The Known Wolf

By Tuesday, May 30, 14 suspects were in police custody, one of them a recent immigrant from Libya who had just obtained a pilot’s license. Eighteen different sites were undergoing forensic investigation. Three European states—Belgium, France, and Britain—now have soldiers on their streets. Two foreign intelligence agencies have supplied details of Abedi’s career as an Islamist. The number of Abedi’s accomplices is not known.

In response to Abedi’s attack, the Home Office began issuing “temporary exclusion orders” to prevent British Islamists now outside the country from returning home. Yet when asked on May 28, Home Secretary Amber Rudd was unable to say how many citizens who have fought or received training in Syria have already returned to Britain. Rudd also admitted that members of Abedi’s network were “potentially” still at large.

Abedi was not a “lone wolf” who had “self-radicalized” on the Internet or been “inspired” by ISIS. Within hours of the attack, NBC and CBS carried a leak from an unnamed American source identifying the 22-year-old Abedi as an Islamist of interest. France’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, announced that Abedi had “proven” links to ISIS, and that British and French intelligence services had information that he had been in Syria in 2015. Even before the British police confirmed Abedi’s identity, they admitted that he was “known to the authorities.”

Just after the bombing, one of Abedi’s friends told the Times of London that Abedi had left for Libya “three weeks ago” and returned “recently, like, three days ago.” On May 18, four days before the bombing, Abedi flew back to Manchester from Istanbul via Dusseldorf. It is not known how Abedi traveled to Istanbul from Libya. He was free to make his return journey because he was not on an international list of terrorist suspects. Should he have been free to make the outward journey from Britain?

Abedi’s was among the approximately 20,000 names on the list of Britain’s Islamist suspects, but he was not one of the 3,000 under “active investigation.” A senior U.S. security source has claimed that the U.S. warned MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, in early 2017 that Abedi belonged to a “terror gang” of North African supporters of the Islamic State. MI5 investigated him and his friends but concluded that he was not about to “go kinetic.” If, as seems probable, Abedi acted with the support of a terrorist cell, this represents a serious security failure.

Abedi also eluded Britain’s wider counterterrorism program. As many as five people, including a Muslim community worker, neighbors, and possibly a family member, had denounced Abedi, some of them using the government’s anti-terrorist hotline. Two of them had warned as long as five years ago that Abedi had said “being a suicide bomber was OK.” Others had warned that Manchester’s Libyan community was breeding fanatics and terrorists. When an imam at the local mosque denounced ISIS, Abedi had insulted him with a command of local vernacular that suggests he was not wholly alienated from English society: “You’re talking bollocks.”

Yet on May 30, Ian Hopkins, chief constable of Greater Manchester, said that Abedi was “not known to the Prevent program.” Prevent is the first element of a four-part Home Office anti-terror approach—the other elements are Pursue, Protect, and Prepare. Prevent might equally be called Preempt, for it aims to counter Islamist ideology, identify potential terrorists, and deradicalize penitents. Britain’s security services, primed by the long war against Irish Republicanism, are perhaps Europe’s best. So it is surprising that Abedi did not command more attention.

In the aftermath of the bombing, the security services launched some preemption of their own. An unnamed “Whitehall source” informed the public that five Islamist plots had been thwarted since this March, when Khalid Masood attacked pedestrians and policemen at the Houses of Parliament. And MI5 has already announced two inquiries into its handling of Abedi.

In some respects, Abedi has the background of a typical Euro-jihadist. The son of immigrants, he dropped out of college and into adolescent criminality, before sinking further into the redemptive fantasies of Islamist violence. Chief constable Hopkins, clearly not an aficionado of “broken windows” policing, said that Abedi was known to the Manchester police only for “relatively minor matters,” including theft, receiving stolen goods, and, after punching a woman for wearing a short skirt, minor assault. Yet Abedi’s case is more complex than the usual tale of immigrant alienation or, as in Khalid Masood’s case, hard drugs and “radicalization” in prison.

Abedi grew up with Islamic “radicalism” and was always known to the authorities. He was born in Manchester in 1994, to parents who had sought asylum from Qaddafi’s Libya. His father Ramadan Abedi is described as a “security officer.” In Manchester, this means a night watchman; in Libya, it denotes more sinister work, perhaps in one of Qaddafi’s many security services.

Ramadan Abedi sought sanctuary in Britain because he was an Islamist, and thus an enemy of Qaddafi. The British authorities granted asylum because Qaddafi was Britain’s enemy too. This was before 9/11, and the reversals of allegiance that followed—when the Islamists became the enemy, and Qaddafi an improbable ally.

