I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  “I’m Muslim. I will respect the rules. Could we just have a cup of tea?”

  He agreed to meet me for tea at a shop near the mosque the following afternoon, provided I did not tape the conversation. I was about to take the first tentative steps into a world I haven’t left since.

  I had so many questions, not least how I was going to talk to him. Again, I wore the typical clothes of a German university student: jeans, sneakers, a shirt, and a jacket. He arrived wearing Arab trousers and a tunic. He had a long beard and looked solemn.

  “Are you Souad?” he asked before sitting down. “We didn’t do anything. We had nothing to do with this. We cannot prevent people from going to the mosque. They came sometimes, they prayed, they ate.”

  I showed al Hajj photographs of the men who had participated in the attacks. He studied them carefully. “That’s el-Amir,” he said, pointing to Atta, whose full given name was Mohamed el-Amir Atta. Al Hajj said he knew that people were going to say it was our religion that inspired the attacks.

  We talked pleasantly for a while, and somehow he took a liking to me. He told me about a place nearby, a bookstore, where Atta and his group sometimes met.

  I felt I was making some progress and was relieved that the task of gathering information wasn’t insurmountable. In fact, it seemed pretty straightforward. But I also worried that I was being given a bad lead. Ten minutes after al Hajj left, I went to the bookstore, which stood around the corner from the mosque.

  The bookstore was one big room with wooden floors and wooden bookshelves. Books for women and children were kept in a small area in back, separated from the main room by a curtain. There were books in Arabic, German, and English. Two men greeted me. I introduced myself to the younger one, who looked to be in his early thirties, and told him I was a freelance journalist trying to figure out what had happened. It helped that, like him, I spoke a Moroccan dialect of Arabic.

  “No journalists have come to us here,” he said. “I’m wondering why you came.”

  I asked if he knew Atta and the others.

  “They came in sometimes. They were normal people.”

  “Why did they do this?”

  “They became political. Ask the Americans why they have killed people in Iraq and Palestine.”

  The man told me that he was from Casablanca and that he hadn’t been religious before. “My brother was a bartender,” he said, as if to drive home his secular credentials. At some point, while he was on vacation with his German wife, he had a strong feeling that his life wasn’t proceeding as it should. Both he and his brother became religious, and they invested all their money in the bookstore. Over time, they and other young men their age became Atta’s acolytes, praying and studying together and moving in the same circles.

  On the day I visited, a bunch of students were sitting in the bookstore talking politics and criticizing Israel. They told me they weren’t speaking against the American people, because “we know the people are good,” but against America’s involvement in the Middle East.

  “If Israel’s the country you have a problem with, why are you attacking the United States?” I asked.

  “The Americans are supporting the Israelis,” one of the men said.

  It seemed that they blamed the United States reflexively for everything that was wrong in the world. And one word kept coming up: jihad.

  “What exactly do you mean by jihad?” I finally asked.

  “You have the right to defend yourself,” a Moroccan student told me.

  “Who attacked you personally?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “They attacked us.”

  “Morocco was not attacked.”

  “We don’t think as Moroccans,” he said. “We think as Muslims.”

  I began to understand that I was entering a world from which my parents had always tried to protect me. As a journalist, it was my job to report what was going on in these men’s minds and to explain it to others. This was just the beginning.

  Another man, an Egyptian, seemed suspicious of my questions. “Why do you want to know these things?” he asked. “Who really wants to know the truth? Didn’t people see the truth all these years, and they did nothing? These men took a decision, based on the truth.”

  I knew after talking with these men that I wanted to know the truth and that I hadn’t found it yet. Days passed, and I continued to explore and talk to people. The Steindamm neighborhood was only the first of many surprises. I’ll never forget my first interview with the father of Mounir el-Motassadeq, an alleged September 11 collaborator, in Hamburg that fall. I wore a suit, thinking I would look professional. But when I met the man who’d set up the interview, he eyed me dismissively.

