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LEADERLESS JIHADLEADERLESS JIHAD

 

 

 

On the morning of 22 May 2013, at around 9 a.m., Michael Adebolajo, an unemployed 28-year-old living in the nondescript south-east London suburb of Lewisham, parked his car close to a local authority housing block where his friend, 22-year-old Michael Adebowale, shared a fourth-floor flat with his mother.

Both men were converts to Islam, having been raised as Christians by devout Nigerian-born parents. They had met a year or so previously.

The two men drove back to Adebolajo’s nearby flat, where they remained for the rest of the morning, going out once to buy some food from a local grocer’s. At 1 p.m., they left in the blue Vauxhall Tigra and headed north-east towards the River Thames and the historic if slightly run-down neighbourhood of Woolwich, where they parked the car opposite the Royal Artillery Barracks, a military base. Then they waited. At around 2.20 p.m., the two men saw Lee Rigby, a 25-year-old soldier who had served in Afghanistan some years earlier, walking out of the exit of the Woolwich Arsenal railway station, around 150 metres from his home in the barracks and 50 metres from the car. Rigby, in civilian dress, was on his way home from the recruiting office at the Tower of London where he worked. Adebolajo, in the Vauxhall’s driving seat, accelerated hard to around 40 mph and ran the soldier down from behind, breaking five vertebrae in his back and five of his ribs. The speeding car skidded across the road, mounted the kerb, smashed into a road sign and then stopped, dropping Rigby, unconscious, to the ground.

Adebolajo and Adebowale got out of the car carrying three of the five knives they had bought for £44.98 from a local Argos discount store the previous day and an old unloaded handgun obtained from criminals, and attacked Rigby’s inert body. One hacked at the soldier’s neck, first with a meat cleaver and then with another smaller blade, in an apparent attempt to decapitate him. The other repeatedly plunged his knife into the man’s chest in what was described later in court as a ‘frenzied attack’.¹

After three minutes, the two men stopped stabbing and cutting to drag Rigby’s body into the road and left it there. As a small crowd gathered, Adebolajo handed out a pre-prepared written statement, then stood with the knife in one hand and the cleaver in the other, hands red with blood, and delivered a speech into a mobile phone held by a stunned passer-by. ‘The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers . . . We swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. So what if we want to live by the sharia in Muslim lands? Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists and kill us?’ he said, speaking with a strong south London accent.

‘Many passages in the . . . Koran [say] we must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth . . . You people will never be safe. Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. You think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? You think politicians are going to die? No, it’s going to be the average guy, like you and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so can all live in peace. So leave our lands and we can all live in peace. That’s all I have to say. Allah’s peace and blessings be upon you.’²

Armed police arrived on the scene thirteen minutes after Adebolajo and Adebowale had run Rigby down. They shot and wounded the two attackers, then gave them first aid, while colleagues worked to save the young soldier’s life. But he was very badly injured and had already lost a lot of blood. Rigby was the first Briton to be killed by Islamic militant violence in the UK for eight years.

The killing prompted another round of heated debate. This centred on issues which had become familiar over the previous decade or so: the integration of migrant communities in the UK, the apparent social and economic problems of some, the success of others, the need for ‘British values’ to be reasserted, and the reasons why some individuals become drawn to violent extremism. Many of the contributions cast little light, not least because of continuing confusion about the origins of terrorist attacks in the West by Islamic extremists. As we have seen, al-Qaeda, IS and their respective affiliates have no significant presence outside the Islamic world, and with the exception of AQAP, the focus of their activity is essentially local. How is it, then, that young men, born and raised in countries such as Britain, France and Spain, perpetrate such atrocious acts apparently in sympathy with those distant militants’ cause? Are they merely damaged individuals looking for a way to vent their alienation and frustration, or are they the product of carefully orchestrated efforts from afar? What is the link between these young men and the rest of the umma? What is their connection with organisations such as al-Qaeda? How do they become ‘radicalised’ and what motivates them then to such appalling violence?

If there were small Muslim communities in the UK from the early nineteenth century, it was only in the 1950s and 60s that these grew to be a significant presence. In the years after the Second World War, all European powers were in desperate need of cheap labour and looked to their overseas possessions to help them reconstruct shattered cities, infrastructure, factories and economies. For Britain this meant the Caribbean, newly independent India, Pakistan (particularly lowland areas near Kashmir) and what was to become, in 1971, Bangladesh. These workers were thought unlikely to remain permanently and almost no consideration was given to their impact on the broader existing community.³ By the 1960s, restrictions began to be introduced to limit the number of relatives joining migrants who now looked to be staying for longer than originally envisaged. Further limits were imposed as the post-war economic boom gave way to the crises of the 1970s. By the early 1990s, the number of Britons declaring themselves Muslim had reached a million (out of a total of around 60 million). Half of these were either themselves from South Asia, or the children of South Asian-born parents. Most of the rest were British-born and of British-born parents. Ten years later, by 2001, the total of Muslims in the UK was around 1.5 million, but this bald figure masks a community of enormous diversity.⁴

Like all immigrants, those in the UK’s growing Muslim community continued to be influenced by events in their (or their parents’, or their grandparents’) countries of origin. Consequently, what happened ‘over there’ was important ‘over here’. So, the religious revival of the 1960s and 70s that had been so powerful in the Muslim world had, in part, been imported to the UK. In the early 1980s, there was excitement among some at the Iranian revolution and a wave of support for the mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan. The end of that decade saw an outburst of assertive faith identity when the Ayatollah Khomeini gave his infamous fatwa calling on Muslims across the world to kill Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British author of the controversial and allegedly blasphemous The Satanic Verses. With the discrediting of socialism and communism that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union, young ‘British-Pakistanis’, for example, were increasingly likely to use their Muslim identity to explain the problems they often faced rather than frame their grievances in terms of class or race.⁵ Major Islamist groups such as the Jamaat Islami of Pakistan and various Muslim Brotherhood offshoots became a political force for the first time.

