Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (7 page)

Boabdil, the last Moorish king in Spain, surrenders the keys of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella on January 2, 1492 (by Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz).

CHAPTER 3
THE MOORS OF MEZUAK

We will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tariq ibn Ziyad [the Berber general who led Muslim forces in the conquest of Spain in 711]…. You know of the Spanish crusade against the Muslims, and that not much time has passed since the expulsion for Al Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisition…. Blood for blood! Destruction for destruction!

—MARTYR’S VIDEO FOUND IN THE DEBRIS OF THE APARTMENT
WHERE THE MADRID TRAIN BOMBERS BLEW THEMSELVES UP
WHEN CORNERED BY POLICE, APRIL 3, 2004

I
n the early eighth century, Muslim forces of the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus captured Roman Hispania from the Visigoths, founding an emirate over the whole of what is today Spain and Portugal. History named these Islamic conquerors of Spain Moors, after the North African kingdom of Maure, an ally of Rome’s archrival, Carthage, in the third century B.c. The Moors themselves never used the term. They were Arabs who led armies of North African Berber converts. Soldiers all, they brought no women with them and mostly married into already established Roman, Visigoth, Jewish, and native Iberian families. From this social mix sprang a culturally creative and technically advanced civilization that would last almost eight hundred years.

Almost immediately after the Muslim conquest, however, the Christian Reconquista of the Moorish states in the Iberian peninsula began, pursued across the centuries through innumerable battles and political intrigues. On January 2, 1492, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile rode into Granada, the last bastion of rule in Muslim Spain, or Al Andalus, with Christopher Columbus at their side. The last ruler of the Kingdom of Granada, Boabdil the Unfortunate (el
zogoybi),
rode out from the magnificent red palace of the Alhambra with eight hundred of his knights to surrender the keys of the city to the Spanish sovereigns: “I saw the King of the Moors sally from the gates of said city,” wrote Columbus, “and kiss the royal hands of your Highnesses.”
¹
Another Christian observed that:

There was no one who did not weep abundantly with pleasure giving thanks to Our Lord for what they saw, for they could not keep back the tears; and the Moorish King and the Moors who were with him for their part could not disguise the sadness and pain they felt for the joy of the Christians, and certainly with much reason on account of their loss, for Granada is the most distinguished and chief thing in the world.
²

Imbued with religious and nationalist fervor, Ferdinand and Isabella issued an edict in late March 1492 expelling all Muslims and Jews from the country; a few weeks later they agreed to sponsor Columbus in a quest to discover new lands for Christianity. For almost five centuries afterward, Spain had no Muslim population. But the Moors have always retained a clear sight and glorious dream of Spain from the northern Moroccan cities of Tangiers and Tetuán, just across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar.

After surrendering the keys to Granada, Boabdil rode off into exile, crossing the hill of Los Martirios (the Martyrs), and up the desolate heights that form the skirt of the Alpujarra Mountains. From a barren summit, known even today as La Cuesta de las Lágrimas (the Hill of Tears), the fallen monarch took a last look at the splendor that was Granada. It was here, too, at a place called
el último suspiro del Moro
(the last sigh of the Moor), that his sadness was turned to bile by the reproach of his mother, Ayxa: “You do well,” she supposedly said, “to weep as a woman over what you could not defend as a man.” King Ferdinand added insult to injury by taking Boabdil’s daughter Aixa as a concubine, then casting her off; she became a nun. Commenting on Boabdil’s fate, Emperor Charles V of Spain reportedly sneered: “I would rather have made this Alhambra my sepulcher than have lived without a kingdom.”
³
Nowhere does this sorrow and bitterness linger deeper than in and around Tetuán, known in Morocco as the Andalucian City
⁴
and the closest African metropolis to Europe. Here is where the Moors’ defeated but unbowed Grenadine knights, under the command of Abdul-Hassan al-Mandari,
⁵
retreated, then rallied to fight off the Christian advance into North Africa. The struggle continued well after al-Mandari’s death in 1511, into the mid-twentieth century, led by descendants of the Andalucian émigrés who had remodeled the city to reflect their precious Granada. Their heroic stories of triumphant resistance to Christian conquest remain an integral part of the lore of present-day Tetuán. But redemption for the loss of the Kingdom of Granada is still missing. Like any Southern boy who has dreamed of reliving Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, only this time winning the day, the young men of Tetuán, beckoned by the Andalucian hills they see across the Strait of Gibraltar, long for bygone glory, for the days when the Moors commanded the world’s respect.

The
caid,
the local police commissar in charge of Jamaa Mezuak, a tumbledown barrio in Tetuán, was firm and formal with his French:
“Le Wali a dit non et c’est non, point à la ligne.”
(The governor said no, and it’s no, period at the end of the line.) “You can’t talk to anyone else here unless you give me a letter from the minister of the Interior,
c’est tout
(that’s all).” Of course, the ministry of Interior in Rabat would promise me a yes for some indefinite tomorrow, but I didn’t have time to wait on its whim.

I had come back to explore the few square blocks in Mezuak that had produced five of the seven suicide bombers who plotted the 2004 Madrid train attacks and then blew themselves up. Several other young men from the same Mezuak neighborhood had gone on to fight and die as martyrs in Iraq.
⁶
I felt I needed to convey a better public sense of who “the enemy” was following a reaction to a briefing I gave in March 2007 for National Security Council staff at the White House. The briefing was based in part on what I had learned in Palestine and in part on information that I had gathered in Madrid and Morocco with Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer who liaised with the mujahedin out of Pakistan during the later stages of the Soviet-Afghan war. The thrust of this information was that small-group dynamics—intimate interacting networks of family, friends, schoolmates, workmates, soccer buddies, and such—were key to the making of terrorists.

