Al-Qaeda's Revenge

The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings

Fernando Reinares

• Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231801409
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Al-Qaeda's Revenge: The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings, Fernando Reinares tells the story of "3/11" - the March 11, 2004, bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, which killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800. He examines the development of an al-Qaeda conspiracy in Spain from the 1990s through the formation of the 3/11 bombing network beginning in March 2002, and discusses the preparations for and fallout from the attacks. Reinares draws on judicial, police, and intelligence documents to which he had privileged access, as well as on personal interviews with officials in Spain and elsewhere. His full analysis links the Madrid bombings to al-Qaeda's senior leadership and unveils connections between 3/11 and 9/11.

Al-Qaeda's Revenge, Spain's counterpart to The 9/11 Commission Report, was a bestseller in Spain.

Part I

The 3/11 Terrorist Network: Origins, Components, and Formation

1

Osama bin Laden’s Man in Spain and His Associates

On March 11, 2004, the same day that the Madrid train bombings took place, twenty-four individuals were about to be prosecuted before a tribunal of Spain’s National Court (Audiencia Nacional). This court, based in Madrid, is the Spanish judicial body that deals with terrorism offenses. The defendants were charged with belonging to or collaborating with an al-Qaeda cell that was active in Spain.¹ Ostensibly, the timing of the trial seemed to be a coincidence. Nonetheless, to understand where the 3/11 network originated, why Madrid was targeted, who had instigated the massacre on the commuter trains, and what international connections had facilitated the terrorists’ plans, it is necessary to know that in 1994—a decade before the train bombings—al-Qaeda had established an important cell in Spain.

Six years earlier, in 1988, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abdullah Azzam had founded the organization that soon would become the entity of reference for global terrorism.² Indeed, al-Qaeda emerged in a specific context: the end of the armed conflict triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. During the decade-long conflagration, Pakistan, then undergoing an accelerated process of Islamization, provided the Afghan insurgents with military aid. The insurgents also benefited from the financial support of Saudi Arabia, which was interested in extending its official fundamentalist version of Islam, and of the United States, still immersed in the bipolar dynamics of the Cold War. Moreover, tens of thousands of volunteers from many Islamic countries and from Muslim communities in Western societies went to Afghanistan to join the insurgents. Their involvement was a response to religious edicts calling for a defensive jihad, understood as the individual obligation of every Muslim to become involved in the fight against the occupation of Muslim lands.³ After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988 and 1989, a limited but sizable number of these former insurgents clustered around the emerging organization known as al-Qaeda, which maintained facilities in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These facilities remained even as al-Qaeda consolidated itself as a terrorist organization in its Sudanese sanctuary between 1991 and 1996.⁴ During this period, al-Qaeda expanded its international presence and penetrated Western European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and also Spain.

Although the al-Qaeda cell in Spain had formed in 1994, the Spanish National Police Corps (Cuerpo Nacional de Policía; CNP) were able to arrest most of the cell’s members in November 2001 during a counterterrorism operation codenamed Operation Dátil (Operation Date), by far the most important police sweep against jihadist terrorism in Spain until then. The operation’s main effort came during its first phase that November and had wide international resonance, but the full sweep was not completed until its fourth and final phase in September 2003. By the start of the autumn of 2005, the National Court had convicted eighteen of the twenty-four defendants in Sumario (Criminal Proceedings) 35/2001.⁵ Of the eighteen convicted, twelve were from Syria, five were from Morocco, and one was from Spain. Almost all of them resided in Madrid, though a few lived in Granada. In May 2006, Spain’s Supreme Court (Tribunal Supremo) upheld the sentences for fifteen of them—including their leader, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, better known among his followers and other jihadists outside of Spain as Abu Dahdah.⁶

These arrests aside, one extremely important fact about Operation Dátil is directly related and highly relevant to the 2004 Madrid train bombings: During the operation, the CNP did not arrest all of the members or collaborators of the al-Qaeda cell led by Abu Dahdah. Five individuals inside Spain eluded arrest in November 2001: Mustafa Maymouni, Driss Chebli (who would be arrested in the third phase of Operation Dátil in June 2003), Serhane ben Abdelmajid Fakhet (nicknamed “El Tunecino,” or “the Tunisian”), Said Berraj, and Jamal Zougam. There were a number of reasons why these five individuals eluded the Spanish police. In some cases, the judicial authorities, with limited knowledge of the emerging jihadist phenomenon, did not consider the evidence sufficient to incriminate certain individuals associated with the cell. These legal considerations were affected by Spanish counterterrorist laws at the time, which did not change significantly until the end of 2010. Perhaps, too, the Spanish authorities had political considerations in mind, wanting to avoid the impression that they were reacting solely to the dictates of US counterterrorism efforts following the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. A sixth and prominent member of Abu Dahdah’s al-Qaeda cell, Amer Azizi—an individual whose history and activities will be examined extensively in the second part of this book—also escaped capture during Operation Dátil. The authorities could not arrest him simply because he was not in Spain at the time.

