Spain’s top terrorism judge has issued an indictment that links last month’s Madrid train bombings with the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
Judge Baltasar Garzon filed an indictment Wednesday alleging Amer Azizi, a Moroccan national, helped organize a July 2001 meeting in Spain that gathered key plotters in the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks, including ringleader Mohamed Atta. Earlier, Spanish authorities identified Azizi as one of the suspects in the Madrid bombings in March.
The indictment seemed to confirm what European counterterrorism officials and other experts have been saying for weeks: that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have made Europe their target of choice.
“What we are seeing is an all-out war in the European theater exacerbated by the Iraq war,” said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
Azizi was also included in an indictment Garzon handed down in September against Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and 34 other terrorism suspects. Azizi was charged then with belonging to a terrorist organization.
Sept. 11 connection
The new indictment alleges that Azizi helped plan the hijackings that resulted in more than 3,000 deaths in the U.S. It charges him with multiple counts of murder–“as many deaths and injuries as were committed” on Sept. 11.
The March 11 commuter rail attacks in Madrid left 191 dead. It was Al Qaeda’s first major strike on the continent, and since then life for many in Europe has been a series of near misses.
Last week, a plot to bomb either a soccer stadium or shopping mall in the British industrial city of Manchester was apparently foiled with the arrest of nine men and a woman, all of them North Africans or Iraqi Kurds.
Earlier this month, police arrested eight British Muslims of Pakistani origin who had acquired a half-ton cache of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer compound that is a favorite of bombmakers. Those detained ranged in age from 17 to 32.
In Spain, police have now picked up 18 suspects–most of them Moroccans–in connection with the Madrid bombings. Seven other suspects, including the alleged Tunisian ringleader, blew themselves up in an April 3 standoff that also killed one police officer.
Three weeks after the Madrid blasts, police found a bomb along a high-speed rail line between Madrid and the southern city of Seville. They also discovered several armed explosive devices and plans to hit Jewish targets in Spain.
According to police, the Madrid terrorist cell, part of an Al Qaeda-sponsored group known as the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, financed its operations though drug dealing and other petty criminal activities. The group may have received some logistical support from colleagues in Britain, Germany, France and Italy.
Some members of the Madrid cell, including Azizi, remain at large. In a particularly gruesome reminder of the bombings, the corpse of the police officer killed during the standoff was removed from its tomb last week and mutilated. No one has claimed responsibility.
French counterterrorism authorities moved against the Moroccan group this month, arresting 13 people in several Paris suburbs. Days later, commuter rail stations in Paris were evacuated after the CIA alerted French authorities about a possible bomb attack.
Information from U.S. intelligence sources also led to the arrest last week of four Islamic militants in Sweden. The four are suspected of aiding insurgents in Iraq.
In a tape that surfaced April 15, bin Laden offered European governments a “truce” in exchange for pulling their troops out of Iraq. But Europe’s leaders hardly needed his words to understand the gravity of their situation.
`Things have changed’
“Before 9/11, Al Qaeda valued Europe as a platform for planning and staging attacks [against the U.S.] and for recruiting,” said Jonathan Stevenson, a terrorism expert at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Things have changed. The U.S. is less vulnerable, and Al Qaeda is less capable,” he said. “Al Qaeda is looking for soft targets of opportunity. That has made Europe much more attractive as a target.”
The war in Iraq has exacerbated the problem for Europe.
“This is one area where the French were right. They said it would increase the terrorism impulse. Clearly, it has,” Stevenson said.
The most problematic threat at the moment comes from two closely linked North African organizations–the Moroccan group responsible for the Madrid bombings and its Algeria-based cousin, the Salafist Group for Combat and Preaching.
Elusively fluid and loosely interconnected, the organizations’ members live on the fringes of Europe’s immigrant community and seem to float effortlessly across borders using well-forged passports.
Their leaders appear to be adherents of an extreme ideology known as Takfir wal Hijra that first surfaced in Egypt during the 1970s. The ideology would later be refined in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the early 1990s and reimported to North Africa by the returning mujahedeen.
Takfiris see immigration as a Trojan Horse for the spread of their jihad, or holy war. Followers tend to be clean-shaven, drink alcohol, indulge in women and generally adopt Western lifestyles to blend in. They fund their activities through petty crimes.
Their declared enemies include all non-believers and also fellow Muslims who do not share their world view.
Spanish investigators say the key figures in the Madrid plot were Takfiris. Some European terrorism experts believe Atta was a Takfiri. So too is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Palestinian and reputed Al Qaeda lieutenant believed to be behind many of the recent suicide bombings in Iraq.
Alienated and frustrated
But for European governments, the war on terrorism is less about Iraq and Afghanistan and more about how to cope with a large and increasingly alienated Muslim immigrant community.
About 15 million Muslims live within the European Union. In the U.S., by comparison, demographic experts say the number of Muslims of Middle Eastern and Asian backgrounds is less than a million, although community leaders tend to give a much higher figure.
Arab-Americans are overwhelmingly Christian, and Muslim Arabs in the U.S. are often more middle-class than their European counterparts, said Stevenson, the terrorism expert.
“In Europe, the Muslim minority is politically and culturally marginalized. They are disproportionately unemployed, disproportionately imprisoned. Accordingly, they are more insular and alienated, which makes them ripe for recruitment,” he said.
Even when these immigrants appear to be well integrated in the host country, it turns out they may not be.
“These boys are the cricketers, the Manchester United fans. Fish and chips is their favorite food,” said the perplexed father of one of the young suspects in the London bomb plot. Manchester United is England’s most popular soccer team.
The families of the bomb suspects blame the mosques where radical preachers openly espouse holy war against the West and try to recruit their sons for the cause.
At one London mosque, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born preacher, speaks approvingly of the Sept. 11 hijackers calling them “The magnificent 19.”
Earlier this month, the cleric tested the limits of free speech in Britain when he accused a Muslim member of the House of Lords of being an apostate. Apostasy, according to the Koran, is punishable by death.
Britain and other European countries are looking at ways to crack down on the excesses of such clerics without sacrificing civil liberties.
“This is a huge policy problem for the U.K., France and Germany,” Stevenson said. “If they hit them too hard, they are going to alienate the entire community and make people turn toward radicalism.”
Different approaches
The problem also underscores sharp differences in approach between Europe and the U.S. on the question of homeland security: While Europe is fighting cross-border brush fires against various Al Qaeda affiliates, the U.S. is trying to build a fire wall to block terrorists from getting through.
“Since 9/11, the U.S. has been trying to plug all conceivable vulnerabilities, making it much harder for the terrorists to get through,” Stevenson said.
“The Europeans, because of their greater experience with domestic terrorism, their view is that you can’t–no matter how many resources you throw at it–shut it down completely. Someone will get through,” he said.
The continuing dispute between the EU and the U.S. over the nature of passenger data that foreign airlines will be obliged to provide the U.S. security agencies reflects these differences. Europeans see the demand as a violation of privacy; Americans say they have a right to know more about who is entering the country.
It was not until after the Madrid bombings of four commuter trains that the EU decided it needed an equivalent of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
However, it is unlikely that Gijs de Vries, the Dutch politician named to head the new agency, will ever be given the same authority or resources as Tom Ridge, his U.S. counterpart.
