Authors: Jason Burke
This has two consequences. The first is an ideological convergence among militants. This can be detected everywhere. Organizations (and individuals) with no previous interest in ‘global jihad’ now have vastly broadened perspectives and can find new common ground. Where once groups focused on local concerns, now they look on all that is
kufr
as their target. In Pakistan, the mixed composition of the group who kidnapped and killed the American journalist Daniel Pearl, of the
Wall Street Journal
, and brutally murdered him in January 2002, was just the first of many examples of increasing co-operation between previously discrete groups, few of which had previously shown much interest in international jihad.
6
Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaeda logistics chief, was captured at a safe house belonging to the Sipa e Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a group previously interested only in a local sectarian agenda. It is likely that the intermediaries who acted as conduits for the London bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan to the men in the mountains of Waziristan and Paktia also came from similar groups previously focused merely on Pakistan or Kashmir. A similar convergence is detectable among militants from or in the Maghreb. Algerian groups now proudly flaunt their internationalist credentials in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, issuing a series of threats in the autumn of 2006 against France, the US and even the UK. More recently, the GSPC in Algeria has made efforts to unify all the disparate militant movements in the Maghreb into a new extremist coalition.
7
In Afghanistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, once the archetypal educated radical political Islamist and the determined rival of both the Taliban and the Arab-dominated al-Qaeda, is now an (albeit reluctant) collaborator with men like Mullah Omar, a cleric, and Jalaluddin Haqqani, the tribal chief who is now one of the Taliban’s most powerful commanders.
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Palestinian groups too are completing their journey from secular leftism to jihadi Salafism. In March 2004, following the assassination of their leader Sheikh Yasin by an Israeli missile, Hamas appeared to be threatening attacks outside Israel-Palestine. There is growing popular support for bin Laden in Gaza, against the will of political leaders. I have deliberately steered away from investigation of
Palestinian Islamic radicalism in this book because it stems from a very different tradition and set of historic circumstances than the bulk of the militancy discussed in these pages. However, such a separation may well come to look increasingly artificial in the years to come. Certainly, for many Muslims, the cause of the Palestinians, in a way that has never previously been the case, is being seen along with Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of one titanic battle. In Iraq itself, though there remain tensions between tribal, nationalist and ‘jihadi’ elements, the discourse of radical Islam is vastly more established than it was a decade ago. Overcoming the
fitna
or the factionalism and parochialism of militant groups, was one of main reasons bin Laden set up ‘al-Qaeda’. This burgeoning ideological consonance has helped him achieve that aim.
The second result of this new radicalization and mobilization is that a whole new cadre of terrorist is being created. In the first chapter to this book I outlined three different meanings of the word al-Qaeda. It could, I said, be a vanguard, a base or a precept, a maxim, a methodology or a formula. Though the hardcore – the vanguard – is scattered, and the base is destroyed, the craving for jihad that sent tens of thousands of young men to seek training and jihad in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 is flourishing. Bin Laden’s message makes sense to millions.
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And it is from among these millions that the new wave of terrorists will continue to come. They will be ‘freelance’ operators who have no obvious connection to any existing group. They will, often, have no previous involvement in terrorism. They may not have access to sophisticated explosives, automatic weapons or rockets, but once they have accepted the radical jihadi Salafist worldview they will be committed to finding the resources necessary to launch their own violent holy war, whether their weapons be a kitchen knife, a gun, a truck full of explosives or an aircraft full of fuel and passengers. For these men, jihad is a profoundly felt religious duty. It brings them something that nothing else can and they will not be diverted from it by a few extra bollards outside an embassy or by the destruction of a training camp in a far-off country. It is worth examining, by way of a conclusion, who these men are, and what can be done to stop them.
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I met Didar in northern Iraq in August 2002. I was investigating the Ansar ul Islam group post 11 September. In the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan, scores of Arab fighters who had been with the Taliban, bin Laden and others made their way to the scrubby hills above Halabjah and catalysed renewed violence.
