The New Frontiers of Jihad

Radical Islam in Europe

Alison Pargeter

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781845113919
• eBook ISBN: 9781786725028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Following the terrorist attacks on London and Madrid, radical Islam is presumed to be an increasingly potent force in Europe. Yet beneath the media hysteria, very little is actually known about it. What radical movements are there? How do they operate? What is driving them? Who are their recruits? What is their relationship, if any, to Al Qaeda? Alison Pargeter has spent three years interviewing radical Islamists throughout Europe to find answers to these questions. She examines how radical ideology travels from East to West, and how the two contexts shape each other. She finds that contrary to what some analysts have claimed, the European Muslim community has not become radicalised en masse. What has happened is that in a globalised world, Middle Eastern power struggles are now being played out in the mosques of Birmingham, Paris and Milan. This is a must-read book for anyone who wants to know the real story of the jihad which has apparently arrived in our back yard.

CHAPTER 1

THE FIRSTWAVE OF RADICALS

In the early 1980s a young Syrian, Mustafa Set Mariam Naser, also known as Abu Musab Al-Suri, arrived in Europe having fled his home country just a few years earlier in fear of his life. The fair-skinned, red-headed Al-Suri had been brought up in a deeply religious and conservative middle-class family in the ancient and beautiful city of Aleppo, a city famed for its Islamist activism. After finishing school he went on to train at university as a mechanical engineer, but soon found a higher calling in life and abandoned his studies to become part of Syria’s underground Islamist opposition. He joined a group called the Fighting Vanguard (Al-Tali’ah Al-Muqatila) that was led by Sheikh Marwan Hadid, which was a militant offshoot of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan Muslimeen) – a Sunni fundamentalist movement that had originated in Egypt in the 1920s and which had spread across the Middle East and whose adherents sought the establishment of an Islamic state. The Fighting Vanguard opposed the ruling Ba’athist government of Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad and sought to overthrow it by force in order to establish sharia (Islamic) law. Al-Suri and the Fighting Vanguard’s objection to the Al-Assad regime was that it was aggressively nationalist and secular. This alienated the traditional and religious classes, of which Al-Suri was a part, which feared that the Ba’athist regime with its modernist ideas was threatening not only their position and status but the very social fabric of the country.

Joining such an opposition movement was an extremely dangerous move for Al-Suri. Like many other regimes in the Middle East at that time the secular Ba’athist government in Syria stopped at nothing to repress its Islamist opponents, who were viewed as reactionary forces opposed to modernity and progress. After the regime launched a particularly ferocious assault in 1981 following an uprising in the town of Hamma that had pitted some members of the Brotherhood against the security forces, many Islamists fled the country, including Al-Suri, who escaped to the relative safety of neighbouring Jordan where the monarchy displayed a rather more tolerant attitude towards the Islamist movement. Still keen to pursue his Islamist ideals, Al-Suri joined the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan that was made up from other exiles who had fled the brutalities of the Al-Assad regime. He began working for their military wing, training new recruits in military camps there. He also spent some time engaged in similar activities in Iraq where he was appointed a member of the Syrian Brotherhood’s supreme military leadership. It was not that the secular Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was any more open to the presence of Islamists than the Syrians, but rather that the Iraqi regime saw the opportunity to support Syrian opposition movements as a means of irritating and weakening its Ba’athist rivals in Damascus and thus was willing to host and give protection to the Syrian Brotherhood.

However, this willingness of the Brotherhood to make alliances with secular regimes such as that of Saddam Hussein never sat very comfortably with the impassioned purist Al-Suri who sought a more strident movement that would see the triumph of Islamist rule in the region. The young Syrian became increasingly disillusioned with the Muslim Brotherhood and escaped to Europe. His first port of call was France where he had hoped to resume his engineering studies which had been interrupted when he left Syria. While he was there, although he managed in 1984 to achieve a black belt in judo, he was not able to complete his education.¹ Indeed it was not long before he was sidetracked once again, as his love of jihad and his homeland pushed him to abandon his studies and to try to work from his adopted home in Europe to further the cause of bringing down the Syrian regime.

