Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (16 page)

So Ramzi and Marwan, along with Atta and Ziad Jarrah, finally made their way to that place of third choice, where they fell into the lap of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, whose proposal to blow up American planes had only recently been accepted by Bin Laden, but in the teeth of opposition from other leading members of Al Qaeda.
⁶
You can almost imagine Khaled rubbing his hands in sublime disbelief, gushing to the Qaeda chief: “Hey, boss, look what showed up, guys with passports that can get them into the belly of the beast, America!”

THE THREE WAVES OF JIHAD

In
Leaderless Jihad,
Marc Sageman argues that terrorism has advanced in three overlapping waves
⁷
—the first wave corresponding with Afghanistan (1988–1991), the second culminating in 9/11 (1992–2001), and the third wave dominant today (post-2001), with significantly younger, less educated, and less skilled aspiring jihadis. Evidence from our database indicates some tendencies in the predicted direction, at least for Al Qaeda.

Of the three waves, our data show that the first has the highest percentage of professionals involved in the organization. The first wave also has significantly more professional members over laborers, skilled or unskilled. The opposite trend exists in the second and third waves—where the highest percentage of members are unskilled laborers.

The educational achievement patterns among the three waves differ significantly. The first wave has a higher percentage of people with a college education (although the second wave has the highest percentage of members pursuing advanced degrees). After the success of 9/11, many would-be jihadis went looking for Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Some paid thousands of dollars out of their own pockets to seek out Al Qaeda or to find someone who had arms training in a Qaeda camp years before, or access to a Qaeda video filmmaker. This seems to be what happened with the “Crevice” plotters, Pakistani immigrants from Britain who went back to Pakistan for guidance and hatched a plan to bomb a shopping center and a nightclub in London. But because only bits and pieces of the old Al Qaeda are left, most who go looking for Al Qaeda obtain precious little direction or sophisticated expertise. Thankfully, they are often caught trying to get to what has not existed since just after 9/11.

Before and just after 9/11, jihadis, including suicide bombers, were on average materially better off and better educated relative to their populations of origin.
⁸
Many had a college education or advanced technical training. A background in science (particularly engineering and medicine) was positively associated with likelihood to join jihad.
⁹
The Hamburg group was rather typical.

This second wave is still ongoing. The so-called medical cell involved in a failed plot to blow up targets in London and Glasgow in the summer of 2007 may be an example. Three doctors—an Iraqi, a Saudi, and an Indian—who had recently immigrated to Britain were arrested for packing gas canisters and nails into several cars and trying to blow them up. The only real damage was the severe burning of the driver of one of the vehicles, the Indian doctor’s cousin, an aeronautics engineer. The clumsy nature and execution of the plot suggest that, unlike the Hamburg group, the doctors’ group and other vestiges of the second wave no longer have access to the funding and planning skills of the old Al Qaeda. Much the same goes for the botched 2009 Christmas Day airline bombing attempt by a well-to-do Nigerian engineering student and the 2010 Times Square fizzle by a disaffected American-Pakistani MBA.

Now it’s a third wave of more marginalized, underemployed youth that carries the fire. This new generation is driven in large part by a media-fueled global political awakening that has stoked vivid awareness of a collective perception of injustice and camaraderie with the sufferings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, and elsewhere. Moral outrage and a large dose of frustration and boredom seem to impel the search for meaning and adventure. Groups of friends and family originating from the same area “back home” in North Africa, the Middle East, or Central and Southern Asia, or from similar European housing projects and marginal neighborhoods, bond into action as they surf jihadi Web sites to find direction from Al Qaeda’s inspiration. Like the older waves of jihadis, however, most in this third wave show little or no prior religious education until becoming “born again” in their late teens or early adulthood.

This “new wave” pattern of increasing marginality and “born-again” religion is reflected in European and North African groups that express allegiance to Al Qaeda,
¹⁰
as well as foreign fighters who went to Iraq (41 percent from Saudi Arabia and 39 percent from North Africa) between summer 2006 and fall 2007. Many came in bunches from the same town, for example, more than 50 young volunteers from Darnah, Libya,
¹¹
according to West Point’s
Sinjar Report on Foreign Fighters in Iraq.
Consider some data given to me by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of the Interior. Between 2004 and 2006, Saudi forces killed more than 100 perpetrators of terrorist events in the kingdom. Of the remaining 60 who were captured and imprisoned, 53 were interviewed. Nearly two thirds of those in the sample said they joined jihad through friends and about a quarter said they did through family.

Compared to an earlier Saudi sample,
¹²
the newer wave tends to be somewhat younger (and more likely to be single), less educated and less financially well off, less ideological, and more prone to prior involvement in criminal activities unrelated to jihad, such as drugs, theft, and aggravated assault. They are much more likely to read jihadi literature in their daily lives than other forms of literature. They tend to look up to role models who stress violence in jihad, like the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, than to those who justify and limit violence through moral reasoning, such as the late Abdullah Azzam. A majority come to religion in their early twenties. In the older cohort there was little traditional religious education; however, the newer cohort tends to be less ideologically sophisticated and especially motivated by desire to avenge perceived injustices against Muslims. (When I asked detainees in Saudi Arabia who had volunteered for Iraq why they had, some mentioned stories of women raped, the killing of innocents, and desecrations of the Koran; all mentioned Abu Ghraib.)

