By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Dzokhar Dudayev Azerbaijani And Russian-Backed Armenians

Since most terrorists make very careful plans for their escape after an attack, suicide bombing cuts out an entire layer of planning. The tactic enables the bomber to get close to his or her target, giving rise to death tolls that are considerable - in fact four to six times more lethal - compared with gun or grenade attacks below the level of car bombs. Costing an average OfUS$150 to mount, suicide bombings are cheap.

If we take the Al-Aqsa Intifada, between September 2000 and September 2005 there were 144 successful suicide attacks in Israel among some 36,000 terrorist incidents. Although suicide bombings accounted for a mere 0.5 per cent of all attacks, they caused 50 per cent of deaths and casualties during this period. There is something else worth noting about suicide bombing too. When successful, there is no one to capture unless the mission fails - while the willingness to die indicates a fanatical belief in a cause. The sheer ordinariness of the bomber indicates that there must be a limitless supply of such people lurking in the hostile population. Denied an obvious object of vengeance, much of the energy of the bewildered opponent goes into working out the motives of why these men and women kill themselves. Such bizarre phenomena as the small child who, in a 2007 Hamas TV advert, swears she is going to follow her deceased mother by becoming a suicide bomber, or the mothers who appear to welcome the deaths of their martyred sons, encourage the view that this is all the fanatical face of a pathological society. In fact, some of the mothers who do not grieve have been bribed, drugged or otherwise intimidated by men, with an interest in ensuring that the martyrs are celebrated.

Israel has around 250 unsuccessful suicide bombers in its prisons, who have been the subjects of extensive investigation by expert psychologists. Some are alive because they lost their nerve, others because their bombs malfunctioned. Their age range begins at fourteen, a boy whom the Israelis captured trying to blow himself up. Many of them were motivated to kill Jews (as they invariably put it) by the loss of family or friends through Israeli military or police action. It is a matter of revenge in a society where blood feuds last generations. This multiplies the carnage. Others saw suicide bombing as a way out of a dysfunctional family, dishonour - especially in the case of women - or sheer boredom. Wafa Idris, a Palestinian woman suicide bomber, had been divorced by her husband after it became apparent she was infertile. Her husband remarried and moved his new wife into a neighbouring house where he threw a party when their first child was born. This sent Wafa Idris over the edge. Several female suicide bombers seem to have disgraced themselves by becoming pregnant with Fatah lovers, or had otherwise acquired a reputation for looseness which shahid or martyrdom would expungeY In 2004, Hamas's first woman suicide, a woman with two children, was driven by her husband to the checkpoint where she blew herself up after she confessed to having had an extramarital liaison.

Ironically, some you,ng female would-be suicide bombers saw joining a terrorist group as an opportunity to meet males without supervision. One of them explained: 'We do not live in the West. When I went to training, I told my father that I was going to a girlfriend ... I had freedom, even though our family is religious. It is natural to go and see girlfriends.' She got cold feet only when the males informed her that the object of these training trysts was for the girls to blow themselves up. One shahida explained that when her father refused to allow her to marry a (poor) disabled man with whom she had fallen in love, she got her revenge by becoming a suicide bomber. The vision of life in the Garden of Eden overcame her depression. For women there would not be the seventy-two virgins, but an abundance of food and a doting martyrwarrior. A male failed suicide bomber explained his vision of heavenly delights, much of which was haram to Muslims: 'All that is forbidden in this world is permitted in the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden has everything - God, freedom, the Prophet Mohammed and my friends, the "shahids" ... There are seventy-two virgins. There are lots of things I can't even describe ... I'll find everything in the Garden of Eden, a river of honey, a river of beer and alcohol ... '44 Once dead, the suicide bomber joins the rollcall of martyrs, his or her photo ringed with a golden frame at home, and plastered everywhere on posters. Proud parents announce the death in the weddings, rather than obituaries, columns of newspapers. By 2001 Hamas was paying them between US$3,OOO and US$8,000 in death benefits. Saddam Hussein raised this to US$28,000, with further perks such as clocks, rugs and TV s. Expectations are so low in places like Gaza and Jenin, that killing oneself can seem like an attractive career option, and a form of social mobility for the entire family or clan. Social endorsement of martyrdom further destroyed residual taboos about suicide, which in any case had been qualified by many Islamist clerics.

Suicide attacks were accompanied by vicious battles between armed elements of the Intifada and the IDF. One of these raged for ten days in a refugee camp at Jenin, home to fifteen thousand people. This was an Islamist stronghold variously described as 'the capital of martyrs' or 'a nest of cockroaches' depending on one's point of view. Hamas and Islamic Jihad wanted to turn this into an Arab Stalingrad, wiring it with booby-traps and sniping from amid the mounting rubble. As the inhabitants were slow to abandon their homes, they also hoped that any Israeli assault would deliver a propaganda victory, with talk of massacre finding its way from journalists to human rights agencies. In fact, talk of 'hundreds' or even 'thousands' of victims, relayed by Western media outlets, whose presenters could hardly contain their own rage, was misplaced. The final agreed death toll was thirty-two Palestinian armed militants, twenty-two Palestinian civilians, and twenty-three Israeli soldiers. Instead of a non-existent massacre there was steady physical erasure, as helicopters and tanks fired missiles and shells into buildings, while sixty-ton armoured bulldozers nudged down houses and ground down the rubble. If there were human rights violations, these included the Palestinian and IDF decisions to fight a pitched battle in a refugee camp, and Israel's denial of medical and humanitarian relief to civilians caught in the fighting. Scenes like these, repeated endlessly on the world's TV channels, further fuelled the anger of the virtual ummah. They were not alone. In 2003 Asif Muhammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, Anglo- Pakistanis in their twenties, who had met studying Islamism under Omar Bakri Mohammed at a college in Derby, volunteered their services to Hamas. They met a Hamas instructor in Syria and then entered Israel via Jordan, mingling with European left-wing activists arriving to insert themselves into the Intifada as part of an Alternative Tourism Group. They seem to have been ferried around various Palestinian towns by a left-wing Italian woman journalist who did not realise they were terrorists, having accepted their cover stories about being interested in Palestinian medical centres. In Gaza they were kitted out with suicide belts and the Italian woman drove them into Israel. Hanif blew himself up outside Mike's Place, a popular Tel Aviv blues bar on the city's waterfront, killing three people. Sharif fled, after a bomb concealed in a book failed to detonate, and his body was washed up on the shore a few weeks later, having drowned in mysterious circumstances.

The mother of a professional Saudi soldier was watching the news with her son one evening in the early 1990S: 'Look what they are doing, they are raping our sisters and killing our brothers. My son, get up, and go, and I don't want to see you again.' Abu Saif, the soldier, and a friend called Abu Hamad al-Otaibi, were soon at the village of Bjala-Bucha in Bosnia. When the Serbs attacked, most of Abu Hamad's head was blown off by a 120 mm shell. Abu Saif was shot dead in the same battle. As they were lowered into one grave, their fellow Arab jihadists said: 'They loved each other in this world and they shall love each other in the next.' Over in east London at the some time, Bangladeshi and Pakistani students at Tower Hamlets College watched a short film, The Killing Fields of Bosnia, which made many of them weep. At the London School of Economics, the 'Tottenham Ayatollah', sheikh Omar Bakri, the Syrian-born spiritual head of the extremist Hizb ut- Tahir, had Muslim students jumping to their feet shouting 'Jihad for Bosnia!' after one of his rabble-rousing performances in the main lecture theatre.45

Perceptions of Muslims as victims were massively enhanced by the terrible wars that erupted amid the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The Balkans inspired anger, with tales of Serbs using ropes attached to cars to drag the testicles off Muslim males. In March 1992, the predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzogovina declared its independence, thereby reminding Muslims elsewhere that they had two million Serbo-Croatspeaking co-religionists indigenous to this part of Europe, South Slavs who had been Islamised under the Ottomans. However, after decades of Communism and secular education, and rates of urban intermarriage of 30 per cent by the 1980s, the Bosnian Muslims were largely Muslim by virtue of culture and tradition rather than fervency. Certain distinct customs and habits marked them out - like drinking coffee from cups with no handles, infant circumcision and distinctive names - but they also drank alcohol and ate pork, and were heavily Europeanised and scarcely hostile to a Western world they regarded as superior to Communism.46

Bosnia has an indigenous Islamist tradition, although this was confined to a tiny handful of intellectuals. Alija Izetbegovic, the first Bosnian president, was typical of most of these, however, in that he had matured from the Muslim Brotherhood influences of his youth, which had repeatedly landed him in the jails of the Communist dictator Tito, to an endorsement of democracy and an openness towards Western culture. He bent over backwards to accommodate Croat and Serb sensitivities as an independent Bosnia developed. This relatively enlightened position was in marked contrast to the crudity with which former Communists, like Slobodan Milosevic, espoused an extreme Serbian Orthodox Christian national socialism which played upon the still visceral mythology of the Second W orld War. In Serbian eyes, the Croats were latterday Ustashe - the Catholic Fascist party that Hitler and Mussolini had helped into power - while the two million Bosnian Muslims were Islamist fundamentalists. Ethnically speaking, they were nothing more than Romanised or Islamised Serbs. As had already happened when.. Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence, Milosevic used the combined muscle of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federal army and sinister ethnic-Serb paramilitaries to fuse the exclaves of territory which he sought to incorporate into a Greater Serbia. This tactic was stymied by the Croats, leaving Milosevic to divert this malign energy towards Bosnia, where the psychiatrist turned politician Radovan Karadzic had already declared Serbian Autonomous Regions as a newly independent Bosnia was recognised by the EEC in April 1992.

West European politicians adopted the idiosyncratic strategy of extruding the US from what they protectively claimed was a European problem, while evincing a patrician disdain worthy of Bismarck for the warring savages in the Balkans. They clutched at any historical cliche in their expensively educated imaginations to justify a fateful inertia. By denying the Bosnian Muslims arms, they left them at the mercy of Serb forces with huge stockpiled (and manufacturing) capacity that was immune to an impartial UN arms embargo. British patricians used every slippery evasion to do nothing while butchery, rape and ethnic cleansing took place right under their noses, until the world's media - above all Penny Marshall of ITN - made this impossible by publicising scenes almost worthy of Bergen-Belsen. Western Christians and Jews were as appalled by what they saw as anyone else, in many cases forcing their reluctant governments to do something about it by comparing it with the Holocaust.