Whilst in France Al-Suri joined forces with a leading Syrian Islamist, the legendary Sheikh Adnan Al-Ackla, who was still inside Syria, and the two men set about trying to restructure the Syrian jihadist movement that had been shattered after the Hamma incident in 1981. However, in 1985 Al-Ackla was himself arrested with other remnants of the Fighting Vanguard, leaving Al-Suri to form his own fledgling Syrian jihadist group from the far away lands of Europe. It was also in 1985 that Al-Suri moved to Spain where he settled in the Andalusian city of Granada with its rich and glorious Islamic history. Al-Suri started his own import–export business, married a Spanish convert to Islam and obtained dual Syrian–Spanish citizenship. Despite being so far from his home country, the young Syrian did not lose sight of his main ambition, which was to fight the jihad in his beloved Syria. While in Spain he continued trying to gather money and to develop his own Syrian Islamist organization.

However, like many Islamists at the time, Al-Suri was lured by events in Afghanistan, where the Arab mujahideen were fighting alongside their Afghan brothers to oust the Soviets from the country. If he could not get back into Syria to fight, Afghanistan was an appealing alternative, not least because it had become a magnet for the new jihadist wave that was sweeping the Islamic world, attracting thousands of fighters. In 1987 Al-Suri travelled to Pakistan and on into Afghanistan in order to fight against the ‘godless communists’ that were backing the Syrian regime as well as the other secular governments in the region. During his time there Al-Suri was to meet some of the top jihadists of the day including Sheikh Sayid Imam Al-Sharif, better known as Dr Fadl, who was a leading member of the Egyptian Al-Jihad group and who was for a time close to Al-Qa’ida ideologue Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Al-Suri also met Osama Bin Ladin, and while he shared some of the Saudi billionaire’s ideas, he felt that he was rather conceited. In an e-mail sent several years later, which was recovered after the fall of Kabul in 2001, Al-Suri complained about Bin Ladin’s love of appearing on the media, noting, ‘I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans, and applause.’ ² Yet these men, along with others he met in Afghanistan, were to shape Al-Suri’s future thinking about the nature of jihad and the jihadist movement.

After the defeat of the Soviets in 1991, Al-Suri went back to Spain. However, keen to be at the heart of the action, it was not long before he moved to London, which by then had become the centre of the European radical scene. He had been invited to the UK to work with a group of Algerians and other radicals who were focusing their attentions on producing propaganda about the Islamist struggle that was unfolding in Algeria. Al-Suri was ideally suited to this role. He considered himself as somewhat of an intellectual and theoretician and made great efforts in writing jihadist literature. In fact he was keen to develop his theories of jihad that could be applied to those fighting anywhere in the world and produced tomes with titles such as ‘The Sunna in Damascus’, ‘Muslims in Central Asia and the New Islamic Struggle’, and ‘The Next Islamic Battle’. Al-Suri seemed to view himself as the chronicler of the entire jihad movement and lamented in a language that betrayed his engineer’s mind:

Where are the studies? Where are the instructions, the creativity to put in place the variables and the non-variables of the next movement? Where is the methodological basis for the international dawa for jihad that we started calling for? Where is its theoretical basis that we have to build upon and continue? ³

In 1996 he established a Bureau for the Study of Islamic Conflicts, through which he succeeded in setting up an interview for Osama Bin Ladin with the American CNN channel. It was as if Al-Suri with his middle-class background was bent on intellectualizing what was essentially a series of armed insurgencies against the ruling regimes of the Islamic world. However, his writings certainly had a big impact, resulting in people referring to him as one of the geniuses of the mujahideen.

Despite Al-Suri’s ambitions to take up a course in media and political science in London, he is alleged to have come under increasing pressure from the British intelligence services during the 1990s and decided to leave. In 1997 he returned to Afghanistan, which by that time was in the grip of Mullah Omar and the Taliban, where he established his own camp and continued to produce works on the jihad. By 2004 Al-Suri had become one of the most wanted militants in the world and had been accused of being part of Al-Qa’ida. His name had been connected to the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, although in exactly what context is still unclear. Al-Suri also had a US$5 million reward placed on his head, something he allegedly described as ‘silly’. In October 2005 his luck finally ran out and he was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to the US authorities.