In the nineties, a large Libyan exile contingent gathered in south Manchester. Ramadan Abedi, who is said to have received religious instruction in Saudi Arabia, was a stalwart of the mosque in nearby Didsbury, honored with issuing the call to prayer. He was also a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).

The LIFG was founded in 1995 by Abdelhakim Belhadj and other Libyan mujahedeen who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan and wanted to overthrow Qaddafi and create an Islamic state in Libya. Its personnel and ideology overlapped with those of other Sunni Islamist groups, notably the Taliban and al Qaeda, and latterly the group Ansar al Sharia, which took part in the deadly 2012 sacking of the U.S. installation in Benghazi.

With the outbreak of the Libyan civil war in early 2011, British security services lifted the “control orders” that restricted the lives of the Libyan Islamists in Manchester and returned their passports. Buoyed with arms and money from Qatar, LIFG members returned from exile and joined the fight in Libya. Ramadan Abedi went to Tunisia with his teenage sons Ismail, Salman, and Hashem, where he organized logistical support for LIFG fighters in western Libya. Akram Ramadan, who fought with Ramadan Abedi, told the New York Times that “everybody went” with “the Manchester fighters,” even “drug dealers.” When the “Tripoli Revolutionary Brigade” advanced on the Libyan capital that summer, Ramadan Abedi posted a photo on Facebook in which his 15-year-old son “Hashem the lion” was holding a machine gun.

In August 2011, the rebels took Tripoli, and the LIFG’s leader Abdelhakim Belhadj became commander of the Tripoli Military Council. Belhadj showed foreign journalists documents retrieved from Qaddafi’s security services. These confirmed that Qaddafi’s post-9/11 anti-Islamist collaboration with the CIA and MI6, Britain’s external security agency, had continued for nearly a decade, up to the outbreak of the Libyan civil war. Questions were asked in the House of Commons. An inquiry into alleged torture by British security services was already proceeding under retired judge Sir Peter Gibson, and Prime Minister David Cameron instructed Gibson to add Libya to his inquiry.

In late 2011, Belhadj sued Britain’s security services, the ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw, and Sir Mark Allen, the ex-director of MI6’s counterterrorism program. Belhadj alleged that in 2004, the CIA, acting on a tip from MI6, had arrested him and his pregnant wife at Kuala Lumpur Airport in Malaysia, taken him to Bangkok for rendition in a secret CIA facility, and then passed him to Qaddafi. Belhadj was held for seven years at Abu Salim prison, a maximum security site in Tripoli, notorious for torture.

In early 2012, the London Telegraph reported that the British government was offering to settle Belhadj’s case out of court for one million pounds. Bel­hadj demurred, but in December 2013, a judge ruled that though Belhadj had a “well-founded” case that he had been unlawfully kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned, the case could not be heard because to do so would damage the national interest, and especially relations with the United States.

In the same week, Sir Peter Gibson issued an interim report. The U.K., Gibson said, “may have been inappropriately involved” in renditions. Meanwhile, some of the “Manchester fighters,” like Ramadan and Hashem Abedi, stayed in Libya. Others, like Ismail and Salman Abedi, returned to Britain. Ismail, who worked as a tutor at Didsbury mosque, is currently assisting police with their inquiries.

On May 29, Fawzi Haffar, a trustee of the Didsbury mosque, admitted to the BBC that the leaders of Manchester’s Muslim communities had “a lot to learn.” They needed “proper policies” if “mistakes” were to be avoided. The same might be said of Britain’s security services.

Like the sword of Islam, the blade of MI6 has two edges, the harsh and the merciful. In the nineties, the LIFG’s English exiles benefited from the merciful edge and found asylum in Manchester. After 2001, when Qaddafi became the friend of MI6 and the CIA, the LIFG felt the harsh edge. After 2011, the blade turned again, as NATO threw its support behind anti-Qaddafi rebels in Libya, regardless of their deep-seated Islamism.

The national interest can change with the political tides. It was in Britain’s interest to shelter anti-Qaddafi Islamists, then to betray them, and then to support them once again. Today, Libya is on the verge of disintegration. Islamists like Salman Abedi are a danger to the British public, but Islamists like his father Ramadan are perceived as potential assets abroad. Did Salman Abedi slip through the net of the domestic security services or fall through the cracks between MI5 and MI6—the cracks between domestic and foreign priorities?

Dominic Green is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.