Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (15 page)

CHAPTER 7
A PARALLEL UNIVERSE: THE 9/11 HAMBURG GROUP AND
THE THREE WAVES OF JIHAD

There were two rams, one with horns and one without. The one with horns butted his head against the defenseless one. In the next world, Allah switched the horns from one ram to the other, so justice could prevail.

—SUBSTITUTE IMAM AT AL QUDS MOSQUE IN HAMBURG, WHERE
THE BOMBER PILOTS OF 9/11 PRAYED, TO MARC SAGEMAN
AND ME WHEN WE ASKED, “WHY DID THEY DO IT?”

A
t a quarter to nine on the morning of September 11, 2001, Mohammed Atta, along with four other young men, seized American Airlines Flight 11 and crashed the fully fueled Boeing 767 into the North Tower of New York City’s World Trade Center to reignite world history. Eighteen minutes later, Marwan al-Shehi, a friendly and perceptive young man, according to all who knew him, and another foursome of helpers banked American Airlines Flight 175 into the WTC’s South Tower, where Josh Rosenthal and thousands of others had just begun their workday. Josh’s mother, Marilyn, who has dedicated her life to improving health care in America and abroad, went to the United Arab Emirates to meet with Marwan’s family “to try to understand why two such promising young men had to die this way.” She told me that Marwan’s parents still refuse to believe it could have been him, or if it was, that he must have been tricked.

Around the time Josh was killed, five hijackers stormed the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington-Dulles to Los Angeles. One of them, Hani Hanjour, who had once lived in the United States, took the controls while passengers who were forced to the back of the plane called loved ones on their cell phones—until 9:37 Eastern time, the minute they all perished, when the aircraft slammed into the west face of the Pentagon.

Passengers aboard a fourth flight, United Airlines 93, now aware of events at the World Trade Center, didn’t die without a fight. At 9:47 Jeremy Glick phoned his wife, Lyz, to say that the passengers had voted to take over the plane. He told her that he loved her, to have “a good life” and to please take care of Emmy, their twelve-month-old daughter. Besides, joked the doomed husband and father, he still had his butter knife from breakfast, so all might not be lost. Jeremy and the other passengers overwhelmed the hijackers and tried to wrestle control of the plane from pilot Ziad Jarrah. The passengers probably saved the Capitol building, the symbolic heart of America’s government. An hour before the flight, Ziad had phoned his girlfriend in Germany, Aysel Senguen, to tell her three times he loved her. But Ziad’s love for a girl couldn’t compete with a deeper, darker love for cause and comrades.
¹

The pilots had shorn their beards to be inconspicuous among infidels. They had perfumed their bodies for paradise, but too much has been made of that and their supposed sexual hang-ups and lust for heavenly virgins. True, Atta left behind a testament saying he wanted no earthly woman to touch and defile his remains. But he was peculiar that way. In Al Qaeda at the time, most were married men and many had several children, though all four 9/11 bomber pilots were bachelors. The personality of each jihadi is different. What gives them all fanatical focus is not some inherent personality defect but the person-changing dynamics of the group.

Three of the pilots—Atta, Shehi, and Jarrah—were close friends from student days in Hamburg, along with a fourth, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Ramzi, so very different from the often morose and uptight Atta, was the backslapping guiding spirit embracing the group. But he would be unable to get a visa into the United States. None of the four had a particularly religious upbringing; none had attended madrassahs. Ziad went to private Christian schools in Lebanon before going to study in Germany; Marwan entered Germany on an army scholarship from the United Arab Emirates; a friend who knew Ramzi back home in Yemen says “he was religious, but not too much”; Atta’s father, a Cairo attorney, said his son was anything but a religious fanatic and that Bin Laden’s video praising his son’s martyrdom had to be “fake” (though now the father extols jihad).

All four told other friends that the chief reason they wanted to fight for the jihad was America’s support of Israel and “the World Jewish Conspiracy,” centered in New York City. This was one thing that drew the amicable Ramzi toward the far less sociable Atta when they first met at Hamburg’s Al Quds mosque on Steindamm Strasse in 1995, later joined there by Marwan and Ziad. (Marc Sageman’s recent interviews with their friends tell of them trying so very hard to obtain a copy of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
the anti-Semitic tract concocted by the czarist police to point the seething anger of Russian peasants away from the regime and at the Jews. But in Germany, such books, by law, can’t be sold.)
²

A score of other co-religionists from those college days led these four middle-class Arab adventurers to Al Qaeda. They first came to meet one another at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, or at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences near the Al Quds mosque. But it was in not in classes or in the prayer room that they radicalized one another; it was in schmooze sessions, sometimes at the mosque, but more often in dorms and cafeterias, halal butcher shops and fast-food eateries, barbershops, campus steps, and libraries.

Sageman and I visited the typically German middle-class neighborhood in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg, where the 9/11 plotters and many of their friends lived. Germans call it a
spiesser
neighborhood, meaning prim and proper and bordering on teddy-bear kitsch. The campus of the nearby Technical University is small and the student atmosphere pleasant, especially on those sparse occasions when the sun is out. It’s hardly a hotbed of radical activity.

So how did it happen?

