Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > Al Takfir Wal Hijra : 'the boy or girl next door who would slit your throat in a second'
Al Takfir Wal Hijra : 'the boy or girl next door who would slit your throat in a second'
March 17, 2006
Takfir Wal Hijra : 'the boy or girl next door who would slit your throat in a second'
March 17, 2006
http://www.rotten.com/library/history/terrorist-organizations/al-takfir-wal-hijra/
Al Takfir Wal Hijra
Al Takfir Wal Hijra may be the most terrifically terrifying terrorist operation in the world today. The fact that you've never heard of it is part of the problem.
Al Takfir Wal Hijra means "anathema and exile" or possibly "excommunication and emigration." A theologically extreme extension of the Saudi Arabia's Wahabbi doctrines, Takfir is dedicated to restoring the Caliphate, the Islamic political empire that once spanned the Near and Middle East.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri is a member of the Takfir sect. While Osama bin Laden is usually called the leader of al Qaeda, Zawahri runs the terrorist network in most meaningful respects, including ordering attacks and concocting theological justifications for killing.
The founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Zawahiri is one of several international terror masterminds linked to Takfir Wal Hijra.
Takfir is as fundamentalist a sect as you can imagine. Its major tenet holds that all the world's non-Muslim leaders should be overthrown by any means including (and especially) violence. Not only are infidels subject to sanctions up to and including death, but even other Muslims who don't fit the Takfir ideal.
It isn't just the bloodthirstiness that makes Takfir Wal Hijra dangerous, however. It's the techniques. A major element of Takfir religious practice is subterfuge. The threat of Takfir is that its cold, heartless killers could easily be the boy or girl next door. Takfir Wal Hijra members are permitted to disregard the injunctions of Islamic law in order to blend into infidel societies.
In other words, Takfirs can have sex with loose women, drink alcohol, eat pork and do whatever else they feel is appropriate to advance their mission.
In the wake of September 11, and even before, the U.S. and media pundits have frequently engaged in head-scratching over the fact that terrorist operatives often don't appear to be especially Islamic. It seems paradoxical that the 9/11 hijackers could be so dedicated that they would die for the cause, but not so dedicated that they avoided picking up girls at nightclubs.
"(They seem like) regular, fun-loving guys -- but they'd slit your throat or bomb your building in a second," a French official told Time Magazine.
Mohammed Atta, although puritanical in his behavior, was believed to be Takfiri. He's not the only al Qaeda operative you could point the finger at. Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed went to discos, drank alcohol and dated call girls. Yousef in particular is renowned for being generally unIslamic and non-observant of prayers and fasting. Although no one has suggested openly that Yousef and KSM were Takfiri, it's hardly a stretch.
Other al Qaeda operatives in the U.S. might be Takfiri, including Ali Mohammed, a senior al Qaeda operative who served with the U.S. Special Forces in the late 1980s, or Mahmud Abouhalima, who joined the NRA before getting mixed up in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
In addition to its unparalleled ability to infiltrate Western societies, Takfir also distinguishes itself for its sheer violence and cheerful lack of discrimination among its targets. Even bin Laden has been a target of Takfir killers, supposedly, during a 1996 assassination attempt in the Sudan. This rumor persists despite the fact that Takfirs fought alongside bin Laden's mujahideen in Afghanistan, which tells you something cautionary about being on the wrong side of a Takfir.
The U.S. government is deeply concerned about the Takfiri movement, although you wouldn't be able to tell from the way they never talk much about it.
In 2002, the Justice Department charged four men with running a Takfiri terrorist sleeper cell in Michigan. Members were charged with planning shoe bombings, airline attacks and casing the U.S. embassy in Jordan, Disneyland and a Las Vegas casino for potential attacks. The case began to disintegrate after a series of missteps and illegal acts by the Justice Department. Only two of the four were convicted, and even those convictions may not stand up to review.
After those named above, the next most famous Takfir may be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Palestinian who is currently making life miserable for the U.S. in Iraq. Although little credible information is known about Zarqawi, his M.O. and stated beliefs are generally consistent with the Takfir cult. It's also worth noting that he recently attempted to stage a chemical attack on the same Jordanian embassy allegedly targeted by the Michigan cell.
Strangely, there's some conventional wisdom circulating which holds that Takfir Wal Hijra was founded by Lebanese immigrant and Boston taxi cab driver Bassam Ahmed Kanj. However, there's some room for debate. It's likely that the sect (in some form) predates Kanj's involvement beginning in 1996. (He was killed in an uprising in Lebanon in 2000.)
