Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (25 page)

Members of the group met and prayed at several neighborhood mosques in Madrid, including the Takouma mosque in Villaverde on the city’s outskirts. The substitute imam, Abdelkader el Farssaoui, or Cartagena, curried favor with the men. His role was duplicitous. He harbored jihadi sympathies but he was also a police informant. Beginning in October 2002, Cartagena began informing the police Central Unit of External Information (UCIE) about the informal group of young North Africans that now called itself Al Harakat Salafiyah (the Salafi Movement), which he described as “Takfiri.” The group included Zougam, Maymouni, the Tunisian, and newcomer Faisal Allouch. Cartagena testified that the group met “clandestinely, with no regularity or fixed place, by oral agreement and without any schedule, though usually on Fridays” at Allouch’s apartment to chant jihadi songs and watch videos of jihadi preaching and of atrocities committed against Muslims.

Maymouni initiated the meetings, advising who in the group needed to commit which verses to memory. His role was similar to that of the deacon in American Protestant churches, who warms up the room by leading the congregation in gospel and traditional prayers. Stepping into the role of mind-shaping pastor was the Tunisian, who transported those gathered through a series of reflections on the tragedies of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya, and elsewhere, conveyed in ways that regularly brought the group near tears. He had found his passion.

Maymouni offered the hand of his fifteen-year-old sister, who worked as a seamstress in the M-30 mosque, to the Tunisian. He married her in November 2002. Soon, by force of personality, intellect, fervor, and knowledge of the Koran, the Tunisian emerged as the group’s de facto leader. After eliciting moral outrage at the barbarous actions of the enemies of Islam, he demanded actions from the group to carry out violent justice and to right perceived wrongs against Muslims. He also took individuals aside to personally discuss what each might do for the cause. According to Cartagena, although they now had “reached the conclusion that they had to undertake jihad,” they really had no idea where or how do to it.

Rabei Ousmane Sayed Ahmed, “the Egyptian,” now came into the picture. The Egyptian helped to convince the group that they should concentrate their desire to wage jihad closer to home, in Morocco or Spain, where they had the material resources to do something, rather than in Afghanistan or Chechnya.

Again, from Cartagena’s testimony on March 7, 2007:

PROSECUTION: The written statement that you presented … talks of what you called the last supper or last meeting with Serhane ben Abdelmajid [the Tunisian]…. In this last meeting, did Serhane show any intention of committing attacks?

CARTAGENA: No, committing attacks, no, but the meeting was very extraordinary, very strange, because we had met many times with him and he hadn’t done anything like he did this time. First, he asked us to disconnect our mobile phones, including taking the batteries out. We all did that, but he even went to check telephone by telephone: “Give me yours. Let’s see if you took it out right. Give me yours. Give me yours.” When the setting was more or less ready, he recited a bit from the Koran and said, “What we want are martyrs; we don’t want troops, we don’t want to prepare people to go to Afghanistan, or Chechnya, or other places of conflict. We need martyrs who are ready where they are. If one lives in France, then he’s prepared for France; if one lives in Spain, then he’s prepared for Spain. Who’s prepared?” Everybody raised their hand, including me.

Although the Tunisian and a few friends may have had the motivation to carry out an attack, they had neither the means nor the know-how. The Tunisian continued to traffic in stolen electronic goods in Lavapies, justifying his actions with the concept of
fa’i,
which allows otherwise unlawful actions, like theft, against infidels for the good of Muslims.

The doer: Jamal Ahmidan, el Chino (the Chinaman).

Jamal Ahmidan was a short young man (a bit over 160 cm, or five four) with buck teeth and intense almond-shaped eyes that earned him the name el Chino, the Chinaman. He made sure everyone knew that bigger men would never get the better of him. The Chinaman’s friends say that above all he wanted respect and believed having money and being tough would gain him that. One acquaintance recalled: “He would insult people in front of their girlfriends, and you might flatten him, but then you had better be prepared for a crusade.” An investigator told us: “He was a little guy, but no matter how big you were, if the Chinaman said he would kill you, you’d believe him and shit in your pants.”

He acted quickly, surprisingly, and without hesitation, with a knife, a gun, or a bomb. When he decided on something, he wouldn’t let go until the deed was done—like a bulldog—whatever it was. Eventually, he would identify his own struggle for respect with that of oppressed Muslims everywhere, and he raved that he was chosen by God to be their champion and kill Jews. But he was pretty much a loner and a loose cannon until he met the Tunisian in the early fall of 2003. Together, the Chinaman and the Tunisian, the doer and the dreamer, planned and executed the most spectacular terrorist attack since 9/11.

The Chinaman was the fourth of fourteen children raised in a cement-block house on the Rue Boujmaa’, just off Shaari’a Mamoun, the main market street in Jamaa Mezuak, the backdoor barrio of Tetuán, Morocco. He dropped out of high school to work with his father, but they quarreled. The Chinaman didn’t like rising early and was fed up with his father always telling him to “live honestly by the sweat of your brow.” He had bigger plans, and after having knifed to death someone who he said tried to steal his ring, followed in the footsteps of an older brother, who was already a successful drug trafficker.

The Chinaman told the Spanish authorities that he was an Algerian. There was a bloody civil war going on in Algeria at the time, so he knew he wouldn’t be deported to Algeria. He made his way to the Spanish mainland and the capital, Madrid. Meanwhile in Morocco, he was sentenced to twenty years in absentia.

Because the Chinaman was now a wanted criminal, he could never use his real name in Spain, and that had a significant effect on him and his activities: He was confined to the underworld and always on the watch. At first, he seemed just to want to glow among the denizens of the deep. He zipped around on a motorcycle and sported fancy clothes. Then, in 1992, he met a fifteen-year-old Christian girl named Rosa who had been on crack since she was twelve. They fell in love and he became a junkie, too.