According to the 9/11 Commission: “Although Bin Laden, [Mohammed] Atef and [Khaled Sheikh Mohammed] initially contemplated using established Al Qaeda members to execute the planes operation, the late 1999 arrival in Kandahar of four aspiring jihadis from Germany suddenly presented a more attractive alternative … the enormous advantage of fluency in English and familiarity with life in the West…. Not surprisingly, Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah would all become key players in the 9/11 conspiracy.”
³

These observations hint at two important features of global jihad from its inception: planning is flexible and opportunistic, and key personnel come knocking at the door to enlist in jihad rather than being drawn in or lured by others. The Hamburg group wasn’t recruited or brainwashed. Like most jihadi groups, it self-radicalized and then went looking for action. It was actually a fluid, constantly evolving network of friends and fellow travelers in search of making sense of their lives and the world, who flowed in and out, depending on the changing states of their visas, studies, jobs, girlfriends and wives, problems with the authorities, and other happenings in their lives. Some left because they felt the group was becoming too radical; others came in because of their attraction to increasingly radical words and the promise of radical deeds. There was no “organization” to speak of, certainly no “cells” to begin with.

The oldest part of the group was a small circle of members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who had sought refuge in Germany in the late 1980s, after the Syrian government massacred thousands of their brethren. The Hamburg circle of Syrian brothers would congregate and discuss their angry vision of Islam and the world at three mosques near the central train station in Hamburg: Al Quds (The Holy, and the name for Jerusalem), Al Nur (The Light), and Al Muhajrin (The Immigrants).

The future 9/11 plotters would go from Harburg by subway to the mosques. They’d have to pass a row of sex shops on Steinheim Strasse to get to Al Quds and Al Nur. This, we were told, disturbed their religious sensibilities (Atta’s in particular; he would sometimes insist, even though his friends might balk, that they make a long detour toward Alster Lake and back around to avoid seeing the women). Most notable was Al Quds, known as the Moroccan mosque because most of its attendees stemmed from that North African country, including its fiery jihadi preacher from Tangiers, Mohammed Fazazi. (When Marc Sageman and I visited the Al Dakhla mosque in Tangiers, where Fazazi began to preach jihad, and went across the street to a café where the men go after prayer, we were struck by the rapt attention they paid to the scantily clad women on American cable television. We left when we saw that they were not happy that we registered their wonder.) On Fridays, about 150 people from Hamburg’s Moroccan community of 1,500–2,000 pray at Al Quds, a small, nondescript apartment structure with a bare second-story prayer room and a third-floor halal food shop, cafeteria, barbershop (where many of the youth hang out), and a set of five outdated computers. In the upstairs parts of the mosque, in fast-food eateries down the street, in dorms and friends’ apartments, conversation would turn to Israel, the Jews, America, Bosnia, Chechnya, and the Muslim plight around the world, which the collapse of the Soviet Union and the torn curtain of bipolar conflict had brought into the light.

April 1,1999: A gathering of friends at the Al Quds mosque. Third from right in the back row is Ramzi bin al-Shibh; Atta is in the middle row, far right, with hands on a friend’s shoulders.
(Source: DDP/ AFP)

Ramzi and Atta had known each other for a couple of years before Marwan arrived from Bonn in early 1998. (Marwan, who had come to Germany in 1996 to study marine engineering, may have met Ramzi at the Bonn mosque, where Ramzi went when visiting the city.) But Marwan became the cheery and calm catalyst that made the trio click. “He was friendly, always in a good mood, well educated, humorous, and sometimes a little clumsy,” one of his friends said. “He never spoke negatively about others and never used a negative word. He never looked stressed.”
⁴

In the summer of 1998, Marwan moved in with Ramzi and Atta in an apartment in Wilhelmsburg. All three worked at a warehouse, packing computers in crates for shipping. The next winter they moved to Marienstrasse 54, near the university in Harburg. Neighbors said that the trio holed up and the apartment stank. After about a month, Marwan moved to a nearby apartment and enrolled in the university, but often stayed with the other two. Ramzi and Atta finally vacated the apartment several months later, taking a bunch of mattresses with them.

This apparently unkempt and decidedly
un-spiesser
lifestyle was more self-conscious and intellectually refined than the neighbors suspected. It was the Takfiri way. Followers of Qutb and forerunners of Al Jihad and Al Qaeda, the Takfiris made their houses available for “fellow travelers” in imitation of the lifestyle of the Prophet and his disciples. They dreamed of accomplishing jihad as the hidden “sixth pillar” of Islam, which, as my colleagues’ and my surveys among militants show, trumps four of the five traditional pillars that are incumbent upon all Muslims (prayer, alms, fasting during Ramadan, the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca) and is second only to the first pillar, the profession of faith in God and his Prophet.

The Hamburg group did not arise from the community in which its members lived; it could have been almost anywhere, in any city in Europe. They were basically the only Middle Easterners in the crowd, socially distant from most of the others around their neighborhood and the mosques: Germans, Turks, and North Africans. They weren’t integrated into the community but withdrew from it to live in a parallel universe of jihad and emerged from their cocoon wanting action.

It’s still not clear how the Hamburg Four made it to Afghanistan. One of their friends told my colleagues that they may have first wanted to do something in the Balkans. Ramzi met with Albanians in Hamburg and asked them how he could help Muslims in the Kosovo conflict that was escalating at the time (late 1998, early 1999). The Albanians reportedly told Ramzi they needed walkie-talkies, not more volunteers. Then the Hamburg Four apparently thought about going to Chechnya. Ramzi told his American interrogators
⁵
that he and Marwan were approached by someone named Khalid al-Masri on a train—probably, Ramzi surmised, because they were Arabs with beards. They struck up a conversation about Chechnya, and al-Masri allegedly told Ramzi and Marwan to get in touch with a person in Duisburg, Mohamedou Slahi, a Mauritanian jihadi who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Slahi explained that it was difficult to get into Chechnya and recommended going to Afghanistan to train for jihad before trying to go on to Chechnya. Ramzi said that Slahi instructed them in how to get visas for Pakistan and how to hook up with the Taliban to reach Afghanistan.