WAS THE MARCH 11, 2004, attack on Madrid’s commuter trains an al Qaeda operation? More than three years after 191 civilians were killed and almost two thousand more injured by ten backpack bombs planted by Islamic radicals, the answer to such a simple question remains clouded. Just this past Wednesday, as the verdicts of 28 of the accused plotters were read by a Spanish court, we were reminded how murky this issue has become.
Few, if any, in the mainstream American press referred to the plotters as agents of al Qaeda. Instead, much of the coverage was similar to the Washington Post‘s description:
The Post does not deserve special scorn for its coverage of this issue; its characterization of the plot is fairly typical. Indeed, the NYPD offered a similar assessment in a recent report titled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.” In that report, the NYPD’s intelligence analysts described the 3/11 attack as one of several, also including the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, which were merely inspired by al Qaeda’s ideology. “Rather than being directed from al Qaeda abroad,” the NYPD surmised, “these plots have been conceptualized and planned by ‘unremarkable’ local residents/citizens who sought to attack their country of residence, utilizing al Qaeda as their inspiration and ideological reference point.”
Simply put, there are many who believe that 3/11 was not committed by the same network of hardened terrorists that struck America exactly 911 days prior in Washington and New York.
Such a hypothesis sounds plausible on its face. But it is entirely wrong.
To fully recount the threads of evidence tying the 3/11 plotters to al Qaeda would take dozens, if not hundreds, of pages. Fortunately for us, an authoritative review of this evidence has already been written. Chapter 11 of counterterrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino’s seminal 2006 book, Al Qaeda in Europe, is devoted to the Madrid train bombings. It is impossible to square the well-sourced compilation of details Vidino provides with the notion that al Qaeda was not responsible for the 3/11 attack. Highlights from Vidino’s book, as well as dozens of press accounts, make al Qaeda’s hand clear.
One of the key conspirators at the heart of the recently concluded Spanish trial was a Moroccan man named Jamal Zougam. Zougam was one of only three defendants convicted of mass murder. Eighteen other defendants were convicted on lesser charges and seven were acquitted in full. Zougam procured the cell phones used to detonate the backpack bombs used in the operation and some eyewitnesses saw him place at least one of the bombs himself.
Although you will not read it in the press, Zougam was clearly an al Qaeda agent. For years he served a Syrian named Imad Yarkas. Known by his nom de guerre, Abu Dahdah, in jihadist circles, Yarkas is a notorious al Qaeda chieftain. Yarkas’s terrorist career began in the early 1980’s as a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist terrorist group then sponsored by Saddam Hussein, and by the 1990’s he had become one of Osama bin Laden’s primary emissaries in Europe. There is no disputing Yarkas’s al Qaeda affiliation; he was thrown in jail shortly after the September 11 attacks and later convicted on terrorism charges.
Indeed, in November 2001 Yarkas’s al Qaeda cell was rounded up. Spanish authorities recognized then that Zougam was one of Yarkas’s cronies. Abu Dahdah spent much of his time loitering in Zougam’s cellphone shop–the same store that provided the cell phones used in the 3/11 attacks. For some unknown reason, Zougam escaped arrest in late 2001. As it turns out, this was not the first time Zougam raised suspicion because of his terrorist ties.
A few months earlier, in August 2001, Spanish officials raided Zougam’s apartment at the behest of French authorities who had tied Zougam to terrorists in their own country. The Spaniards found evidence linking Zougam to al Qaeda, including taped speeches by a Kurdish al Qaeda cleric named Mullah Krekar, but he was allowed to walk.
Incredibly, Spain failed to detain Zougam a third time following al Qaeda’s May 16, 2003, suicide bombings in Casablanca. Moroccan authorities alerted their Spanish counterparts to Zougam’s extensive ties to al Qaeda’s Moroccan affiliates, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (known by its French acronym, the GICM) and Salafia Jihadia, an offshoot of the GICM. The GICM had long been known as an al Qaeda affiliate. For example, the U.S. designated it as such in November 2002. But Spain decided, once again, there was not enough evidence to detain him.
Vidino explains Zougam’s ties to the GICM in Al Qaeda in Europe. He writes that Zougam was “a close associate of the Beniyach brothers, three Tangier natives who are equivalent to royalty in al Qaeda.” One of the Beniyach trio died while fighting American forces at Tora Bora in December 2001. A second is “a veteran of Bosnia and Chechnya who met repeatedly with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” the now deceased leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. And the third brother is also a veteran of the Chechen jihad who is in jail in Morocco for plotting to destroy a French refinery.
The Beniyach brothers were not Zougam’s only affiliation with al Qaeda’s Moroccan affiliates. Vidino explains that Zougam turned to jihad after listening to “fiery sermons of Mohammed Fazazi,” the spiritual leader of Salafia Jihadia. Zougam was so impressed with Fazazi that he asked Yarkas to speak with him after he had promised Fazazi that his al Qaeda companions in Spain could provide him with financial contributions. Fazazi’s effect on Zougam was not atypical. Some of the 9/11 hijackers were influenced by Fazazi during his time at the al Quds mosque in Hamburg.
Thus, there can be no serious dispute that Zougam, one of only three terrorists convicted of playing a direct role in the murder of hundreds of Spanish civilians, was a member of al Qaeda’s global terrorist network.
What about his fellow plotters? Are their dossiers as replete with connections to al Qaeda and al Qaeda’s Moroccan affiliates as Zougam’s? In fact, they had myriad connections to the al Qaeda network.