Nor was the British Muslim community unaffected by the power struggle between the contesting strands of religious practice in the Islamic World. Saudi Arabia’s funds poured into bursaries and mosque construction in Europe and the US, promoting their rigorously conservative brand of Islam. In the UK, mosques went from fifty-one in 1979 to 329 six years later.⁶ Perhaps half of the new mosques being built, especially in areas dominated by communities with roots in Pakistan, were of the Deobandi school of Islam, the extremely conservative strand of observance that had originated in India in the late nineteenth century and had steadily spread across much of Pakistan and Afghanistan; the Afghan Taliban, for example, are all Deobandi. Bankrolled in part by donors in the Gulf, the numbers of Deobandi madrassas had increased hugely in the countries of origin of many British immigrants and their hard-line views were imported into the UK by preachers through the 1990s. Just as significant was the Ahl-e-Hadith movement, which was also similar to Gulf-style Wahhabism and had grown powerful in Pakistan through the later decades of the twentieth century at the expense of more tolerant schools of observance, particularly that known as Barelvi. In the UK too, Barelvi clerics found themselves pushed aside by their better-funded, less tolerant counterparts, whose message often appealed to a younger, more assertive generation.

The sense among some British Muslims of a global Islamic identity infused with a strong anti-American or anti-Western sentiment was reinforced through the mid- and late 1990s by the war in the former Yugoslavia, which was seen by many in the Islamic world as one pitting Christian Serbs against local Muslims left unprotected until it was too late, the conflict in Chechnya and the second Palestinian Intifada. The membership of groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international organisation founded in the 1950s and dedicated to the restoration of the caliphate through peaceful activism, rose steeply, even if the numbers involved, a few thousand, were a tiny proportion of the UK Muslim population. Some British Muslims even became directly involved in these conflicts. One of the most notorious was Omar Saeed Sheikh, a graduate of LSE who had become interested in violent militancy when an aid worker in Bosnia in the early 1990s, but then, like many others, became involved in Pakistani extremist groups fighting in Kashmir and elsewhere.⁷ By the end of the decade, radical organisers claimed that 1,800 British Muslims took part in ‘military service’ each year, recruited at mosques and university campuses across the country.⁸ The number was perhaps inflated, but that increasing numbers of young Britons were actively engaged in violence overseas through Islamic groups was indubitable.⁹ Inevitably, South Asia was a particular focus. A Briton died in a suicide bombing in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, in 2000. In October 2001, two young Britons from families of Pakistani origin who had joined the Taliban in Afghanistan were killed in Kabul in a missile strike.¹⁰ Two months later a young British convert who had travelled to Afghanistan in 2000 and been trained in Afghan camps tried to blow himself up on a transatlantic jet, but failed to detonate the explosives concealed in his shoes.

The 1990s also saw the arrival in the UK of a wave of extremist ideologues and organisers. Many were fleeing the repression of the violent campaigns veterans from the Afghan war had catalysed in their native lands throughout the Middle East in the early years of the decade.¹¹ Britain, which had a long tradition of accepting political dissidents and relatively generous social welfare systems, and which had long been a favoured destination of English-speaking dissidents in the Arab world, was a popular choice. Though many were virulently anti-Western in their views, most were entirely focused on striking the ‘local enemy’ back home in Algeria, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere in the region and were not seen as a threat by the UK’s security services. Many were simply content to have a base where they could organise and communicate without fearing a knock on the door at midnight. But some had a wider vision and more ambitious plans and believed that targeting the West was an essential part of any long-term strategy.

The foremost such thinker was Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, better known as Abu Musab al-Suri. If al-Awlaki was the propagandist who did most to shape today’s threat against the West, and al-Zawahiri and al-Baghdadi are currently the most influential commanders, then al-Suri is the strategist of greatest relevance. Born in Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city, in 1958, al-Suri was a qualified engineer and the son of educated, prosperous, conservative parents. He was drawn into the underground ‘Islamic resistance groups’ agitating against the nationalist, secular, Ba’athist regime of Hafez al-Assad and was forced to flee Syria when the Islamists were bloodily crushed in 1982. By 1988, he was supporting the local fighters and Arab volunteers in Afghanistan from Peshawar, where he knew bin Laden and al-Zawahiri but maintained his distance from both. By 1992, he was on the move again, and eventually fetched up in London, via Spain, in 1995.

In the UK, al-Suri became involved with the network of support for Algerian militants, then in the middle of their savage insurgency. After three years – and an acrimonious dispute with some of the other activists in the British capital – al-Suri moved on once more. By 1999, he was in Afghanistan, where he ran a kind of rudimentary think tank in Kabul and wrote prolifically.¹² His relations with bin Laden remained chilly – he had no prior warning of the 9/11 attacks – but he did spend a lot of time considering how al-Qaeda, or other groups, might bring about the ‘global Islamic revolution’ he wanted to see in his homeland of Syria and elsewhere. This, he decided, would only be brought about by a dramatic shift in understanding the way Islamic militant groups should work.

‘Al-Qaeda is not an organisation, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be,’ al-Suri wrote in his 1,600-page work The Call for Global Islamic Resistance. ‘It is a call, a reference, a methodology.’ This had always been the case to a certain extent of course. From the start, the al-Qaeda phenomenon has been multivalent – partly a revolutionary vanguard, partly a network of bases or trainings camps, partly a broader movement of sympathisers, fellow travellers and motivated individual actors – bound together by ideology.¹³

Al-Suri’s strategy took this to a further extreme. His vision was of a popular uprising that was entirely self-organising, without leaders or structure, one that would be led by scattered and only loosely connected cells of active militants. These would unite together for specific attacks and then disperse once more. Shared principles could be provided on a collective basis through texts, such as his own, uploaded to the Internet for general consultation. The texts would give guidance as to what targets were considered legitimate, for example, or what form attacks should take. But there would be no overall authority and no orders from self-appointed leaders.

Bin Laden’s thinking was closer to al-Suri’s than either man appeared prepared to admit. The 9/11 attacks were not, of course, self-organising. They were extremely complex, involving scores, if not hundreds of people, on three continents, but they were ultimately conceptualised and run by key personnel from within the core of al-Qaeda itself. However, what the two men did share was a vision of the principal aims of such operations: to inspire further attacks elsewhere. ‘Every Muslim has [now] to rush to make his religion victorious,’ bin Laden said in his first message after 9/11, a videotaped speech broadcast by Al Jazeera on 3 November 2001. And if an immediate mass uprising was unrealistic, then the mobilisation of hundreds, or even thousands, of young men in the West, all of whom could strike a single blow, was at the very least a significant step towards achieving the ultimate aim of convincing the Western powers to end their support for Middle Eastern despots, weakening the latter sufficiently for their regimes to collapse, and thus expediting the establishment of true Islamic states and an eventual caliphate.

This was al-Suri’s belief too. The cumulative impact of all the dispersed activity would inevitably lead to further radicalisation and mobilisation and thus advance the cause. Its sum would be greater than its ‘leaderless’ parts. Al-Suri summed up his thinking with a pithy motto: Nizam la Tanzim, System not Organisation. Western commentators dubbed it ‘leaderless jihad’.

The first major Islamic extremist strike in Western Europe was the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid’s Atocha station in March 2004. Nearly 200 people were killed, more than 2,000 hurt and the death toll would have been much higher if the bombs had exploded, as intended, inside the station instead of on its approaches. They still did horrific damage, and the scores of mobile phones ringing hopelessly in the pockets of the dead as news of the attack spread to worried relatives must count among the most haunting images of the last decade or so of violence. The network responsible was largely composed of Tunisian and Moroccan immigrants, some present in Spain for a while, but some newly arrived. One possible trigger for the attack, though it came when preparations were already well advanced, was a document posted on the Internet by al-Qaeda calling for a strike against Spain to force the nation to withdraw its troops from Iraq.

A year later, on 7 July 2005, four suicide bombers killed fifty-two on Tube trains and a bus in London. More than seven hundred were injured and rescue workers described horrifying scenes in carriages wrecked by the home-made explosives deep underground.¹⁴ This time the attackers were all very much ‘home-grown’, in the newly emerging parlance, and all British citizens. Astonished reporters related how the ringleader, a thirty-year-old care worker from Leeds called Mohammad Sidique Khan, liked football and fish and chips.

Extremist strategists saw the two attacks as evidence of a ground-swell of anger and alienation among European Muslims. Al-Suri immediately posted a long statement on the Internet describing how happy he had been ‘when the attacks on the historic stronghold of oppression and darkness [London] took place’ and calling on ‘mujahideen in Europe . . . to act quickly and strike’. He appeared certain that his strategy of ‘leaderless jihad’ was working, that the uprising had started and that victory was close. ‘We are at the height of the war, and the enemy is on the verge of defeat, as many signs clearly indicate. Whoever stays asleep now may not be able to participate on waking up,’ he wrote.

The reality, however, was much more complex. True, the Madrid attacks had only the most tangential connection to al-Qaeda central, but neither did they involve Spanish citizens, and so they hardly indicated radicalisation among European Muslim communities. And while the 7/7 attacks involved second-generation immigrants, suggesting something genuinely ‘home-grown’, they also involved al-Qaeda, which suggests the opposite. Certainly Mohammad Sidique Khan had become interested in extremist ideas over a period of years and entirely independently of any ‘global terrorist organisation’. But he had also, as became clear in the months after the bombing, made repeated journeys to Pakistan to meet senior al-Qaeda leaders. There he had been turned from an angry young man hoping to fight with the Taliban against international forces in Afghanistan into a skilled, dedicated and highly motivated terrorist. The gulf between participating in combat against foreign troops in a distant country and killing scores of civilians in one’s own is immense, and without the intervention of the al-Qaeda high command, it is likely that Khan would never have bridged it. He returned from Pakistan and recruited friends who themselves were dispatched to training camps there. Not all the bombers travelled overseas, but the conspiracy is likely to have taken a different, much less dangerous, form without the direct input of the experienced and dedicated militants working closely with bin Laden at the time.

This led analysts and commentators, as well as security officials and policymakers, to emphasise the continuing threat from bin Laden’s group, an impression that was reinforced over the following two or three years. Two weeks after the bombings of 7 July, another atrocity was narrowly averted when explosive devices carried onto Tube trains by a second wave of bombers failed to detonate. This network too was composed of young men resident in the UK led by someone who had travelled to Pakistan to meet leaders of al-Qaeda. Most were recent immigrants themselves, and thus differed from the 7/7 attackers, but again, the input of al-Qaeda was important in converting an inchoate desire to act into the capability to cause massive harm.

Then came the discovery of a hugely ambitious bid to bring down a dozen US-bound planes with liquid explosives mixed by passengers inside the aircraft – the reason we are still not allowed to bring fluids through airport security. This conspiracy too had been run by al-Qaeda from Pakistan. There were several more plots during this period, of which at least half involved young Britons who had successfully sought out and spent time with al-Qaeda in the unstable South Asian state.

