Nine Lives: My time as the West's top spy inside al-Qaeda

by Aimen Dean

  The Koran says of the Prophet: ‘We did not send you, except as a mercy to all the worlds.’ It is unconditional, universal. But the phrase ‘sent with the sword’ is part of a hadith that concerned a certain time and place long ago. Adnani and others in ISIS worked up toxic hybrids of prophecies whose sell-by dates have long passed, and fobbed them off on impressionable, adoring audiences.74

  In the course of my research in the past decade, I have found that many of the hadith commonly used by al-Qaeda and ISIS, including a significant number cited in this book, have dubious lineage – especially those containing prophecies about the emergence of the Mahdi and the Black Banners.* But very little has been done to challenge that illegitimacy.

  The initiative by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman in 2017 to establish a hadith centre in Medina overseen by senior Islamic scholars from around the world to ‘eliminate fake and extremist texts’ and curb interpretations put forward by terrorist groups to justify their violence was long overdue. A Saudi clerical official said the centre would strive ‘to learn and understand the hadith – to liberate people from the darkness of thought, the extremism and misinterpretation of the book of God and the teachings passed down to us through the Prophet’.75

  Ironically enough, the emergence of groups that would distort Islam was actually foretold. Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, warned:

  ‘If you see the black flags appearing then do not leave your homes. Stay where you are. Do not move an arm or a leg. For a people no-one cares about will appear. They will seek the truth. But they are never given the truth. Their hearts are as hard as iron. They are the founders of the State but they do not honor any covenant or agreement. Their hair is as long as women . . . They are known by the names of their villages and cities.’76

  Almost every word matches what the group led by al-Baghdadi came to represent. They were like the Khawarij (dissenters) of the seventh century. The Khawarij regarded themselves as the only true Muslims and their interpretation of Islam was merciless. They held that the women and children among disbelievers should be enslaved and the men put to death. That’s exactly what happened to the Yazidi minority in Iraq. The Khawarij emerged during times of upheaval and civil war, when the elite had become unjust. The Khawarij saw the earliest years of Islam as the perfect age and everything afterwards as a drift towards disbelief, some of them held that jihad was the sixth pillar of Islam.

  The Prophet identified the Khawarij as heretics. According to one contemporary account that is widely accepted, he said:

  ‘Towards the end of time, a group will emerge, young of age and simple of minds, who will speak the most beautiful words but whose faith does not go deeper than their throats. Wherever you find them you must kill them since those who will kill them will be rewarded on the day of Resurrection.’77

  With ISIS and al-Qaeda weaponizing the prophecies, Muslim scholars need to answer. Not to do so would be to surrender on a key field of battle. Tens of millions across the Muslim world have become fascinated with these sacred mysteries.

  Reclaiming the prophecies will be a challenging task because of the extremists’ skill at spinning the sacred texts into a theological web justifying their actions. ISIS and al-Qaeda have distorted the sacred texts of Islam. They have done so by cherry-picking the verses that suit their agenda and wildly extrapolating from others. I saw up close how al-Qaeda’s silver-tongued preachers did it and I abandoned their ranks because of it.

  Not all see it this way. In March 2015, the influential American magazine The Atlantic published a much-quoted cover story, ‘What ISIS Really Wants’, which extensively featured the viewpoint of the Lebanese-American scholar Bernard Haykel.

  ‘People want to absolve Islam,’ he said. ‘It’s this “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra. As if there is such a thing as “Islam”! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts . . . and these guys [ISIS] have just as much legitimacy as anyone else,’ he added, rejecting the notion the group had distorted the texts of Islam. ‘Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadis] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition.’

  Haykel is correct that the sacred texts of Islam, just like the Old Testament, contain verses espousing violence. In many cases, those texts described periods of war and brutal conflict. But I reject as a wildly inaccurate affront the argument that ‘these guys’ can claim legitimacy.

  The vast majority of the world’s nearly two billion Muslims are horrified by their crimes. The likes of ISIS have deceived tens of thousands of Muslims and disfigured our religion, but perhaps that was foretold.

  ‘The Antichrist will appear from a valley between Iraq and the Levant and will cause chaos and mayhem where he goes.’78

  Muslim communities have to do a better job of identifying, ostracizing and confronting the preachers of hate. Avoiding them, or muttering about them under our breath, is not enough.

  There must also be a still greater effort in the virtual sphere – where the extremist narrative, through videos, online lectures and applications such as Twitter and Telegram, frequently went unchallenged. There needs to be a more systematic response that leverages the know-how of technology companies to stifle the online space for extremism. How is it, for example, that the lectures of al-Qaeda’s most famous ideologue, Anwar al-Awlaki, whose siren call I heard in Dudley, could remain available on so many platforms for so long, even after his words proved inspirational in so many terror attacks in the West?

  Progress has been made in taking down the accounts of militant groups and their sympathizers. And we have to be realistic: stifling the online appeal of such groups can only achieve so much. Those intent on a stabbing rampage or driving a truck into a crowd don’t need guidance on the Internet, even if their online habits stoke their rage.