At the White House I spent nearly an hour showing data about neighborhood, team, and collegial relationships, arguing that even focusing on pairs of friends—offering them both soccer scholarships, job opportunities, religion and art workshops—was likely to prove far more effective in the long run than was targeting individuals. In Palestine, I found that suicide bombers will usually turn down individual scholarships if the choice is between personal gain and family and friends. I gave the example of Nabeel Masood, the high school boy from Jabaliyah refugee camp in Gaza who blew up himself and other people in the Israeli port of Ashdod in 2004. He had a scholarship to study in England, which his mother said he was proud of, but it was no match for the eternal esteem of martyrdom in a cause shared by friends. What if he and a friend each had had scholarships; what if they’d had the chance to go to England together? Yet for some at the briefing, it seemed this rather simple message was incomprehensible.

“But don’t these young people realize that the decisions they make are their personal responsibility,” a young woman on Dick Cheney’s staff sternly said in her most authoritative voice, “and that if they choose violence against us we’re going to bomb them?”

“Bomb them?” I was truly bowled over. “Who are you going to bomb? Madrid? London? Morocco?”

Contacts in Tetuán had given me names of five young men who had gone on to Iraq, the first of whom had been identified by his DNA as a suicide bomber in Baquba. As with the Mezuak contingent of the Madrid bombers, two were brothers and all were soccer buddies. It turned out that the cousin of one of the Iraq-bound volunteers was married to someone from the Madrid group, which would make the Madrid deaths a family matter for the Iraq-bound friends.

And all of them, Madrid bombers and Iraq-bound martyrs alike, had lived their formative years along Mezuak’s Mamoun Street. All had gone to the Abdelkrim Khattabi primary school, where icons of Mickey Mouse framed the lessons of the day. They played soccer at the schoolyard or in the field below the Dawa Tab-ligh mosque that first promoted jihad in Mezuak. They saw the larger world on Al Jazeera at Café Chicago and other nearby hangouts, and at the Cyprus Coiffure and other barbershops, where tending hair was always a serious matter. There they earnestly debated the meaning of world events through the filter of their common experiences.

But why did just these ten, out of many hundreds who seemed no different, decide to kill and die for friends and faith? We’ll see that there’s as much randomness as purpose in the process of radicalization: Someone gets the jihad bug, for whatever reason, and friends follow, gathering force from sticking together, like a stone rolling downhill.

There are, of course, a few pathological jihadis. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was probably a crook and a killer, and one of the two main movers of the Madrid plot, the diminutive bucktoothed Chinaman
(El Chino),
as he was called, sometimes resembled the violent, coked-up Al Pacino character in the movie
Scarface.
For the most part, though, jihadis span the normal distribution of the surrounding population. The great majority cluster under the highest part of a bell-shaped curve: average in schooling, wealth, social adjustment, psychological disposition, and intelligence, with a few outliers at the tail ends.

The idea that joining jihad is a carefully calculated decision or that people are “brainwashed” or “recruited” into “cells” or “councils” by “organizations” with “infrastructures” that can be hit and destroyed is generally wrong. This (minus, perhaps, the brainwashing part) is the way most government bureaucracies, law enforcement agencies, and military organizations are structured. It’s their reality, and they mirror that reality by interpreting, understanding, and acting on the world in these terms. But generally, this isn’t the way most human lives are structured, including the jihadi social movement. Hierarchical armies whose minions act on their own initiative rather than following orders tend to lose wars, but the egalitarian jihad prospers because, like Google, its leadership is distributed over a social network in ways that are fairly fluid and flat.

I also went to the neighboring Spanish enclave of Ceuta at the northernmost tip of Morocco. There, the Alonso Principe barrio, where one of the Guantánamo prisoners had come from, is a faithful image of Mezuak. I wanted to talk to the young men, so I stationed myself in the plaza where children were playing soccer. The Plaza del Padre Salvador Cervos is bookended by two cafés, one devoted to fans of the Barcelona soccer team Barça, the other to aficionados of archrival Real Madrid. Young men sipped tea in a shaded corner. An endless trickle of children and adolescents flowed through the small plaza, pausing in pairs to kick the ball. A pair became a triad, someone came and two pairs formed, then the triads became a free for all. Someone’s little sister, left alone, cried, “I have to go,
adios, ciao, salaam.”
“Me too.” And the plaza suddenly emptied, then filled up again.

“Who’s your hero? Who do you want to grow up to be like?” I asked as I had done with the boys in Mezuak.

Number one was Ronaldinho, the Brazilian-born star of the Barcelona soccer team. Osama Bin Laden came up number three. And sandwiched between the athlete and the terrorist? The Terminator. About the Terminator’s subsequent career as governor of California, the children neither knew nor cared. When I queried the older teenagers, they were ready with wary and sarcastic replies. “George Bush,” said one. “Rumsfeld,” said another: “I want to make the world free for democracy!” All laughed.

I asked which soccer stars they liked: Barcelona’s Cameroonian striker, Samuel Eto’o; or Sergio Ramos, a defender for Real Madrid. What about Zinedine Zidane? This Frenchman of Algerian origin was probably the planet’s best-known soccer star. He had previously led France to the greatest of all triumphs in team sports—the World Cup Championship—and had been named outstanding player of the 2006 World Cup, where he was famously expelled in the tournament’s final match for head-butting an Italian who had insulted his family.