  “Don’t you have something to wear on top?” he asked. “You can see everything from the back. Where’s your head scarf?”

  I went to a Pakistani shop and bought a very long shirt and some scarves.

  At another mosque where Atta and his comrades had prayed, I heard about the wars in Bosnia and the Arabian Gulf from an entirely new perspective. I had thought the United States was protecting Muslims in those wars. But for the first time, I was talking to people who hated America, and they saw Western intervention differently. They believed that the United States and its European allies were only interested in economic gain and were forcing their “system” and “way of life” upon others. Some mentioned what the United States had done in South America, specifically that “they killed Che Guevara and others because they didn’t like U.S. imperialism.” These men also accused America of supporting a “genocide against the Palestinians” for decades. To them, the United States was “the big Satan.”

  I also began hearing a narrative about the meaning and spirit of Islam that was very different from what I’d grown up with. Like my parents, I believed that religion should be separated from politics. Suddenly I found myself among people whose religion and political views were hopelessly intertwined. At first, the Hamburg connection to the September 11 attacks had baffled me. But the more time I spent there, the more certain I grew that Mohamed Atta and the others had been radicalized and recruited in Germany.

  People on Steindamm described Atta as an austere man, strict in his thinking and quick to point out religious lapses in others. He chastised Muslims for their love of music and for smoking cigarettes. He and his cell were not sleeper agents. Atta was known in the city, as were some of his friends. But he’d operated out of sight of German authorities in this parallel world. I found it extraordinary that no one in the security or intelligence services had noticed such extremism.

  Despite my naïveté, I did have some advantages, even then. The al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, where Atta and his circle had prayed often, was run by Moroccans. They had long beards, unlike anyone in my family, but the fact that I spoke Moroccan Arabic helped a lot—and not just with the Moroccans.

  That fall in Hamburg, I was out for a walk when I happened to meet the head of Der Spiegel’s investigative unit, who had spoken at my journalism school the previous year. He asked who I was working for.

  “Nobody now,” I said.

  “But you speak Arabic,” he responded.

  Der Spiegel was Germany’s most famous weekly magazine, with a reputation for integrity and courage. It was one of the media outlets I most respected. In 1962, its editors had been accused of treason for printing a story that criticized the country’s military readiness. The magazine’s founder had been imprisoned along with several top editors and reporters. It ultimately emerged that the defense minister had lied about his role in the affair, and he was forced to resign.

  The magazine had a staff of top-notch reporters but needed someone with access to the Arab communities in Germany. The editor passed my name along, and I became a stringer for the magazine—contributing stories but not yet on staff. It was a huge break, the kind of lucky happenstance that can make a young reporter’s career.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that someone from the m
agazine had called the German security services and asked if I had “a clean sheet.” Did my family have links to any terrorist groups? How religious were my parents? Was I attending mosque, hanging out with the wrong people? Was I part of a sleeper cell, another Mohamed Atta in the making? As a Muslim and the daughter of migrants, I was automatically suspect in Germany, the country of my birth.

  I threw myself into my work for Der Spiegel’s investigative team. I soon grew interested in a nineteen-year-old German convert to Islam named Dennis Justen, an ordinary teenager from a Frankfurt suburb. Justen had become an observant Muslim seemingly overnight, fasting for Ramadan and breaking up with his girlfriend. His parents didn’t think much of the changes until one day he disappeared. In September 2001, he was arrested trying to illegally cross the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan and interrogated by the FBI. I called an editor and told him I wanted to interview Justen’s parents. The magazine had tried several times to talk to them, but they had refused. I wasn’t sure I could convince them either, but I was deeply curious and felt obligated to try.

  This editor wanted the interview with Justen’s parents, but he wasn’t keen on my involvement. “It’s better you stay away from this,” he answered. “If this involved a mosque or Islamic bookstore, you could do it. But these are German parents.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me here,” I answered.

  “Well, if I imagine myself in their shoes and see someone like you knocking on my door, I would think you might be a spy for the Taliban,” he said.