During the Chinaman’s junkie phase, his friends said he was capable of anything and really didn’t care whether he got killed or not. Rosa said the big problem was tranquilizers. He’d get high on cocaine, making sure some nightclub stayed open all night for his friends, then take downers and say, “If I die, I deserve it.” Once, while he and Rosa were walking to the Plaza del Dos de Mayo, the Chinaman downed a few pills. Someone he knew came up to him. He was a pest, so the Chinaman took out a knife and stabbed the guy in the stomach. The wounded man survived and dropped charges in return for a dose of smack.

The police described the Chinaman at the time as the “head of a small criminal gang dealing in heroin.” Many of the small-time Moroccan dealers, junkies, and ex-cons worked for him, dealing in 5-, 10-, 20-gram doses. He was caught and sentenced to eighteen months. In jail, the Chinaman got hooked on heroin himself. But in the spring of 1995, with Rosa five or six months pregnant, he decided to kick his addiction cold turkey with the support of people at a local mosque. There he found religion, and now his mission in Lavapies was to save his fellow Muslim junkies, including the three Oulad Akcha brothers from his home barrio of Mezuak.

The Chinaman convinced Rachid and Mohammed Oulad Akcha to quit. Khalid Oulad Akcha resisted. Khalid would always remain wary of the Chinaman, though the two continued to deal together. Mohammed and Rachid became devoted to the Chinaman, willing to place their lives on the line for him. In Madrid’s underworld of petty criminals, they were dubbed the Chinaman’s bodyguards.

After the Chinaman kicked his drug habit, he became a serious businessman. During 1999–2000 he was dealing in Ecstasy from the Netherlands. The price of making a tablet in Holland was the equivalent of 100 pesetas (.60 euro). The selling price of a tablet on the streets of Madrid was 2,000 pesetas (12 euros). The Chinaman imported lots of 30,000 to 50,000 tablets and sold them for 465 pesetas a tablet, sometimes making the equivalent of a couple of hundred thousand dollars a deal. No longer simply small-time, the Chinaman was now a big shot in his criminal underworld. In Amsterdam, he asked some Moroccan radicals in mosques if it was permissible to sell drugs, and he was told he could sell them to “atheists” to “fuck them up,” even if it killed them—
fa’i,
again. He also got a BMW 318 out of it.

Another of the Chinaman’s operations was obtaining false documents for illegal immigrants, especially Chileans, according to Rosa. On March 25, 2000, police nabbed the Chinaman for this. Under the name Said Tildni, he was locked up in the Madrid Center for Internment of Foreigners. The center’s chief inspector wrote of his new prisoner:

He called the officials “Sons of a Whore” and threatened them with death once he got out of the Center. Later, in a private conversation, he claimed that he had millions coming from drugs, but that he had been chosen by Allah to benefit his people and lead them; he went on to say that, because he had no fear of dying, he was nothing less than invincible, and that his grand illusion was to march on Israel to kill Jews. In another moment of the conversation, he threatened to goad his companions into a hunger strike if his “great mission” was disturbed. It appeared that we found ourselves, if not before a religious fanatic, at least before a megalomaniac with twisted mental faculties that could imperil the peace and social stability in this Center.
⁶

The Chinaman escaped from the detention center on April 4, more interested now in fighting for Islam than in making money. But where and how to fight?

According to
New York Times
reporter Andrea Elliot, who interviewed some of the Chinaman’s family and friends:

One day, while traveling in Holland, he called his brothers and told them to set fire to his cars. “Life is worth nothing,” Chino told his brother Mustafa. “We won’t live long.” (They ignored the instruction. “Mustafa likes cars,” one brother explained.) … He began sending cash to the mother of the man he had stabbed in Tetouan. He continued to drink and do drugs. But his drunken binges sometimes ended with him crying over the stabbing and the mother of the victim. One of his Madrid friends, Abdelilah el Fadwal el Akil, recalled, “He would say that it was his fault she had lost a son, and that the least he could do was take care of her.” Akil wrote to me from a Spanish prison, where he was being held as a defendant in the Madrid bombing trial.
⁷

The Chinaman decided to visit his family in Morocco. He left Rosa and the baby behind and took the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 euros with him to take care of the charges against him. That apparently wasn’t enough. He was arrested and jailed for murder, but never tried. No one, it seems, would dare testify against him.

The Chinaman’s family hired one of Tetuán’s better-known criminal lawyers, Mourad Elkharraz, who recounted that during the Chinaman’s three years in prison in Morocco, his client went from sporting jewelry and jeans, and cursing up a storm, to what the people of Mezuak describe as “going Afghan,” in emulation of the pious and heroic mujahedin who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. That means wearing not the refined Moroccan robe, but a coarse cotton tunic and pants. It also means that one is preparing for jihad.

The Chinaman’s drug-dealing buddy Abdelilah finally paid off the last 10,000 euros to get his friend out of prison, and by late July 2003, the Chinaman was back in Madrid. Rosa remembered that day well:

He called me and said, “Come down.” “Where?” “To the door.” I almost died when I saw him; I was shaking. I was in love and I still am. I mean, I know what he’s done. It’s very hard to say. You can’t control your feelings…. Shit, I saw him arriving at Lavapies when he came out of prison, taking all the drug addicts to pray at the mosque. And I said, “But where are you going, Jamal?” Many times I’ve thought,
Was he a psychopath?
But how could he be two things, what I saw, and something different?
⁸