Al-Qaeda (49 page)

Lindsay was the outsider of the group. Born in Jamaica when his mother was 19, he barely knew his father. After converting with his
mother to Islam at 14, Lindsay took the name ‘Jamal’ and started wearing the traditional white robes. Though disciplined at school for handing out leaflets supporting al-Qaeda, he was admired among friends at Islamic groups around his home town of Huddersfield for his maturity and for the speed with which he achieved fluency in Arabic. Soon after his mother moved to America – leaving her son to manage alone in the family home – Lindsay met his wife, a white convert to Islam, over the internet. He probably encountered Sidique Khan at prayer groups around Leeds or possibly at the community centre where the older man led discussion groups towards the end of 2002. As Sidique Khan and Lindsay became close friends, there was said to be a ‘marked change’ in the latter’s character.

On the day of the attacks the group assembled at Luton train station and travelled together to London. The four men, apparently ‘euphoric’, were seen embracing at around 8.30am at King’s Cross station, twenty minutes before the blasts. They then split up to conduct their near-simultaneous explosions.

None of the four bombers fit into easily defined categories though they do, of course, show many of the key elements seen elsewhere. There is the classic profile of one more senior man, more experienced, motivated and charismatic, acting to bring together younger, more impressionable members of the cell. All four are young Muslim men. They are also immigrants or the children of immigrants, as almost all the militants we have seen throughout this book have been, whether it is a matter of migrating from the countryside to the town as in the case of early Afghan Islamists or across the Atlantic, such as in the case of Lindsay. One comes from a broken home, one was an underachiever at school, the others appear to have enjoyed happy and relatively stable backgrounds. There appears, at first reading, little to make them different from hundreds of thousands of young British or European men, Muslim or otherwise.
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Their radicalization process was equally unexceptional. It was, by contemporary standards, relatively long, taking several years. A key factor, often understimated in all militant associations, is ‘small group dynamics’ and it is clear that this group, which began planning the suicide attacks shortly after the return of Khan and Tanweer from
Pakistan in February 2005, were held together partly by ‘personal contact and group bonding’ and partly by a fierce mutual antagonism to perceived injustices by the West against Muslims. There was as well, of course, the powerful emotional glue of a shared desire for martyrdom.
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Videos, the internet and the generally heated political climate in the UK following the controversial invasion of Iraq too played a role. It is worth stressing that at least three of the four bombers were at the very least interested in the more extremist tendencies in Islamic thought well before the invasion of Iraq – though not, it is equally worth noting, before the September 11 attacks. This provides further evidence for the idea that, as in Madrid, the conflict in Iraq acted as an ‘intensifier’ for the propaganda, methodologies and ideas disseminated by bin Laden and others with some considerable effect since the late 1990s, and particularly since 2001, rather than being a single factor itself. This is born out by Sidique Khan’s videoed ‘last will and testament’, released just two months after the London attacks.

The video, broadcast first by al-Jazeera and then by TV stations all over the world, is a ‘classic’ in the long tradition of Islamic militant propaganda that bin Laden had done so much to develop. Sidique Khan’s words were heard by hundreds of millions of people, amplifying and explaining the message the bomber’s hoped to send with the London attacks. For many in Britain, the images, and particularly Khan’s flat Yorkshire accent, were shocking. Suddenly the public was face to face with an adult British citizen explaining why he was prepared to kill and to die.

Khan’s words were directed at Muslims in the West. He made various points, in a clear English devoid of religious rhetoric, references to the Koran and of the usual nods at Islamic history. He reiterated the arguments of the Madrid bombers, explaining that civilians were targets because in a democracy everyone bears responsibility for the government’s actions. These, in the case of the British government, apparently involved ‘the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture’ of Muslims. Khan rejected national identity in favour of the umma, the global community of believers, saying that the violence will continue as long as the government continued to ‘perpetuate atrocities’ against ‘his
Muslim brothers and sisters’. He also made the classic theological argument often overlooked by Western observers but deeply relevant to any listening activists who might be considering violence. Bombs are justified, Khan said, because the umma is under attack. This means that violent resistance is therefore an obligation on all believers and ‘collateral damage’ in the form of the death of innocents is thus acceptable. In the classic formulation we have seen so often, Khan stated bluntly: ‘We are at war and I am a soldier.’

Appropriating the language of the traditional and anti-globalization left, Khan also spoke of the ‘propaganda machine’ which aimed to ‘scare the masses into conforming to their power and wealth-obsessed objectives’ and in a concise expression of the ‘propaganda by deed’ strategy promoted by Islamic militants for decades, and by other activists for centuries, Khan explained: ‘Our words have no impact… therefore I am going to talk to you in a language you understand. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.’ In a major innovation, though the tape delivered to al-Jazeera was in Arabic, there were English subtitles.

