Al Qaeda in Europe

by Lorenzo Vidino

  28. Tribunal of Milan, Indictment of Muhamad Majid and others.

  29. Tribunal of Milan, Evidence on Mohamed Daki.

  30. By "the best brothers," Merai means the militants arrested in the earlier Italian investigations that led to the arrests of members of the Ben Khemais cell and of Remadna and Chekkouri. Most individuals convicted for terrorism-related crimes serve their sentences in the San Vittore penitentiary in downtown Milan.

  31. Brahim was later identified as the Guinean national Bah Ibrahima, the librarian of the Via Quaranta mosque.

  32. Tribunal of Milan, Indictment of Muhamad Majid and others.

  33. John Leicester, "Madrid Bombing Probe Sharpens Focus on al-Qaida Connection amid Reports of Five Moroccan Suspects," AP, March 16, 2004.

  34. Tribunal of Milan, Evidence on Mohamed Daki.

  35. Tribunal of Milan, Indictment of Muhamad Majid and others.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Ibid. According to intelligence reports, Mullah Fouad left Syria in 2004. British and Turkish authorities are thought to believe that Mullah Fouad's network in Syria was actively involved in planning the November 2003 bombings in Istanbul of two synagogues, a British bank, and the British consulate.

  38. Tribunal of Milan, Indictment of Muhamad Majid and others.

  39. Carlos Fonseca, "Fresh Clues about Al-Qa'idah's `Spanish Network,"' Tempo de Hov, September 1, 2003. Accessed via FBIS.

  40. Indictment of Reda Zerroug and others, Audiencia Nacional, Madrid, January 14, 2005.

  41. Fonseca, "Fresh Clues about Al-Qa'idah's `Spanish Network."'

  42. Indictment of Reda Zerroug and others.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Sean O'Neill, "Extradition for 9/11 Suspect Linked to London Ricin Flat," Times of London, June 3, 2005.

  45. Victor L. Simpson, "European Militant Network Shut Down," AP, December 19, 2003.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE IRAQI JIHAD

  God favored the [Islamic] nation with jihad on His behalf in the land of Mesopotamia.'

  -Abu Musab al Zarqawi (January 2004)

  As the United States came closer to launching its attack, Ansar al Islam and the situation in Iraq began to attract the attention of Islamists based in Europe. Many Kurdish and Arab sympathizers donated money to Ansar al Islam before the beginning of the Iraq war. The group even had a Web site (www.ansarislam.com) that posted information on its activities in Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, and English. But while money was important for its operations, what Ansar al Islam needed most were fighters-particularly suicide bombers, as the conversation in which Mullah Fouad requested kamikazes, "those who were in Japan," showed.

  Another telling phone call was intercepted on March 16, just three days before the beginning of the hostilities in Iraq. A militant named Yahia in Kurdistan called Mohammed Hammid, one of the Kurds based in Parma:'

  Yahia: When are you coming?

  Hamid: I hope by the end of May. I wanted to come sooner but I have problems with work.

  Yahia: Did you know that Abdallah was killed in Kurdistan?

  Hamid: Yes, yes, I was told.

  Yahia: How is the situation of the Muslims over there [in Europe]? What do they think of the situation [i.e., the upcoming war in Iraq]?

  Hamid: Now that the Americans have decided to go to war against Iraq there are many communities of Moroccans and Tunisians that are getting ready to go and fight against the Americans ... their blood is hot ... this thing that they [the Americans] want to do [i.e., invading Iraq] will be a good thing for the future of the Muslims!

  Hammid's assessment at the eve of war would be confirmed by the events on the ground in Iraq in the following months. Though some young Muslims living in Europe reached the Kurdish camps before the war to train with Ansar al Islam, the number of European Muslims who decided to travel to Iraq soared as the war began. "Iraq is the motor.... It's making them all go crazy, want to be shaheed [martyrs]," commented a French counterterrorism official.'

  In the first days of war, American forces pounded suspected Ansar al Islam facilities in northern Iraq and destroyed its training camps. After the bombings, American Special Forces and the peshmerga (the Kurdish fighters allied to the United States) combed the Kurmal training camp, looking for clues on the group's activities. The evidence uncovered in Kurmal showed the extent of Ansar al Islam's recruitment efforts outside Iraq. American forces and their Kurdish allies found bags of documents belonging to militants from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Sudan, United States, and several European countries. Soldiers also found copies of training manuals that had commonly been used by al Qaeda in its Afghan camps.'

