Al Qaeda in Europe

by Lorenzo Vidino

  French magistrates began investigating a possible network of recruiters operating in France in the fall of 2004, after American and Iraqi authorities informed their French counterparts that between July and October 2004, three young Parisians of North African descent had died while fighting US forces in Iraq. The first one was Hakim Redouane, a nineteen-year-old who was killed during the bombardment of the insurgency's stronghold of Fallujah on July 17. On September 20, American forces shot dead Tarek Ouinis, also nineteen and from Paris. Finally, on October 20, another nineteen-year-old from Paris, Abdelhalim Badjoudj, carried out a bold suicide attack on the road to Baghdad's airport, injuring two American soldiers and two Iraqi police officers. In addition, the magistrates learned that three French citizens were being detained by US forces in Iraq. Two of them, twenty-two-year-old Peter Cherif and twenty-year-old Chekou Diakhabi, had been arrested in Fallujah during the violent battle between US forces and insurgents in the city over the last weeks of 2004. A third Frenchman, twenty-year-old Faras Howeini, was arrested by Iraqi forces in the city of Mosul in April 2004 and accused of murdering an Iraqi police officer .21

  As they began their investigation, French authorities realized that the three French "martyrs" and the three detainees all came from the same Paris suburb, the 19th arrondissement, an area in the north east of the French capital heavily populated with North African immigrants.29 Moreover, they discovered that the six young men, all unemployed, had left France in March 2004 for Syria. There they enrolled in the al Fateh al Islami Institute, a religious school in Damascus known for its radicalism, where they stayed only briefly before crossing the border into Iraq. Clearly, some kind of network was recruiting young French Muslims for jihad, and investigators wanted to understand, in the words of a French Interior Ministry official, "how it is that Parisian youngsters of 19 go to sacrifice themselves in Iraq." 30

  As they began to search in the past of the young men, French authorities found similarities in their backgrounds. Relatives described them as quiet and normal youths who were not particularly religious. "Abdelhalim drank beer, he smoked hashish a lot," said the uncle of Badjoudj, a suicide bomber.31 Other relatives of the young jihadists painted a picture of Westernized young Muslims who wore jeans and listened to rap. But in the months following the beginning of the Iraqi war, the young Parisians had fallen under the spell of radicals who had sensed their weakness and lured them into their world of fanaticism. Exploiting the Iraqi conflict, recruiters living in the neighborhood persuaded the impressionable young men to abandon everything and defend the life and pride of the Muslim nation. "They go to the mosque, discuss, they receive radical prayers, they hear a lot of things, and most of the time they are unemployed. And it's a kind of adventure. They go because it's an honor to go. They become like stars," said Giles Leclair, the head of the French internal intelligence agency, the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire).32

  The story of Hakim Reduoane, the first Frenchman killed in Fallujah, is particularly telling. Hakim, a nineteen-year-old of Tunisian origin, grew up in the 19th arrondissement with his mother and his four siblings. While working odd jobs in the neighborhood, Hakim, whom friends characterized as "easygoing," fell under the influence of his older brother Boubaker, a twenty-one-year-old committed Salafist who worshiped at the Iqra mosque.33 The Iqra mosque, a radical prayer hall in the northern Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret, is suspected of being fertile ground for recruiters; authorities closed it in June 2004, after a man who used to worship there received a text message from Iraq saying, "Group has arrived. I will contact you if I need help. 1134 False documents, plastic laminating materials commonly used in forging official papers, and a pistol were found in the raids connected with the closure of the mosque.35

  Bombarded with speeches about the suffering of fellow Muslims, Hakim gave in to his older brother and Boubaker's radical friends at the mosque. In the spring of 2004, he traveled with five other young men from the neighborhood to Syria and then to Iraq. Boubaker also traveled to Syria, but was arrested by Syrian border police in August 2004 while attempting to cross the border into Iraq.36 One of the men, Abdelhalim Badjoudj, returned to Paris to marry his Moroccan girlfriend. After less than a month, Badjoudj went back to Syria, reportedly telling his relatives: "God willing, I will be going to Iraq."37 A few weeks later he died while driving an explosive-laden vehicle into an American convoy on the road to Baghdad airport.