At first, the organised Muslim world did not know how to respond to the plight of a Muslim community they knew next to nothing about. In 1992 the subject was discussed at Islamic conferences in Istanbul and Jeddah. The Iranians were the first to offer practical aid, shipping arms and training instructors via Turkey and Croatia to Bosnia, a supply stream that the US tolerated to redress the imbalance between Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, for many of these weapons fell out of their crates in Zagreb. Egypt and Saudi Arabia donated respectively humanitarian aid and US$150 million, while discouraging a repetition of the Afghan Arab jihad that was already blowing back streams of militants into their countries. Inevitably, since the fall of Kabul in 1992, the free electrons of the jihad were drawn to Bosnia as if by a powerful magnet. Unless they went deeper into Afghanistan, they had nowhere to go, for home was not an option. Pakistan had also blocked the passage of further Arabs into that country. Men connected to Al Qaeda installed the personnel to receive both Arab Afghan mujaheddin and local recruits from among Muslim European immigrants as they made their way to Bosnia via  Croatia.
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A forty-two-year-old Saudi, sheikh Abu Abdel Aziz 'Barbaros' - the latter word referring to his two-foot-Iong henna-red beard - was a veteran Arab Afghan also known by the term 'Hown' after the Soviet Hound artillery shell he had used so proficiently. He was one of the first recruits to Al Qaeda. Although he initially thought Bosnia might be situated in the US, Aziz quickly pronounced that the conflict was a legitimate holy war for his fellow jihadi-salafists. Another key participant was a radical cleric, an Egyptian called sheikh Anwar Shaaban, imam of Milan's Islamic Cultural Institute, a mosque installed in a former garage. There are ten mosques in Milan, serving a Muslim population of about one hundred thousand. Most of them are moderate, but the I CI was not, following its London equivalent in PillSbury Park in encouraging worshippers to occupy the pavements in aggressive defiance of motorists and shopkeepers. The mosque was also the hub of an extortion racket which monopolised the supply of halal meat to butchers it terrified into being sole customersY The ICI performed an equivalent role to Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar during the Afghan wars, and both the Jordanian cleric Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza aI-Masri in London, in despatching fighters to Bosnia. The hook-handed Hamza went to Bosnia in person, but soon fell out with Algerian Islamists he encountered. Another Italian-based cleric, Mohamed Ben Brahim Saidani, head of a mosque in Bologna, was the direct link between the Bosnian jihad and bin Laden. Beyond these two, a network of Islamist clerics including sheikh Abu Talal al-Qasimy in Cairo and sheikh Omar bin Ahmad in Yemen banged the drum to lure young men to Bosnia. While these clerics provided the theologicallegitimisation, and many recruits, for this new field of jihad, Algerian and Egyptian veterans of Afghanistan, like Boudella aI-Hajj, Moataz Billah and Wahiudeen al-Masri organised the military training at two camps which the jihadists operated from Mehurici and Zenica.

A motley array of volunteers descended on Bosnia. A Bahraini prince and one of the nation's soccer stars, a Qatari handball player and young British Muslim medical students rubbed shoulders with bulky ArabAmericans from Detroit. The group's official cameraman was a young German Muslim who as a teenager discovered that his German parents had adopted him from a Turkish couple, whom he rejoined. At the age of twenty-one Abu Musa went to Bosnia to fight and film for the mujaheddin, one of his key tasks being to capture the smile on the faces of dying jihadi's. A shadowy network of Islamist charities, based in the US, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, many of which had proven links to AI Qaeda terrorists and which would move its money around too, oiled the assembly and supply of this army. The names, Human Concern International or Third World Relief Agency, belied the evil intent.

The core fighters were wild people, in their Afghan-style flat caps and long quilted jackets, whose cries of'Allahu Akhbar!' sent a shudder down the spines of UN peacekeepers, who were under orders not to fire at them. They frightened their Bosnian allies, who generally wanted to live, as well as villagers whose pigs they shot. The Arab jihadist presence in Bosnia led to a new apocalyptic rhetoric, in which this complex struggle was portrayed as 'a war between Islam and Christianity ... a war carried out by the entire West against the Islamic world'. It also led to the introduction of Mghan mores, as when the heads of three captured Serbs were displayed on poles, while others were crudely circumcised with a commando knife. Another Serb prisoner described what happened to him in Arab jihadist captivity: 'As soon as we arrived, the mujaheddins tied us with a hose, into which they let air under pressure, to make it expand and press our legs. This caused terrible pains and Gojko Vujeiae swore [to] God, so one of the mujaheddin took him aside and cut his head off. I did not see what he used to do the cutting, but I know that he brought the head into the room and forced all of us to kiss it. Then the mujaheddin hung the head on a nail in the wall.' Unsurprisingly, captured Serbs, like captured Soviets in Afghanistan, began to accept offers to convert to Islam.

When in 1993 the Arab mujaheddin and their Bosnian allies found themselves fighting the Croats as well as the Serbs, similar atrocities occurred. On one occasion, the jihadists had to be restrained by their Bosnian allies as they attempted to blow up an ancient monastery after they had already scraped images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary from the murals around the altar. Elsewhere they grabbed four young men in a village, cut their throats, and collected the blood so as to tip it back over the victims' heads.48 Western aid workers became targets too, notoriously when three British men were kidnapped, which resulted in the execution-style killing of Paul Goodhall, and the shooting of two of his friends as they fled the same fate at the hands of the jihadists. Tensions
. between the Bosnian army and their indispensable foreign friends led to the formation of a separate Battalion of Holy Warriors, whose semisuicidal propensities w:re in evidence in several major battles. They were owed a debt of blood by the Bosnian government. This explains why that government ignored warnings that the networks that sustained these foreign fighters were simultaneously engaged in acts of terrorism. In 1995, Algerian jihadists were sent from Bosnia to blast with shotguns an imam of a Paris mosque who had co-founded the Islamic Salvation Front, which by then had fallen foul of the more extreme Armed Islamic Group or GIA. Others connected to the 'charity' Human Concern International were responsible for two bomb attacks on the Paris Metro - the first of which killed ten and injured 116 - as well as a failed attempt to derail a high-speed TGV near Lyons, an early indication that the jihadists were bent on indiscriminate mass casualties.

Warnings from Egypt about this viper's nest in Europe's midst were also ignored by most European governments. After an attempt was foiled to assassinate Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptians decided to strike back. They had the Croatian police arrest Talal al-Qasimy, simultaneously the patron of the Bosnian jihadists and the international spokesman of Al-Gama'at, the terror organisation which had co-operated with Al Qaeda in a bid to murder the Egyptian leader in Addis Ababa. In an early example of CIA-supervised rendition under US president Bill Clinton (for George W. Bush did not patent the policy), al-Qasimy was 'de-territorialised' by being moved to a US warship, and then handed over to the Egyptians. After a spell in the so-called ghost villas maintained by the Egyptian secret service, he was executed in accordance with a death sentence passed in 1992.49 A decade before major terrorist atrocities in Europe, the Egyptian government issued a clear warning in Al-Ahram:

His [al-Qasimy's] arrest proves what we have always said, which is that these terror groups are operating on a worldwide scale, using places like Afghanistan and Bosnia to form their fighters who come back to the Middle East ... European countries like Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, England and others, which give sanctuary to these terrorists, should now understand it will come back to haunt them where they live.

Virtually every European government, with the honourable exception of the French, ignored a warning whose chill truth is evident a decade later. AB sixty thousand NATO peacekeepers descended on Bosnia in the wake of the- Dayton Agreements to halt the carnage, the Bosnian government enabled many of the Arab jihadists, including those who had married locally, to become citizens by issuing them with batches of blank passports. This got around the provision in Dayton that the jihadists had thirty days to leave the country. The villages where they settled acquired roadsigns warning 'FEAR ALLAH'. Since the jihadists regarded the peace deal as a sell-out, and viewed Western NATO troops as enemies of Islam, any number of ugly incidents occurred when the two sides met, even as a Canadian suicide bomber attacked a Croatian police station in revenge for the abduction of al-Qasimy. In December, a nineteen-year-old British suicide bomber was killed when a car bomb he was readying for use against Croat forces prematurely exploded. A spiral of violence ensued, especially after Croat troops ambushed and assassinated sheikh Anwar Shaaban, the key figure in the entire Bosnian jihad. As Christmas was celebrated for the first time in four years in Bosnia, the mujaheddin shot up Croat soldiers returning from mass.

What happened in Bosnia is important for several reasons. The wars mobilised Muslim opinion across the world, simplifying complex internecine conflicts into a war between Christianity and Islam - a view somewhat undermined by the enormous relief efforts made by Christians in the West who would have recoiled from the nationalist Orthodox Christianity of the Serbs, whose only firm allies were their Russian co-religionists. The foreign jihadists acquired further combat experience and extended the organisational sinews of terrorism into Europe, under the noses of security services that had yet to learn that Human Concern International was not quite what the words implied. Yet there was something else too. The war was resolved by another Pax Americana and the presence of large numbers of NATO troops, including many from Muslim countries like Turkey. The jihadists' attempt to plant Islamist palms in the snows of the Bosnian hills had failed. The local Muslim population resembled a body that rejects an organ transplant. Faced with what the jihadists represented, the Bosnian Muslims opted for their local tradition of confining their religion to the private sphere, laughing off radical calls to ban Father Christmas. That this was all the local Islamist radicals called for was a victory of a notable kind. The trouble was that this evolving reality did not moderate the scenes of jihad that circulated on the internet or via DVDs, for these had joined the timeless fairytale too.50

A third conflict enragea the jihadi-salafist imagination by supplying lurid images of Muslim suffering and, one strongly suspects, scenes of retaliatory savagery that often reflected a psychopathic bloodlust. When would-be Anglo-Pakistani jihadists sit down of a night in some dilapidated northern English suburb to watch their spiritual comrades in action, the most gruesome scenes invariably stem from the Chechen wars, whose agonies and complexities have been reduced to a jihadist splatter movie on a DVD costing about US$20.

The implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991 brought not only the collapse of the Soviet outer empire, but demands for greater autonomy within the newly minted Russian federation, 30 per cent of whose citizens were not ethnic Russians. Only two federal subjects refused to sign the 1992 Federation Treaty, and by 1994 Tatarstan had negotiated a special accord granting it enhanced autonomy. That left Chechnya, the predominantly Muslim part of the former ChechenIngush Soviet Republic, a million of whose people Stalin had deported in 1944 to Kazakhstan, from which the remnants returned home in 1957. They found that eight hundred mosques and four hundred religious colleges had been shut down, while the mazars or shrines, essential to the Sufi brotherhoods to which many Chechens belonged, had been closed or demolished. Although the Muslim world is entirely unaware of this, it has largely been conservative Western scholars like Robert Conquest and John Dunlop who have spent decades investigating the crimes of the Soviet Union against the Chechen people, studies partly informed by the spirit of the Cold War, but also honouring the struggle of a small nation against a chauvinistic totalitarianism. Others have increased our understanding of Islam's role in Chechen society. The vast majority of Chechens practise a popular Sufi strain of Islam that incorporates local customs, drum and string music, and venerable paganisms; since the 1980s, some 10 per cent have adopted the more bracing beliefs of the Wahhabis. On 6 September 1991, militant Chechen separatists led by former Soviet general Dzokhar Dudayev, a Chechen married to a Russian woman, stormed the Chechen-Ingush Supreme Soviet, killing the Communist leader of the capital Grozny and effectively dissolving the government. After having himself elected president by a suspiciously large margin, Dudayev unilaterally declared Chechen independence. When Russia's president Boris Yeltsin declared a state of emergency and flew Interio~_ Ministry troops to Grozny, Soviet president Mikhail, Gorbachev declared his action illegal. The Chechens rounded up the Russian troops and bussed them home. Two months later, Shamil Basayev, whose first name evoked the legendary imam Shamil who had fought tsarist invaders in the mid-nineteenth century, hijacked a Russian plane and 178 passengers en route to Ankara in Turkey. He threatened to blow them up unless Yeltsin rescinded the state of emergency. The incident was settled peacefully, but strikingly president Dudayev made Basayev a colonel and gave him a command in his Presidential Guard, a worrying response to an act of terrorism.