  The American operation against Ansar al Islam can be considered only a partial success. The massive bombardment unquestionably destroyed the group's sanctuary and killed many of its operatives. Yet hundreds of other Ansar al Islam members, anticipating the American attack, had left the camps before the bombings started. The complacency of Iranian border guards allowed most of them to cross into Iran, where they regrouped near the border.

  Early in the conflict, when Saddam Hussein was still in power and the regular Iraqi army was trying to resist the pressure of the American infantry, the allied forces seemed to be engaged in a conventional war. Members of Ansar al Islam were trying either to blend in with the civilian population in Kurdistan or to regroup in Iran. Foreign volunteers had been seen in Baghdad before the war, but they did not carry out any significant attack in the first weeks of the war. Only after the fall of Saddam's regime, when American forces thought that the difficult part was over, did the activities of the terrorists begin. According to American military intelligence, Ansar al Islam members crossed the border from Iran back into Iraq and began spreading in small groups throughout the country. While some remained in the group's original area, Kurdistan, many made their way to Baghdad and the so-called Sunni Triangle-the central part of the country, where American forces have encountered the stiffest resistance. The terrorists who had trained in the Kurdish camps before the war were joined by more foreign volunteers, who crossed the border into Iraq from Jordan and Syria to fight US forces.

  Militants from throughout the Middle East streamed into the country with the intention of waging jihad against "the infidel occupier." Most of the volunteers came from neighboring countries, with Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia reportedly sending the largest number of fighters. Estimates vary, but reliable reports put at about two thousand the total number of foreign fighters present in Iraq in January 2005, just before the country's landmark elections. Muslims from Europe represent just a small fraction of the total number of jihadis, but they, too, have been reported fighting in Iraq.

  Evidence gathered by American and Italian military intelligence in Iraq has revealed the effectiveness of the Milan network in recruiting suicide bombers, those "who can hit the ground and make the iron come out of it," as Mullah Fouad called them. According to military reports, at least five militants who had left Milan for Iraq have died in suicide attacks against US forces. One of them was Lotfi Rihani, a Tunisian who was well known to Italian authorities, as he had been indicted in Italy for his role in the cell headed by Essid Sami Ben Khemais. Rihani had lived in Milan and worshiped at the city's Islamic Cultural Institute; he had been photographed outside the ICI by DIGOS in August 2002, when he met with Hammid and Mohammed Amin Mostafa, the two Kurds from Parma, and with Mullah Fouad, two months before Mullah Fouad left for Syria. Authorities believe that Rihani arranged the details of his journey to Iraq at that time. Rihani died in September 2003, when, accompanied by two other Tunisians, he drove a car laden with explosives against US forces.' Another man recruited by Merai in Milan, Fahdal Nassim, apparently also died in Iraq in a suicide attack. An uncorroborated intelligence report suggests that Nassim may have participated in the August 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed twenty-two people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN's special envoy to Iraq.'

  Another Milan-based militant who died in Iraq is Morc
hidi Kamal. The twenty-four-year-old Moroccan, another member of the Ben Khemais cell, reportedly was killed in October 2003 during an attack on Baghdad's Rashid Hotel. The likely target was US Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who was staying at the hotel on the night the terrorists struck. Kamal's documents were found in the rubble of the Ansar al Islam camp in Kurmal after the facility was bombed by US forces, along with the passports of two other militants who had lived in Milan, Hamsi Said and Yousfi Ben Tijani.7 And the shipment of documents continued even after the war began. Months after the start of the conflict, a Tunisian man arrested by Kurdish forces in the northern part of the country was found to be carrying a bag full of Italian documents, most of them issued in Milan.' Authorities believe that, even though the main players have been caught, militants in Milan are still actively recruiting young Muslims to fight in Iraq. Working from what they think is incomplete knowledge of their activities, Italian officials estimate that the network recruited no fewer than two hundred militants throughout Europe, seventy of them from Italy alone.'