In retrospect, these attacks and attempted attacks in the middle years of the last decade were the climax of al-Qaeda’s campaign to strike Europe. By 2007, as the group’s efforts began to weaken elsewhere, there were signs that the threat in the UK was diversifying. In the summer of that year, a small group of extremists attempted a double bombing of a nightclub in London. This failed and two of its members, an Indian-born doctor and an Iraqi engineer, later drove a car full of gas and petrol into Glasgow airport. They had no connection with any established militant organisation, big or small, affiliated or independent. Other plans for major mass-casualty attacks, some linked to Pakistan and al-Qaeda, some autonomous, were uncovered over the following years, though all were broken up before reaching the stage of actually making bombs. What is truly notable about the threat to the UK and the West at this time is how few attacks ever came close to fruition, despite the fact that MI5 officials said there were at least two such plots annually.¹⁵

That none of these various efforts successfully achieved their aim of killing large numbers of Britons was, not unfairly, judged a victory for security services. Those charged with keeping the UK safe had been caught largely unprepared by the 9/11 attacks and had taken several years to develop the resources necessary to better face what was a significant challenge. Prior to 2001, watching Islamic militancy was the job of junior MI6 station staff overseas, while in the UK a third of MI5’s 1,500 staff were focused on Irish republican terrorism.¹⁶ The domestic service had few offices outside London, and none in areas where Muslim communities were concentrated, while ‘the number of Urdu or Arabic speakers could be counted on half a hand’.¹⁷ The result of these failings was clear. Eliza Manningham-Buller, then head of MI5, had spoken in 2003 of the threat coming from terrorist sleeper cells hiding ‘in plain sight’ composed of ‘individuals . . . that blend into society . . . who live normal, routine lives until called upon for specific tasks’. A key focus of MI5, Manningham-Buller revealed, was to track down people in the UK who might offer logistic help to overseas militants planning strikes abroad.¹⁸ Her analysis was an indication of quite how deficient the security services’ understanding of the threat they faced was. Most of those involved in Islamic militancy in Britain led normal lives because they were normal people, and the threat came from local extremists receiving help from overseas to strike locally, not vice versa. The police were even less well informed, with officers admitting, even as late as 2005, that they really didn’t ‘have a handle’ on the problem. The result of these failings was made all too clear.

However, particularly after the London bombings of 2005, the injection of considerable resources, intellectual as well as financial, led to improvement. By the end of the decade, MI5 had officers based in police stations around the UK, exploiting the growing flow of intelligence from concerned local communities, and were using their own behavioural science unit to develop a more accurate understanding of what led individuals into extremism. They, and the police, were also able to benefit from newly legal powers – to monitor and question suspects, for example. Cooperation between intelligence services within Britain and internationally had advanced rapidly in the years after 9/11 while the declining use of torture by the US removed a significant impediment to close collaboration between agencies on either side of the Atlantic. Though there were serious problems with the British government’s ‘counter-radicalisation’ strategy, named Prevent, the need for some kind of effort to tackle the problem of extremism at a community level had at least been recognised. The departures from power, in 2007 and 2009 respectively, of both Tony Blair and President George Bush, allowed work to begin on countering the ‘single narrative’ of an aggressive West set on the humiliation, oppression and division of the Islamic world. Though the change brought by the election of President Barack Obama in the US may have been less substantive in policy terms than some had hoped, the change in tone was definitely dramatic. In the UK, officials had been told in 2006 not to use the term ‘war on terror’.¹⁹ However, only when Blair was gone could the vocabulary of the previous five years or so be set aside, and a genuine attempt be made to convince all citizens of the UK that the effort to keep the West safe, and combat violent Islamic extremism everywhere, was a collective fight that was in the interests of everyone.

But it wasn’t just the success of British security efforts that accounts for the failure of the various attempts to execute mass-casualty attacks in the UK. One of the main reasons was the genuine decline in al-Qaeda’s ability to do harm anywhere from the middle of the decade onwards. This weakness was particularly evident when it came to attacking Britain. The militants’ strategy here had involved forging a direct connection, preferably in person, between the extremists in Pakistan and British volunteers. But this link was getting harder and harder to establish. From 2008, the pressure brought to bear on al-Qaeda in their bases in western Pakistan by drone strikes increased steadily as every month passed, restricting movement, prompting internal security scares and inexorably eliminating many of the organisation’s most capable people. Successive offensives by Pakistani military forces along the rugged frontier with Afghanistan were also causing significant problems. Though local security forces left the toughest zone around the town of Miranshah in north Waziristan well alone, other key areas were being denied to militants. The process was haphazard – an offensive that I watched in the high valleys of Mohmand simply pushed veteran extremists across the border into Afghanistan while angering local communities – but did deny al-Qaeda the leisure to plan, organise and operate that they had earlier enjoyed. Tighter travel restrictions helped too, as did ongoing cooperation between the Pakistani intelligence services and their British counterparts. These were often difficult and tense, but the various local agencies proved relatively effective when dealing with individual British militants who neither nation wanted at liberty.²⁰

In these conditions, just reaching al-Qaeda was much more difficult for Britons, let alone actually being accepted, trained and given a mission by the organisation. Several tried but failed to establish the critical connections. Even those that succeeded appeared much less competent than earlier groups on their return. In September 2011, police broke up a network of young Britons, all the children of migrants from Pakistan, in Birmingham who had been plotting to plant up to eight bombs to turn the UK into a ‘war zone’. Several among them had made their way to Pakistan at least once. Two, the leaders, had managed to contact people close to an al-Qaeda leader and had, they claimed, been intensively trained, taking forty pages of notes during a month of instruction.²¹ If so, they had retained little, as they made a series of basic mistakes in what spies called ‘tradecraft’, particularly the steps taken to avoid detection. One reason for this weakness was probably the rudimentary nature of the facilities al-Qaeda was reduced to using. These were very different from the training camps that were being run just a few years earlier, let alone a decade before in Taliban-run Afghanistan. The ringleader of one network was recorded by MI5, describing how al-Qaeda ‘hasn’t got no more camps now . . . the brothers used to be in the mountains [but] the drones just get them straight away, they just bomb the camps, so . . . they taught us inside houses . . . They were restricted to one place most of the time: One place to eat, sleep, go to toilet and do everything.’²²

Nor were the volunteers arriving in Pakistan always particularly well received, or indeed motivated. The same ringleader was recorded boasting to a friend of how he faked stomach aches to avoid ‘lessons’ and spent his days watching ‘jihadi videos’. ‘After dawn prayers they would come to our room . . . we used to say we were ill . . . after two months they threw us out,’ he said to a friend, laughing.²³ It is little wonder, perhaps, that the advice given to the departing volunteers was ‘don’t send anyone [more to us]’.²⁴ Significantly too, the Birmingham plotters do not appear to have had any contact with anyone in Pakistan once they had returned to Britain, indicating that communications were difficult to maintain or that no one in al-Qaeda had any desire to talk to them again. The former appears more likely, though we cannot be sure. None of the dozen or so individuals involved in two major plots uncovered in 2012 had any serious link to any extremists in South Asia at all.

If Pakistan was an increasingly problematic destination for aspirant terrorists, a growing number of young British men did travel to Somalia, or Yemen, with several killed in both locations. One militant, when his hopes to travel to South Asia appeared unlikely to be fulfilled, even suggested Mali as a destination. But of the various al-Qaeda affiliates in 2011 or early 2012 which might have offered any serious training to aspirant British bombers, only AQAP appeared to pose a serious threat with its track record of sophisticated attempts to hit Western targets. Senior officials genuinely felt they had turned a very significant corner in the fight against Islamic militancy and quietly celebrated. ‘If you’d told me five years ago that we’d be where we are now, I’d have been very happy,’ said one MI6 official in 2011.²⁵ The London Olympics of 2012, despite being described by counter-terrorist officials as ‘the biggest peacetime security challenge since the Second World War’, was untroubled by any extremist violence.

The killing of Rigby challenged this new optimism and confidence. Security service officials had been aware for some time of a new form of terrorist attack that was emerging alongside the older ‘hybrid’ type, although they were unsure exactly what sort of threat it might pose. This new type of operations involved individuals attacking seemingly random targets with weaponry limited to whatever they could make, steal, find or buy themselves. Entirely without any connection to major groups like al-Qaeda, or even minor ones, they were said to herald a new wave of violence. Borrowing a term from the US security services’ analysis of domestic right-wing extremist violence in the 1990s and its perpetrators’ own texts, they were given the name ‘lone wolves’.²⁶ It was a profoundly misleading one.

Michael Adebolajo was Romford-born and -bred, growing up on the ragged eastern edge of London’s urban sprawl, in a family of devout and hard-working Nigerian immigrants who took him, his brother and his sister to church every Sunday and read the Bible most evenings. He was ‘a typical teenager’, playing football, listening to rap and hip hop, and had friends from all the various local communities in a very mixed neighbourhood. Tall, good-looking, popular, he initially did well at school and teachers remembered nothing out of the ordinary about him until early adolescence.²⁷

By his mid-teens, however, Adebolajo was involved in local gangs, and was stealing phones, carrying a knife, as well as using and selling drugs. His worried parents moved the entire family a hundred miles away to Lincoln, a large country town and a much quieter environment. By the time Adebolajo returned to London aged nineteen, having scraped a single E grade in his A levels, he had ‘calmed down’, friends told reporters. Discipline was still an issue and, though he managed to get a place first on a building-surveying degree at Greenwich University and then on a politics course, he dropped out entirely in 2005.²⁸ There is no evidence that he was involved in any kind of activism at university, where few students appeared interested by hard-line ideologies.

It is unclear when, why or how he converted to Islam, but there were plenty of outreach efforts by Islamic activists in the neighbourhood, and soon after leaving university, Adebolajo became involved with a series of groups which were all eventually banned by British authorities. One was al-Muhajiroun, named after those who had accompanied the Prophet Mohammed on his flight from Mecca to Medina, which had a long history of provocation and protest.²⁹ The group gained notoriety with a celebration of the ‘magnificent nineteen’, as they described the 9/11 hijackers, in London shortly after the attacks in the US. The group’s founder was Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born cleric who had fled to the UK in the mid-1990s and was well known to the British media. (I once sat next to him on the sofa of a morning TV talk show in a surreal debate about the causes of Islamic militancy. Bakri Mohammed, citing the words and deeds of the Prophet, argued that because the UK had taken in refugees like him, a covenant forbade him from any attacks on Britons.) He later told reporters that Adebolajo had become a Muslim after attending al-Muhajiroun’s meetings in south London. This is unconfirmed. Adebolajo offered another explanation. ‘It was the Iraq war that affected me the most,’ he told the jury in Court 2 of the Old Bailey.

Soon Adebolajo was one of the most active and vocal of al-Muhajiroun’s members, taking part in demonstrations in 2006 against the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper and finally being arrested after scuffles with police outside the Old Bailey following the trial of another al-Muhajiroun member who had been sentenced to four years in jail for inciting racial hatred. Adebolajo received a 51-day jail sentence for assaulting a police officer, but continued to attend protests and meetings on his release.³⁰ By 2008, the activist, now twenty-four years old, was well known to police and was being investigated by MI5.