In 1992 Dudayev sent Basayev to aid Muslim Azerbaijani national forces fighting Russian-backed Christian Armenians in NagornoKarabakh, and then to help Abkhazians fighting for freedom from Georgia. The rumours were ominous. One of the reasons why two hundred thousand ethnic Georgians fled Abkhazia in terror was that, after decapitating a hundred prisoners, Basayev had organised soccer matches for his men playing with the heads of these captives. He returned to Chechnya with a band of brutal 'wolves', although the human variety were a great deal more sinister than the four-legged ones. In 1994 Basayev and twenty of his best men flew to Pakistan where the ISI sent them for advanced training at a mujaheddin camp in Afghanistan. He returned home to Chechnya after being taken ill handling chemical weapons, they and nuclear explosives being a constant in the apocalyptic imprecations he rained down upon Russia.

When a Moscow-backed opposition emerged against President Dudayev's dictatorial rule, Basayev played a leading role in suppressing them, defeating a squadron of Russian tanks operating as freelance mercenaries on the rebel side. Not so covert Russian support for the rebels became an all-out onslaught once the Chechen leader refused an ultimatum from Yeltsin for all sides to disarm and desist. The Russian attack was a shambles, as officers and men refused to participate in actions of dubious legality, while nervous conscripts drafted in from neighbouring regions trembled as they approached formidable Chechen fighters. Encountering resistance in Grozny, most of whose citizens were ethnic Russians, the Russians spent five weeks bombarding the city with heavy artillery and waves of bombers. As the Chechen rebels had fallen back to wage a guerrilla campaign from the mountains, most of the twenty-seven thousand dead in the ruined city were innocent civilians, who unlike the Chechens had no village teips or clans to seek sanctuary with.

The Chechen wars' were fought with terrible brutality on both sides, even before the Chechens resorted to spectacular terrorist violence. The Chechens used mines and ambushes to disrupt Russian movement, while the Russians, many of whose commanders were routinely drunk, pulverised towns and villages with artillery fire that took no account of a civilian presence. Torture of prisoners was similarly normal on both sides. After the Russians killed eleven members of Basayev's family by dropping two six-ton bombs on his uncle's house, fatalities which included the rebel commander's wife and child, no captured Russian pilot would survive. Basayev made two fateful decisions.

First, he decided to take the war to Russia, or, as he had it, to make the Russians see what blood looks like, the second of many acts of terrorism he committed. These acts played into Russian propaganda that built on the widespread reputation Chechens had among ordinary Russians for Mafia-style activities. In the summer of 1995 he hid 145 of his men in trucks, while others, disguised as Russian policemen, claimed that the vehicles contained the bodies of Russian troops killed in Chechnya. Bribes ensured that the convoy swept through Russian checkpoints until they were stopped in the southerly town of Budennovsk. Escorted to the town police station, Basayev's men leaped from the trucks and killed all the policemen, before initiating a full-scale gun battle with police reinforcements in the town centre. Basayev initially secured the town hospital, situated in a former monastery, so as to treat his wounded, but then decided to use it as a last redoubt. He herded hundreds of civilian hostages into the building, wiring explosives to the entrances and exits. As there were a total of sixteen hundred hostages, this was the biggest incident of its kind in modern history. To show his earnestness, and to settle an old score, he personally shot dead six Russian pilots he unearthed among the patients.

Refusing all offers of compromise, and entreaties from general AsIan Maskhadov downwards, Basayev warned that he would kill everyone in the building if the Russians did not abandon their campaign in Chechnya. When he was told the Russians were planning to round up and shoot two thousand Chechens, he effectively indicated that they could kill every Chechen in Russia and he 'would not even flinch'. The Russian defence minister decided that four days of this were enough. Russian troops were ordered to storm the building, which resulted in the deaths of over a hundred hostages by the time they had fought their way to the first floor. The following day, prime minister Viktor Chernomirdin decided to negotiate with Basayev, live on TV. As a result of these talks, Basayev and his men (shielded by 139 volunteer hostages) set off back to Chechnya in six trucks, with a refrigerated lorry bringing up the rear with their dead. A peace agreement was signed that July.

Basayev's second stunt was to call upon the services of a Saudi he had fought with in Abkhazia, Samir bin Salekh al-Suweilum, also known as al-Khattab, or as he was variously called 'one-handed Akhmed', 'the Black Arab' or 'the Lion of Chechnya'. Dark, flat-nosed, heavy-set and bearded in an ursine way, al-Khattab's menacing face adorns thousands ofDVD covers issued by Hamas and the like (one of his hands had been mangled by a home-made grenade). He had turned down the chance to study in the US in favour of waging jihad in Afghanistan where he fought, for six years, under the aegis of Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden. Perhaps because he claimed that his mother hailed from the Caucasus, or more simply because he saw the fighting there on TV, he went to help the Muslim Azeris, followed by a stint killing Russians in Tajikistan. Having already met Basayev, al- Khattab surfaced in Chechnya in early 1995, bringing eight more Arabs who were contracted as 'consultants' to train Chechen fighters. He brought in more Afghan Arabs, and men he had fought with in Dagestan, to form his own Islamic Regiment. That autumn about forty of these men decimated a hundred Russian troops in an ambush. In their next outing, in April 1996, they attacked a convoy of fifty Russian trucks, killing two hundred Russian soldiers in an action that was videotaped from beginning to end. Al-Khattab is seen brandishing the severed heads of Russian officers, shouting 'Allahu Akhbar!' In August 1996 Basayev and al-Khattab stormed the Russian garrison in Grozny; al-Khattab was given Ichkeria's (Chechnya's) highest decorations and promoted to general. Four months later he murdered six Red Cross relief workers in a hospital, after warning them that he found the ubiquitous crosses offensive. That autumn he also opened the first of four Wahhabist training camps, to which international jihadists flocked for two- to six-month courses in ambushing, hostage taking, armed and unarmed combat, and sabotage. Saudi money paid for the Wahhabist religious infrastructure, which was supposed to presage an Islamic Republic of the Caucasus in embryo, for the plan was to link up Wahhabi enclaves in neighbouring Dagestan after a coup.

General AsIan Maskhadov, a former Red Army artillery officer, was largely responsible for the Chechen separatists getting the upper hand in the First Chechen '(Var. It was he who in December 1996 negotiated a ceasefire at Khasar~ Yurt with the Afghanistan war hero general Alexander Lebed. The Russians undertook to withdraw their troops, while agreeing to talks, scheduled for early 2001, to determine Chechnya's future relations with the Russian Federation. Dudayev had been killed in April 1996 by a Russian missile, and Maskhadov succeeded him as president in early 1997. In Russian eyes he was the lesser evil in relation to the other main candidate, Shamil Basayev.

A Second Chechen War erupted in August 1999 as the Russians sought to reverse the de-facto independence that Maskhadov had achieved in the first war against Russia's conscript rabble. From a Russian perspective there were various grounds to restart the war. General lawlessness and kidnappings for huge ransoms were endemic in Chechnya, while the Chechen diaspora in Russia itself was heavily involved in organised crime. Obviously there were many gangsters from other nationalities, but the Chechens enjoyed a reputation for blood feuds and savagery low even by local standards. Worse, if Chechnya gained independence, other regions might make similar bids for freedom, triggering a domino effect that might menace Russia's southern oil and gas supply routes from the Caspian region. There was also a growing Islamic dimension. In order to placate Basayev and the jihadists, Maskhadov introduced sharia law, publicly executing a few offenders at a time when Russia abolished the death penalty, and turned to the Gulf and beyond for external support. He was unable to correct the impression that he was not on top of gangsters and warlords or that the jihadists were out of control. On Basayev's command, al-Khattab and his Arab jihadists attacked Russian troops in neighbouring Dagestan. Suspecting that this was part of a wider effort to Islamise the entire northern Caucasus, the Russian air force was despatched, dropping fuel-air explosive bombs on Chechen villages and killing hundreds of people.

Some people, most of them nowadays dead, view the Second Chechen War as part of a dark conspiracy on the part of the secret police/ industrial complex to terminate Russia's passing fling with democracy and free markets. The former KGB lieutenant-colonel Vladimir Putin has been the main beneficiary, and sundry oligarchs the chief losers, as mysterious acts of terror were exploited to reverse the liberalising gains of the Yeltsin era. In September 1999 explosions demolished entire apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian cities. Hundreds of people were killed. These bombings were attributed to Chechen separatist terrori~ts, meaning that hapless Chechen emigrants were rounded up and framed by the FSB (the KGB's successor). Discovery of FSB involvement in a bomb that failed to explode in Ryazan was covered up with claims that the whole operation was an 'exercise' involving harmless sugar rather than the explosive hexogen. People who argued otherwise subsequently found that the brakes of their cars failed or, like journalist Anna Politkovskaya, were shot dead or otherwise murdered (former agent Alexander Litvinenko was very publicly poisoned by FSB-connected assassins in the middle of London).

Putin progressed from prime minister to president in a toxic atmosphere of chauvinism, fear and resentment about loss of empire. Using air power and contract professional soldiers rather than hapless conscripts, the Russians attacked Chechen separatists that autumn. They dropped cluster bombs and hit villages with artillery shells and rockets, without any regard for civilian casualties. The Russians. dominated the northern Chechen plains and pulverised the ruins of Chechnya's cities. In February 2000 they took Grozny after weeks of fighting that had reduced it to the condition of Dresden in 1945. The deployment of eighty thousand regular troops, and countless security agents, forced the Chechen separatists into fighting a guerrilla war from the mountains and to launch a full-scale terror campaign, whose international ramifications meant that after 9/11 Chechen groups were put on various Western watch lists.

Both sides fought viciously and without rules. As Putin once remarked: 'We'll get them anywhere. If we find terrorists in the shithouse, then we'll waste them in the shithouse. That's all there is to it.' The FSB reached out to 'touch' al-Khattab in 2002 after discovering that his mother in Saudi Arabia regularly sent mail to him via Baku in Azerbaijan which was always picked up by the same courier. In March the courier brought a package containing a Sony video-camera - to record him cutting off heads - a watch and a letter. Al-Khattab retreated to open the letter; he returned deathly pale fifteen minutes later and dropped dead. He had been poisoned with botulism smeared on the letter. His patron Basayev shot dead the courier who he suspected was on the FSB payroll.