The question of how, when and where the various elements that form the tape were spliced together has remained unclear. The footage of Ayman al-Zawahiri, edited in with the images of Khan, was almost certainly filmed in the high hills of the Afghan–Pakistani border some time in the months before the bombing. But it was very unclear where and when the footage of Khan himself was taken. Friends of the former school-care assistant insisted, following the release of the video, that from the young man’s appearance it was at least six months or a year before his death. The lack of a weapon in the frame, merely a pen, indicated that it may have been filmed in a location that was less secure than those usually used for such videos. However, it is unlikely that anyone planning an attack in Britain would risk filming himself in the UK. It is likely, therefore, that the film was made in the eastern Pakistani cities and villages that Khan visited between December 2004 and January 2005.

The question of who made the tape and where it was made touches on the critical question of the nature of the involvement of ‘al-Qaeda’ in the London bombings. As is so often the case, the government of the
attacked country, in this case the UK, tried to strengthen theoretical links with bin Laden. As was pointed out in chapter one, governments, including some particularly unsavoury ones, have consistently used the new international bogeyman of bin Laden to mask the responsibility of their own policies in fomenting unrest and eventually violence. The British government, whose foreign policy was deeply controversial, was at pains to deny any link between the bombing and the war in Iraq despite the conviction of their own secret services that such a link, though indirect as I pointed out above, existed. The parliamentary report into the bombings stated categorically that there was ‘no firm evidence’ to back up the claim that the al-Qaeda hardcore had launched the attacks.
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The probable truth is that the 7 July cell was autonomous and self-starting but that its leader, having decided to attempt some kind of major and violent action, sought logistical help, guidance or legitimization from people closer to the al-Qaeda hardcore in southwest Asia. A key point is that this was made possible by the fact that, by the end of 2004 bin Laden and those around him had been able to regroup and thus once more to offer, though in a vastly reduced form, facilities to those who wished to execute bombings or other attacks around the world. In this they were merely operating in their classic role as a ‘clearing house’ for projects brought to them by self-starting, motivated volunteers. This means that the London bombing should be placed on our scale slightly further towards the centre than the ‘fully autonomous’ Madrid or Casablanca bombing, though it is still far from being a ‘radio-controlled’, highly organized and choreographed operation such as the September 11 attacks or the 1998 embassy bombings.

Significantly, Sidique Khan was mentioned by captured non-British Islamic militant detainees in interrogations in early 2004 which referred to men from the UK known only by pseudonyms who had travelled to Pakistan in 2003 and
sought
meetings with al-Qaeda figures.
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Once again we have a scenario where individuals who are
already radicalized
travel from their home countries to find the al-Qaeda hardcore, looking for help with their jihadi ambitions.
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In addition, being British and from a community with historical links to southwest Asia, Sidique Khan would have advantages in reaching
Pakistan and eventually the al-Qaeda hardcore that for example, a French Muslim of Algerian extraction or a Jordanian or Egyptian Arab would be denied. Nearly half a million British Pakistanis make the journey every year and monitoring them all is clearly impossible. The trip in November 2004 was not the first that Khan made to Pakistan. It is believed he travelled there sometime in 2003 too.

Sidique Khan was thus, like Mohammed Bouyeri, the killer of Theo Van Gogh, an individual self-starter or ‘home grown’ militant radicalized by the combination of events around him and the propaganda of bin Laden and others. However, unlike Bouyeri, Sidique Khan had the connections and the drive to successfully seek the strategic, theological and practical means to carry out a very ambitious, murderous project. The dynamic and evolving model of al-Qaeda, with its composite elements in a continuing shifting and flexible relationship, was proving as effective as ever. In the London attack we see a recently strengthened ‘al-Qaeda’ hardcore, assisted by a particular set of circumstances pertaining to the bombers, their ethnic origins and their country of residence, taking a slightly larger role in an attack than it had done for a number of years. However this should not distract us from the salient fact that without the spread of the al-Qaeda ideology Sidique Khan would never have set off for Pakistan in the first place.
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1. Osama bin Laden, born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, has become the pre-eminent figure in contemporary Islamic militancy. Though now a fugitive, his mission to radicalize and mobilize the Muslim world has met with considerable success.

2. Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor, joined forces with bin Laden in the early 1990s. Bin Laden benefited from the older man’s long experience of militancy and greater ideological sophistication.