Nine Lives: My time as the West's top spy inside al-Qaeda
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‘Pistachio,’ he said, exposing a couple of jagged teeth.
‘What month do you get the nuts?’
‘In thirty years,’ he said. ‘They’re for my grandchildren.’
As for Yemen, it will take a generation to recover from decades of conflict and environmental collapse. Any form of government worthy of the name is still years away.
Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Syria, the Sahel region and the jungles I once roamed in South East Asia also continue to offer breeding grounds for jihad.
Both al-Qaeda and ISIS will continue to dream of creating their perfect ‘Islamic State’, even if their paths and ideologies will be distinct. They will also look for new ways to attack the West.
An Inventive Enemy
I worry often about the technology of the mubtakkar leaching out to ever more jihadi groups and being developed as a new weapon of terror. Abu Khabab’s deputy Abu Bakr al-Masri remains unaccounted for. He always dreamed of travelling to Yemen. If he did, it is possible that he shared expertise developed in Darunta with the Yemeni explosives expert Ibrahim al-Asiri. Al-Asiri was the brains behind the so-called ‘underwear bomb’ attempt in the skies above Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 and is widely viewed as the most dangerous bomb-maker to have emerged since 9/11.44
The mubtakkar blueprints have likely been accessed by thousands of jihadis online. The instructions spread like a virus from one al-Qaeda website to another, making it impossible for security services to permanently remove the content from the web.45 In 2009, I noticed detailed blueprints for the mubtakkar had again been posted online and immediately alerted MI6, but I was told it had been downloaded more than 700 times before the British were able to take down the post. In 2015, the blueprints were found in the possession of an al-Qaeda-aligned terrorist cell arrested in Egypt.*
If a small terrorist cell in Egypt was able to access the blueprint, I am sure larger groups have it and are working assiduously to make it more lethal. ISIS, after all, had access to laboratories at Mosul University and some of Saddam’s chemical weapons engineers among its number.47 It experimented with chlorine and sulphur mustard attacks in Syria and Iraq.48
One straw in the wind was a plot in Australia, uncovered in 2017, in which two brothers were allegedly planning to build an ‘improvised chemical dispersion device’ that would release highly toxic hydrogen sulphide. The plotters had allegedly received instruction from an ISIS controller in Syria, who had been put in touch with them by a third brother who was with the group.49 I fear the technology might be deployed one day.
Communications and propaganda are and will continue to be a critical piece of the battlefield. The wide availability of end-to-end encryption apps allows terrorists to communicate in secret, which has revolutionized their ability to plan, coach and provide information. Many plots and attacks in the West in recent years have involved extremists being remotely instructed from overseas, dramatically increasing terrorist groups’ reach.50 The ISIS terrorist cell which attacked Paris in November 2015 and Brussels in March 2016 was communicating via these apps with their handlers in Syria. In the run up to the Brussels attacks they were able, without being detected, to record long audio briefings for these handlers, discussing attack plans and asking technical questions related to making the TATP explosive they used in the attack.51
The imagination and innovation of these terror groups should not be underestimated. Those working in counter-terrorism need to prepare for a range of new threats, from weaponized terrorist drones to poison gas attacks to continued efforts to design bombs that can defeat airline security.
With the explosion of terror attacks worldwide, jihadism has evolved in my lifetime. I was one of the youngest members of the first generation, which came of age in jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan and among the mountains of Bosnia. The second generation emerged during the Iraq War. And now there is a third generation of often tech-savvy youngsters, who have grown up amidst the carnage and upheavals unleashed since the Arab Spring and the rise of far-right anti-Muslim extremism in the West. Ahmed Hassan, an Iraqi orphan and teenage refugee convicted of attempting to blow up a London Underground train in 2017, was barely two years old at the time of 9/11.52
How to Win
The scourge of global terror can only be confronted in a multi-dimensional way. Air strikes and drone attacks, training regional armies, putting more police on the streets of Western cities, better intelligence sharing, staunching the flow of money – these are all necessary but obvious steps.
But the social and sectarian issues I have outlined also have to be addressed. As John Brennan said when he was the director of the CIA, ‘We have to find a way to address some of these factors and conditions that are abetting and allowing these movements to grow.’53
Targeting the appeal of the ideology is paramount.
The US National Security Strategy, published in 2006, recognized the imperative of ‘winning the battle of ideas, for it is ideas that can turn the disenchanted into murderers willing to kill innocent victims’.54 But first we have to understand the idea. In 2014, the New York Times published confidential comments about the appeal of ISIS by General Michael K. Nagata, the then US Special Operations commander for the Middle East.55
‘We have not defeated the idea,’ he said. ‘We do not even understand the idea.’
For a time ISIS was almost put on a pedestal, a force that could not be overcome. We mythologized the ideology that sustained it. At the same time we insufficiently probed their means of control, how relatively few men could control cities through a mixture of fear, extortion and favour.