  Once more, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I wanted to throw up. It seemed that my own colleagues and editors didn’t trust me. I knew this editor wouldn’t support the extension of my contract and that it was just a matter of time before I would have to leave the magazine. So I decided to prove him wrong. That evening, on my own, I drove to Dennis Justen’s parents’ home. I found his grandfather there, who spoke with the parents on my behalf. I met with them that same night. The next day, they agreed to the interview. I wrote the story with a colleague in the Frankfurt office.

  I called the editor. “See, they didn’t think that I was a spy for the Taliban,” I told him.

  My hope was that he would understand how much his comment had hurt me and that the next reporter of Muslim descent to work for the magazine wouldn’t face the same prejudices.

  * * *

  MY EARLY EXPERIENCES with journalism devastated me and gave me a sense of the alienation and rejection that so many Muslims in Europe were feeling. But I didn’t let my feelings deter me from my search for what was really happening on the streets. I remained interested in understanding how young Arab men could be brainwashed in the country of my birth—and often their birth as well. Sometime that fall, I called al Hajj again.

  “I would like to see the mosque,” I said.

  “Don’t let anyone know you are a journalist,” he advised. “Do you have a hijab? You know, Sister Souad, you will have to wear one.”

  I told him not to worry. As I entered the mosque, it felt strange to be walking in the literal footsteps of Mohamed Atta. My heart started to beat faster. I couldn’t look into the faces of the people who were there to pray. I thought they would be able to see that I was a reporter.

  To me, a mosque was an imposing building with a minaret. Here was a mosque on the same street as sex shops, with prostitutes standing outside. The nondescript building occupied a seedy area near the Hamburg train station, right across from a police station. The men’s prayer room was a study in color, with brightly colored carpets and turquoise walls in a sprawling room built for hundreds. By comparison, the women’s prayer room was plain and cramped.

  After praying, I ducked into the mosque’s library. In it were videotapes of Imam Mohamad Fizazi, a fiery preacher from Tangier and one of the biggest influences on Atta. “The Jews and Crusaders must have their throats slit,” the imam said in a sermon videotaped at al-Quds. At the mosque I spoke to an Egyptian and a Moroccan who had known Atta and the others. I asked why their friends became radicalized and why they ended up killing all those people. The Egyptian told me that I’d been “brainwashed by the Western media, which isn’t surprising because you ended up working with them. Look at all these tens of thousands of Muslims who have died for years now, and they are not even mentioned in the media.” Atta and the other hijackers, he said, had “paid America back for what they and the Jews have done to us all these years.”

  I was a bit shocked, but also very young. If that’s how they think, I thought, I’ll just need to spend more time with them to understand.

  Soon I moved back to Frankfurt, balancing my freelance journalistic work with my studies. I also started attending a major terrorism trial there. The case involved five Algerians who had been accused of plotting to blow up the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France, in December 2000, nine months before September 11. Most of these men had spent time in training camps in Afghanistan, and I wanted to understand who they were and why they’d made the choices they did. Sometimes I wrote articles for one of the Frankfurt papers or reported for the radio station, but it was really my own curiosity that made me keep showing up.

  During a break in the proceedings, at a nearby coffee shop, I ran into some American journalists. One of them was Shannon Smiley, an American who worked in the Washington Post’s Berlin bureau as an assistant to the correspondent and stringer. She spoke German, and I’d talked to her before at the courthouse. There was also a guy from the Associated Press, someone from the Chicago Tribune, and a woman from Reuters. And there was another reporter I hadn’t met before: Peter Finn, the Post’s Berlin bureau chief and an important contributor to its global terrorism coverage.

  “The Watergate Washington Post?” I asked when I was introduced to Peter. He smiled. I couldn’t believe that I was sitting with a senior correspondent from that paper. I asked if Woodward and Bernstein were as good-looking in real life as the actors in the movie. Peter and Shannon laughed.