As if to signal that al-Khattab's death changed nothing, that summer a massive mine blew up in the midst of a Russian military parade commemorating the end of the Great Patriotic War. On 22 October a large gang of Chechen terrorists- including several women, some in their forties, whose husbands or relatives had died at the hands of the Russians - seized a theatre in Moscow's Dubrovka suburb during the second act of a musical. They took eight hundred people hostage, wiring the auditorium with explosives and strutting about with explosive belts wrapped with nails, nuts and bolts. They started to shoot hostages so as to pressure Russia into withdrawing its forces from Chechnya. At about 3 a.m. on 26 October, Russian commandos released an obscure gas into the theatre, knocking out several hostages and a few terrorists in the front-row seats near an orchestra pit that by this time was the communal lavatory. Two hundred Russian commandos then stormed into the building, killing forty-one terrorists, mostly with a single shot to the forehead. One hundred and thirty hostages also died, since the authorities failed to inform the local hospitals about the type of gas they had used in the assault.

Adopting tactics pioneered by the Israelis, the Russians demolished the family homes of all those terrorists killed in the Dubrovka theatre siege. They dropped fuel-air explosives on the Vedeno Gorge in an attempt to kill Basayev. By this time sporting a wooden leg after stepping on a mine, Basayev was publicly threatening to use Cruise missiles or nuclear bombs, in the 'Whirlwind of Terror' he wished to visit on Russian cities. On 13 February 2004, FSB assassins killed the former acting Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev with a car bomb at a villa in Doha, in Qatar, owned by a prominent Saudi arms dealer. The Russians were caught, tried and imprisoned, although their local controller evaded justice by claiming diplomatic immunity. Basayev hit back when a bomb built into the VIP section of the Dynamo Stadium in Grozny killed the pro-Russian Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov and several members of his government. This killing stopped Putin's policy of Chechenising the conflict through local clients, while triggering a blood feud between Basayev and the dead president's son Ramzan Kadyrov.

Basayev mounted his most dastardly action that autumn, managing to grab the world's attention even though the Russian authorities disbarred and harassed foreign reporters and put psychotropic drugs in the tea of the more venturesome local journalists who flew in to cover it. On 1 September 2004, the Day of Knowledge in the Russian school calendar, thirty-two heavily armed Chechen terrorists took over School Number One at Beslan in Ossetia.

They held twelve hundred schoolchildren, parents and teachers hostage in the gymnasium, immediately killing anyone who spoke Ossetic rather than Russian and fifteen to twenty men whose physique indicated that they might offer resistance. Dehydrated and hungry children were forced to strip off in the terrible heat. While negotiations to resolve the crisis dragged into a third day, explosions inside the school led to an assault by hundreds of men from poorly co-ordinated secret service, military and police formations. While army conscripts fled the scene, local civilians arrived armed to the teeth, causing further chaos and confusion. The roof was set alight with flame throwers while tanks fired anti-personnel shells into the school; the exhausted and confused hostages were too weak to flee. An escaping terrorist was lynched by crazed parents, while the school rapidly burned down in front of one antiquated fire engine with no water. There were no ambulances either to take casualties to hospital. Nearly four hundred hostages died in this chaos, together with eleven Russian commandos and all but one of the thirty-two terrorists. Two of the latter were British Algerians based in London with links to Abu Hamza's PillSbury Park mosque. Before he disappeared into the Russian prison system, the surviving terrorist, Nur-Pashi Kulayev, explained the strategy behind murdering children, namely to trigger a religious war between the Orthodox Christian Ossetians and the Muslim Chechens and Ingush that would engulf the whole Caucasus. On 21 September 2005 Russian special forces tracked down and killed AsIan Maskhadov, by then designated a terrorist fugitive with a US$lO million bounty on his head. A Russian soldier allegedly threw a grenade into his hideout by mistake. On 10 July 2006, FSB agents used an improvised explosive device to kill Shamil Basayev as he drove in a car alongside a truck filled with explosives. The youthful Ramzan Kadyrov still manages to act as Chechen president, with his menage of pet tigers and hordes of heavily armed men.

Given this poisoned atmosphere, it was inevitable that dark forces would gravitate to Chechnya. In November 2006 Russian police stopped a minivan carrying three men, one of whom identified himself as Abdullah Imam Mohammed Amin, as was confirmed by his Sudanese passport. The photo of a middle-aged man in a suit and tie with neat hair suggested nothing untoward. However, in the van there was US$6,400 in seven currencies, a laptop, a satellite phone, a fax machine and piles of medical textbooks. Closer inspection revealed a visa application for Taiwan, bank statements from a bank in Guandong, China, a receipt for a modem purchased in Dubai, a registration certificate for a company in Malaysia, and details of a bank account in Missouri. The fake Sudanese passport had multipl~- stamps from Taiwan, Singapore and Yemen. The Russian police called in the FSB, who sent the laptop to Moscow for analysis. Mr 'Amin' was detained for five months, during which time letters flooded in from local Muslim clerics protesting his innocence. At his trial, the judge decided to believe his claims that he was a pious merchant - the accused repeatedly dropped to his knees to pray in the dock - come to scout the prices of leather. He received a six-month sentence for illegal entry, most of which he had already served. In his diary, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for it was he, wrote that 'God blinded them to our identities.' After spending ten days free in Dagestan nursing an ulcer, he left to join bin Laden in Afghanistan.52

There was one other conflict in the 1990S whose complexities did not impinge on any Muslim with a crassly polarised view of the world. After the Algerian military had 'interrupted' the January 1992 elections, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was banned and some forty thousand Islamist militants were despatched to camps in the Sahara. The problem with FIS was that although many of its supporters called themselves democrats, others believed in 'one man, one vote, one time'. Armed Islarnism predated this coup, since the Algerian Islamic Movement (MIA) was formed in the early 1980s, evolving into the AIS or Islamic Salvation Army a little later, while the rival GIA emerged in 1991. The two organisations fought different types of campaign. Sometimes they briefly merged, more often they attempted to kill each other. Both organisations had a heavy representation of Algerian veterans of Afghanistan, who basked in the glory of successful jihad, members of the FIS who had gone underground, as well as criminals and unemployed street toughs who, combining Levi 501S, the Kalashnikov and the Koran, imposed totalitarian Islamism on their neighbourhoods. Ideologically, the groups encompassed people who still wished to pursue a democratic course from a position of armed might, and jihadi-salafists who regarded democracy as un-Islamic and the entire Algerian population as kuffar  apostates. This unstable composition led to deadly faction fights within these groups, which were subject to the murderous attentions of the Algerian military and murky intelligence agencies that regard torture as routine. Islamist prisoners arriving at a prison at Blida, where use of a blow torch was normal, were told: 'There is no God or Amnesty International here: you talk or you die.'

In the early 1990sJhe G IA murdered about ninety Western employees in the oil and gas industry, forcing a mass exodus of six thousand Europeans from Algeria. Twelve Croat technicians were abducted and, their hands bound with wire, had their throats cut in an empty swimming pool. The French interior minister, Charles Pasqua, deported seventeen Islamist clerics to Burkina Faso. The GIA also murdered forty francophone Algerian journalists, writers and doctors, including the Kabylia magazine editor and novelist Taher Djaout, whose Last Summer of Reason describes Islamist destruction of the dying remnants of Algeria's cosmopolitan culture. This great left-wing writer was shot dead outside his home in an Algiers suburb. His film-maker friend Merzak Allouache caught the hypocrisy and paranoia of the Islamists in his Bab el-Oued City, filmed in an atmosphere so dangerous that he could not return to do second takes in that quarter of the capital. The G IA also abducted and executed an Islamist cleric who refused to issue a fatwa licensing their activities, and in 1998 murdered Lounes Matoub, one of Kabylia's leading rat singers. Some six hundred schools were burned down in an effort to eradicate secular education, while sociologists and psychiatrists found themselves token victims of disciplines that the jihadists did not like. Women who did not conform to Islamist notions of decorum were threatened, raped and murdered; people who persisted in accessing 'pornographic' French satellite TV were warned before their severed heads ended up in disconnected dishes.

Late in 1994, four GIA hijackers took over an Air France jet at Boumedienne airport with a view to smashing it into the streets of central Paris. French commandos stormed the plane when it refuelled at Marseilles, freeing 171 passengers and killing the four hijackers. The aim of this attack was to force France to abandon ties with Algeria, thereby weakening the Algerian government to the point of collapse. All it achieved was for the French to stop issuing visas in Algeria, using a central service in Nantes instead, and for Air France to cease flights to Algeria. Although many French people thought that Algeria could 'go hang itself', the French government came under intense US pressure to encourage the military regime to extend its political base. In Algeria itself, the government began arming village patriots to fend off the jihadists who came to commit murder in the dead of night.

The GIA was run by a swift succession of violent emirs, as most met grisly ends. The then emir, Djamel Zitouni, the son of a poultry merchant with a sec~!!dary education, alienated many Islamists when he had two leading Islamist ideologues murdered. He exceeded himself when in May 1996 seven French Trappist monks from the desert monastery of Tibhirine were kidnapped and beheaded. That brought to nineteen the number of Christian clergy killed by Algerian Islamists, culminating in the murder of Pierre Claverie, bishop of Gran. The murder of these monks, whose security the GIA had guaranteed, was too much even for Abu Qatada, the GIA mouthpiece in London, who suspended publication of the GIA's AI-Ansar bulletin. Zitouni was shot dead, by GIA members fed up with him, a while later. His twentysix-year-old successor, Antar Zouabri, found a new spiritual guide to replace Qatada in the shape of Londonistan's hook-handed Abu Hamza. They satisfied themselves that the main problem in Algeria was that the majority of the population had become apostates because they were not pursuing their duty of jihad. In the autumn of 1997 several hundred Algerian villagers had their throats cut, including women, who had first been raped, as well as children whose heads were smashed against walls. Attempts to blame this on the Algerian security services, one of whose members claimed that his former colleagues were really behind the G lA, were confounded when Zouabri acknowledged his own authorship of a vulgarly phrased communique that called all Algerians 'kuffar, apostates and hypocrites'. As the US journalist Robert Kaplan reported, relatives of the people massacred by Islamists knew that they rather than the secret police were responsible, although shady army and police units undoubtedly killed many people, sometimes with a view to discrediting the Islamists in the eyes of Western opinion.53

In 1998, and with encouragement on a satellite phone from Gsama bin Laden, the Salafist Group for Prayer and Combat emerged out of the wreckage ofthe GIA. The GSPC took several steps back from the GIA's universal war on Algerian society, while simultaneously subscribing to the international jihad. It sought to destroy the Algerian military regime, replacing it with a sharia-based Islamist state, while pursuing the cause of the 'rightly guided caliphate' against Jews and Christians. Even as the GSPC evolved into one of the world's most deadly terrorist organisa tions, with a network of supporters throughout Europe, the AIS caffil in from the cold, accepting an Algerian government amnesty an< the introduction of the presidential elections that put veteran foreigI minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika in power. It is widely believed that abou two hundred thousand Muslim Algerians were killed in the struggl< between Islamists.~nd the government during the 1990S. The head of th Algerian secret police, General Smai"n Lamari, was fully prepared to kiJ up to three million people in order to wipe Islamism out. No longe willing to treat Algeria as France's backyard, the US has built up a larg CIA presence in Algiers, spreading its eagle wings over the Bouteflik regime, which has become an eager partner in the 'war on terror'. 54

Seeming inevitabilities unravel if one goes back a generation or tw< In 1957, a year after US president Eisenhower brutally brought th Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Suez to a halt, he inaugurated a ne' building on Washington's Embassy Row. This was a mosque. It WE built after a Palestinian tycoon had attended the funeral of a Turkis diplomat. He had said to the Egyptian ambassador, 'Isn't it a shame th, the prayer for such a great Muslim is not held in a mosque?' An Italia architect designed the building, incorporating details recommende by the court architect in Egypt. Eisenhower dedicated the buildin: 'America would fight with her whole strength for your right to hm here your own church and worship according to your own conscienc This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept '" would be something else than what we are.' Today, three thousan people attend the Friday prayers in a building that is the equivalent c the Episcopalian National Cathedral.