The fact that these six individuals were not arrested during Operation Dátil, even though they had actively participated in the cell led by Abu Dahdah, proved crucial in the formation of the network that would carry out the 3/11 attacks. These six individuals, and their relationships with Abu Dahdah’s cell, are essential to understanding how the massacre on the commuter trains was planned, prepared, and executed.

From Soldiers of Allah to Abu Dahdah’s Cell

Two individuals formed the initial core of the al-Qaeda cell established in Spain in 1994. The first, the Palestinian Anwar Adnan Mohamed Saleh, also known as Chej Saleh, was around twenty years old at the time. The other was the Syrian Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, or Abu Musab al-Suri, then in his mid-thirties, who would become a key figure in global jihadism.⁷ In 1987, about two years after first arriving in Spain, al-Suri had married a Spanish Islamic convert, Elena Moreno, and subsequently became a naturalized Spanish citizen. Between 1988 and 1991, he spent time in Afghanistan, where he served as an instructor in various al-Qaeda training camps.⁸ In 1991, he returned to Spain, and with Saleh he disseminated an extremist vision of Islam that attracted Muslims living in and around Madrid, especially among those who frequented the Abu-Bakr Mosque in the Tetuán district in central Madrid. Soon after, al-Suri and Saleh formed a small group calling themselves Soldiers of Allah.

The Soldiers of Allah adopted the extremist view of Islam propagated by Saleh and al-Suri, a Sunni Muslim doctrine known as Salafist-jihadism. Salafism is a fundamentalist conception of the Islamic creed whose adherents argue that it is necessary to follow the rigorously observant behaviors of the first Muslims—the term Salaf, or “ancestor,” refers to the earliest generations of the prophet Muhammad and his followers—hence the notion of “Salafism.” However, proponents of this movement also reduce the meaning of the Quranic term jihad, or “struggle,” to mere bellicosity, providing the “jihadist” adjective. For the adherents of Salafist-jihadism, or jihadism for short, jihad in the form of violence against infidels and apostates is justified, on both moral and utilitarian grounds, to advance and defend Islam. Indeed, the jihadists regard violence against enemies of the faith as a religious duty for every believer in Allah. Salafist-jihadism is the ideology of al-Qaeda.⁹

Both Abu Musab al-Suri and Chej Saleh abandoned Spain in 1995. The former moved to London in June of that year to take over Al-Ansar magazine, the propaganda arm of the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé; GIA) of Algeria. The GIA had formed around Algerians who fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s, as well as individuals who had become radicalized within Algeria. Based in Algeria since its foundation in 1992, the GIA established strong ties to al-Qaeda.¹⁰ It extended its network across various European countries throughout the 1990s, notably on the northwest shore of the Mediterranean, including Spain. Abu Musab al-Suri had been in close contact with the leaders of the GIA since at least 1993, well before he left Madrid. In February 1994, he had become an adviser to GIA leader Cherif Gousami, and remained in that post at least until Gousami was killed by the Algerian security forces in September 1994 and Djamel Zitouni stepped up to take Gousami’s place.

In 1994, al-Suri—who was still focused on developing an al-Qaeda cell in Spain—advised the GIA leadership that they should “strike deep in France.”¹¹ The GIA made an initial attempt in December 1994, when four GIA members hijacked Air France Flight 8969 at Algiers International Airport, intending to crash it into Paris. French security forces thwarted the plot during a layover in Marseille. French security also saw the effects of Abu Musab al-Suri’s advice on July 25, 1995, when timed bombs exploded on board a Réseau Express Régional (RER) train at the Saint-Michel station in central Paris. Eight people died in the bombing, and around a hundred were injured. The Saint-Michel bombing was the first and the deadliest of several attacks that the GIA executed that year in France, and the first act of jihadist terrorism in Western Europe against commuter trains. The 3/11 network members would choose a similar target for their own attack nearly a decade later.