We’ll explore this third wave of Qaeda wannabes at the Western edge of the Muslim world through case studies of the 2004 Madrid train bombings and related North African volunteers for martyrdom in Iraq, and then we’ll look at Pakistan and Afghanistan, homegrown threats to the homeland, and the problem of Palestine. But first, we’ll cast an eye on the first wave as it overlaps with the second wave at the eastern edge, in the October 2002 Bali bombings and other attacks spearheaded by militants of Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah.

Part III
WHITHER AL QAEDA? BALI AND MADRID

I call those who carried out these actions all mujahid. They all had good intentions, that is, jihad in Allah’s way…. They are right that America is the proper target because America fights Islam. So in terms of their objectives, they are right, and the target of their attacks was right also…. If they made mistakes, they are only human beings who can be wrong. Moreover, their actions could be considered self-defense … they didn’t attack because they defended themselves.

—ABU BAKR BA’ASYIR, ALLEGED EMIR OF JEMAAH
ISLAMIYAH, CIPINANG PRISON, JAKARTA, AUGUST 11, 2005
(AUTHOR’S INTERVIEW)

CHAPTER 8
FARHIN’S WAY

A
t 12:15
A.M.
on Saturday, November 8, 2008, in an orange grove on Nusakambangan Island off southern Java, three men convicted of plotting the October 12, 2002, Bali bombings that killed 202 people stood in front of a firing squad. Their last social act while alive was to shout words,
“Allahu Akbar”
(God is Greatest), at their executioners, who then shot them each dead through the heart. Family members of two of the men, Amrozi, forty-seven years old, and his older brother Ali Ghufron, aka Mukhlas, forty-eight, who had flown in for the execution from the family’s village of Tenggulun in eastern Java, were allowed to retrieve the bodies and bathe them, and to call home to say the deed was done.

Back at Tenggulun, a crowd of 200 had gathered to await the news in front of the Al-Islam religious boarding school, founded by the dead brothers’ father, to promote a
salaf
form of Islam in line with the teachings of the school’s patron, Abu Bakr Ba’asyir. “May our brothers, God willing, be invited by green birds to heaven now,” said one man in the crowd. Ba’asyir, once the emir of Jemaah Islamiyah, the secret organization of radical Islamists to which the brothers belonged, was also there. He had previously been jailed and sentenced to death but then was retried on a lesser charge of conspiracy and released the year before. The vice-president of Indonesia, who used to visit Ba’asyir in Cipinang Prison in Jakarta, said he couldn’t understand why such a pious man had been locked up at all, and besides he saw no proof that such a thing as Jemaah Islamiyah ever even existed. (The governing coalition of minority parties at the time could not afford to alienate even radical Islamist support or to do anything that might please the invaders of Muslim Iraq.)
¹

OPPOSITE: Farhin by the site of the Kompak-Jemaah
Islamiyah training camp he ran near Poso, Sulawesi.

On this execution day, Ba’asyir praised the bombers as mujahedin, echoing what he had said in my interview in Jakarta’s Cipinang Prison in the summer of 2005. All three plotters had expressed defiance over the bombings and repeatedly boasted of their willingness to die. Their only regret was that 38 Indonesian Muslims had perished in the attack on the holiday nightspots that killed 160 foreigners, including 88 Australians. “I don’t ask for forgiveness from infidels, I only ask for forgiveness from Muslims,” Mukhlas told the international media a month before he was executed.
²

Amrozi, dubbed by the media “the smiling assassin” for his ever-present Joker-like grin, laughed and jested with his interrogators. In court, he mocked the victims, except for the Muslims, and in press conferences smiled from ear to ear as he vowed retribution on America and infidels. But his most ecstatic grin came at the moment of his verdict, death, for which he was proud.

Back home, though, people remember the sunny smile of a friendly boy who often played pranks on his teachers and classmates. The fifth of thirteen children, Amrozi had no interest in schoolwork or studying the Koran and was expelled from junior high school. Although he said his father always wanted him to be a holy warrior, the good-looking lad liked motorbikes and taking girls on the back for a whirl. He was a whiz with his hands and became the local Mr. Fix-It, repairing everything from cell phones to cars. But he seemed to have no center.

That was never the case with his older brother, Mukhlas. From an early age, when he tended goats and began studying the Koran, Mukhlas decided that his way of life would be the ascetic and religious way, the way of the goat-tenders Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Mukhlas would later recall that as a fifteen-year-old in hormonal turbulence:

If it weren’t for Allah’s grace and direction … I’m sure I would have slipped. Because my classmates were a wicked lot…. I had to make acquaintance with adulterers and drinkers…. I was once locked in by my friends, locked in to be with a prostitute. I just waited. I just kept quiet. Praise be to Allah—Allah kept me safe…. I never neglected prayer and never touched those women.
³

Mukhlas’s prudishness and Amrozi’s grin were often taken as telltale signs in the popular press of some innate psychopathic flaw. In fact, Mukhlas became a happily married man, a loving father, kind to friends and students—most of whom had nothing to do with terrorism yet admired and even adored him. But Mukhlas, it seems, had always sought glory in the good fight for God, having found it first in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets and then back in Southeast Asia for the struggle over the region’s soul. Mukhlas was always a deeply moral man, and that is what drew others to his side. These included Amrozi, and another brother, Ali Imron, who would also be involved in the Bali plot though spared with a life sentence for showing remorse in court.