Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [297]
This was Jamal Ahmidan, a fugitive from Tetuan, where in 1993 he had murdered his accomplice in an armed robbery. Tetuan is the epicentre of Morocco’s US$12.5 billion hashish business, with local drug barons joining Lebanese dealers in West African conflict diamonds as an alternative source of terrorist funding after movements of money became harder after 9/11. He and his brother ran a small business in Lavapiés, combining this with dope dealing through his cousin Hamid. Drugs were the medium of exchange when Hamid bartered explosives from a Spanish miner who was a drug addict in return for thirty kilograms of hashish. Deported in 1993, Ahmidan had served a two-and-a-half-year sentence in Morocco where incarceration led to his vehement espousal of Islam. Back in Spain, he had a blousy girlfriend and continued to deal drugs, but he no longer consumed them himself. This was a matter of takfir, the art of deluding the infidels. You can drink, smoke, womanise, so long as you have hatred in your heart. He gathered around himself four friends from Tetuan as well as Zougam whose shop was near a barber shop and the Alhambra restaurant where the group hung around. In 2001 Zougam stabbed a stranger who presumed to bring a dog into the restaurant, a bad thing to do when Moroccan Islamists were around. This was when Yarkas, the Al Qaeda cell leader in Madrid, took an interest in this group of dealers and toughs, converting their cultural Islamism into the jihadist variety, through media that would engage their limited attention spans.
A middle-class Tunisian student provided more intellectual sobriety than the drug dealers disposed of, while Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, also known as ‘Mohammed the Egyptian’, was brought in as leader after Yarkas had been arrested. Ahmed was an electronics graduate who had served for five years in the explosives branch of the Egyptian army before going to jail for Islamist activity. By posing as a Palestinian, a common ploy to elicit automatic European sympathy, he had conned his way into Germany, using a special substance to modify his fingerprints whenever the Germans took them and compared them with their databanks. He knew how to ‘work’ Germany. One just had to rise early, eager for a day’s work, which in his case meant being the Lebach asylum centre’s resident demagogue arguing ‘rights’ with German social workers. After simply walking out of this unguarded facility, Ahmed headed for Spain. He rented the country house where the group assembled their eleven bombs, but was careful to leave Spain before the bombings. A lucky break enabled the Spanish police to track him to Milan, where the Italian secret service reported that he was working as a decorator. They bugged a flat he shared with other Egyptians. This is probably the single most important source available for insights into how a jihadist recruiter operates, insights we owe to Italian intelligence.
On 26 May they recorded his efforts to recruit a fellow Egyptian as a ‘martyr’. He had audiotapes, a two-thousand-page manual on jihad, and three hundred video-cassettes, for a morbid fascination with heads being sawn off or bomb blasts is very much part of the mindset. So too is a mastery of modern technology. The internet is what bin Laden once described as the electric current connecting the global ummah.