Young idealists

Particularities aside, Al-Suri’s experience is by no means unique. Indeed his story is similar to that of many young Islamist activists who were forced to seek safety in Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s. The rather precarious path trodden by Al-Suri was typical of the first wave of Islamist radicals who, largely by default, found themselves in Europe but whose hearts and ambitions remained firmly in their homelands. This situation was directly related to the circumstances in the Arab world where the failings of the postcolonial independence experiment were becoming increasingly apparent. The progressive secular nationalist regimes, like the Syrian, the Libyan and the Egyptian, that had promised so much had ultimately failed to meet even the most basic socio-economic needs for much of their populations. At the same time the elites of these countries had become mired in corruption and focused their attentions, as well as their investments, in Europe and the West more widely, serving to further alienate themselves from their populations. In addition the increasing reliance by all the regimes in the region on repressive authoritarian measures as a means of prohibiting any genuine political opposition to emerge had prompted many people to seek alternatives.

It was in the 1980s that political Islam arrived on the scene and came to offer new hope in this respect. The success of the populist Islamic Shi’ite revolution in Iran in 1979, combined with efforts by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to promote Sunni Islam, including backing the mujahideen in Afghanistan, gave people new aspirations that Islam could bring about the change that they craved and somehow bring about more equitable societies. Political Islam came to be viewed as a morally fastidious and viable alternative to the status quo, and opposition movements of an Islamist hue began to spring up across the region. However, these countries had become so stagnant that they were unable even to absorb their own political opponents and took to employing the tools of repression with even greater ferocity to deal with their Islamists, forcing many to seek safety elsewhere. Europe, with its tradition of accepting others and its asylum policies, was the obvious place for those fleeing persecution, and they came to follow in the footsteps of the thousands of immigrants who had moved to Europe in search of work in the 1960s and 1970s, bringing a new flavour and new dimension to the Muslim migrant communities in the continent.

Given the nature of the regimes in the Middle East, many of those who came to Europe seeking refuge at this time came from the nationalist states of Egypt and Syria, whose Islamist movements were perhaps the most developed. They included figures such as the Egyptian Anwar Shaban, who had been a member of the militant Egyptian Al-Jama’a Al-Islamiya group that was heavily persecuted in Egypt. Shaban escaped to Afghanistan and then sought asylum in Italy at the beginning of the 1990s. Once in Italy his fiery oratory style attracted a group of followers and it was not long before he set up a mosque in Milan, which allegedly became a key jihadist recruitment centre.⁴ Another Egyptian who trod a similar path was Talaat Fouad Qassem. Like Abu Musab Al-Suri, Qassem was also an engineering student and joined the Al-Jama’a Al-Islamiya group and soon became the leader of the movement in his university faculty and then of the whole Al-Minya University at a time when the Al-Jama’a Al-Islamiya had been able to take over most of the country’s universities, imposing their rigid ideology on both students and staff. After being arrested for his activities and a brief spell in prison, Qassem escaped from Egypt and went to Afghanistan to join the jihad, where he remained until 1992 when the jihadists were forced to find a new refuge. According to one report, after he fled Qassem ‘stopped by several countries looking for a base for his message until he settled in Denmark, where he obtained political asylum’.⁵