Such individuals were of increasing interest to security services who, though still focused on the more predictable threat from small groups of young British Muslims from the South Asian community who somehow managed to connect with al-Qaeda, were beginning to understand the new danger from these ‘lone wolves’. One of the first such attackers was a young convert who in May 2007 got on a bus in the northern English town of Rotherham carrying a plastic bag containing bags of sugar connected to an alarm clock and wrapped with wiring. Police found bomb-making equipment in his home, and a large poster of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.³¹ A year later, another convert with a history of mental illness blew himself up in a cafe toilet in the western city of Exeter. Both were described as ‘peripheral’ to Islamic militancy in the UK by officials at the time but, as the months passed and further evidence of a pattern accumulated, it became harder to dismiss such attackers quite so easily.³² In July 2009, Isa Ibrahim, a nineteen-year-old ‘disturbed and alienated adolescent’, was convicted of terrorist offences. He had made viable explosives, manufactured a suicide vest and carried out reconnaissance on a Bristol shopping centre.³³ A turning point came in 2010 when a Member of Parliament was knifed in the stomach by a young British Pakistani woman angered by his support for the Iraq war. Roshanara Choudhry, a gifted 21-year-old university student, later told police that she had carried out the attack because ‘as Muslims we’re all brothers and sisters and we should all look out for each other and we shouldn’t sit back and do nothing while others suffer’.³⁴ Choudhry had spent more than a hundred hours watching videos of lectures by al-Awlaki, the Yemen-based extremist preacher, over previous months before finally resolving to act. When she was sentenced to life imprisonment a group of men began shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, ‘British go to hell’ and ‘Curse the judge’ in the public gallery of the court. The next ‘successful’ attack was on Rigby.

Quite how Rigby’s killers went from being vocal and committed but non-violent activists to becoming murderers is unclear. In 2008, Adebolajo had been in touch with someone thought to have connections to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but there is no indication he was influenced unduly by any single individual, let alone ‘brainwashed’ by some kind of senior overseas-based militant.³⁵ In 2009, he said during his trial, he had broken with al-Muhajiroun, though he did not explain why. One possibility is that he, like a number of others who later became involved in violence, found the group too moderate.³⁶ In 2010, an MI5 investigation of Adebolajo indicated that he was involved in drug dealing and assessed him as ‘low-risk’. The criminal activity may have been to raise funds for an ambitious overseas trip, however, which proved his commitment to the cause rather than indicated a declining interest. In October 2010, Adebolajo set off for Somalia, with the intention of joining al-Shabaab. This backfired badly, and, betrayed to police, he ended up in court in Mombasa, Kenya. He may have been mistreated, even abused in prison there. Once back in the UK, he was soon seen again in Islamic activist circles.

It was around this time that he is thought to have met Michael Adebowale, six years his junior. Adebowale’s path to extremism resembled that of the older man in some aspects, though his life had been significantly more chaotic and violent, marked by crime and mental illness. His parents, also Nigerian-born and devout Christians, were separated, and his schooling had been intermittent. In his early teens, Adebowale first became known to police in Greenwich for his involvement in petty crime, and then with local gangs. One was the largely Somali ‘Woolwich Boys’. In 2008, he was wounded in a frenzied knife attack at a crack den in which a friend was killed.³⁷ Adebowale got a fifteen-month sentence for dealing drugs, which he served in the notorious Feltham Young Offenders Institution. The incident also triggered the onset of psychological illness, with the young man suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and periods of delusion. It was around this time, according to MI5, that he ‘converted to Islam in order to move away from the crime gangs and drugs scene he was involved with in London’.³⁸ By 2011, Adebowale had come to the Security Service’s attention as a result of his interest in online extremist material. Of particular concern was his reading of Inspire magazine, produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. An internal MI5 assessment of Inspire in 2012 described how the magazine, which sought to promote home-grown ‘lone actor’ attacks, had been read by those involved in ‘at least seven out of the ten attacks planned within the UK since its first issue [in 2010] and had significantly enhanced the capability of individuals in four of these ten attack plots’. Al-Awlaki, who had been key to its creation, was dead but the magazine he had founded was proving extremely effective in propagating the idea of leaderless jihad. Though formulated in the days before mass usage of the Internet, the strategy was ideally suited to an age where everyone could access the Web anywhere in the world. The cover of one booklet, published on the Internet by AQAP in 2013, asked: ‘R U dreamin’ of wagin’ jihadi attacks against [the unbelievers]? . . . Well, there’s no need to travel abroad, coz the frontline has come to you. Wanna know how? Just read ‘n’ apply the contents of this guide which has practical ‘n’ creative ways to please Allah by killing his enemies ‘n’ healing the believers’ chests.’³⁹

By mid-2012, Adebowale and Adebolajo were both involved with the networks of Islamic activists in south-east London. They spent days in small groups, watching videos, praying, preaching angrily on local high streets and going over and over their various grievances. In September, Adebowale attended a protest outside the US Embassy in the centre of the capital in which protesters marched with a banner reading: ‘The followers of Muhammed will conquer America.’ It is possible that the two converts met there and, with such similar backgrounds, were drawn to one another. Phone records later revealed that they frequently exchanged forty or more texts in a day.

Yet the activism they had been involved in until this point, however offensive, was still non-violent. It is unclear when the two men decided that they wanted to go further, or when they decided to kill a soldier. Others had laid similar plans before, leading to repeated warnings over previous years to servicemen in the UK not to wear uniforms outside barracks. In early 2013, Adebolajo described graphically what he hoped to do on Facebook, and just over a week before the attack he was seen a mile away from the Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, manning a stall outside a community centre after Friday prayers and preaching as the congregation dispersed.⁴⁰ There, he spoke of how killing unbelievers was justified, and how there was no need to travel to kill the ‘enemy’s soldiers’, as they were here. However, most of his speech, a witness later said, described the war in Syria which was beginning to move into a newly murderous phase. Then came the trip to buy the knives, the drive to Woolwich and the wait for a suitable victim to step out of the station.