Didar was born, he said, in 1985 in the sprawling city of Arbil, the capital of the de facto mini-state of Iraqi Kurdistan where the Kurdish Democratic Party (the KDP), who run the western half of the enclave, have their headquarters. It is a big, busy place and, in August at least, is extremely hot. The KDP’s rivals, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) are based in the smaller, quieter eastern city of Sulaimaniyah, which was where I was talking to Didar.
Didar had five brothers and three sisters. His father, once a shop-keeper, was unemployed but, as two of his sons were (illegally) in Britain and sent back money on a regular basis the family had a good standard of living. They lived in their own house and owned a car. All the children went to school and Didar, the sixth child, studied until he was 14. His favourite subject was Arabic. He also did geography, history and science but didn’t like them.
Didar told me his upbringing had not been particularly religious. Like most Kurds he went to the mosque to pray several times a week and kept the fast at Ramadan but little else. Nor had he been involved in politics, though he said he felt strongly that things were not right with the world from his early teens. His education, he said, was unlikely to get him a decent job. He played football a lot but had few male friends and no girlfriends. When he left school in 1999, without employment, he ‘didn’t have much to do so started going to the mosque a lot’. Soon he was spending every evening there and was invited to join a Qur’anic study group. He enjoyed the meetings and liked being with his new friends. Didar’s teacher at the mosque, a man about twice his age, gave him books and pamphlets to read. Some were Wahhabi tracts published with subsidies from the Saudi Arabian government. Others were reprints of Abdallah Azzam’s works. His teacher explained Azzam’s doctrine that jihad was the duty of every Muslim man and told him that men like Osama bin Laden were true Muslims whose examples should be followed. He introduced Didar to
other young men with similar ideas. Didar felt welcome and was happy with his new group of friends. ‘We felt we could change things. We could make everything come right in our homeland. What Osama and my teacher said was true. If everybody did what it said in the Qu’ran then everything would be OK. It was only the atheists in government who were stopping that and their supporters among the Jews and the Crusaders. We had to fight them all,’ Didar told me. He and one of his new friends, Hisham, were soon talking about the new party they would form that would be part of al-Qaeda. ‘We would be warriors and strong and everyone would be proud of us,’ Didar said.
In November 2001 Didar was told by his teacher that a group called Ansar ul Islam had announced a jihad in Kurdistan. He had not heard of the organization before. ‘I was very excited. I wanted to be a part of it very much,’ he told me. The two men took a bus across the mountains to Sulaimaniya and then another bus out towards Halabjah. As they neared the city they got off and picked up a battered local taxi up into the hills to the headquarters of the group.
Ansar ul Islam’s base, in a series of interlinked valleys and mountains just outside Halabjah, was surrounded on three sides by the PUK’s peshmerga. On the fourth side was the Iranian border. Around forty Arabs had recently arrived. There were around 500 Kurds.
The first man Didar met was Abu Abdullah al-Shami, a Kurd who had spent most of the 1990s in Afghanistan before returning to Kurdistan a few months previously. Another Kurd who had spent time in the Afghan camps was running the training of new recruits and for the next three months Didar was instructed in basic infantry tactics, explosives, urban warfare and assassinations. The training followed the syllabus that had been taught to Ansar ul Islam’s representatives who had made it to Afghanistan in the previous year. On one of the walls of their dormitories, Didar said, was a rough mural of bin Laden standing above a burning World Trade Center with a Kalashnikov in his hand. Every morning the recruits would rise for morning prayers and then run until the sun came over the horizon. They spent the rest of the day training, in lectures or reading the Qu’ran. The idea of
ishtishahd
, or ‘martyrdom operations’ was first raised by the Arab instructors, but it was Didar’s friend, Hisham, the twenty-two-year-old
who he had met in the mosque at Arbil, who starting talking about suicide seriously.
‘Hisham said we should do it together. He quoted all the verses of the Qu’ran and repeated the prophet’s teaching on
ishtishad
and every day we talked about it. Especially after two of our group were martyred when they attacked the [PUK forces] in Halabjah. I decided that I wanted to do this too. I knew that PUK people were
kufr
and our duty was to fight against the kufr to free the umma. I told Abdullah al-Shami that I was ready and then during the night they called me on the radio and asked me to come to them. I drove to Biyara, the village where they were, and they showed me the jacket and showed me how it worked. Then we had lunch.’
