The Al Qaeda Factor

Plots Against the West

Mitchell D. Silber

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780812244021, 9780812244021
• eBook ISBN: 9780812205220
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The horrific and devastating events of September 11, 2001 changed the world's perception of Al Qaeda. What had been considered a small band of revolutionary terrorists capable only of attacking Western targets in the Middle East and Africa suddenly demonstrated an ability to strike globally with enormous impact. Subsequent plots perpetuated the impression of Al Qaeda as a highly organized and rigidly controlled organization with recruiters, operatives, and sleeper cells in the West who could be activated on command.We now know, however, that the role of Al Qaeda in global jihadist plots has varied significantly over time. New York Police Department terrorism expert Mitchell D. Silber argues that to comprehend the threat posed by the transnational jihad movement, we must have a greater and more nuanced understanding of the dynamics behind Al Qaeda plots. In The Al Qaeda Factor he examines sixteen Al Qaeda-associated plots and attacks, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to today. For each case, he probes primary sources and applies a series of questions to determine the precise involvement of Al Qaeda. What connects radicalized groups in the West to the core Al Qaeda organization in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan? Does one of the plotters have to attend an Al Qaeda training camp or meet with an Al Qaeda trainer, or can they simply be inspired by Al Qaeda ideology? Further analysis examines the specifics of Al Qaeda's role in the inspiration, formation, membership, and organization of terrorist groups. Silber also identifies potential points of vulnerability, which may raise the odds of thwarting future terrorist attacks in the West. The Al Qaeda Factor demonstrates that the role of Al Qaeda is very limited even in plots with direct involvement. Silber finds that in the majority of cases, individuals went to Al Qaeda seeking aid or training, but even then there was limited direct command and control of the terrorists' activities—a sobering conclusion that demonstrates that even the destruction of Al Qaeda's core would not stop Al Qaeda plots.

PART I

Al Qaeda “Command and Control” Plots

Chapter 1

9/11 (New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, 2001)

ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists, directed by al Qaeda, hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. Each team of hijackers included a trained pilot. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the World Trade Center in New York City, resulting in the collapse of both buildings soon afterward and irreparable damage to nearby buildings. The hijackers crashed a third plane into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. Passengers and members of the flight crew on the fourth aircraft attempted to retake control of their plane from the hijackers; that plane crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

The active core of the cluster of individuals responsible for carrying out the September 11 attacks was radicalized in the West, in Hamburg, Germany. This background construct has been obscured because the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, consisted of the fusion of a Westernized group (from Hamburg) with a Saudi “muscle” group, and was directed against the United States. A variety of other factors in this plot have subsequently reappeared in many of the other major al Qaeda–linked plots targeting the West.

The Hamburg Expatriate Student Scene

The Arab community in the 1990s in Hamburg was relatively small. Consequently, among more fundamentalist elements of the community, almost everyone knew everyone. The younger, more Salafi-inclined individuals, ranging in age from sixteen to thirty, were not in one static group but were distributed among numerous informal and amorphous clusters.¹

One member of that community, Mohammed Atta, chose to worship at al Quds Mosque, which was known for its harsh jihadi-Salafi rhetoric. Though the mosque was founded by Moroccans, Muslims of all backgrounds attended this location. It frequently featured radical imams, who encouraged the killing of unbelievers along with martyrdom and jihad. By 1996, Atta had not only developed a circle of acquaintances there but was also at the center of a number of student religious study groups.² Mohammed Fizazi, an extremist Moroccan imam who traveled Europe, would often spend weeks at a time at al Quds Mosque. He was a forceful advocate of the obligation for all Muslims to participate in jihad and seemed to have a special appreciation for the cluster that included Atta and another Hamburg Arab resident, Ramzi bin al Shibh.³

One of the key focal points of the scene was Mohammed Belfas, “a middle-age[d] immigrant from Indonesia, Yemen and Egypt, who had lived in Germany illegally for almost twenty years before being given legal status.” He worked for the post office and, more important, conducted a halaqa (study group) at the al Quds Mosque. Foreign students that hailed from North Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Levant, and even Indonesia attended the group.⁴

Around 1996, Mohammed Atta, following his religious pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, as well as Moroccan students Mounir el Motassadeq and Abdelghani Mzoudi, began to frequent the study group meetings. At the al Quds Mosque was also “an outspoken, flamboyant Islamist named Mohammed Haydar Zammar”: “A well-known figure in the Muslim community (and to German and U.S. intelligence agencies by the late 1990’s), Zammar had fought in Afghanistan and relished any opportunity to extol the virtues of violent jihad.” Zammar claims to have—and to some degree was witnessed doing so—pushed the core members of the 9/11 plot to participate in jihad and directed them toward receiving training in Afghanistan to fulfill their jihad responsibility.⁵
The members of the Hamburg cell who were directly involved in the September 11 attacks included Mohammed Atta, Ramzi bin al Shibh, Marwan al Shehi, and Ziad Jarrah. However, they were part of a larger and more dynamic group in Hamburg that included other individuals, including Mohammad Belfas, Said Bahaji, Zakariya Essabar, Mounir el Motassadeq, and Abdelghani Mzoudi. Many of these individuals were students and few, if any, began as radical Muslims. Most were initially apolitical and from unremarkable backgrounds. Moreover, many were fluent in English, Western educated, and accustomed to Western lifestyles. However, as students far from home, this group was vulnerable to radicalization.