  Back then I barely spoke English. But with Shannon’s help, we chatted about Hamburg, and I told them about some of the people I had gotten to know there.

  “Interesting,” Peter said.

  A week later, Shannon called me and said that Peter had a proposal and wanted to meet me. My heart was beating very fast when I walked into the breakfast room of the Steigenberger airport hotel that day in May 2002. Peter stood up to greet me. He said that he was working on a piece for the Washington Post about the Hamburg cell. It was supposed to be the main story in the paper one year after the September 11 attacks.

  “Would you work with me on this?” he asked.

  I was close to tears. After all I’d been through with the German media, here was a Washington Post reporter asking if I would work with him on a story. I’d been burned before. During my time in Hamburg, I’d seen how some reporters would press Arab students, using incriminating photos of them with the September 11 hijackers and telling them the photos would be printed if they didn’t agree to an interview. I was cautious about working with Peter. “Would it include blackmailing Arab students?” I asked.

  “We don’t do that,” he told me. “You have to follow the ethical principles of the paper.” He explained that we always told people who we were working for. We couldn’t blackmail sources. This was the beginning of a new path into the world of journalism, one I’d always dreamed about.

  For this new assignment I had to go back to al-Quds. I wanted to know if this was a place people could go into and come out as terrorists. I wanted to know what was taught there. Where in my religion did it say that Muslims had a right to kill innocent people?

  I returned to Hamburg, speaking with young men who had known the September 11 pilots, going to the places they had gone, reading the same strict interpretations of the Koran and books about how a Muslim should behave in the West that they had read. I no longer felt nervous or out of place on Steindamm.

  I learned how Atta an
d his group operated and how they were influenced by Bosnian and Afghan war veterans who were affiliated with Al Qaeda. I learned how their plot had unfolded here in plain view.

  On September 11, 2002, I entered the world of American journalism as a named contributor on a long piece in the Washington Post headlined “Hamburg’s Cauldron of Terror.” After what felt like a long journey, I had, in a sense, arrived. But I had much farther to go.

  * * *

  ONE COLD FALL day later that year, I joined a crowd of journalists from around the world standing in line outside a courthouse in Hamburg. We had been told to arrive four hours early for the chance to score a press pass to cover the trial of the first man accused of direct involvement in the September 11 attacks: Mounir el-Motassadeq, a twenty-eight-year-old Moroccan student in Hamburg who had been a friend of Mohamed Atta’s and a signatory to his will. Prosecutors said that Motassadeq was a moneyman for the Hamburg cell, paying rent and utility bills for a hijacker named Marwan al-Shehhi, and sending money to him in America. Motassadeq was charged with more than three thousand counts of being an accessory to murder and belonging to a terrorist organization. He said he had no prior knowledge of the plot. If convicted, he could spend up to fifteen years in prison.

  After the September 11 anniversary story, the Washington Post had put me on contract. I also began to take intensive English-language classes, so I could contribute not only as a researcher but also as a writer. As one of my first tasks for the Post, Peter Finn sent me to get our accreditation to the Motassadeq trial. But as I stood freezing alongside correspondents, cameramen, and producers from Asia, the Arab world, and all the big American news organizations, I had no inkling that covering the Motassadeq trial would change my life. It would propel me into a war zone, and from there into the heart of jihadi networks, including the Islamic State.

  The trial was supposed to last several months. Peter and I attended the first few sessions, then moved on to other stories. We returned to Hamburg some weeks later, when the relatives of several September 11 victims arrived to testify. Among the most impressive was Maureen Fanning, whose husband was a firefighter who had died at the World Trade Center. Fanning struck me as strong and determined. She had two autistic sons, and with her husband gone, she’d had to send the fourteen-year-old to live in a group home while she cared for the six-year-old, who could not read, write, or speak. Like the other victims’ relatives, she was still waiting to see what kind of support she would get from the U.S. government. It was her first time in Hamburg, and after hearing her testimony, some of us invited her out to dinner.