Didar was talking to me in the office of the PUK security chief. The chief went to a cupboard and pulled out the jacket that had been taken off Didar when he had been arrested. It had two slabs of TNT over the chest and in the small of the back and was made of blue nylon. A belt, made of the same material, contained more explosives. There were two metal switches, one for the jacket and one for the belt. I sat and clicked them back and forth, listening to the metallic tick, as Didar continued.
‘After seeing the jacket I went back to our base.’
‘What date was it?’ I asked.
‘It was the June 12,’ he said, ‘because it was during the World Cup.’
‘You were watching the World Cup?’
‘There were no televisions because they were
haram
[forbidden]. But I was following it in the newspapers.’
‘What was your favourite team?’
‘England. Michael Owen and I like David Beckham and David Seaman.’
‘England is your favourite team and you are about to blow yourself up in the jihad against kufr?’
‘Politics is one thing. Football is something else.’
After lunch with Abu Abdullah, Didar was driven to a house on the outskirts of Halabjah. He was told that when he heard shooting the next morning he was to make his way to the local PUK office and blow
himself up. He had dinner at the house of a sympathizer. Then they watched a Jackie Chan film on a DVD.
‘I didn’t dream. I slept fine. I knew I was going to paradise so was very calm.’
‘Didn’t you think about your mother?’ I asked.
‘Just about paradise.’
‘Did you have an alarm clock?’
‘I woke up at 3am and put the jacket on with the help of the owner of the house. But there was no shooting so I thought the plan had gone wrong so I took it off again and went back to Biyara. I was sad that I was not able to die. I went to Abu Bakr al-Tauhidi [another of Ansar ul Islam’s senior figures] and spent three days with him. He spoke to me about
ishtishad
and faith and jihad and my duty. On the third day after morning prayer I went in a car to the same house again and I slept until lunchtime and then prayed and ate and then waited until Ushr prayers and then put on my jacket and went with my host to the bus stop. It was just after 5pm, I think, but I had no watch. I was calm and not at all nervous. I was thinking about paradise. He paid one dinar to the driver and I got on the bus that went through the bazaar and I got down just before the PUK office and walked up to it with the switch in my pocket and my hand on it. I walked up to the peshmerga at the door and gave him the name of a man who I thought would be inside and said I had come to see him and he said what is that underneath your shirt and he spoke with the accent of my home town and I said nothing and he asked again and I said “it’s TNT” and then they arrested me.’
Analysis of the backgrounds of the thousands of individuals of whom the modern Islamic militant movement is composed is a fraught business. It is very difficult to impose any analytic order on the huge variety of different people involved with their diverse motives, backgrounds, experience and culture. However, three broad groups can be distinguished. The first can be termed intellectual activists. These are men who can justify their attraction to radical Islam in relatively sophisticated terms. They share many common elements, particularly in regard to their backgrounds, with more moderate political Islamists.
This group would include Hekmatyar, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden himself, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Omar Saeed Sheikh, Amar Makhlulif, Abu Qatada and many others. Such men are drawn from the same social groups as those who were involved in the earliest Islamist movements of the colonial period. They dominated Islamic militant leadership cadres in 1970s and 1980s as well as filling the ranks of more moderate organizations. They also share many common elements with radical political activists on both the left and the right. In fact, they don’t fit just a particular model of Islamic activist over recent decades, they fit a model of revolutionary cadres over several centuries. There is no space here to look at the similarities in background between Egyptian Islamists in the 1970s, Russian anarchists, Bolshevik activists and French revolutionaries of an earlier age but it is striking how often it is elements from the newly educated lower-middle classes in societies in flux who are most active. These are the people who are so often at the forefront of calling for change, even if change is justified by retrospective appeal to a nostalgically imagined ‘just’ golden age. They are men who are articulate, intelligent and relatively worldly. They have aspirations and experience profound resentments when those aspirations are frustrated. When their expectations cannot be met, they perceive it as an injustice. If there are no effective ways to resolve the problem within the bounds of state-sanctioned political or social activism then alternatives are sought. Radical Islamic militancy is one.