  The delivery of the counter-narrative is as important as its content. The pulpit, scholarly tracts embedded with Koranic verses, have roles to play but are not very effective vehicles. ISIS’s appeal among the disaffected young Muslims of European cities was based on slick multilingual videos, with high production values. It recognized, to put it bluntly, that most teenagers in the early twenty-first century have a three-minute attention span.

  You only need to look at the numbers on YouTube to know that what’s needed is a viral campaign of savvy and punchy two-minute videos undermining the message that has been propagated by ISIS and extremist preachers of all stripes. These must be produced by Muslims and taunt and mock such messaging, showing in graphic form its hypocrisy. Why, for example, was so little done to attack the savagery – and the utter absence of religious justification – when ISIS burned alive a Jordanian pilot in a cage? According to my sources, there was real disquiet within ISIS about both the crime and its propagation online, but too little was done to exacerbate the dissent. Prophecies like the one foretelling the emergence of an evil group flying the black banners could be used in these videos.

  Properly done, such a campaign has the potential to sow the seeds of doubt among those joining groups like ISIS. And it can help inoculate others who might be vulnerable to their message. This pool of the vulnerable, the impressionable, has expanded hugely because of the tide of foreign fighters who went to Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2016, some of whom have returned home true believers still. This cohort of foreign fighters who survived will be the officer class of the terrorist networks of the future.

  While the majority of the million plus refugees from Syria and other conflicts that have come into Europe in recent years have tried to assimilate, the large number of dislocated young Sunni men trying to make their way in a new society will be an attractive target for extremist proselytizers. In Iraq, ISIS groomed many thousands of young boys as ‘Cubs of the Caliphate’, indoctrinating them in ways we are only beginning to understand.

  These are all challenges of which we must be aware but not afraid. There are too many Muslims today who would rather bury their heads in th
e sand than confront the crisis of our faith. There is ultimately a stark choice for every one of us. Side with justice and humanity – regardless of religion, creed or colour. Or never give up a Muslim brother to non-Muslim authorities, no matter what they might be planning or might have done, and defend any and every action undertaken in the name of Islam, however un-Islamic.

  Beyond the ideological challenge, and the need to devise an ‘exit strategy’ for thousands of young men lured to al-Qaeda and ISIS, there needs to be root-and-branch reform in the Middle East. The Arab world is a swamp fed by corruption and the misconduct of elites, a lack of viable institutions, poor governance and ideological and sectarian rivalry. It is also awash with weapons. Swamps invite only mosquitoes and disease. Instead of draining the swamp, the outside world has competed to kill mosquitoes.

  So how do you drain the swamp? Better governance – which admittedly may seem like a hopeless quest at times – is a big part of the response. So is economic growth and political stability. And better education is also vital: the best way to ward off disease is inoculation.

  I believe it is necessary to establish stronger and more just nation states in the Arab and Muslim world. The prophet Mohammed himself stressed that safety, security and stability are blessings from God. This requires robust governing institutions working for the interests of the people and the rule of law. A healthy form of nationalism and patriotism – or in other words a sense of citizenry – is an antidote to the jihadi vision of a borderless Ummah and the chaos that it has produced.

  This does not mean trying to quickly graft democracy onto societies whose institutions are too weak to support it. It means embracing and adapting those forms of government that have offered stability within an Islamic framework. Balancing Islamic tradition and observances with the reality of the modern world is the best medium-term strategy to erode the appeal of ISIS, al-Qaeda and like-minded groups. It will likely take decades, but it has to start somewhere and sometime.

  To me that means developing and modernizing one of the few systems of government to provide a measure of stability in the Arab world. Monarchies in the Gulf, Jordan and Morocco have performed better than other forms of government in delivering progress and security to their citizens, even if they do suffer from a ‘democratic deficit’. They also have a legitimacy that’s often lacking among other forms of government.

  For sure, monarchies have their own secret police and less than stellar human rights records. We are not seeking perfection here: we are seeking a form of contemporary government that works for Muslims, and especially Arab Muslims. They are not going to become liberal democrats in our lifetimes – period.

  Secondly, we as Muslims have to begin to build some middle ground that allows rapprochement, co-existence at least, between Sunni and Shia. At the time of writing, it seems that the ‘rejectionists’, who trade insults and bomb each other’s places of worship, are invincible. In Iraq both Shia militias and ISIS have terrorized the population. In Syria, Hezbollah fighters, as well as Shia from Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan recruited into militia trained by Iran, have in their tens of thousands fought Sunni jihadis. In Yemen, Houthis backed by Iran have fought al-Qaeda fighters. In Saudi Arabia, ISIS suicide bombers targeted Shia areas to try to poison relations between the communities.

  There is a real risk larger scale sectarian conflict will break out across the Middle East, fuelling even more widespread extremism. Fundamentalist belligerents either side of the Sunni–Shia divide believe they are engaged in an end-of-days battle that will soon see the return of the Mahdi and an ultimate victory for their version of the faith. They view Syria as the epicentre of this struggle. Shia Muslims believe the Mahdi is the twelfth and last imam who will reappear from hiding after hundreds of years near the end of time to right the historical injustice suffered by the Shia.* Like ISIS or al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Shia militia of Iraq are willing to fight to the death to bring about the Mahdi’s return. As Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem put it, ‘Our actions but pave the way for Imam al-Mahdi’s emergence.’79

  It would be easy and tempting for governments to back the groups they identify as sectarian and ideological allies. But it will only deepen the fault lines that criss-cross the region.