Gravitating to Reactionary Islam

Although Mohammed Atta had come from what in Egypt was a relatively secular family, once in the West, his religious commitment intensified. Praying five times a day, strictly observing a halal diet, and avoiding normal student social activities like clubs and sporting events became his pattern.⁶ Even this level of religiosity was not sufficient upon his return from hajj in 1995. Atta returned more quiet, introverted, and intense in his level of observance, began to grow a beard as a visual display of his new religious devotion, and spent increasing amounts of time at the mosque.⁷

Atta also began to teach a religious class at a Turkish mosque in Hamburg. However, his class was so strict, most students dropped out. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1998 for a visit, his transformation was obvious—when Atta met up with one of his friends from university, he noted that Atta “had changed a great deal, had grown a beard, and had ‘obviously adopted fundamentalism’ by that time.”⁸ Similarly, friends who knew Ramzi bin al Shibh from home in Yemen characterized him as “religious, but not too religious,” but by the late 1990s bin al Shibh was advocating that “the highest duty of every Muslim was to pursue jihad, and that the highest honor was to die during the jihad.”⁹

For Ziad Jarrah, the catalyst for his change seems to have been a return visit to Lebanon in 1996 during the holiday break. It is unclear what occurred there, but his new, more devout approach upon his return was clearly evident and, in fact, caused friction with his secular girlfriend in Germany. He began to chastise her for not being sufficiently devout.¹⁰ Not long after, he decided to move away and study aeronautical engineering at the University of Applied Science in a suburb outside Hamburg. By 1998, Jarrah began spending time at the al Quds Mosque with bin al Shibh and eventually Atta.¹¹ In 1997 he began to grow a full beard and started praying on a regular basis. He avoided introducing his girlfriend to his new, more religious friends because she was secular. By 1999 he had become so radicalized that he told his girlfriend “he was planning to wage a jihad because there was no greater honor than to die for Allah.”¹²

The catalyst for Marwan al Shehi may have been his father's death. In early 1998 he transferred to school in Hamburg and soon hooked up with Atta's group.¹³ By the time al Shehi arrived in Germany in 1996, he was already praying five times a day, but he still wore Western-style clothes. By 1997, following the death of his father, he was avoiding restaurants that served or cooked with alcohol. Soon after his father passed, he also became more pronounced in his faith and stopped wearing Western clothes. When he moved in with Atta and bin al Shibh in 1999, he began to become more Salafi in outlook and, as Shehi noted to a former friend who visited him, he began to emulate the Prophet—a key Salafi signature.¹⁴

Zakariya Essabar's religious transformation happened rapidly. By 1999, he reportedly “pressured one acquaintance with physical force to become more religious, grow a beard and compel his wife to convert to Islam.”¹⁵

Politicization of Beliefs

An important participant in these sessions and well-known among the Muslims who worshiped at al Quds was Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a three-hundred-pound, Syrian-born, loud-mouthed auto mechanic and jihadi veteran who had fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia. He was promoting the concept of active participation in military jihad to the group and was known as an admirer of bin Laden. Moreover, he ran something of a travel agency for jihadists seeking to go to Afghanistan.¹⁶

Ramzi bin al Shibh was a key proponent of the idea that “the men were obliged to go to those places where Islam was under attack, to defend it literally as holy warriors.” He played jihadi propaganda videos that highlighted Chechnya, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Moreover, he shared Atta's worldview that the real enemies behind all of these conflicts were Jews and America, noting, “One has to do something about America.”¹⁷

Israel and Jews in general animated the men. Atta was known to have said, “How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine.” When Atta interacted with other students in Hamburg, he voiced anti-Semitic and anti-American attitudes, citing a worldwide Jewish conspiracy based in New York City as well as strong antipathy toward secular Arab leaders, like Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Ramzi bin al Shibh shared this conspiratorial worldview.¹⁸

By the end of 1999, discussions shifted from debates on the legitimacy of jihad to where jihad should be fought—Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya. The men had reached a consensus on the necessity of their religious-political goal. They wanted to fight; they just had to choose the war. Russian atrocities against the Muslims that they saw in videos about Chechnya motivated the men to originally plan to travel to Chechnya to fight jihad.¹⁹

The Bait al Ansar Cluster

Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al Shibh met in a mosque in 1995 and subsequently became close friends. The Mohammed Belfas study group in the al Quds Mosque provided the forum for the group to expand to include the two students from Morocco, Mounir el Motassadeq and Abdelghani Mzoudi. Subsequently, it was Atta and bin al Shibh who showed up around town at mosques and study groups to serve as mentors and recruiters of foreign students. When, around 1996, Motassadeq moved into an apartment in the student-housing complex, “it became the center where militant Muslim students congregated when on campus, eating meals together from the common kitchen, and discussing religion and politics in the living room.”²⁰