Nineteen fifty-seven is ancient history to most Muslims today, tl majority of whom are so young that they come up to the averal Westerner's waist. The jihadi-salafist imagination deals in racial esseno and ahistorical archetypes, to which history is a necessary correctiv In their view, the Jews are inherently malevolent, using the USA, tl IMF, the World Bank and the UN for their nefarious purposes. Th explains the bizarre concept of 'Crusader-Zionists'. Anyone with even sketchy recollection of medieval history knows that nothing links medieval Christian crusaders, who on occasion massacred Rhenish Jews prefatory to slaughtering Arabs, with a political movement born in the nineteenth century, primarily as an antidote to European anti-Semitism. But facts do not seem to inhibit emotion and prejudice. Even in countries where there are few Jews, like Indonesia, the local jihadi-salafists find them by imagini~.g mercantile 'Chinese-Zionists'. In a sense this proves that anti-Semitism links all jihadists. They are like the man looking at an empty salt cellar who is compelled to talk about Jewish domination of the medieval salt trade or a monopoly 'they' have recently acquired in the Camargue. Although Israel is home to large numbers of conservative Orthodox Jews, it is also an outpost of Western secular modernity. That last part is what Islamists hate, especially when it is combined with the manifest superiority of the high-tech Israeli economy in the region. Instead of allowing this to fructify the neighbourhood commercially, the jihadists are bent on enveloping it in the chaos and violence they create everywhere.

In their view, Israel is the modern incarnation of the Latin Kingdom ofJerusalem, a crusader outpost planted among Muslims by an imperialist West which the Jews control, a claim that passes over the halfmillennium that separates the crusades from the age of European imperialism, and accords 'the Jews' more power than they could conceivably possess. Intervening events, like the Protestant revolt against the medieval papacy, and the multiplication of hundreds of Protestant denominations, figure not at all in Islamist understanding of the West, which is routinely chastised for not comprehending the division between Sunni and Shia. This is because Islam, at least in Arabia, has overwritten societies where kin or clan are paramount, resulting in indifference or hostility to what lies beyond. In the very few instances where Christians have attacked Muslims (and vice versa), such as Serbia or Indonesia, these attacks have not been endorsed by any Christian religious authorities of any standing. There have been no Christian calls for an anti-Muslim crusade, unlike the many voices demanding warlike jihad. 55

There is something narcissistic about this assumption that the West is obsessed with Islam and seeks to destroy it. It is not. It is obsessed with itself, followed by China, India and Russia which jostle for Westerners' short attention span. It is drawn, wearily, into so many Middle Eastern crises because this region, with a manufacturing capacity only equal to US civilians were fair game as they paid taxes which indirectly propped up the Zionist regime. Besides, from firebombing Tokyo, via Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the US itself rained death on civilians. Noam Chomsky, John Pilger or Harold Pinter might have written his script. In fact, Y ousef was not especially motivated by religious zeal; he was driven more by a sort of criminal fertility that opeI:ated under cover of Islam. 57

Still posing as an Iraqi, Yousef quickly got his bearings in Brooklyn's Arab community, establishing contacts with the Alkifah Refugee Center, a 'charity' established by Abdullah Azzam to funnel money to the jihad in Afghanistan. He frequented mosques in Jersey City, where the blind sheikh Omar Rahman - unconscionably having been given a visa by the US embassy in Sudan - preached. Egyptian requests for his extradition had been refused. Y ousef and the sheikh spoke several times on the phone. Yousef recruited a small team of migrant ne'er-do-wells and set about manufacturing sixteen hundred pounds of explosives from commercially purchased chemicals, designed to blow up the W orId Trade Center. It took three weeks of mixing, spreading and drying, to assemble enough explosives for a gigantic bomb which was kept in rental storage. The detonation system was trickier, so much so that Yousef actually phoned Ajaj in prison to see if he could help. Other comical moments occurred when three of the bombers were almost killed after their car careered out of control late one night, hospitalising Y ousef, who nonetheless ordered more chemicals from his hospital bed. The driver, Mohammed Salameh, even though he had failed his test four times, and even though his visa had expired, successfully rented a Ryder van for which he put down a US$400 deposit. In one of his few sentient acts, he even remembered to rent one that would clear the height barriers. Hell bent on collapsing both towers so as to kill a quarter of a million people, Yousef added one last refinement to his ammonium-nitrate and fuel-oil bomb. These were four cylinders of hydrogen gas, intended to propel the initial blast further forwards.

On 26 October 1993, Yousef and a Jordanian, Eyad Ismoil, parked the truck in the basement of the World Trade Center, where it detonated shortly after noon. The blast went through three floors down and two floors up, killing six people, building workers having lunch, and injuring more than a thousand. Y ousef flew to Karachi that night while Ismoil took a flight to Jordan. Salameh hung around, brooding about his US$400 deposit. By the time he went to claim it, haggling the sum up from zero to US$200 with an undercover FBI agent, FBI forensic experts had identified the truck used to house the bomb. He was arrested after he left the rental office. Although the attack had killed six and caused half a billion dollars' worth of structural damage, the jihadists around the blind sheikh were not satisfied. Urging them on to greater depravities was the imprisoned Egyptian EI-Sayyid Nosair, serving seven years for assassinating the fanat~c rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990. Osama bin Laden had paid his legal bills.- A motley group, eventually numbering eleven, resolved to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels into Manhattan. Cars, bomb-making materials and timers were acquired. Justification was sought from sheikh Omar, unaware that one of the key conspirators worked for the FBI and that all of the group were under electronic surveillance. A long series of trials put several of these men, including the sheikh, in jail for the rest of their lives. One of the sheikh's defence lawyers would more recently follow him behind bars for colluding in passing messages from his prison.

These events had no direct connection with bin Laden save that the master bomber had been through his training programme, and he has vowed to wreak havoc if and when the elderly sheikh finally expires from the multiple illnesses he is afflicted by. Refusing medication, the sheikh scoffs immense quantities of fast food from prison canteens so that his diabetes and high blood pressure may expedite this murderous outcome. In 1995 al-Zawahiri's expatriate campaign of terror in Egypt led to the ejection of the entire aI-Jihad group from Sudan. Aided by Sudanese intelligence officers, al-Zawahiri conspired to assassinate Hosni Mubarak as he attended an African Unity conference in Addis Ababa. The plan - referred to above in the context of Bosnia - was to kill him as his motorcade drove from the airport into the capital, using teams of shooters equipped with RPGs and automatic rifles. The plot failed, although not before two Egyptian bodyguards had been killed, as Mubarak sped by.

The Egyptian government lashed out at Islamist sympathisers, commissioning five new prisons to house them. Its intelligence agencies decided to strike directly at al-Zawahiri. They kidnapped the young sons of two leading fundamentalists connected to aI-Jihad and Al Qaeda, who were drugged and then photographed being sodomised. These compromising photographs were enough to turn them into spies, and to agree to plant a bomb outside al-Zawahiri's Khartoum home. The first bomb was discovered by al-Zawahiri's Sudanese protectors before it went off. Meanwhile one of the boys was being treated for malaria, ironically by al-Zawahiri. The Egyptians tried again, equipping the first boy with a suitcase bomb to kill al-Zawahiri as he attended a meeting. The boy bomber was caught by the Sudanese, who also picked up his ailing companion. Both boys were tried by a sharia court presided over by al-Zawahiri who had them both shot. Their confessions and execution were filmed to discourage others.

This evidence of a state operating within a state angered the Sudanese so much that they ordered al-Zawahiri to leave immediately together with his al-Jihad followers. He fled to Yemen. But he had not finished with the Egyptians. On 19 November 1995, two men fired on the guards outside the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, scattering them so that two suicide bombers could drive a pick-up truck inside, which exploded killing both drivers and sixteen other people. The Pakistani authorities rounded up two hundred Arab Afghan jihadists; bin Laden appeared offering air tickets to take them to the Sudan. But relations were cooling there too. The Americans had joined the Egyptians and the Saudis in putting pressure on Turabi to expel bin Laden. This was an irresistible combination. Bin Laden might have slept more soundly had he known that White House lawyers, the US military and the CIA were simultaneously frustrating suggestions from counter-terrorism officials that the US simply snatch him in Sudan. Faced with the choice of either staying put, in closely monitored inactivity, or leaving for Afghanistan, bin Laden chose to revisit the scene of his early glories. The crooked Sudanese stripped him of his considerable assets before he flew to Jalalabad. Their claims that they offered up bin Laden to the uninterested Americans are probably lies, even if it is true that at this time the CIA regarded him merely as a 'financier of terrorism'. That year, however, it did set up a special office, code-named 'Alec', the first time it had concentrated such resources on an individual terrorist,58

Bin Laden sought refuge among the Taliban, the Pashtu word for students, an Islamist movement supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia which built and financed the madrassas from which the Taliban came. In the eyes of Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the Taliban would restore order after four years of civil war, a necessary precondition for Pakistan to tranship oil and gas from Turkmenistan to its burgeoning industries. This was the line she sold to the Clinton administration, for whom the Taliban were like some orientalist fable come alive. Bhutto's armed forces also calculated that a Pashtun-dominated Afghanistan would enable Pakistani forces to regroup there if the east of the country ever fell to Indian arms. Saudi Arabia's motives were more straightforward: the Taliban would be a useful Sunni bulwark against Iran. The Saudis dictated the terms of settlement for the wandering prodigal, since they insisted that the Taliban keep bin Laden quiet on the farm he purchased near Jalalabad with a view to going into the production of honey. His men were ~oused in the expanded facilities ofTora Bora near by. They were not happy, because compared to that oasis of 'progress and civilisation' in Yemen, Mghanistan was a desolate place, 'worse than a tomb' as one Yemeni put it. Nothing worked, with every journey spent perched on an eighth of a car seat, over rutted tracks. The Afghans were child-like, barbaric and venal with an unhealthy interest in boys. There were also clashes of personality, which probably explains why bin Laden initially based himself in Jalalabad rather than Taliban-dominated Kandahar.