  Modern history shows us that rapprochement need not be in the realms of fantasy. When Mohammad Khatami was president of Iran, he visited Saudi Arabia and signed a security pact with the Kingdom. King Fahd was effusive about Khatami’s reformist policies, and between 1997 and 2005 there was a genuine relationship between the two Gulf powers. It was driven in no small part by commerce. The family of former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had significant business interests on the other side of the Gulf and Rafsanjani himself visited Saudi Arabia to advance reconciliation. Then came the hostility of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who succeeded Khatami, and the deterioration of the regional situation.

  Hope

  I do not pretend for a moment that the challenges ahead are anything other than immense. Since 1979, the situation of the Ummah has deteriorated drastically, buffeted by centrifugal forces. An ‘arc of crisis’ has spread – like an eclipse – across a vast expanse of territory from the western Sahara to the rainforests and teeming cities of South East Asia. Violence in the name of Islam is one of the great challenges of our times. Entire communities have been wiped out on the killing fields of Syria and Iraq, millions banished from their homes. Skilled bomb-makers have honed their deadly craft in Yemen, operating with impunity in a collapsed state. In the years since I stood at Ibrahim’s grave on that late summer evening, the battle has only deepened; it has become more viscerally sectarian.

  But I live in hope. A year after I left Idlib, I married, after being introduced by friends to a strong, sympathetic and deeply spiritual woman. She was as modern as the fundamentalists were backward. At the beginning of our first date, I had a strange request for her.

  ‘Would you mind if I explain a few things – about my childhood and youth?’

  Three hours later I finished relating my journey from Khobar to Canary Wharf via too many battlefields. Her expression was – rather than one of shock or disappointment (or worse still boredom) – one of utter curiosity.

  ‘So you’re really something of a revolutionary,’ she said when I was done. And she continued to pepper me with questions.

  ‘Aren’t you frightened by all this?’ I asked at one point.

  She laughed.

  ‘Put it this way: if they come for us I will happily kill them.’

  As I arrived home that night, I was euphoric. I knew we were destined for a future together. Five months later we were married.

  And she told the wedding party in Dubai: ‘Just so everyone knows, if Aimen tries to make me wear a hijab, I will force him to wear one too.’

  I was recently blessed with becoming a father. My wife might be described – not surprisingly – as a lioness, fiercely protective of her family.

  My belief in God has never been stronger. The Islam I now follow is an Islam of private contemplation, spiritual reflection and study rather than communal worship. Long gone are the days I considered myself a Salafi. What I think important now is how you live your life and how you treat others. I believe God has provided guidance in both respects through the Koran, but no believer should call their religion the only pathway to God.

  I have seen plenty of goodwill and optimism among Muslims, in the crowded streets of Peshawar among people who have nothing, in the mosques of my hometown where Islam was taught as an uplifting force, among the young fighters of northern Syria who wanted above all to be freed from the repression of a vicious police state.

  I think of that quiet field near Saraqib every day, of my dearest nephew hastily laid to rest there, his grave unvisited and untended ever since that September day in 2013 when I stood by it in the gathering gloom.

  Like his father and (I hope) his uncle, Ibrahim was motivated not by blind hatred but by a hatred of injustice. I
n the words of the Koran,

  ‘Let not the hatred of a people swerve you away from justice. Be just, for this is closest to righteousness . . .’80

  If and when Muslims unite under this command, my religion will begin to heal.

  * After I encountered him in 2004, Binali became even more radical. He rounded on his former mentor, Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, the hardline Salafi cleric who had provided spiritual guidance to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in his early years. After ISIS declared a Caliphate, Binali became the group’s chief theologian, issuing fatwahs justifying its actions.1

  * A Guardian journalist who visited the site a month later found that Abu Khabab’s workshop did not suffer a direct hit. He found ‘a makeshift laboratory packed with bottles of poisons, including cyanide, bomb instruction manuals and . . . antiquated gas masks . . . strewn across the room’. In 2008 several unnamed US officials told the Los Angeles Times they believed Abu Khabab had a link to the development of the poison gas device al-Qaeda planned to deploy in New York. They, of course, knew this because of my intelligence.2

  * Abu Muslim claimed his British passport had been cancelled in 2013, tweeting: ‘I just wana thank the Home Secretary Theresa May 4 taking my British Citizenship away.’6

  ** I was also told by intelligence sources that Abu Muslim was regarded as particularly skilled in electronics and circuitry and had provided training in bomb circuitry to ISIS members with some grasp of English, including recruits from Europe and North America. Intelligence about the plan to create laptop bombs led to a ban on laptops in aeroplane cabins on certain Middle East flights to the United States and the UK for several months in 2017. The bans were lifted after enhanced screening measures were put into place.7

  ** After being released by the CIA, Ghul was killed by a US drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt in 2012.8