Ziad Jarrah met bin al Shibh in 1997 at the al Quds Mosque and began attending the study group. In 1998, Atta and bin al Shibh began to share an apartment in the Harbug section of Hamburg with Marwan al Shehi, who “grew very close to Atta.” Meanwhile, Zakariya Essabar met Jarrah at the Volkswagen plant, where he had an internship. Motassadeq met Said Bahaji at al Quds and brought him into the group as its last addition. Together, these men spent countless hours thinking, talking, reading, and debating what this reactionary interpretation of Islam required of them.²¹

The group began to coalesce around Atta and bin al Shibh in late 1997. By the summer of 1998, the core of the cluster, Atta, Belfas, al Shehi, and bin al Shibh, were all working together in a computer warehouse, spending time packing boxes. Meanwhile, Belfas was gradually losing influence as Atta perceived him as too “soft” when it came to Islamic matters. By 1998, the private study sessions of the cluster moved out of the mosque and into both a bookstore near the al Quds Mosque and a private flat in Wilhelmsburg. The group met three to four times a week and hosted sessions that involved extremely anti-American discussions. A year later, Atta, bin al Shibh, and Bahaji and later al Shehi moved and lived together in a flat at 54 Marion-strasse. They called the location Bait al Ansar or “The House of the Supporters of the Prophet.” The flat increasingly became “a kind of clubhouse for young Hamburg jihadis who would gather for an evening meal and conversation.” By 1999, the cluster became even “more extreme and secretive, speaking only in Arabic to conceal the content of their conversations.” Discussions intensified and the focus began to be on fulfilling their duty to fight jihad: “One week, the members were intent on fighting in Kosovo, the next in Chechnya, or Afghanistan or Bosnia. Then men were agreed: they wanted to fight—they just didn't know which war.”²²

Anatomy of the Cluster

Active Core

Mohammed Atta, age thirty-three at the time of the September 11 attacks, grew up in a middle-class, relatively secular family in Kafr el Sheikh, Egypt. His father was an attorney. Atta attended Cairo University, where he earned a degree in architectural engineering and subsequently worked as an urban planner in Cairo for a few years after graduation. In 1992, he went to Germany to continue his studies, first in Stuttgart and then in Hamburg. He attended the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg through 1999 and received a degree in city engineering and planning. Teachers recall him as a serious and committed student. During his early years in Hamburg, Atta worked part-time as a draftsman for an urban planning firm until he was laid off in 1996.²³

Marwan al Shehi, age twenty-three at the time of the September 11 attacks, was born in Ras al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). His father had been a local prayer leader. Following his graduation from high school, he joined the UAE military, went through basic training, and then earned a scholarship that would enable him to study in Germany. When he arrived in Bonn in 1996, Shehi was already somewhat religious, praying five times a day. He encountered academic difficulties and requested a leave from his technical, mathematical, and scientific studies in 1997. He ultimately had to repeat the first semester of his studies and subsequently requested to complete his studies in Hamburg. Though it is unclear how he met Atta and bin al Shibh, that association seems to have been part of his motivation to relocate to Hamburg, as he moved in with them. His academic problems followed him to Hamburg; he left his program and began to study shipbuilding in Hamburg at the Technical University in the summer of 1999.²⁴

Ziad Jarrah, age twenty-six at the time of the September 11 attacks, was born in Mazraa, Lebanon. He came from a well-to-do family and attended private Christian schools. In April 1996 he moved to Germany to enroll, with a cousin, in a junior college in Greifswald. Jarrah's reputation in Lebanon had been that of a “playboy”; he had been known to frequent discos and drink alcohol. He attended student parties and drank beer. By the end of 1996, after a trip home, Jarrah began to discus the merits of jihad. The next year he changed his academic focus from dentistry to aircraft engineering and enrolled in the University of Applied Sciences. It is unclear if previously established contacts were part of the appeal of moving to Hamburg. Jarrah had a girlfriend who was secular and of Turkish heritage in Greifswald.²⁵

Ramzi bin al Shibh, age twenty-nine at the time of the September 11 attacks, was born in Ghayl Bawazir, Yemen, and was known as “religious, but not too religious” during his formative years. After a stint from 1987 to 1995 working for the International Bank of Yemen, he attempted to leave Yemen for the United States but was denied a visa. Subsequently he traveled to Germany and claimed asylum under a false name. Though this enabled him to stay in Hamburg for a period until his application for asylum was denied, he ultimately traveled back to Yemen and then returned to Hamburg under his true name as a student in 1997. His student days were short-lived, however, as he was expelled from school in 1998 due to his poor performance.²⁶

Followers

Said Bahaji, age twenty-six at the time of the September 11 attacks, was born in Lower Saxony, Germany, the child of a Moroccan father and a P...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Al Qaeda “Command and Control” Plots
• Part II. Al Qaeda “Suggested/Endorsed” Plots
• Part III. Al Qaeda “Inspired” Plots
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments