26

Setting Europe on Fire

The morning of 11 March 2004 was clear and bright. As the city of Madrid awoke, a band of young men planted thirteen sports bags in four trains leaving from the outlying town of Alcalá de Henares. Each bag held a mobile phone. The men wore football scarves – in the colours of Real Madrid – as a light disguise and weaved between the trains, distributing the bombs.

This was all performed in a playful mood. At this time in the morning – between 7.00 and 7.15 a.m. – the trains were busy with early commuters, cleaners, labourers, shift workers and the packed carriages were alive with banter. One of the bombers stopped to chat up two pretty Romanian girls on their way to work, before hopping off the train, leaving behind a bomb in a rucksack. One of the girls, fancying her chances with the cheeky but good-looking Arab, called after him. Minutes later she was blown into pieces.

All the trains were heading towards Atocha, the main station in Madrid. At 7.39 a.m., as the first train went past the Calle Téllez, which lies no more than 500 metres from the station platform, the first bombs were detonated by a mobile phone. A few seconds later, four more bombs went off in another train heading into Atocha. Within minutes, two more trains were wrecked. By 8 a.m., the trains lay across the lines between Atocha and the district of El Pozo del Tío Raimundo, a poor, immigrant quarter of Madrid. Between the station and the trains, the lines were scattered with bloodied, limbless trunks, arms, legs, and severed heads.1

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The first Moroccans to be arrested were Jamal Zougam, Mohamed Bekkali and Mohammed Chaoui. The police had found one of the mobile phones used in the attacks and discovered that the SIM card had been sold on to other Moroccans, from Tangier and Tetouan, who worked in or hung around a locutorio called Nuevo Siglo (New Century) in the Calle de los Tribuletes, near the centre of Madrid. The Calle de los Tribuletes is in the district of Lavapiés – a former bastion of the white working class of Madrid which is now home to Africans, Arabs, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Indians. Locutorio is the Spanish word for the kind of cheap communications shop that exists now all over Europe, where immigrants from poor countries can call home at cheap rates, or simply hang out with friends and compatriots.

Shortly after the arrests I went to see for myself the locutorio where the massacre had apparently been plotted. When I got there, the shop was boarded-up, but the sign was still on the door. ‘Those guys were not terrorists,’ I was told by a Tunisian waiter at a nearby café who regularly served them coffee (he would not give me his name). ‘No way. They were maybe rogues and did some bad stuff, but they were not killers.’ This was a fair point; the fact that they had supplied the mobile phones used in the attacks did not make them guilty of anything more than dealing in stolen goods.

Jamal Zougam, however, was already well known to the Spanish security services. He had been picked up by the police in 2001, who found in his apartment videos of his Moroccan friends fighting in Dagestan, Russia. He also had videotapes of Bin Laden’s speeches and books by radical imams – the paraphernalia of the apprentice jihadi.

Under Zougam’s influence, the Nuevo Siglo became the place to meet with religious extremists and begin the journey towards radicalization. In recent years there have been numerous academic studies of how this works. The process is simple. The first step is to have a sense of belonging with other outsiders who feel displaced in their host society. Smoking kif (the Moroccan form of cannabis, traditionally smoked in a thin pipe called a sebsi), renouncing alcohol, singing old songs, watching videos, remembering the past, all contribute to a sense of family. The group also bonds over shared grudges and perceived slights – it could be a girl rejecting sexual advances because she was a ‘racist’, or a drugs deal gone wrong.

In this context, Islamic radicals present themselves as superheroes, at war with the world of Jahiliya. Like all young men, the Islamic radicals are competitive and try to outdo each other with the ferocity of their faith, their denunciations of the West and their plans for destruction. The Spanish sociologist Rogelio Alonso, an expert on psycho-social stress in immigrant groups, has described this bonding very effectively: ‘Terrorism is a group phenomenon,’ he says; ‘it is an action which is entirely determined by group dynamics.’ In simple terms, this means that the radicals need each other: like football hooliganism, terrorism is violence as a game, a contest between competing egos to see who can wreak the most havoc.

There are two more steps towards murder. Firstly, you have to identify the enemy. For the young men at Zougam’s locutorio, the enemies were the Spaniards they met every day, who not only denied them opportunity and wealth, but who were occupying the historic lands of Al-Andalus, which had once been Islamic territory. Police informers, who had been monitoring the group in the locutorio and in the nearby Restaurante Alhambra, reported that the Moroccans constantly referred to the ‘occupation’ and the ‘Jews’: they saw no difference between the Spanish ‘occupation’ of Ceuta and Melilla, which are on North African soil, and the lost world of Al-Andalus.

Secondly, in order to kill the enemy you must dehumanize him. This step towards terror takes the form of a linguistic sleight of hand. Zougam and his followers began by thinking that the Spanish act like the Jews in Israel. The experience of living in occupied Al-Andalus – the radicals in the locutorio argued among themselves – is directly equivalent to living like the Palestinians, displaced and lost in Israel and Gaza. The next step in this murderous logic is to imagine that the Spanish, the agents of dispossession, actually are ‘Jews’. Police informers say that this was how the young men in Zougam’s circle habitually referred to all the ‘sub-humans’ outside the locutorio. Beyond its doors, everything was haram – that is to say, forbidden by Islam and sinful. In this world, all Jews are the enemy, and all Jews are targets.

These young men in Madrid had no official affiliation to al-Qaeda. They didn’t need it. This was al-Qaeda ideology as youth revolt.

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The city of Tangier was central to the Islamist atrocity in Madrid. Not only were nearly all of the assassins of Moroccan origin, but most of them were from Tangier, only an hour away by ferry from the Spanish coast.

Although Tangier is in an Islamic country and in Africa, it is also part of the Spanish-speaking world. The neighbouring cities of Ceuta and Melilla, roughly a ninety-minute drive from Tangier, actually are Spanish territory – Moroccans need visas to get past the heavily policed border controls and a number of people have been killed trying to cross the borders illegally. The city of Tetouan, an hour away and a halfway house between Tangier and the Spanish enclaves, is in Morocco but looks like a Spanish city – it has the same plazas, the same architecture and street furniture.

But Tetouan is a desperately poor place and anything modern also looks half-wrecked. It is notorious as a lawless base for hard-line Islamists and many of the toughest gangsters in Tangier – experts in drug-running and people-trafficking – originate from here. I once stayed for a week in a hotel in Tetouan where the owners effortlessly combined pious prayers with an open drugs racket. With its whitewashed buildings, its Spanish-speaking population and its backdrop of high mountains controlled by drug-runners, Tetouan resembles nothing so much as a Mexican border town with an overlay of Islamic culture.

It also hides an eerie secret. Beneath the floor of the Medina are the Mazmorras (a Spanish word meaning ‘silos’) – a subterranean labyrinth of caves and grottoes that runs almost entire the length of the city. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this was a vast underground prison, holding thousands of Christian captives at a time. Cervantes made reference to it in one of his comedies, comparing a dead marriage to being worse than the prisons of Tetouan. One of the entrances is in the rue al-Smitir, covered by a steel plate in front of a juice store and café. Under this spot was a Franciscan church, ministered by monks who came from Spain to barter for the prisoners, most of whom died here.

I was last in Tetouan the summer of 2013 to make a BBC documentary about Islam and I went to look at the steel plate in the Medina and say something about what it might mean for Christian and Muslims. As I stood there recording, I was cursed and hissed at by locals who, despite the best attempts of the Moroccan government to keep the Mazmorras out of public view, knew exactly what I was looking at. Later that day, all of my other interviews were cancelled at the last minute for no reason. I was told by a friend that the government was anxious about my presence in Tetouan and had decided that no one should speak to me. As I was leaving the city, I saw an angry demonstration by Islamists against Spain at the Spanish consulate. My Arabic-speaking companion said he could not make out what they were saying. To me it sounded like another curse.

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The relationship with Spain in this part of Morocco is complicated. For one thing, there has always been a large Spanish population in Tangier and Tetouan – in Tangier they are called ‘Tangerinos’ to distinguish them from the ‘Tanjawi’, the Muslim inhabitants of the city. Even now, in the streets around rue Jebha al Watania, you can find remnants of a community of exiles who came to flee from Franco’s Spain. This is a visibly ageing population but they still have barbershops and the kind of old-school tapas bars that you can’t really find in Spain anymore. On clear days you can see the Spanish coast across the Mediterranean from almost any point in Tangier. Sometimes it seems so near that you can make out cars and houses.

One of the best views is from the Plaza de Faro, a square dead in the centre of the city on the boulevard Pasteur. During the late afternoon and early evening this place swarms with shoeshine merchants and low-level hustlers selling drugs or sex. Mostly, however, it is populated by young men hanging out, smoking dope, chatting with each other and staring out at Spain. The place is nicknamed Plaza de los Perezosos, ‘Square of the Lazy’, because it attracts the unemployed and the idle.

Nearly all young people have worked, or want to work, in Spain. This can be a fatal ambition. The bloated corpses of those who try to get across the Strait of Gibraltar illegally are regularly swept up on Spanish beaches. In the bars and cafés of Tangier there is a lot of black humour about this. The sea between here and Spain is casually called the ‘graveyard’. There are jokes about the gullibility of the sub-Saharan Africans who perish there. These would-be immigrants come to Tangier and pay all they have to sail to their dream of Europe, usually at night and with no guide, in tiny boats called pateras – an old Andalusian word for a flat-bottomed fishing boat. They have little or no chance of survival. ‘It’s called “African tourism”,’ I was told by one late-night Moroccan drinker in the Bar Negresco. ‘This is how it works: Don’t See Europe and Die!’

In the 1990s there were several major crackdowns on the would-be emigrants. Many of them were rounded up and imprisoned in the old, disused Plaza de Toros outside Tangier. The Tanjawi gave the bullring a Spanish nickname – ‘Matamoros’ (Moor-Killer). When the sub-Saharan Africans began to outnumber the Moroccan prisoners, they renamed it ‘Matanegros’ (Nigger-Killer).

In the wake of the bombings in Madrid, and the very visible Moroccan involvement, the French-trained Moroccan security forces in Tangier, the Renseignements Généraux, began coming down hard on anyone suspected of association with terrorists, and the jails filled up. The mosques were empty. Overnight young men shaved their beards – the mark of the Islamist radical. People were frightened.

‘We Make Jihadis!’

The con artists and hustlers of Tangier are world-class experts in the art of frightening first-time visitors to the city. They do this most often at the gates in the lower parts of the Medina, where the tourists get off the ferry and can be easily scared into handing over their cash to a group of tough-looking, dark-skinned lads who may or may not carry knives. The authorities have tried their best to clean the place up, but this part of town can be an intimidating introduction to the city. For many tourists, this is also their first introduction to the Arab world, and the Tangier hustlers, unwittingly following the Orientalist tradition, convince them that they are about to enter a new world of exotic and unknown dangers.

In fact, the most dangerous part of Tangier is not the relatively laidback centre, the Medina or the ‘French’ boulevards, but the outlying suburbs – an impenetrable forest of badly built, low-level apartment buildings. This is where most of the riots and other forms of violence – murders, muggings – take place. These areas are not unlike the French banlieues, the badlands of decaying public housing which surround all major French cities, although the suburbs of Tangier are far worse than anything you can see in Paris, Lyons or Marseilles.

I was told by a friend with inside knowledge of the political administration in Tangier that the apartments are often built by gangsters who are laundering money made from trafficking people or drugs. The buildings are badly built, prone to floods and even collapse. People have died as a result of the shoddy construction work. Because they were built at night by illegal labour, without regulation, many of these housing estates don’t officially exist, but every time I drive down from the airport I am astonished at how quickly another forlorn, half-built rash of apartment blocks has sprouted out of nowhere. The Tanjawis call this ‘hizam al-fakr’ (the belt of poverty).

Unsurprisingly, this is where the most radical Islamists have taken control of the mosques and the streets. It was here, in the early 2000s, in the suburb of Casabarata, that the preacher Mohamed Fizazi promised to send ‘Islamic Brigades who would set fire to Europe’. Fizazi is now in jail for his involvement with the bombings in Casablanca in 2003, but he knew or had contact with all the Moroccans who bombed Madrid.

All of the eighteen bombers convicted at the trial in Madrid in 2007 had connections with Tangier. The ringleader, Jamal Zougam, had worshipped in Casabarata with Mohamed Fizazi. Zougam helped make the bombs and, according to three eyewitnesses, planted the rucksacks on the train in a smiling, relaxed mood.

Zougam was born in Tangier in 1973, in the rue Ben Aliyem, a rundown street in the upper part of the Medina. This is the poorest part of the Medina but only a few steps away from the American legation, the former headquarters of the US Diplomatic Mission, which has been here since 1821 and is now an elegant museum. In the cafés further down towards the port, where sebsi and tea are the main staples, Zougam is remembered as a tough and witty friend. In the years since the bombing, at least for some Tanjawis, he has also become a hero, a local boy made good. ‘Zougam showed that we can fight back,’ I was told by a heavy-lidded smoker. Nobody here had heard of Paul Bowles, William Burroughs or any other bohemian expatriates, but they knew all the names of the Madrid bombers and said that they were proud that they came from Tangier. ‘We should be making famous footballers who can play for Chelsea,’ I was told by a guy called Rachid, who spoke English with a Cockney accent as a result of his time spent in UK prisons, ‘but we don’t: we make jihadis instead!’ This was in the summer of 2012.