I hope this book has helped trace the evolution of jihadi ideology and I hope it provides at least some guidance for Muslims to get involved in what is a defining struggle for the soul of Islam. Muslims, not Western governments, must win the battle of ideas. We must reject absolutely and vocally the notion that the Islamic State or al-Qaeda are somehow representative of our religion, that beheadings, slavery and crucifixion are valid today because they were seen as legitimate in the Middle Ages. That means challenging and refuting the teaching of the likes of Abu Abdullah al-Muhajhir and his book, The Jurisprudence of Blood.
After terror attacks in the United Kingdom in 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May said that defeating the ideology that inspired such attacks ‘is one of the great challenges of our time, but it cannot be defeated by military intervention alone’. She went on: ‘It will only be defeated when we turn people’s minds away from this violence and make them understand that our values – pluralistic British values – are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.’56
It sounded as if she saw it as a government programme – one that would educate Muslims in the ways of Westminster. Well-intentioned perhaps, but irrelevant to the larger struggle. The most effective counter-narrative at this stage is not to offer Western democracy, which has had a terrible track record in the Arab world, but alternatives grounded within the history and traditions of the Islamic world. The assault must – can only, for the time being – be waged from within Islam.
One step in this direction was a twenty-three-page open letter published in September 2014 repudiating ISIS and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It was signed by many prominent Muslim scholars around the world and it picked apart point by point the group’s claims to Islamic legitimacy.57 Counter-narratives from mainstream clerics are helpful but they may also be a dialogue of the deaf, simply because they come from a moderate perspective. To those seduced by the message of al-Qaeda or ISIS, the messengers will be seen as traitors to Islam, seduced by Western lassitude. The jihadis dismiss many of their critics in the Muslim world as ‘dollar scholars’.
As Labib al-Nahhas, a senior and moderate voice within the Syrian Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham, put it: ‘The Islamic State’s extremist ideology can be defeated only through a home-grown Sunni alternative – with the term “moderate” defined not by CIA handlers but by Syrians themselves.’58
M
oderate imams – whether in the community or visiting prisons – are not going to impress young men already halfway to jihad. Islamic academics and theologians cannot alone formulate counter-messaging against al-Qaeda and ISIS. They don’t understand what makes these groups tick.
To make an impact, to chip away at the certainty which binds such groups, requires us to recruit respected Salafi fundamentalists, men whose ideological outlook is close to that of the terror groups but who eschew their violence. Men who have already travelled that route and then seen a better way can be precious allies. They can help detect and disrupt radicalization; they can help rehabilitate those either tempted by or convicted of conspiracies. But they have to be credible, and their work can only flourish in a society where tolerance and diversity are championed. A rise in hate crimes; a resurgence of the far right on both sides of the Atlantic; a sense that police don’t afford equal protection to all; discrimination in the workplace – these are just a few of the factors that will undercut any efforts to counter radicalization. There’s a great danger that in Europe, maybe even in the United States, too, Islamist and right-wing extremists will feed off each other in a vicious cycle.
ISIS and al-Qaeda lash out most ferociously against Salafi critics for a reason – because they feel their certainty undermined. ‘Quietist’ Salafis believe in personal purification rather than involvement in the political sphere, and reject taking up arms. While the jihadis believe they are God’s instruments in ushering in a Caliphate near the end-of-days, their Salafi critics believe only God can and will bring about the victory for Islam foretold in the prophecies, making the battle for the soul the only one that matters. Salafis are well versed in the religious texts on which al-Qaeda and ISIS rely, and well placed to undermine their controversial interpretations of the hadith.
As purists, Salafis can demonstrate that those who rail against ‘revisionism’ of the faith and demand a return to a medieval brand of Islam are themselves guilty of the worst revisionism. Of course, Salafis themselves have an uncompromising view of the perfect Islamic society, one that is theocratic and intolerant of dissent. And many have travelled the road from uncompromising Salafism to taking up arms and ultimately to global jihad. It was a journey I took before seeing it as a futile descent into a cycle of violence. But there are some among them who reject the bleak and joyless interpretation of Islam being spouted in many shabby prayer halls around Europe.
In too many places Islam has become a religion based on fear of damnation and sin. There are echoes of fundamentalist Christianity in the US and the seventeenth-century Puritans in England. In our religion, our relationship with God is based on three pillars: love of the Lord, hope for forgiveness and fear of damnation. All three must receive equal weight, as historically they have. But in recent decades imams around the world have responded to globalization and the rise of a permissive liberal culture in the West by placing overwhelming emphasis on hellfire and damnation. They have created a generation of the guilty. Their sermons warn of the torture and torment waiting in the hereafter for those indulging in alcohol, drugs, sex before marriage and other vices. It is a message of damnation which has driven many young men to martyrdom as a way to atone for their sins.
Certainly, among second- and third-generation immigrants to Europe, many young Muslim men feel marginalized, conflicted, discriminated against and rootless in societies where their parents often tried hard to be accepted. Opportunities are few, unemployment high. They often reject their surroundings and retreat to the edge of society where alcohol, drugs and petty crime are the language of defiance. If and when their crimes lead to jail time, they are all too often vulnerable to siren voices preaching a short cut to redemption.