Not all of those responsible for the 3/11 attack were judged at the recently concluded trial. Seven of those responsible blew themselves up at a flat in Leganes as Spanish police tried to arrest them in early April 2004. In their hour of desperation they reached out by phone to an influential al Qaeda cleric named Abu Qatada, who was then in prison in London. As Lawrence Wright reported in the New Yorker, investigators believe that the seven sought a fatwa, or religious edict, declaring their suicidal escape from capture religiously justified. Qatada belongs on any “Who’s Who” list of al Qaeda sheikhs (along with the aforementioned Fazazi) having inspired many of the group’s most accomplished terrorists. For example, during the post-9/11 investigation, more than one dozen videotapes of his sermons were reportedly found in lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta’s apartment. That the 3/11 plotters reached out to Qatada is certainly strong evidence that they too were under al Qaeda’s sway.
Like Zougam, at least a few of the seven who blew themselves up in Leganes–including a Tunisian named Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, who has been identified as one of the key 3/11 plotters–were alumni of Yarkas’s al Qaeda cell in Spain. In October 2004 the Spanish daily El Mundo reported that as many as 15 of the suspects in the 3/11 attacks were once Yarkas’s minions.
Also like Zougam, his accomplices had numerous ties to al Qaeda’s Moroccan affiliates. Fourteen of the suspects who were recently tried were Moroccan by birth, and at least several of them have been identified as members of the GICM. In fact, the GICM connection has been clear since the beginning of the 3/11 investigation. Within weeks of the attack, Spain’s Interior Ministry named the group as the prime suspect. One of the GICM’s members, Youssef Belhadj, is believed to be the terrorist who masked his appearance and claimed credit for the 3/11 bombings on behalf of al Qaeda in a videotape. (Belhadj was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his role in the attack.)
With all of these ostensible ties to al Qaeda, then, why is 3/11 not widely regarded as an al Qaeda plot? The answer lies in the confusion over the identity of the plot’s mastermind. As the Washington Post notes, Spanish authorities do not know “who directed the conspiracy or gave the final orders for the attacks.”
One suspected mastermind was acquitted this past week. Rabei Osman, who is reportedly a high-ranking member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which merged with al Qaeda in the 1990’s, was caught on tape by Italian authorities admitting that he was in charge of the 3/11 plot. Despite his admission, and his extensive ties to terrorists around the globe, the Spanish tribunal concluded there was not enough to convict Osman. He was one of seven suspects fully acquitted of all charges.
Other senior al Qaeda leaders have been connected to the 3/11 plot on multiple occasions. In fact, the Spanish tribunal judges admitted that one of the terrorists they were trying, Hassan el-Haski, was a leader of the GICM. Despite being a senior terrorist leader, el-Haski received a sentence of only 15 years in prison.
Because the Spanish found no evidence that either Osama bin Laden or Ayman al Zawahiri personally ordered or directed the attack, they refused to say that 3/11 was an al Qaeda operation. But this is an incredibly myopic view for a variety of reasons. The genius of bin Laden’s terror network is that he can rely on affiliates around the globe, like the GICM, to do his bidding. Like the CEO of a major corporation, he need not control the day-to-day activities of all his employees in order to be considered their boss. Moreover, bin Laden runs a clandestine network. Transparency is not one of its goals. It is possible that al Qaeda’s most senior leaders ordered the 3/11 attack, through human couriers, or through the leaders of al Qaeda’s affiliates (like el-Haski), and we simply do not know it.
In fact, there is evidence that the 3/11 attack was part of al Qaeda’s global strategy for confronting America and her allies. In December 2003, the Norwegian think-tank Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt discovered an al Qaeda analysis of the war in Iraq, titled “Jihadi Iraq, Hopes and Dangers,” as it made its rounds on al Qaeda’s web sites. As Vidino notes in Al Qaeda in Europe, the precise author of the document is unknown, but it is widely believed “to have been written by an astute political analyst within al Qaeda.”
The author explored ways to break up the coalition of nations then engaged in the war in Iraq. The UK and Poland were not going to abandon the U.S., al Qaeda’s analyst concluded, but Spain was a weak link. Then Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar’s “position [on the Iraq war] does not express the Spanish popular stance.” Al Qaeda’s analyst argued:
We think that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three blows, after which it will have to withdraw as a result of popular pressure. If its troops still remain in Iraq after these blows, then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured, and the withdrawal of the Spanish forces will be on its electoral program.
Lastly, we are emphasizing that a withdrawal of the Spanish or Italian forces from Iraq would put huge pressure on the British presence (in Iraq), a pressure that Tony Blair might not be able to withstand, and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly. Yet, the basic problem of making the first tile fall still remains.
Just three days after the Madrid bombings, on March 14, 2004, al Qaeda’s analyst proved to be prescient. Aznar’s conservative government was supplanted by the Socialist PSOE party led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The socialists’ victory was unimaginable just days earlier, but Aznar’s government was caught up in a storm of controversy following the attack in Madrid. Aznar insisted that the strike was solely the work of the ETA, a Basque separatist group. As it quickly became apparent to most of Spain that Islamic radicals were responsible, Aznar looked as though he did not know what was going on. Even worse: many in Spain began to believe Aznar was covering up for an elaborate conspiracy.
Zapatero, of course, would go on to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. And perhaps this is why so many are now reluctant to credit al Qaeda with the Madrid bombings. In the end, Spain gave al Qaeda exactly what it wanted.
Thomas Joscelyn is a terrorism researcher living in New York. He is the author of Iran’s Proxy War Against America, a booklet on Iran’s ongoing support for al Qaeda and our terrorist enemies published by the Claremont Institute.