According to the Justice Department, Takfiris are guided by fatwas issued by influential radicals, like the following, issued in 1998 by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, an exiled Egyptian cleric now imprisoned in the U.S.:
Cut all links with the [United States]. Destroy them thoroughly and erase them from the face of the earth. Ruin their economies, set their companies on fire, turn their conspiracies to powder and dust. Sink their ships, bring their planes down. Slay them in the air, on land, on water. And [with the Command of Allah] kill them wherever you find them. Catch them and put them in prison. Lie in wait for them and kill these infidels. They will surely get great oppression from you. God will make you the means of wreaking a terrible revenge upon them, of degrading them. He will support you against them. He will cure the afflicted hearts of the faithful and take all anger out of their hearts.
Clearly, God will have his hands full with some of these hearts. In the meantime, you can only hope that the boy or girl next door isn't planning to slit your throat any time soon.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1288722004
Mon 8 Nov 2004
Fanatical Muslim group linked to film-maker's death
DUNCAN FORGAN
THE man charged with the murder of a controversial Dutch artist last week has been linked to a fanatical Islamic sect whose members are said to include the al-Qaeda second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Islamic experts believe that the style and content of a five-page letter that was found pinned to Theo van Gogh's body were close to those of al-Takfir wal Hijra, a radical group that has declared war on westerners.
Mr Van Gogh, who had angered many Muslims after releasing articles, books and films critical of Islam following the attacks of 11 September, was attacked near a park close to the centre of Amsterdam last Tuesday.
Police arrested a 26-year-old man with dual Dutch and Moroccan citizenship at the crime scene following an exchange of gunfire in which a police officer was wounded.
Dutch authorities have since detained a further seven suspects on charges of conspiring to murder Mr Van Gogh and threatening to kill several Dutch politicians.
Founded in Egypt in the 1970's, al-Takfir wal Hijra has been responsible for several acts of violence, including the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981.
The sect's strict interpretation of Islam endorses the indiscriminate extermination of infidels and secular Muslims.
Both al-Zawahiri and al- Zarqawi, the man behind many of the spate of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq, are thought to be members of the brutal sect.
The organisation - whose name translates as "excommunication and migration" - is active in most Arab nations and has carried out attacks on both Muslims and non-Muslims in Sudan, Morocco, Algeria and Lebanon.
But their views are known to be excessive even among Islamic extremists - four members even attempted to assassinate Osama bin Laden in 1995 while he was staying in Sudan. Its followers are so fanatical for a pure Islamic world that they have been known to undertake killing sprees in mosques to drive out "corrupt elements".
Most worrying for westerners is the fact that the sect apparently allows its members to appear non-radical, and even non-Islamic, if the mission requires it.
Shockwaves have been reverberating around the Netherlands for days following the killing of Mr Van Gogh.
Messages - later left at the pavement shrine where Mr Van Gogh's throat was slashed - were full of venom against radical Islam. "Enemies live among us," read one missive in a bed of flowers, votive candles and crosses.
"The Muslims say they're scared," said mourner Nicolette Toering. "No, we're scared."
Mr Van Gogh - a distant relative of the famous painter - often tested the boundaries of free expression by denouncing Muslims in the most graphic terms.
His last work, Submission, a joint project with a Somali-born lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali, attacked the treatment of women under Islam.
The film-maker's fans were as passionate as his detractors.
"He was trying to warn us about the dangers of radical Islam," said Geert Plas, a teacher, as he visited the site where Mr Van Gogh was ambushed. "Now maybe we'll listen. "To me this is not just a small event. It's part of the World Trade Centre and Madrid. We must see this." The letter pinned to the victim's body also threatened death to Hirsi Ali, who has gone into hiding, and predicted the downfall of the "infidel enemies of Islam" in Europe, America and the Netherlands.
"The jihad [holy war] has come to the Netherlands," the parliament speaker, Jozias van Aartsen, said.
The memorials that piled up on the pavement often crossed the line from sympathy to seething recrimination.
"This is the true face of Islam," said one message. A framed poem called Imam ends with a stanza: "If you want to improve the world, start with yourself and your faith."
Related topic
International terrorism
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1
-------------------------
The secret war
A matrix of terrorist cells - allied to bin Laden but often more extreme than him - planned mayhem across the continent from bases in Britain, Spain, Germany and France. Only now are the links between these shadowy groups coming to light as intelligence services realise that, unknown to them, the battle had started long before 11 September
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,560787,00.html
The secret war. Part 2
War on Terrorism - Observer special
Martin Bright, Antony Barnett, Burhan Wazir, Tony Thompson and Peter Beaumont in London; Stuart Jeffries in Paris; Ed Vulliamy in Washington; Kate Connolly in Berlin; Giles Tremlett in Madrid; Rory Carroll in Rome
Sunday September 30, 2001
The Observer
As a member of Takfir-wal-Hijra, an extreme and puritanical Islamist organisation financed by Osama bin Laden, he knew he had to keep a low profile, but Beghal was being cautious for a second reason. Returning to Europe from Kabul after a year of training with Abu Zoubeida, named on the FBI's list of most wanted bin Laden lieutenants, he was preparing to participate in a series of pan-European 'spectaculars' on American targets. Beghal - a constant presence at Finsbury Park mosque in London where he recruited for his cause in the late 1990s - was on his way to open the European front of bin Laden's war on the West.