During his stay in London, al-Suri was in direct contact with Khaled al-Fawwaz, a Saudi businessman whom Osama bin Laden had appointed as his delegate in the United Kingdom in 1994. To this end, al-Fawwaz established an office in London, presenting it as a Saudi political group called the Advice and Reform Committee. The office took advantage of the official tolerance toward radical Islamists in the city, a tolerance that helped coin the derisive nickname “Londonistan.” Through this office, the directors of al-Qaeda channeled instructions to the organization’s cell in East Africa, most notably in 1998 when the cell was planning suicide bombings against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. These attacks, which took place on August 7, killed more than 220 people. A month after the US embassy bombings, the first of such spectacular and lethal plots prepared and executed by members of al-Qaeda, British police arrested Khaled al-Fawwaz after the US authorities accused him of being involved in the attacks.¹²

Abu Musab al-Suri, however, carried out most of his daily activities with Abu Qatada, one of the most influential contemporary ideologue propagandists of Salafist-jihadism.¹³ Born in Bethlehem as Omar Mahmoud Othman, Abu Qatada had lived in Amman and taught Islamic law in Peshawar before settling in the United Kingdom in 1993. He received political asylum there, even though he was still leading a terrorist organization in Jordan and disseminating edicts and treaties that incited hatred toward the West. Sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by the Jordanian courts for his connections to terrorist activity, the British arrested him only after 9/11 and finally extradited him to Jordan in July 2013.

In spite of their close working relationship, Abu Qatada and al-Suri did not always concur over ideological positions, which led to some very public clashes between them.¹⁴ Despite their tactical and strategic disagreements, both shared the same vision of Salafist-jihadism. As a doctrinaire of religious violence, Abu Qatada had tremendous influence on the members of the al-Qaeda cell established in Spain in the mid-1990s and, by implication, on the 3/11 attackers. The following passage is a succinct yet eloquent example of the kind of ideas that Abu Qatada propagated safely from London, thanks to his status as a political refugee in the United Kingdom:

Let them say we are terrorists. Yes, that is what we are. The word is in Islamic terminology. Let people call us enemies of thought and opinion. Yes, we should raise the Islamic state with fire and steel, as Allah prescribed to purify gold impurities and rubbish.¹⁵

Abu Musab al-Suri moved back to Afghanistan in 1996, joining Osama bin Laden’s inner circle.¹⁶ Later, he led his own terrorist training camp in Kabul. At this camp in August 2000, he made a series of twenty-eight audiovisual recordings, with the generic title “Jihad Is the Solution.” He made these videos to share one of the intensive courses he taught on terrorist indoctrination and training. In the twenty-second recording he made, he shared with his students—mainly well-educated Arabs—ideas such as “Terrorism is an obligation and murder, a rule”; “All young Muslims should become terrorists”; and “You, as a university student, what do you lose if you commit a terrorist act once a year, or once in your life?”¹⁷ In his videos, al-Suri advised his students to attack Western countries to cause “collective massacres” against “personalities contrary to Islam,” “Jews in Europe,” “train stations,” “airports,” “nuclear installations,” or even cause a “wildfire.”¹⁸ His videos also provided suggestions for funding the creation and maintenance of a jihadist cell:

Any tourist carries a good amount of money, [perhaps] $1,000 or $1,500, apart from [his] passport, credit cards, and jewelry from his wife. One can attack him and rob him, or we can enter his hotel room, kill him, and rob him.¹⁹

In 2005, a voluminous treatise written by al-Suri, entitled “Call to Global Islamic Resistance,” leaked onto the internet. As al-Suri explained, the book “was written to teach those who seek to comply with the obligation of jihad and to fight our enemies, the infidels, and their allies, the apostates and hypocrites.”²⁰ In 2005, around the first anniversary of the 3/11 attacks, he posted a letter online in which he defended “the right of those who committed these attacks to fight against Spain.”²¹ Between March and May 2005, the Pakistani authorities located and arrested al-Suri in the city of Karachi and handed him over to the US authorities. The United States later rendered him to Syria, his native country. In December 2011, according to several reputable sources, al-Suri secured his freedom from a Syrian prison.²²

Chej Saleh, the other founder of the al-Qaeda cell in Spain, left Madrid in October 1995, about four months after Abu Mus...