  Within a few months, the French investigation uncovered the network that had recruited the six Parisians. After the Iqra mosque was shut down, the group of radicals that used to convene there moved to the Addawa mosque, a former warehouse located in their own neighborhood, the 19th arrondissement.38 It became Paris's main recruiting center for Iraq. A group of about forty or fifty young men of North African descent, all childhood friends who had attended the same schools, began to worship at the mosque, attracted by the fiery sermons of the local imams.

  The spiritual leader of the group, whose average age was no older than twenty, was a twenty-three-year-old Islamic fundamentalist named Farid Benyettou, whose fiery speeches about jihad inflamed the hearts of the young worshipers. His prominent position was due largely to his connections-his mentor was a well-known veteran of Afghanistan, Mohammed Karimi, whom French authorities had deported to his home country, Morocco.39 Benyettou also benefited from the high regard in which radicals held his Algerian brother-in-law, Mohammed Zemmouri; a leader of the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat, or Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat), Zemmouri was deported by French authorities for his involvement in a plot to carry out terrorist attacks during the 1998 soccer World Cup, hosted by France.40 French authorities began to monitor Benyettou and his group during the 2003 street protests against the Iraq war. After noticing their radicalism, agents snapped several pictures of them praying on the sidewalks of downtown Paris.41

  In January 2005, French authorities acted against the group and arrested eleven individuals, including Benyettou. Most of those arrested were young North African men with dual nationality, childhood friends of the Redouane brothers and the other men detained or killed in Iraq. One was a French convert to Islam, and two were women.42 The arrests came in reaction to information uncovered by the DST: two of Benyettou's recruits, Thamer Bouchnak and Cherif Kouachi, were about to depart for Iraq. According to French authorities, Bouchnak had already traveled to Syria, where he had studied in a religious school. He had returned to Paris, where Benyettou encouraged him to do the hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Bouchnak was supposed to meet with Kouachi at Benyettou's apartment and to travel to Iraq with him. They were arrested (along with the others) before they could board their flight to Syria.43

  With the arrests of Benyettou and his closest collaborators, French authorities believe they have completely dismantled the network operating in the 19th arrondissement. The lingering question is how many other such neighborhoods there are in France. Recent intelligence reports are not encouraging. The agency in charge of security outside the country's border, DGSE (Direction Generale de Securite Exterieure), has indicated that around December 2004, a group of twenty fighters was operating in the Fallujah area under the command of a Frenchman.44 The man, known only as Fawzi D., is believed to be a French citizen in his twenties from a middle-class Algerian family.45 France's top antiterrorism judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, is conducting the sprawling investigation on the filiere irakienne and is convinced that dozens of young Frenchmen have reached Iraq since the summer of 2004.46 In June 2005 French authorities detained seven individuals in the cities of Montpellier and Limoges, accusing them of having recruited French Muslims for jihad in Iraq. Unlike those arrested in the 19th arrondissement, which constituted a spontaneous movement, in this case authorities allege that the men were working closely with Ansar al Islam leadership in Iraq and with other cells of the group in Germany, Spain, and Italy.47

  Recruitment for jihad in Iraq has touched almost every European country
with a large Muslim population. The archbishop of Canterbury, on a visit to Jordan in November 2003, met a group of young British men who claimed they were about to cross the border into Iraq "to be part of the battle against the evil occupying forces."48 The encounter was widely reported by the country's media, which immediately saw a repeat of the events of 2001, when dozens of British Muslims left the country and went to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban and against UK forces. Recognizing the likelihood that British Muslims were actually battling British soldiers, the nation's tabloids raised disturbing questions about young Muslims' attachment to their home country. The issue will surface again after the July 7, 2005, attacks in London, which were carried out by British-born Muslims.