What are the lessons from the stories of Adebolajo and Adebowale? To what extent was either of these men a ‘lone wolf’? Had al-Suri and bin Laden been right? Had ‘the awakening’ finally started? Was this a new era of ‘leaderless jihad’?

It was true that the vast majority of UK Muslims, like those elsewhere in Europe and beyond, had long remained resolutely opposed to violence. In July 2005, 85 per cent of respondents to one poll said that further suicide bombings against the UK would never be justified, while 88 per cent agreed that Muslims should denounce any terrorist plot to the police. These figures had remained broadly unchanged since 2002, and were not to alter greatly in the coming years either. Support for al-Qaeda or approval of bin Laden in Britain had been almost non-existent in the 1990s, not least because virtually no one had heard of either, and remained extremely limited in the following decade. In moments of significant anger, such as that prompted by the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper in late 2005, there were plenty of protests but no upsurge of violent activism. The greatest preoccupations of British Muslims throughout the decade following the 9/11 attacks remained those of their non-Muslim counterparts: health, jobs, even immigration. This was entirely unsurprising and something which anyone spending any time on the streets of Walthamstow, Bradford or Sparkhill would have known without needing expensive polls.⁴¹ On the whole, one important Europe-wide survey revealed, Muslims’ views on key questions such as homosexuality or pre-marital sexual relations appeared to be more influenced by the country in which they were living than any ‘common’ Muslim identity.⁴² This testified not just to the diversity of the Muslim community, but also to quite how problematic the concept of a ‘Muslim community’ was at all.

So al-Suri, who had been captured by Pakistani security services shortly after publishing his celebration of the 7/7 bombings, had been mistaken.⁴³ His belief that the attacks of 2005 were the first strikes of a major wave of violence that would lead to a general uprising had no basis in the truth. The total number of arrests, let alone charges or convictions, for terrorist offences linked to Islamic militancy from 2005 to 2013 was no more than a thousand out of a population of Muslims in the UK which in 2011 was 2.7 million.⁴⁴ But if al-Suri had been very wrong about imminent mass mobilisation, there had been one development in the UK since his short stay in London in the mid-1990s that could still have encouraged him. Polls might have revealed a widespread rejection of violence throughout the decade, but they still showed that there was a significant number of people, from 2.5 per cent to 15 per cent, depending on the survey and the exact question, who believed that suicide attacks in the US or the UK might indeed be justified. Equally, there were always some, 9 per cent in 2009 according to one survey, who said they would not inform the police if they suspected al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism.⁴⁵ This was a fraction of the total, and may indeed have been over-represented by the polls, but was still a substantial number of people

If there was still nothing to indicate that al-Suri’s predictions of a wave of ‘leaderless’ violence were premature, rather than simply wrong-headed, this was worrying nonetheless. For the spread of such views indicated how practices, ideas and values which had once been associated with only a tiny minority of mainly foreign extremists, such as al-Suri, in the UK a decade or so earlier were now much more frequently heard, and much more vocally expressed. In the late 1990s, to hear such views one would have to visit particular mosques such as the one in Finsbury Park in north London, or radical bookshops in Birmingham, or a handful of specific Islamic centres around the country run by hardliners well known to both MI5 and journalists. Almost the only people who had personal experience of actual militancy were a few foreign refugees, and a small subsection of the British Pakistani community with a particular interest in Kashmir. Groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir or offshoots such as al-Muhajiroun were growing but still restricted to what was effectively considered a lunatic fringe, with a narrative and views that resonated with no more than a negligible number of British Muslims, or anyone else, at the time. Those who envisaged that the US, still less the UK, might be a legitimate target for violence were a fringe of the fringe.

Establishing quite how many people accepted at least some of the principal elements of the extremists’ world view – the deep anti-Semitism and aggressive homophobia; the conviction that the West was decadent, immoral and had been set on the humiliation, division and subordination of the Islamic world since the seventh century; the belief that most Muslims were weak, hypocritical, who had left the true path – at the time of Rigby’s murder was of course extremely difficult. But, even just purely anecdotally, there certainly appeared to be more of them than ever before. One indication of quite how widespread this poisonous mix of prejudice and misinformation had become is that within five years of 2001, a UK-born seventeen-year-old of Bangladeshi parents in east London could earnestly tell me that he had no problem with ‘British people’ because they were, like ‘the Muslims all over the world’, victims of ‘the Jews and the Americans’ too, and think his statement was sufficiently banal to establish some kind of common ground between us. Expressed, in a more militant form, in the online lectures by firebrand clerics and self-taught preachers, such ideas had become principal elements not just of speeches given in back rooms of mosques, front rooms of homes, on street corners, even in universities on occasion, but also of the daily conversations of significant numbers of, particularly young, people. ‘None of the words we heard [from Adebolajo] were new,’ said the killer’s brother revealingly, shortly after the attack.⁴⁶ Many of those who joined the 2011 Birmingham plot met in a gym popular among local young men in the Sparkhill neighbourhood because it did not play music or allow women to enter, had a prayer room and sold halal bodybuilding supplements. On its website the gym explained that ‘this centre was much needed in our local community, due to the disgraced state of the youth. They are losing their Islamic identity and moral foundations which is central to the teachings of Islam. We offer to educate the youth and let them know how far they have strayed away from Islam i.e. inappropriate attitude, swearing, wearing of earrings and chains, non-Islamic hair styles and dresscode.’⁴⁷ There were few such establishments in the 1990s.