Bin Laden's host, mullah Omar, was a tall, forbidding figure with a dark beard, whose sinister air was intensified by his having lost an eye as fragments of Russian shrapnel excavated the upper half of his face. His voice was an almost inaudible whisper. Mullah Omar and his Taliban had their own foundational myth. After experiencing a vision of the Prophet, mullah Omar believed that he had been chosen to deliver Afghanistan from chaos. He gathered together a small group of madrassa students who initially went around like Robin Hoods, rescuing boys and girls from warlord sodomites and rapists. Within a year his band had multiplied into an army of twenty-four thousand that took over most of southern Afghanistan, with Pakistani volunteers arriving at critical moments in the fighting against the Iranian- and Russian-backed Northern Alliance. On 4 April 1996 this obscure village mullah literally wrapped himself in the mantle of the Prophet when he removed a robe from a shrine in Kandahar that was said to be Mohammed's. Ecstatic crowds cheered as he paraded on a roof, clutching this garment, the event that gave rise to the only known photograph of him. From that moment he was unstoppable, going on to take Kabul itself that September. One of the Taliban's first acts was to enter a UN compound from which they dragged out the Communist-era president Najibullah and his brother. Both men were castrated and tortured, shot, dragged behind a car and then hanged from a concrete pillar with cigarettes in the fingers and money spilling from their pockets.

As Pashtun peasant boys who had been through refugee camps and make their point. They rounded up Shia Hazara, a Turko-Mongol mountain people, raping the women and killing the men by shutting them in giant metal containers which were then dumped in the surrounding desert. Taliban clerics gave the surviving Shia three choices: convert to Sunni Islam, leave or die. Between six and eight thousand Shia died. The dead included eleven Iranian consular officials and secret agents, who were taken.~o a basement and shot.60

Bin Laden had various residences in Afghanistan, including a hundred-acre complex at Tarnak Farm outside Kandahar. This consisted of about eighty buildings surrounded by a ten-foot-high mud wall, separating it from the surrounding scrub. Bin Laden also used various villas in Kandahar itself, shifting his location frequently in dim awareness of the US satellites miles above his head. Relations with the Taliban leader were not smooth. The ultra-shy mullah Omar resented bin Laden's obsessions with the modern media, or, as two AI Qaeda men reported it to al-Zawahiri, 'the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause'. Bin Laden was obliged to acknowledge the supremacy of his host, which may have rankled as he was forever bailing out the feckless Taliban with prodigious amounts of money when they ran through the US$40 million they had received in aid from the Pakistanis. Using onetype code systems, AI Qaeda tried to conceal itself within the language of international business. The mullah might have been surprised by coded references to himself and the Taliban as the 'Omar Brothers Company', business partners of the 'Abdullah Contracting Company', meaning bin Laden and comrades, traders (jihadis) in competition with 'foreign competitors', that is the CIA and MI6.61 Despite these frictions, the Taliban became major state sponsors of terrorism, adopting many aspects of the jihadi-salafist platform. They enabled bin Laden to set up a network of training camps, from which he despatched guerrilla fighters (the majority of those trained) and terrorists to attack in dozens of places, coming and going without visas, while bin Laden himself sped about freely in a heavily armed convoy.

The training camps were multi-purpose, designed to build bodies, minds and skills. They were where the Taliban themselves learned how to calculate artillery ranges, to use high explosives like C-4, and other guerrilla tactics. A special Arab unit called Brigade 005 was deployed to help the Taliban at crucial times in its struggle with the Northern Alliance. The training camps were also useful to the Pakistanis for they were where men destined for Kashmir learned to use M -16s, more suited to Kashmir than the shorter-range AK-47. All Al Qaeda recruits began with a fifteen-day session of physical preparation, involving leaping over gaps or through fiery hoops. Each day began with dawn prayers and ended at about eight at night. This was followed by a forty-five-day period of learning the art of war, from map reading to handling various weapons. A more select band went on to another forty-five-day course in counter-surveillance, counter-interrogation, agent recruitment, forgery, hijacking, assassination and bomb making. Much of this knowledge was codified in a training manual, discovered by British police in Manchester, that eventually reached twelve volumes before being put on a CD-Rom; if one wanted to brew up ricin poisons this was where to look before the internet offered many .alternatives. With the help of Pakistani scientists, there were attempts to use such biological and chemical agents as anthrax and cyanide, experiments confined to dogs in glass cages. Indoctrination sessions forged a group mindset, while films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and other US action movies were shown for relaxation and to pick up useful tips.62

It was from amid this charming world that in August 1996 bin Laden issued his 'Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places'. This so-called occupation had gone on for seven years rather than the few months promised by Saudi's rulers. The declaration ingratiated itself with the Saudi in the street by describing the corruption and economic downturn afflicting the kingdom, blaming this on the US military presence in remote desert provinces. In a long literal passage about the joys of martyrdom, bin Laden announced: 'Men of the radiant future of our ummah of Mohammed, raise the banner of jihad up high against the Judaeo-American alliance that has occupied the holy places of Islam.' He quoted poetry to describe his type of holy warrior:

I am willing to sacrifice self and wealth for knights who never disappointed me. Knights who are never fed up or deterred by death, even if the mill wheel of war turns. In the heat of battle they do not care, and cure the insanity of the enemy by their 'insane' courage. 63

In an interview that November with Australian Muslim activists, bin Laden praised the bombing of the World Trade Center, and more recent attacks on Americans in Riyadh and at the Khobar Towers apartment complex which killed respectively seven and nineteen people, the majority US servicemen, even though these were Iranian- rather than AI Qaeda-sponsored operations. That operations of an almost fantastic ambition were then entertained was due to a visit by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with a story that stretched all the way to Kuala Lumpur and Manila as he searched for a way of hitting the USA.

Khalid Sheikh had .come from Karachi where he notionally worked as a public works engineer. He travelled extensively posing as a Saudi businessman. One of his supposed business ventures was in Kuala Lumpur, where his partner was the Indonesian Encep Nurjaman who went by the name of Hambali in honour of an eighth-century Muslim saint. Born in West Java, Hambali had gone to Malaysia in 1985 to deepen his acquaintance with Islam. After a period fighting in Afghanistan, he returned to Malaysia in 1989, settling in Sungai Manngis, a hamlet about sixty kilometres west of Kuala Lumpur, where Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and Abdullah Sungkar, the exiled founders of Jemaah Islamiyah, also lived. This was Terror Central for South Asia. The schemes hatched here were oddly at variance with the ambient squalor. These men hated cosmopolitan and prosperous Singapore, finding local cell members who felt that its materialism and order were spiritually vacuous or who were unnerved by the rational choices a modern society involves. They wanted more certain rules than even this most law-abiding society involved. Perhaps they could stoke enough strife between Chinese and Malays to trigger a war from which the Islamist vanguard would emerge victorious? Hambali lived with his wife in a hut with a zinc roof, one light fitting and a lavatory that was a hole in the ground. He eked out a living selling kebabs and slaughtering poultry. But most of his time was spent preaching and leading discussion groups called usrah. These enabled him to identify potential jihadists, whom he sent for military training either with AI Qaeda in Afghanistan or with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) which operated in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. The MILF was not the only sympathetic group in the Philippines. The port city of Zamboanga was a hotbed of jihadist militancy. Bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, had a branch of his International Islamic Relief Organisation there, which had close links with a breakaway MILF faction, of bandits, kidnappers and pirates, called Abu Sayyaf or Bearers of the Sword, named in honour of a giant Afghan jihadist. In March 2000 Abu Sayyaf is said to have received US$25 million from Libya's Colonel Ghaddafi.

Khalid Sheikh and Yousef plus one Wali Shah arrived in Manila, where the two younger men had already acquired girlfriends in the Philippine capital's many go-go bars. Khalid Sheikh, by now using the name Abdul Majid, and Shah rented apartments there while Yousef  took up residence in the Manor hotel. They held meetings in the city's karaoke and go-go bars, plotting holy murder in places filled with mirrors, flashing lights.and half-naked dancers. They hired a helicopter to survey the city. Khalid Sheikh took up with a Filipina dentist, sometimes phoning her from the helicopters so she could look up and wave at her paramour. They purchased priests' robes and Bibles, for the reason they were in Manila was to assassinate pope John Paul II, having given up on the heavily protected US president. To that end they rented an apartment along the route his holiness was most likely to take. This was not the only plot under way because, since his discussions with Murad, Y ousef had become obsessed with downing large planes. He developed a new bomb, involving nitroglycerine disguised in containers for contactlens solution, and a timer made from a Casio Databank watch which had the advantage of an alarm that could be set for up to twelve months ahead. The batteries used to power the lightbulbs which (their glass having been deliberately weakened) would set the thing off could be hidden in the heels of shoes, as they did not come within the range of airport X-ray machinery. He tried out a mini-version of this device in a Manila cinema. Then he summoned the pilot Murad. On 8 December, Yousef took a flight from Manila to Tokyo. He assembled his little bomb in the lavatory, and then attached it below his seat, leaving the plane when it refuelled at Cebu. An hour into its second leg, the bomb killed a young Japanese engineer, Haruki Ikegami, who happened to sit where Y ousef had placed the device. It ripped the lower half of his body to pieces and almost sent the plane out of control when it burned through the aileron cables controlling the flaps. The pilot managed to force the plane into a turn before landing it on Okinawa, saving the lives of 272 passengers and twenty crew.

Returned to Manila, Y ousef moved into the apartment block where the pope would pass by, joining Wali Shah who lived below. Neighbours began to gossip when they noticed the rare spectacle of these Arab men struggling upstairs with boxes and bottles in the torpid heat. They might have found it even odder that on 21 December Yousef threw Manila's only party to celebrate the sixteenth anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103. Just after Christmas Khalid Sheikh and Murad arrived, for it was all gloved hands to the pump as two plots got under way, to kill the pope, and something called Boijinka, a made-up word Khalid Sheikh had picked up from Afghanistan or Bosnia. Y ousef told Murad to be ready to fly to Singapore on 14 January 1995, one of five men who were going to explode ten Boeing 747 aircraft over the Pacific, by changing planes after the initial legs of their journeys. Yousef reserved for himself the tri.<:ky exercise of boarding and leaving three different flights. About three thousand people would have died had this plot been a success.

The 6th of January was intended to be clean-up day in Manila. Yousef was burning off superfluous chemicals on the stove when the flat filled with a cloud of dark smoke too thick to disperse through the windows. It billowed into the hall too, discommoding the neighbours. The fire brigade were called, who arrived with a policeman. Seeing that there was no fire, they accepted Yousef's claim, delivered in the hall where he was frantically dispersing smoke, that he was making fireworks for a belated New Year's party. Firemen and police returned when a fire alarm finally detected the fumes. Police thought they had wandered into the lab of a mad scientist, with nitroglycerine in grape-juice containers, switches, timers, wires, soldering irons, cassocks and maps of the pope's visit. After the two men had fled, Yousef told Murad to retrieve his laptop from the flat. He did. The police arrested him, along with Shah the following day.