  Confirmation that British Muslims were indeed involved in the fighting in Iraq soon followed. In mid-November, the Yemeni newspaper Al Ayyam reported that the parents of a twenty-two-year-old Yemeni national who lived in Sheffield had received a congratulatory phone call from Islamic fighters in Iraq, informing them that their son had been killed in a suicide operation. Wail al Dhalei, a young asylum seeker who had married a British woman and was training to fight with the British Olympic tae kwon do team, was said to have traveled from Sheffield to Iraq, where he fought alongside the local insurgents.49

  Another British Muslim was arrested by American forces in Iraq in January 2005. Mobeen Muneef, a twenty-five-year-old Londoner of Pakistani descent, was apprehended by US Marines in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, a stronghold of the insurgency. Capt. Brad Gordon described the arrest:

  The gentleman was detained after Marines spotted men passing a weapon over a wall in Ramadi. When Marines approached the house, two men began to flee the house and were subsequently detained when they were found hiding in a shack near by. According to one report, in their possession was an Iraqi pistol and four AK-47s. When he was detained he was found to have an Iraqi ID card which he admitted was fake. When questioned about his reason for being with other foreign fighters, he stated he was there to assist a humanitarian relief organization. He had no other identification at the time of his detention and could not produce any credentials belonging to or the name of the relief organization. He was given a gun-powder residue test. He tested positive for gun powder residue, further indicating that he did have a weapon in his possession.51

  As of June 2005, British authorities estimate that about seventy volunteers have left the United Kingdom to join the Iraqi insurgency. While at least three have been killed in combat, one man, a forty-one-year-old Manchester resident named Idris Bazis, is known to have died in a suicide attack.51 Sunni Muslims have made up the majority of those traveling to Iraq, as most of the groups actively fighting coalition forces are Sunni and often have strong anti-Shia feelings. Nevertheless, at the peak of the conflict between coalition forces and militias loyal to radical Shia clerics, some Shia Muslims, too, left Europe for Iraq-including, according to various uncorroborated reports, small groups from the United Kingdom. Some of them allegedly joined the militias of the Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr and engaged British and American forces in the south of the country.

  MAP 10.1. RECRUITMENT FOR THE IRAQI JIHAD IN EUROPE

  Spanish authorities have also dismantled a network that was recruiting volunteers for the Iraqi battlefield. On June 15, 2005, more than five hundred policemen raided locations in Madrid, Andalucia, Cataluna, Levante, and Ceuta and arrested eleven individuals, including Samir Tahtah and Fouad Dkikar, the two leaders of a Barcelona-based cell with close links to Zarqawi's network in the United Kingdom and Iraq.52 Investigators also believe that a young Moroccan man with deep connections to the March 11 Madrid train bombers, Mohammed Afalah, reached Iraq after escaping capture in Spain and died in a suicide attack there.53

  Even countries with a small Muslim community have been affected. European intelligence agencies believe that one of the leaders of Ansar al Islam, known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Lubnani, is a Lebanese citizen who lived for fourteen years in Denmark under his real name, Mustafa Darwish Ramadan. According to Danish officials, Ramadan served three and a half years in a Danish prison for a robbery committed in 1997. Upon his release, he robbed a money-transfer store in Copenhagen and fled to Jordan or Lebanon. Authorities believe that Ramadan then joined the ranks of Ansar al Islam, becoming one of its leaders.54

  Members of Ansar al Islam have also been active in Sweden. A few days before they arrested him, German authorities recorded a conversation in which Mohammed Loqman, the Ansar al Islam leader operating in Munich, was asked by a man to smuggle twelve men into Iraq, presumably with the intention of joining the local insurgency. The man requesting Loqman's assistance was a Kurd living in Sweden, Shahab Shabab. Both Shabab and Loqman had grown up in the Kurdish village of Chamchal, which they had left together to immigrate to Europe. Loqman had chosen Germany; Shabab had settled in Stockholm.55 German authorities relayed this to their Swedish counterparts, who began investigating Shabab. The results of the probe came in April 2004, when Shabab and three others-two Iraqis and one Swede of Lebanese descent -were arrested in separate raids in Stockholm and in the southern city of Malmo. Under recently introduced Swedish counterterrorism laws, the men were charged with crimes involving "murder and devastation endangering the public," crimes that, according to Swedish authorities, were "directed at the state of Iraq and were aimed at striking grave terror into a population." Swedish prosecutors believe that the men participated in some way in a suicide operation carried out in February 2004 in the Kurdish city of Irbil, when two kamikazes simultaneously blew themselves up at the offices of Kurdistan's two main secular parties during the celebration of the Muslim holiday of Eid al Adha, killing more than one hundred people.56 Shahab and another suspect have been freed by an appellate judge for lack of evidence, but Swedish authorities continue to investigate what they believe was an Ansar al Islam cell operating on their territory. In May 2005, the two Iraqi Kurds arrested in 2004, Ali Barzengi and Ferman Abdalla, were found guilty by a Swedish court of collecting and transferring more than $148,000 to Ansar al Islam.51