  The ongoing Italian investigation of the Ansar al Islam recruiting network uncovered several important links to Germany. Not only was the alleged leader of the network, Abderrazak Mahdjoub, based in Hamburg, but the wiretaps and the confessions of the two Kurds arrested in Parma made clear that Ansar al Islam had its European base in Germany specifically, in Munich. One of the Kurds from Parma admitted to Italian interrogators that on several occasions, he had traveled to Munich and given money to a man named Omeid Adnan Bamarni, also known as "Doctor Omeid." Further investigation proved that Doctor Omeid was the moneyman of the organization, collecting the funds gathered by various groups of Ansar al Islam sympathizers spread throughout Europe. The money, transported to Kurdistan by young Kurdish immigrants claiming to be returning their native country in order to visit their families, was used mostly to finance Ansar al Islam's camps.10

  Other evidence confirmed that Munich was the decision-making as well as the financial hub for the group's European operations, hosting a key logistics cell. Under the leadership of a thirty-year-old Kurd named Mohammed Loqman, the group organized safe houses, recruited volunteers, and raised money for "the brothers" in Kurdistan. Investigators found that a major source of its financing was the smuggling of illegal Kurdish immigrants into Europe. The Munich group worked closely with the two Kurds living in Parma, who ran a safe house there for immigrants. After paying thousands of dollars to the smugglers, the Kurds entered Europe from Greece and Italy, and then were sent to settle in wealthier countries, such as Germany, Great Britain, and Switzerland. The profits of this scheme, often the life savings of young Kurds, were sent back to Kurdistan to finance the activities of Ansar al Islam." Ironically, the immigrants were unwittingly financing the very activities that some of them had left Kurdistan to escape.

  The information provided by the Italians on the group operating in Munich led German authorities to open an investigation into Loqman's cell. A first round of arrests hit the Munich cell in March 2003. German authorities charged Bamarni, the moneyman of the group, and a dozen other Kurds with facilitating illegal immigration into Germany. The Bavarian minister of the interior said that, before his arrest, Bamarni had raised almost a million euros.12 As German authorities began to gather evidence for their case against the key players of the cell, they uncovered new information on the network's activities.

  Months of intercepted conversations and tailing confirmed that Munich was the headquarters of Ansar al Islam's operations in Germany and also revealed that the network's reach across the country, as other cells were active in Stuttgart, Berlin, Hamburg, Duisburg, Cologne, Ulm, and Frankfurt. 13 Investigators estimate that at least one hundred members of Ansar al Islam are currently active in Germany.14 The number of Muslims who have been recruited by the group to fight in Iraq is unclear, but they believe that from Bavaria alone, between ten and fifty militants have left the region to join Ansar al Islam in Iraq. Among them reportedly was a twenty-seven-year-old courier who traveled twenty times between Germany and Iraq before his March 2004 arrest by Iraqi authorities." German authorities believe that at least two of the militants recruited by the network went to Iraq determined to die as suicide bombers.16

  After months of investigation, on December 3, 2003, Bavarian police arrested Loqman, the leader of the cell, inside Munich Central Station, as he was trying to leave Germany. The charges against Loqman are serious: he is accused of being a high-ranking member of Ansar al Islam and of having recruited volunteers to fight coalition forces in Iraq, as well as raising funds and procuring medical equipment for militants fighting in Iraq. Loqman was also involved in smuggling Kurds into Europe-and not merely innocent asylum seekers. According to German federal prosecutors, Loqman was responsible for smuggling members of Ansar al Islam who had been wounded in Iraq into western Europe for medical treatment. For example, in September 2003, Loqman organized the smuggling in of a severely wounded senior official of the group from Iraq via Italy and France to Great Britain." The senior official was later identified as Ali Fadhil, a bomb expert who lost his hand in an explosion in Iraq. Loqman allegedly arranged for his treatment in a British clinic, using the same routes that network used to smuggle illegal Kurdish immigrants. Authorities have been unable to locate Fadhil and do not know if the Ansar al Islam official is still in Europe.'8