This perverse feeling of pride was far from universal across the city; there were many who said that they were still ashamed of the bombers. One of the hit songs of 2012 was a track by DJ Muslim, a Tanjawi rapper, called ‘Ana Muslim Mashi Irhabi’ (‘I am a Muslim but not a Terrorist’). The smokers in the Medina laughed when I mentioned this and said that DJ Muslim was probably a stooge funded by the Moroccan government. ‘DJ Muslim is not a rebel,’ they told me. ‘The real rebels are somewhere else. They don’t take money from the government.’

They meant rebels like Jamal Ahmidan, who killed himself in April 2004 as the Spanish police began to lay siege to the house in Leganés (a southern suburb of Madrid) where the plotters had made the bombs. He was one of the key figures in the plot, probably one of the most daring and hard-line figures, without whom the bombing would never have happened. To many young men in Tangier he is now a role model. His story is like a video game, taking him from bad-boy gangster to Islamist street-fighter and finally world-famous martyr.

Ahmidan was born in Tetouan in 1970 and arrived in Madrid in 1990, by then already steeped in the low life of his native city and Tangier. He had the nickname ‘El Chino’ (the Chinaman) because his features looked more Asian than Arab. Shortly after settling in Madrid, he married a Spanish woman, a junkie. He did this most probably to get papers, although he also fathered her son. He made a living by selling dope and forging documents, and he soon had his first experience of a Spanish jail when he was convicted in 1992 for drug dealing. He was arrested again in 1999 for the same offence, and this time was sent to a detention centre outside Madrid. With an Algerian cellmate, he started a fire in an attempt to break out. In 2000 he was back in prison in Morocco, having run someone over while drink-driving.

According to Ahmidan’s brother Mustafa, this was the turning point when Jamal found Islam as the solution to his messy life. Mustafa testified to police that in prison Jamal gave up heroin, cocaine and alcohol and became a religious fanatic. On his release, however, this did not prevent him taking up his former career as a dope dealer. Only this time he was on a mission.

By now Jamal was an expert at negotiating the Madrid underworld and also a regular worshipper at the mosque in the Villaverde district of Madrid. This combination of criminal expertise and religious faith was toxic. He bought the explosives for the Madrid bombing with money made from his drug deals. For Ahmidan, this was a perfect and blessed exchange: to use the profits made from Western corruption in the holy war against the West.

One of the documents found by police in the locutorio on Calle de los Tribuletes after the bombings, described the bombers as ‘most valuable young men who have changed history’. Certainly this is how they thought of themselves. They exulted in how the bombings in Madrid immediately divided Spain into two factions: the small minority in government who blamed the killing on the Basque separatist group ETA, who were no strangers to organized violence in Madrid, and the overwhelming majority of Spaniards, of all political views, who sensed a cover-up, a refusal to describe the bombing as an Islamist attack. In the days after the bombing their anger grew into a ferocious contempt for the government – obvious liars who were now mocking the dead by refusing to tell the truth. Spaniards with long memories claimed that they had never seen such heightened emotions on the streets since the Civil War of the 1930s.

For a brief moment, as Spain seemed about to split apart once again, the bombers must have imagined that the expulsion of the Moors from Al-Andalus was finally being avenged. Meanwhile in the radical mosques of Tangier, the worshippers exulted that it was Jamal Zougam from Tangier and his friend Jamal Ahmidan from Tetouan, the spiritual sons of Fizazi, who had divided the Spanish nation.

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Outside Morocco, the attack in Madrid was seen as a blow against Europe, against Spain, the former colonial power. But it was also more complicated: it was part of a hidden Moroccan civil war – the long-standing conflict between Spanish-speaking Tangier in the north and the French-speaking élites of the south, Casablanca and Rabat. Nearly everyone in Tangier supports Spanish football teams. This is partly a provocation – they invoke Spain against France and French influence. At football matches between Tangier and the French-speaking teams, fans used to sing the Spanish national anthem or pro-Franco songs. Since the government banned this, they simply hum the tunes.

The north of Morocco has always been poorer than the south, to the extent that they sometimes seem to be two very different countries, with a largely Berber-speaking peasantry in the north, and in the south a metropolitan Arab class who use French easily, dress like the French (both men and women), and, if they have the money and visas, move easily between France and Morocco. In the north, where there has been little money and few visas, such a life seems impossible.

The hatred which inspired the Madrid bombing was not simply Islamist anger: it had a specifically Moroccan meaning. The bombing spoke directly to Moroccans; it was an act of revenge against the Moroccan French-speaking élites of Rabat and Casablanca who had wrecked Tetouan and Tangier and left its inhabitants to rot in squalor. As such it was an assault on the real mother of French-speaking Morocco – the hated nation of France.