. Now 34, he headed once more to Afghanistan and established his own training camp in the west of the country near to Herat. According to several former militants who visited the site, the camp was extremely basic. Despite his lack of
facilities and funds, al-Zarqawi rejected the patronage of bin Laden after a meeting with the Saudi in mid 2000. He successfully evacuated his camp and the families of his followers to Iran in the aftermath of the war of 2001 in Afghanistan, a feat which (though he still remained little known outside certain tight circles of Jordanian militants), undoubtedly added to his status. It is likely that al-Zarqawi reached northern Iraq at the end of 2002 and established himself in the enclave around Biyara held by Ansar ul Islam. His exact whereabouts in this period are unclear. It is extremely unlikely, despite claims to the contrary by the White House, that he visited Baghdad for treatment on an amputated leg at this time, not least because he apparently had both legs firmly attached to his body when finally killed in 2006. Al-Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq was cited in February 2003 by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations that set out the American case for attacking Iraq. What Powell did not say was that al-Zarqawi saw himself as a rival of bin Laden, that the Jordanian certainly never took an oath of allegiance to the older militant leader and that he had never made any formal alliance with bin Laden or any of his close collaborators. Powell also failed to make clear that al-Zarqawi, if present in Iraq at all, was based in a zone that was outside Baghdad’s control.
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