One clear difference from the previous decade was the emergence of a youth subculture – with its own rituals, aesthetics and language – that simply had not existed before. Dubbed ‘jihadi cool’ by commentators, this had its own dress code – styles ranged from the traditional shalwar kameez of Pakistani communities, though worn high at the ankle in emulation of the Prophet and often paired with a many-pocketed combat-style waistcoat, to the pristine white robes of Gulf communities, often worn with lurid and expensive trainers. It had its own language, such as ‘kufr’ for ‘kuffar’, or unbelievers, with some words, such as ‘crew’ for a group, borrowed from gang culture. The influence flowed both ways, and the closeness between some gangs and some faith-based groups is underlined by the view of the police who investigated Adebowale that the young man’s conversion to Islam was in some part due to his involvement with Somali gangs in Woolwich and was more about a desire to fit in with the gang’s own mixture of criminal and religious identities. This was characterised by one officer as ‘jihad meets The Sweeney meets gangsta’.⁴⁸

The last reference was particularly pertinent. One high-profile element of this complex phenomenon was the genre that had become known as ‘jihadi rap’. This had begun to attract significant attention from around 2004, when a clip entitled ‘Dirty Kuffar’ was posted online by activists. It featured images of US soldiers celebrating after shooting an Iraqi, the 9/11 attacks and Western leaders. Lyrics included ‘Peace to Hamas and the Hizbollah, / OBL [bin Laden] pulled me like a shiny star, / Like the way we destroyed them two towers ha-ha, / The minister Tony Blair, there my dirty Kuffar, / The one Mr Bush, there my dirty Kuffar, / Throw them on the fire.’ The clip, posted on the Internet by Mohammed al-Massari, a Saudi Arabian Islamist who had arrived in Britain a decade earlier, developed something of a cult following. ‘I do not know of any young Muslim who has not either seen or got this video. It is selling everywhere. Everyone I meet at the mosque is asking for it,’ al-Massari said.⁴⁹ A year later a videotape containing ‘Dirty Kuffar’ was found in the flat of the leader of a second wave of bombers, whose abortive attempt followed the 7/7 bombings by two weeks in July 2005.⁵⁰ Also popular, though of very poor quality, were clips recorded by Omar Hammami, an American recruit to al-Shabaab, who in 2006 uploaded a rap including the lines ‘Bomb by bomb, blast by blast, / only going to bring back the glorious past’, a revealing if inadvertent reminder of the importance of history, however imperfectly known or imagined, for Islamic extremists.⁵¹ Over the coming years, the genre would proliferate, in many languages and, in some cases, blurring in tone and message with mainstream music.

Such music could, conceivably, help draw some people into extremism, though to suggest a central role would be absurd. Of far more relevance is what its apparent popularity says about the profile of the new generation of militants to appear in the last ten years. There were of course many exceptions, but by 2012 or 2013, Islamic extremist ideas were attracting people who were younger, less educated and poorer than, certainly, the majority of the militants of the late 1990s in the UK. Their knowledge of Islam, and indeed of Islamic extremism, was more superficial, and the attraction of militancy appeared to be much less ideological. If the similarity with gangs is striking, it should not be surprising. Militant groups offered a different form of gang-type community with a different narrative but with often similar benefits – purpose, companionship, status, excitement, adventure and the prospect, infrequently realised, of both material and sexual advantages. They also offered a way to mark a clear difference with the Islamic practices of an older generation, which had stressed the importance of avoiding political issues rather than engaging with them. Above all, there was a sense of empowerment, as was very clear from the music, in both its jihadi and its more conventional versions. Belgian researchers working for the nation’s intelligence services noted that posts made by extremists on social media referred to Tupac Shakur, icon of American gangsta rap, shot dead in 1996. ‘At least some . . . [militants] identify with his life and his rap lyrics, which indeed seem to fit well into the world outlook of this group,’ the report said.⁵² The rapper 50 Cent, whose 2003 album was called Get Rich or Die Tryin’, was also popular. This new generation of recruits was also much more likely not just to have previously been involved in criminal activities, but to continue to be involved even when active in militancy too.⁵³

So, the Rigby killing revealed two critical developments among militants in the UK in the period following the 7/7 bombings. The first was fairly obvious: the apparently random, low-tech, less ambitious, more chaotic attacks which had been developing since around 2006 or 2007 had finally become a significant threat, albeit one that would coexist with, rather than supplant, the ongoing danger posed by extremists intent on mounting bigger mass-casualty attacks. The second point was that ‘lone wolves’ were not actually alone. Of course in terms of absolute numbers there were very few extremists like Adebolajo and Adebowale. Indeed, there were few extremists at all. MI5 officials said that in 2013 they were watching two networks believed to be an imminent and serious threat, several hundred people who posed a significant danger, around a thousand others who were only involved in ‘marginal aspects of activities under investigation’ and then many more who were sympathisers or fellow travellers who associated with actively violent militants. Even this remained a very small proportion of the British Muslim population.⁵⁴ But these few thousand people were part of something still bigger. Al-Suri had not been entirely mistaken when he had seen in the London bombings the vindication of his strategy. The mobilisation that had taken place was neither as extensive as he had hoped, nor did it involve the degree of extremism and violence they had wished to see. But that an ideology, a world view, a language and an identity rooted in a profoundly polarised, dogmatic, prejudiced and hate-filled vision of the world had spread significantly over the previous decade and a half was without doubt.⁵⁵

Nor, sadly, was this only true for the UK. As we shall now see, this language and identity would flourish elsewhere too, and, combined with the inherently social nature of the activity, would give rise to what is perhaps the most dangerous phenomenon of all.