While undergoing interrogation by senior superintendent Rodolfo 'Boogie' Mendoza, with the aid of a rubber hose occasionally debouching water into the suspect's lungs, Murad fell for the classic gambit of being told 'You're a shit, a nothing to me' by boasting that he was one of the Wodd Trade Center bombers and an associate of the fabled Ramzi Y ousef. Assaults on human vanity usually work for the skilled interrogator. Yousef was holed up in an Islamabad hotel, whose location was betrayed by a potential recruit who had turned him down before deciding to collect the US$2 million reward money. Pakistani and US diplomatic security agents burst in upon him in February 1995, dragging him out blindfolded as he demanded to see the necessary paperwork. On the long flight to New York he bragged about his own atrocities to agents who went to the lavatory to jot down his words. At his trial, in between trying to chat up the pretty blonde court sketch artist, Yousef volunteered that he was a terrorist. On his computer the FBI discovered a business card with 'international terrorist' given as his profession. Yousef is currently imprisoned for life, in solitary confinement and without possibility of parole, in a federal Supermax facility in Colorado.

Khalid Sheikh, who had been staying on the ground floor of the same hotel, used one of his twenty passports to slip away to Doha in Qatar where he had many friends and sympathisers. US pressure on the Qatari government to arrest him, after senior US officials had talked themselves out of a snatch operatiC?n, led to Khalid Sheikh's visit to bin Laden, with a portfolio of plans that had been hatched by his ever fertile nephew. Khalid Sheikh mentioned Murad's idea of crashing a plane into Langley or the Pentagon, to which bin Laden responded: 'Why use an axe when you can use a bulldozer?' The plan to crash ten aircraft simultaneously seemed over-ambitious and dependent upon too many changes of planes. Of course, one could combine the two projects, by smashing fewer aircraft into prominent symbolic targets in the US itself, which would be unmistakable from the air. Bin Laden authorised Khalid Sheikh to commence planning such an operation; the Saudi would finance it, and provide the manpower from AI Qaeda training. camps. This would not come to fruition untiln September 2001-.

In the course of 1998, the CIA's bin Laden unit studied satellite imagery of the Tarnak Farm. US agents based in Islamabad recruited about thirty Afghan tribesmen for an armed raid to snatch bin Laden. This operation was vetoed at an advanced stage by the CIA itself, because of worries about the legality of assassination, if bin Laden refused to come quietly, and about collateral casualties, because bin Laden and his associates had many women and children around them. Attempts to use newly developed armed Predator drones to kill the AI Qaeda leadership were frustrated by the military's concern that the CIA should pay for them.

Unaware of these deliberations, bin Laden activated an AI Qaeda operation whose feasibility had been established in 1995 when he sent AIi Mohammed to Nairobi. The latter spent four or five days scouting and photographing targets until he had recorded on his Apple PowerBook that the US embassy fronted the street and was lightly protected by Kenyan policemen. No lessons had been learned from the 1983 Beirut bombings about strengthening embassy security, despite a report on this subject by admiral Bobby Inman. A Kenyan AI Qaeda cell had been established in 1994. A Palestinian, Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, opened a fishing business in Mombasa, while Wadi el-Hage opened an NGO called Help Africa People in Nairobi, where he lived with his wife and five children. Other recruits included Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a native of the Comoros, and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali. They rented a single-storey house where an Egyptian bomb maker arrived to assemble a device consisting of 2,000 pounds of TNT concealed in a brown Toyota truck. On 7 August 1998, the eighth anniversary of the arrival of US forces in Saudi Arabia, al-Owhali and a man known only as Azzam drove this tru\:!<- towards the embassy's small underground garage, after a Kenyan guard had waved them away from the public car park. Al-Owhali dismounted to open the barred gate, dispersing the guards by throwing a grenade, after which he fled.

This bang made many people in surrounding offices rush to the windows. Azzam detonated the truck bomb. The concrete face of the embassy was ripped off, killing twelve Americans, and injuring ambassador Prudence Bushnell, but most of the blast struck a neighbouring secretarial college, while also hitting a bus and passers-by in this busy commercial district. Two hundred and one Africans were killed, with a further 4,500 injured, the majority blinded or cut by shards of flying glass when they had gone to their windows after the grenade had exploded, only to be caught in the second huge blast. Nine minutes later, an Egyptian called Ahmed Abdullah, known as Ahmed the German because of his fair hair, drove a petrol truck laden with gas canisters packed around a similar bomb into the US embassy in Dar-es-Salaam. Luckily, a water tanker absorbed most of the blast, although not enough to save eleven Tanzanian visa applicants who were killed or the eightyfive wounded. The upper half of Ahmed Abdullah hit the embassy roof, still clutching the steering whee1.65

In the White House the first priority had been to provide rescue experts while arranging to fly the most serious African casualties to hospitals in Europe. Israel flew in specialist sniffer-dog units which played a major role in rescuing victims buried under tons of rubble. Kenya's emergency services, geared up for a mass catastrophe involving at most sixty people, were overwhelmed. There was no heavy lifting gear, insufficient reserves of blood, and not enough room in the mortuaries. The US offered US$2 billion by way of compensation and reconstruction, although individuals would receive only US$500 for injury and relatives only US$l1,OOO for a death. The hunt for the perpetrators was relentless, with five hundred FBI agents and hardened CIA counterterrorism operatives like Gary Berntsen descending on Nairobi in C-130s. Odeh was arrested using a false passport when he flew into Pakistan.

nuclear submarines armed with Cruise missiles off the coast of Pakistan, to decrease the response time between actionable intelligence and any attack, while secretly authorising the CIA to use lethal force to deal with bin Laden, thereby breaking with US policy since the Ford era.
These missile attacks led to expressions of anger, easily incited on the streets of Pakistan, while boosting bin Laden's prestige in the Muslim world as his voic~ ,announced on radio, 'By the grace of God, I am alive.' Weighing up whether he wanted the US as an enemy, mullah Omar moved closer to bin Laden, who prudently took an oath to Omar as 'the emir of the faithful'. Omar himself vowed in return: 'Even if all the countries of the world unite, we would defend Osama with our blood.'66 By this time, bin Laden was ensuring his personal primacy over the various separate terrorist 'nations' that had washed up in Afghanistan with a view to waging jihad by making them swear an oath he had devised himself: 'I recall the commitment to God, in order to listen to and obey my superiors, who are accomplishing this task with energy, difficulty and giving of self, and in order that God may protect us so God's words are the highest and his religion victorious.'

One of those to swear this was a young Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of the Bayt aI-Imam terrorist group who in 1999 had been freed from a fifteen-year jail sentence as part of a broader amnesty of three thousand prisoners. Al-Zarqawi was a reformed juvenile delinquent from the rough town of Zarqa from which he took his name. Embarrassingly for a jihadist he was covered in tattoos, including a nautical anchor, although he later tried to remove these with hydrochloric acid. People called him 'the green man' because of his body art. He had drifted from crime to radical jihadism, spending time in Afghanistan from 1989. His three years in Jordan's tough Suwaqah prison had been spent body-building and extending his gang of forty Islamist inmates by recruiting imprisoned drug addicts and felons. His prison charisma was cemented by beating people up and washing the bodies of the sick. People obeyed when he blinked his eyes. On returning to Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi and forty of his Jordanian comrades were recruited into Al Qaeda by their high-ranking fellow countryman Abu Zubaydah. Something of a maverick, al-Zarqawi was allowed to establish a training complex near the Iranian border at Herat, whose primary function was to infiltrate Iraqi Kurdistan via a jihadist group called Ansar aI-Islam, whose leader mullah Krekar lives in Norway. This would not only help establish an Al Qaeda sanctuary, if they were ever driven Abu Qatada, the Palestinian Omar Mahmoud Othman, who issued the GIA's newsletter Al-Ansar from London. One result of this was the formation of the GSPC, which while refraining from the GIA's mindless violence inside Algeria made up for it by swimming into the wake of Al Qaeda. Abu Doha met bin Laden in Afghanistan and agreed to put his European network at his disposal like a temporary franchising operation. That was how Ahmad Ressam ended up crossing the Canadian-US border to blow up LAX. The call from Frankfurt to London forced the German police to act. They raided the Frankfurt flat, arresting four of the five-man cell. Two of them were failed asylum seekers living in Britain who, despite committing crimes like drug dealing, had not been deported by the British. Another was a convicted GIA terrorist with French citizenship, which did not stop him moving freely between Britain, France and Germany. A fourth was an Algerian who had been refused leave to stay by the Germans when he admitted having procured arms and ammunition for the PIS, but who then disappeared anyway, except when he was repeatedly arrested for theft.

In an apartment used by this cell, German police found thirty kilograms of potassium permanganate, a chemical usually sold in quantities of five to ten grams to treat children with eczema. It is also suitable for making bombs. The men had disguised themselves as respectable doctors embarking on an aid mission to Africa, who visited forty-eight pharmacies near Frankfurt airport claiming they had forgotten they needed prescriptions for the chemical in their haste to reach the paediatric clinics where they intended to do good. This hard-luck story worked on most pharmacists. In another apartment rented by the group, the German police found a twenty-minute videotape recording a journey from Baden-Baden to Strasbourg. In Strasbourg the camera focused on the cathedral fa<rade, and especially on shoppers in the Christmas market. There was a soundtrack in Arabic: 'These are the enemies of God taking a stroll ... These are the enemies of God. You will go to hell. God willing.' The plan seems to have been to put bombs inside pressure cookers, but there is no certainty, for at their trial the defendants maintained silence, only to shriek, 'You are all Jews. I don't need the court. Allah is my defender. Our only judge is Allah,' as they were sentenced. The entire plot had been organised from London, where many members of the cell lived. The British arrested Abu Qatada, and then Abu Doha as he tried to flee from Heathrow. Italian police rolled up a Milan-based cell after their extensive electronic eavesdropping revealed that a Munich-based Libyan was trying to replay the Strasbourg attack with the aid of a toxic-gas attack.68

The continent's lax asylum laws meant that, whereas in 1983 there were eighty thousand asylum seekers, by 1992 the figure was seven hundred thousand, with highly organised smuggling rings bringing in many more illegally, often in deplorable circumstances. This laxity enabled several serious Islamist playe~s to gain a foothold, despite the fact that they routinely told multiple lIes to gain the requisite permissions, as when Abu Hamza contracted a bigamous marriage with an Englishwoman in order to gain leave to stay. Even when they broke the terms of their asylum or committed crimes, as in the case of the entire Strasbourg group, it was the exception rather than the rule that any European government would deport those concerned. The Yemeni Ramzi bin al-Shibh claimed to German authorities that he was tOmar' fleeing persecution in his native Sudan. Even before they rejected his claim, Ramzi bin al-Shibh had acquired the correct registration papers, in his real name, for a German university which he used to obtain a student visa from the embassy in Yemen.69 There was virtually no co-ordination between courts, interior ministry, immigration authorities, prisons and police, in contrast to the teams oflegal activists such men could mobilise if ever they were arrested. At a rarefied level police and intelligence services co-operated, but lower down national jurisdictions ensured no co-ordination of policy in any depth. A conversation recorded by Italian intelligence agents reveals how such men regarded Europe as a soft touch, even without the aid of sympathetic immigration and human rights lawyers, professions that have successfully insulated themselves from all criticism. The named speaker was Mahmoud Abdelkader Es Sayed, a high ranking Egyptian AI Qaeda member, who had anticipated the Italians' curiosity by admitting connections with Islamic Jihad:

Unknown man: Did you get political asylum?