  Three days after Bavarian police arrested Loqman, another key member of the European network of Ansar al Islam was arrested in Amsterdam: Mullah Braw, Loqman's right-hand man in Munich, who had repeatedly traveled back and forth between Germany and Kurdistan before and after the war began. The thirty-two-year-old Kurd had managed to avoid arrest in Germany and had purchased a one-way ticket from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to Istanbul under the name Aziz Hassan, intending to make his way to Iraq. He was detained by Dutch police as he was boarding the aircraft.19

  As authorities quietly closed in on the two leaders of the Munich cell of Ansar al Islam, a plot linked to the German network of the group made headlines worldwide. On December 6, German authorities arrested three men accused of planning to kill Iraq's interim prime minister, lyad Allawi, during his visit to Germany. Authorities believe that the unsophisticated plot was hatched on the spur of the moment, but as Michael Ziegler, spokesman for Bavarian security authorities, noted, "the foiled attack on Allawi shows that this group must be considered dangerous also for Europe. 1120 The attack was thwarted because the members of Ansar al Islam involved, who had been under surveillance by German police for months, were overheard in late November planning to gather information about Allawi's schedule in Germany and to obtain weapons for a possible operation. On December 2, one day before Allawi's arrival in Berlin, Rafik Y., one of the three men arrested, received authorization from the cell's leader to carry out the attack. Authorities suspected that he intended to murder Allawi at a meeting between the prime minister and a group of exiled Iraqis living in Germany, and the event was canceled at the last minute.21

  In the following days, police continued to intercept conversations between Rafik Y. and the other two men. Their use of coded language did not prevent investigators from learning that the men planned to carry out an attack on December 6, when Allawi was supposed to meet with German officials at the Berlin headquarters of the Deutsche Bank. On December 5, police observed Rafik Y. walking around the Deutsche Bank building; later, he was overheard informing his accomplices that he had "viewed the building site."22 In the early hours of December 6, special operations police stormed nine apartments in Berlin, Stuttgart, and Augsburg and arrested Rafik Y. and two of his accomplices. On the 7th a fourth man, a Lebanese national, was arrested in Berlin on suspicion of supporting Ansar al Islam.23

  The revelation of the plot against Prime Minister Allawi shocked Germany. Whereas once Ansar al Islam had used the country as a logistical base of operation, now it was planning attacks inside the country. And though the target this time was an Iraqi, there was no guarantee that in the futur
e the group would not aim for Germans. "If someone is involved in an attack in Iraq, I am virtually 100 percent convinced that he'll also carry out an attack over here if ordered to do so," said Guenter Beckstein, the top state security official in Bavaria.' This fear drove German authorities to act with unprecedented firmness and they decided to dismantle the Ansar al Islam network in the country. On January 12, more than seven hundred police officers raided dozens of apartments, businesses, and mosques in Munich, Frankfurt, Ulm, Bonn, Duesseldorf, and Freiburg. Twenty-two members of Ansar al Islam were arrested and charged with such crimes as raising money for a terrorist organization and forging documents.21 And again, in June 2005, three Iraqis linked to the individuals who planned to assassinate Allawi were arrested in southern Germany and accused of raising funds for Ansar al Islam.26

  Europeans are increasingly coming to understand that Iraq may become the new Afghanistan, a place where militants gain military and terrorist experience before they travel back to their home countries. France, the country that more than any other in Europe has monitored the movements of Islamists leaving its borders, has formally opened an investigation on French Muslims fighting in Iraq. French magistrates fear that Iraq, along with Chechnya, might become the terrorists' new playground, and that Iraqi-trained jihadists might use their newly acquired skills to strike in France. "We consider these people dangerous because those who go will come back once their mission is accomplished," said a top French counterterrorism official interviewed by the New York Times in October 2004. "Then they can use the knowledge gained there in France, Europe or the United States. It's the same as those who went to Afghanistan or Chechnya. Now the new land of jihad is Iraq. There, they are trained, they fight and acquire a technique and the indoctrination sufficient to act on when they return."27 Though France has strongly opposed the US intervention in Iraq, French authorities have taken strong actions to dismantle the networks of recruiters attempting to send French Muslims to fight in Iraq. To be sure, those actions are motivated by a desire to protect France, not to help US forces on the ground in Iraq; nevertheless, by aggressively pursuing militants who were planning to join the conflict, the French government has indirectly lent a hand to the United States.