On the Syrian front, apart from Al-Suri, other figures included Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, also known as Abu Dahdah, who came to Europe and who was the leader of a wide-ranging Islamist network in Spain. In September 2005 he was sentenced to 27 years in prison, 12 on charges of leading a terrorist group and a further 15 for conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks. Similarly, the well-known preacher Omar Bakri Mohamed, who regularly hit the headlines in the UK with his anti-Western diatribes, also came from Syria at this time. Surprisingly, given his somewhat oafish appearance, Bakri Mohamed was born into a wealthy Aleppo family and studied law at Damascus University. He joined the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood but was forced to leave the country in fear of his life. After a short spell in Beirut and Saudi Arabia, Bakri Mohamed was granted asylum in Britain in the mid-1980s. Along with fellow Syrian Islamist Farid Kassim, he established Hizb ut Tahrir in the UK and went on to gain a reputation for being one of the most hardened and radical espousers of violent jihad until he was excluded from Britain in 2005. In fact the uncompromising stance of the Syrian regime towards its opposition, especially in the clamp-down of the 1980s, meant that many Syrians ended up in Europe at this time. Many of them were linked to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, so much so that a number of them were able to set up an important base in Germany, in the beautiful and historic town of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) that became a key Syrian Brotherhood hub. They joined established Syrian figures there, including Issam Al-Attar, the former General Guide of the Syrian Brotherhood who moved away from the movement in the 1970s ostensibly because of infighting within the group. One commentator has gone so far as to suggest that ‘Aachen was one of the main exile refuges of the Syrian branch [of the Muslim Brotherhood], to the extent that some observes have attributed to it, probably in exaggerated terms, the role of coordinator of the Islamic uprising in Syria during the three or four years up to 1982.’ ⁶ It is true that this is somewhat of an exaggeration, but the vigour of the Syrians who had arrived at this time meant that Aachen came to represent an important centre for Islamist radicals in Europe.

Like Al-Suri, many of these Islamists were young idealists who were products of the internal social and political upheavals of their own societies and who had become involved in political Islam as a means of challenging their own governments. It was these men who were to lay down the roots of militant Islam in Europe. After being forced out of their own countries they had little choice but to settle in Europe, although some passed through Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan on their way. Indeed Saudi Arabia represented a special haven for them, as it was considered the centre of the Islamic world and a place of ‘pure Islam’. These Islamists, who were full of the fervour of their new-found ideology, were extremely attracted to the Wahabist version of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which offered a refreshing antidote to the traditional Islam generally practised by the regimes of the region. Even those regimes that proclaimed themselves as secular continued to rely on traditional forms of Islam as a means of bolstering their own legitimacy. Therefore for those Islamists who sought to bring down their regimes, the purity and simplicity of Wahabism held a special appeal, so much so that Saudi Arabia was for the Islamists what Moscow represented for the communists during the Soviet era. Yet it was in Europe that these fugitives felt most free to engage in political activism and to openly condemn their own governments without fear of persecution or of being sent back to their own countries. Indeed, being in Europe was not going to prevent them from trying to fulfil their dream of creating a ‘true’ Islamic state in the Islamic world.

Jihad and new Islamic thinking

What constituted the ‘true’ Islamic state, however, was a highly contentious issue and one that was debated fiercely among the various schools of thought that were prevalent at the time. Indeed the 1970s and 1980s had seen a mushrooming of different strands and ideologies that were essentially a response to the political environment of the day. What all of these different ideologies shared, however, was the belief that the answer to society’s problems lay in Islam, or more specifically in purifying Islam and going back to the roots of the religion and to the golden age of the Prophet and the salaf (ancestors i.e. companions of the Prophet) and to the core texts of the Qu’ran and the hadith (sayings of the Prophet).

This was an idea that gained great currency in the late nineteenth century in Egypt and was expounded by a number of scholars such as Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani, Muhammad Abdu and later Rashid Ridha who were proponents of what is known as salafiyah or salafism, i.e. returning to the time of the ancestors. The movement developed largely in response to the challenges that Western colonial occupation and modernity had brought and that had forced Arabs to confront their own backwardness in relation to the West’s technological and scientific advances. These scholars argued that it was by stripping away the biddah (innovations) and superstitions that had come to dilute and corrupt Islam and by getting back to its Islamic roots that Arab society could move on and meet the challenge of Westernizati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The First Wave of Radicals
• 2. Europe as Islamic Melting Pot
• 3. Recruitment for Jihad
• 4. Islamist Opposition Groups and European Support Networks
• 5. Europe as Battleground
• 6. Algerian Radicalism Targets France
• 7. The 9/11 Effect and ‘Globalized’ Islam
• 8. The Madrid Bombings
• 9. The London Bombings
• 10. Radical Converts
• 11. The Danish Cartoon Row and the Dilemma of the Moderates
• Conclusion
• Notes