Es Sayed: Yes, when I got here I went to Rome. I came to Milan only after obtaining the asylum. Anyway, when I came here, I shaved my beard and I 'shaped up'.

Man: Yes [laughing] of course they never got to know anything about your extremism ...

Es Sayed: I filed my claim in Rome ... [laughing] naturally

I told them I have three brothers in jail ... I also told them I had been in jail.

network. To put this in perspective, French security authorities calculate that of France's 1,685 mosques, which are regularly attended by only 10 per cent of five million French Muslims, eighty or 4.7 per cent gave cause for concern, with 1.1 per cent actually controlled, rather than contested, by radical salafists. Most imams were actually rather meek people, avoiding controversy so as not to offend their congregations or the presbyterian-like mosque committees that controlled the money from collections. The' committees often preferred to hire these foreign village preachers because they were cheaper than employing someone with a Western education ranging beyond mastery of the Koran. Control of such committees was one way for radicals to hot up the temperature in the mosque. Radical Islamists were recipients of centralised funding, whether from a local organisation in the host country or from an external source like Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. Unlike some aged peasant cleric preaching in an Urdu that young second-generation Muslims found difficult to comprehend, the radicals frequently operated in the national vernacular, or in authentic Arabic, and were the first to utilise the most modern technologies,?

They also knew just which aspects of the local culture to adopt, so that, for example, sheikh Omar Bakri managed to combine the belligerence of his native Syria with a comedic touch worthy of Bernard Manning, an unlamented British racist comedian of a vulgar disposition. Any attempt by moderates to say 'yes, but' could be slammed down with citations from the holy book by 'sheikhs' and 'imams' with no theological grounding whatsoever, but with a feel for life as young Muslims live it. Masters of vituperation, these figures had angry young men eating out of their hands, especially if they bore the physical stigmata of some foreign jihad. Battles for control were fought over moderate mosques, sometimes leading to the bizarre spectacle of a moderate preaching upstairs and a maniac in the basement, or, as in the case of Abu Hamza, out in a London street under the gaze of bored policemen. As in Milan, radicals set up ad-hoc mosques in a former garage or similar premises, or, as in the case of Stepney's East London mosque, gravitated to an alternative venue that they totally controlled. This is what the French call 'Islam des caves', of the basements and cellars in huge public housing projects. Muslim student societies, for this was the generation that enjoyed mass tertiary education, were quickly dominated by bodies like the Young Muslim Organisation, one of the routes into more radically subversive groups such as Hizb ut - Tahir. British academics refused to 'spy' on their students, although they still monitor signs of drug abuse or mental instability. At enormous cost, some European governments, notably the Netherlands, have belatedly commissioned university-based licensing programmes for imams, the goal being to combine Islamic learning with a plural, rationalistic Western education. That 70 per cent of the students are female is not encouraging for the scheme seems doomed to failure in such a male-dominated culture.72

The ayatollah Khomeini's parting gift to the world before his death in June 1989 was the issuance of a fatwa calling upon the world's Muslims to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie for insulting the Prophet. This outrage was a bid to reassert Iran's hegemony in the Muslim world now defined to mean everywhere Muslims lived - after the conclusion of the Saudi-sponsored victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan. It also stymied the efforts of Iranian moderates to reopen doors to the West. After a significant lapse of time, Muslims in India and Pakistan succeeded in whipping up a fury among their co-religionists in Britain. A country that had blithely ignored the religious implications of mass migration, assuming that all immigrants would happily melt into the prevailing secular hedonism, was shocked by scenes of angry people burning books and effigies in northern British cities. This anger has not gone away; it has been regularly re-incited over the last twenty years, to the decreasing amusement of natives who are wearying of the fist -waving and finger-jabbing, the flames and the insatiable anger.

For many European Muslims, their last vision of a functioning multicultural society ends when they leave the false dawn of multi-ethnic, multi-faith primary schools for an increasingly segregated secondary school system. There is something deeply tragic about the way this has happened, and it is difficult to see how things can be rectified. These divisions are an inevitable consequence of the formation of de-facto ghettos, the 'dish cities' where the TV satellite receiver is tuned to other shores. Five per cent of British citizens are Muslims, but in some towns they constitute 15 per cent of the population. In a town like Blackburn in Lancashire, people in the Muslim south live separate lives from white people in the north. School children are bussed back and forth, as if visiting a church or mosque in the other part of town was like a trip abroad. According to a recent BBe television programme in May 2007, 'white flight' will result in entirely South Asian or entirely white cities. Politicians express grave concern about such ghettos, but have no idea how to break them up since each fresh initiative seems to fail. In Britain they have to bear in mind that some fifty or so Labour Party MPs are heavily dependent on the Muslim vote, which can be influenced this way or that by telephone calls from a religious or political leader in Pakistan or by fraudulent manipulation of postal voting systems. Politicians of all stripes, except Labour MPs with constituencies containing large numbers of poor whites, ignore polls in which 70 per cent of Britons express their wish to tighten immigration criteria, preferring to side with bien-pen~ant opinion rather than with what their fellow countrymen - including many Asians and Afro-Caribbeans - actually think. Even to raise these issues was once to be dismissed as a Fascist, a racist or, bizarrely, a eugenicist, a creed that had some purchase on the left too.73

One of the major problems is that something for which we already had the neutral term cosmopolitanism, that is all the everyday things about mixed ethnic communities we historically liked, was elided with the activist ideology of multiculturalism, which means far more than buying coffee from a purportedly Algerian store on a gay street in London's Soho run by Italians and Poles, or the fact of (highly ordered) multi-ethnic city states like Hong Kong or Singapore. Some Jews do not like the word cosmopolitan, seeing it as a coded synonym for nineteenthcentury Berlin or Vienna, but that is insufficient reason to avoid it.

Multiculturalism means that each diverse group adopted a story of victimhood so as to put itself beyond close scrutiny, enveloping itself in the myth of moral purity that comes with being the historically oppressed. These diverse communities spoke to government through their so-called community leaders, a liberal version of an imperial power dealing through nabobs and tribes with the natives. In fact, the self-appointed leaders of victim minorities can be oppressors too, as anyone familiar with the Bogside, Falls Road or Short Strand will know. There are bullies aplenty in Muslim communities too, in societies like Hizb ut - Tahir that function like gangs. Wild charges of institutionalised or systemic racism shut down discussion of Muslim subordination of women or the hatred they expressed towards gays and Jews, just as some Jews have for decades inhibited criticism of Israel, or of dubious acts involving individual Jews, by automatically insinuating charges of anti-Semitism.74
 
 

 Continued in Part 3....

43 See especially Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge 2005) pp. 134ff. and the less interesting Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win. Why Suicide Terrorists Do It (London 2006) and Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford 2005)

44 Anat Berko and Edna Erez, , "Ordinary People" and "Death Work": Palestinian Suicide Bombers as Victimizers and Victims' Violence and Victims (2006) 20, pp. 603-23

45 Ed Husain, The Islamist (London 2007) pp.74-81

46 Noel Malcolm, Bosnia. A Short History (London 1994) pp. 220-22 is characteristically humane and intelligent

47 Lorenzo Vidonio, Al Qaeda in Europe. The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst, New York 2006) pp.215-31

48 Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaeda's Jihad in Europe. The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford 2004) pp. 85-6

49 'The 1995 and 1998 Renditions' Human Rights Watch at http://dRl/hrw.org/ reports/ 2005/ egypto 505h 5.htm

50 Kepel, Jihad pp. 251-3

51 Paul Murphy, The Wolves of Islam. Russia and the Faces of Chechen Terror (Washington DC 2006) pp. 20-24

52 Andrew Higgins and Alan Cullison, 'Saga of Dr Zawahiri Sheds Light on the Roots of Al Qaeda Terror' Wall Street Journal 3 July 2002

53 Evan Kohlmann, 'Two Decades ofJihad in Algeria: The GIA, the GSPC, and Al-Qaida' www.nefafoundation.org (2007) pp. 1-28. Mohammed Samraoui, Chronique des annees de sang (Paris 2003) should be used with caution as it has been the object of libel actions in French courts. See especially Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria. Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven 2007) pp.235ff.

54 Stora, Algeria 1830-2000 pp. 213ff. is good on politics in the 1990S

55 For the first point see Mark Allen, Arabs (London 2006) p. 30

56 Habeck, Knowing the Enemy pp. 83ff. 57 Simon Reeve, The New Jackals. Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (London 1999) pp. 125-32 is a persuasive account of Yousef's mind

58 Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies. Inside America's War on Terror (New York 2004) pp. 140-47

59 Burke, AI-Qaeda p. 127

60 See mainly Ahmed Rashid, Taliban. The Story of the Afghan Warlords (London 2001) pp. 72-5

61 See Alan Cullison, 'Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive' Atlantic Monthy (September 2004) pp. 1-16. Cullison's brilliant reporting from Afghanistan for the Wall Street Journal includes details from abandoned Al Qaeda computers he purchased in Kabul

62 Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections. States that Sponsor Terrorism (Cambridge 2005) pp. 205-9

63 McDermott, Perfect Soldiers Appendix C p. 264 for most of this text

64 Baradan Kuppusamy, 'Hambali: The Driven Man' Asia Times 19 August 2003

65 Lucien Vandenbroucke, 'Eyewitness to Terror: Nairobi's Day of Infamy' and Patience Bushnell, 'After Nairobi: Recovering from Terror' American Foreign Service Bulletin (2000) June, July issues

66 Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind. Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and the Holy War (Sterling, Virginia 2003) p. 174

67 Jean-Charles Brisard and Damien Martinez, Zarqawi. The New Face of AI-Qaeda (Cambridge 2005) is essential on Zarqawi as it is based on extensive Jordanian documentation

68 Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe pp. 147ff.

69 McDermott, Perfect Soldiers pp. 37-46

70 DIGOS (Italian secret service) report 'AI Muhajroun 3' dated 21 November 2001

71 Shiv Malik, 'My Brother the Bomber' Prospect (June 2007) p. 34

72 Gerald Robbins, 'Dutch Treat: The Netherlands Tries to Assimilate its Muslim Immigrants' Weekly Standard 13 July 2007 pp. 1-2

73 George Walden, Time to Emigrate? (London 2006)

74 Paul M. Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn, When Ways of Life Collide (Princeton 2007) pp. 27ff.

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