As Alain Grignard of the Belgian federal police has pointed out, a generation ago European security services were mostly dealing with Islamists who were being radicalized into violence, but they are now mostly dealing with violent young men involved in petty crime and street gangs who are then becoming Islamized.59 Young Muslims in the West have much greater exposure to such vices than the average teenager in Riyadh or Algiers. And so it follows that their perceived need for redemption is all the greater.*
Take, for example, the case of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a young Belgian who became a notorious figure within ISIS before returning to Europe and dying in a shootout with police after leading the cell that attacked Paris in November 2015. His sister Yasmina told the New York Times that Abaaoud did not attend the mosque before leaving for Syria and ISIS – and wasn’t especially interested in religion.61 But he had gone to prison several times, and it was apparently there that, like so many Western jihadis, he found a radical, violent version of Islam.62 A significant proportion of ISIS-linked plots in the West have involved extremists with criminal records.63 It has often been within prisons that young Muslim men have found an anchor and structure that their lives lacked, a path to redemption. That path could easily become a short cut to paradise – as a suicide bomber in Syria or on the streets of Europe. It may be a warped form of religious conviction based on scant knowledge of the Koran, but it is conviction nevertheless. Those who avoid prison often fall prey to silver-tongued preachers who operate outside the mainstream ‘community’ – men like Khalid Zerkani in the Brussels district of Molenbeek. When he was ultimately tried and convicted in 2015, Zerkani was described by the judges as propagating ‘extremist ideas among naive, fragile and agitated youth’, and as the ‘archetype of a seditious mentor’. But by then, his influence had set many young men on the path to jihad, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud.64
Many Muslim communities in Europe are now microcosms of the communal tribalism that plagues their home countries. An intolerant, hectoring minority takes the quiet majority hostage, tries to bully and threaten them into submission. Their view is that there are no circumstances in which a Muslim may work with a non-Muslim, that loyalty to a fellow Muslim, whatever his motives and however depraved his behaviour, is paramount.
Allegiance to religion stifles any other form of allegiance, to society or even family. I think back to the youth of Tooting, sneering towards their parents and their communities in their narrow certainties.
Unless we stand up to this, we face the competing totalitarianism of the jihadi extremist and the far right, feeding off each other. We have to reject blind faith and embrace faith with justice. As the medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyyah wrote: ‘It is said that God allows the just state to remain even if it is led by unbelievers, but God will not allow the oppressive state to remain even if it is led by Muslims.’65
Oppression and intolerance should have no place in contemporary Islam.
I believe we as Muslims need to embrace and celebrate the advances of human creativity, political emancipation and science, rather than reject them as corruptions of the modern world. The Koran, after all, was the first to describe the ‘Big Bang’ that ushered in the universe.
‘The heavens and the earth were one piece which We tore asunder.’66
I view the Koran as a book of secrets which Muslims will better understand as their lives progress and as the generations pass. The Big Bang meant nothing to my great-great grandfather, but for many Muslims living today the mystery of the verse above has been unlocked by advances in scientific knowledge.
It is not the holy texts that need to be reformed. It is our understanding that needs to evolve. It is not that Islam needs reforming, it is that the message of God should be better understood.
Salafi critiques of jihadism can help improve security in our societies, but that security ultimately depends on the broader Muslim community challenging the message of extremist preachers.
Within the global jihadi movement there are weaknesses and divisions waiting to be exploited. The glue that holds such movements together is a potent combination of certainty and unity. It is also the source of their vulnerability. Undermine their absolute belief that they will end up in heaven, sow seeds of doubt and dissent, exploit and widen ideological discord – and
there will be far fewer jihadis ready to become martyrs. Indeed, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi invited Muslims to challenge him when he said in Mosul in July 2014: ‘If you find what I say and do to be true, then assist me. And if you find what I say and do to be false then put me right.’67
We should aid those with even a sliver of doubt. We have to undermine the theology peddled by Baghdadi, Adnani and Binali by shouting persuasive and authentic readings of the Koran and hadith from the rooftops.
The holy texts themselves offer the most persuasive response. The Koran says there are people who
‘pervert words from their contexts and they have forgotten a portion of what they were reminded of’.68
The Prophet issued a warning to Muslims not to mistake civil war or fitna for jihad, because ‘every Muslim house will suffer because of it.’
Why must Islam be so severe and unforgiving, as ISIS ideologues like Muhajir insist? God says:
‘Indulge people with forgiveness and enjoin kindness, And turn away from the ignorant.’69
Nor is forcible conversion to be applauded. Persuasion and tolerance are woven into the fabric of Islam. God says:
‘Call to the way of your Lord with wisdom and fair exhortation, And debate with them what is best.’70
Nor is there any justification in the Koran or hadith for wanton and arbitrary slayings.
‘And do not slay the soul whom God has made inviolable, except with due cause.’71
Perhaps worst of all is the corruption of the very concept of jihad. In an audio sermon in 2015, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said, ‘Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war.’72 But without a legitimate cause or vision, jihad is nothing more than criminality. In one of his speeches, ISIS ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Adnani said: ‘God bless Prophet Muhammad who was sent with the sword as a mercy to all worlds.’ It was a typical manipulation of the Koran and hadith.73