  The presence of Ansar al Islam has been far more pronounced in another Scandinavian country, Norway. Since 1991, the prosperous and isolated country has hosted the undisputed star of Kurdistan's Islamic fundamentalism, Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad. Ahmad, better known as Mullah Krekar, escaped Iraq after the Gulf War and received political asylum in Norway, where he has been based ever since. Even after obtaining asylum, Krekar, whose extended family also resides in Norway, never abandoned the fundamentalist cause in Kurdistan; he often journeyed back to northern Iraq to guide various local Islamist factions. When, in 2001, Ansar al Islam was formed after the merger of other radical groups, Krekar became its undisputed leader.58 Enjoying the freedoms granted by Norway, Krekar also traveled extensively throughout Europe, building alliances with other extremists operating on the Continent and raising funds for militants operating in Kurdistan.

  American authorities accuse Krekar of having a direct role in preparing attacks against US forces in Iraq, even though he claims not to have had any contact with Ansar al Islam since May 2002 and has not been in Iraq since September of that year.59 The US government believes Krekar has kept closely in touch with militants in Iraq through the Internet and has provided ideological inspiration to suicide bombers there. Norwegian authorities also interviewed several Ansar al Islam members detained in Kurdish prisons who confirmed that Krekar had told them killing nonbelievers in sucide actions was their religious duty. But Krekar has never hidden his views. Interviewed by the Dutch television network NOS on the eve of war, Krekar said that Ansar al Islam's suicide commandos were ready to strike US forces. "We believe it's America's war against Islam," said the fiery mullah. "Let them come. Now they bring more than 300,000 [troops]. We believe our God-Allah-will be with us."60

  Mullah Krekar was detained in Holland in September 2002, on his way back to Oslo from Iraq. Dutch authorities were acting on an extradition request filed by Jordan for drug-relat
ed crimes. When arrested, Krekar was carrying documents detailing the history of Islamist groups in Kurdistan, the charter of Ansar al Islam, and a notebook with more than two thousand names.61 Because the evidence provided by Jordan was judged insufficient to grant extradition, Holland deported Krekar to Norway in January 2003. Two months later, after his televised interview threatening the use of suicide commandos, he was arrested by Norwegian authorities; he was released after a few weeks.

  In January 2004, Krekar, while fighting a deportation order from the Norwegian government, was arrested again and charged by Norwegian prosecutors with conspiracy, attempted murder of political rivals in Iraq, and inciting criminal activity.62 Briefly detained, he was released in February while the investigation proceeded. Finally, in June, Norwegian authorities dropped all charges against Krekar, admitting they did not have enough evidence against him. Currently, Krekar is living in Oslo with his family. In April 2004, he won a lawsuit against the Dutch government for his 2002 detention and was awarded 45,000 € by a Dutch appeals court.63 While the Norwegian government has stripped Krekar of his refugee status, his family still receives benefits from the country's welfare system. The self-professed leader of Ansar al Islam supplements the family's income by his frequent appearances on talk shows on Norwegian television and by the sales of his April 2004 autobiography, In My Own Words.64

  The difficulties experienced by Norway in detaining Krekar have been repeated across Europe as countries have tried to deal with other members of Ansar at Islam and with volunteers who want to join the jihad in Iraq. Manfred Murck, deputy chief of Hamburg's security services, revealed his frustration in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel: "There is nothing that can be legally done to prevent anyone from going to Iraq, possibly in order to shoot American soldiers there."65 In many European countries, joining a terrorist organization outside the country's territory is not a crime, and therefore those who travel to Iraq to fight do not break the law. In certain cases authorities have taken an approach similar to that used successfully by the FBI against Al Capone, detaining militants for lesser crimes such as document forging or illegal immigration. Nevertheless, most European prosecutors must work within legal systems that do not provide them with effective tools to tackle recruitment networks.