It is a disclosure that has sent a shudder of fear and horror through Europe's intelligence and police: the knowledge that the murderous attacks on New York and Washington which took the lives of almost 7,000, were to be repeated throughout Europe as well.
French investigators now believe Beghal was returning to France to give the go-ahead for a suicide attack on the US embassy in the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, using a lorry or even a helicopter. By last week Beghal - who spent two years in London recruiting for his violent and bizarre organisation of fanatics - was emerging as one of the key British links at the centre of a worldwide conspiracy; the point of contact between bin Laden's group and a wider network of allied Islamist terror groups.
Last Friday another possibly crucial link, Lotfi Raissi - an Algerian pilot resident in Britain - was standing before a British court, fighting his extradition to the US. He had been named by the FBI as the man who trained key figures in the suicide attacks in America on 11 September. Britain, along with Germany and France, had emerged as a key jumping off place for the world's biggest terrorist conspiracy.
Raissi's home in Colnbrook, Berkshire, sits under the Heathrow flight path. It is an unassuming modern suburban house, divided into flats. His neighbours knew him as a quiet, dumpy, slightly strange character who spoke little and gave nothing away when he did. Many assumed he didn't speak English because he often failed to acknowledge them when they greeted him. 'I would see him and his wife out in the back garden but they just kept themselves to themselves,' says neighbour Gary Hanley. 'When you looked at them to say hello, they would just look the other way. They made it clear they didn't really want to get involved with anyone socially.'
The first neighbours knew of Raissi's background was when armed police raided his house last weekend. He now stands accused by US investigators of training four of the suicide hijackers, giving increasing credibility to claims that Britain has become a haven for Islamic terrorists. It is a claim borne out by the evidence presented to Bow Street magistrates on Friday, outlining in detail for the first time the allegations against Raissi at a hearing to determine whether he should be extradited to the US.
Prosecutor Arvinda Sambir gave a list of devastating charges which put him at the heart of the terror plot. She claimed he was the lead instructor for four of the hijackers, including the man who seized the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington to Los Angeles and skillfully steered it into the Pentagon.
On 23 June Raissi visited Las Vegas with his wife and then flew to Arizona with the Pentagon pilot. The FBI claim he was there to ensure the hijackers were capable of taking control of the aircraft and smashing it into the Pentagon. 'He attended a number of flying schools attended by four of the hijackers,' said Sambir. Raissi has denied all the accusations, and his family say they are confident he will be found innocent.
US officials have identified a 29-year-old man who used the name Hani Hanjour as the hijacker who crashed the plane into the Pentagon. He attended CRM Airline Training Centre in Scottsdale, Arizona and was videotaped travelling with Raissi.
Raissi, who previously worked for Algeria's national airline, had registered for an advanced flying course at the Four Forces Aviation flying school in nearby Poyle. The company promises to give pilots all the training they need to fly jets in just three months, and has a number of state-of-the-art simulators. He was determined to get a licence to fly commercial planes in Europe and was described as a good student by his instructor. The company went into voluntary liquidation earlier this month for reasons unconnected to the attack on the World Trade Centre.
Prosecutors say that the warrant from the US was for obtaining a pilot's licence dishonestly - because he did not declare a previous conviction for theft or that he had had surgery on his knee. Both would have barred him from applying for a licence. Further charges are expected. One source said: 'It is no secret that conspiracy to murder is being looked at.'
Sambir said that when Raissi was arrested by British police, logbooks were found in his house with crucial dates missing. Further details about Raissi were also emerging in the US yesterday, including the disclosure that he received a US commercial pilot licence in January 1999, with a rating to fly a Boeing 737. Two days later he was certified a ground instructor, and in March 1999 received a license to be a flight instructor.
Raissi, who lived at this time in a Phoenix apartment complex, listed himself as both a student and employee at Westwind Aviation Academy, a flight school at the Phoenix Deer Valley Airport. He has said he trained at Westwind in 1997 and 1998, according to documents the FBI showed to another local flight school director. In an odd twist, a database search of public records shows Raissi had used the social security number of a Jersey City woman who died in 1991. The woman, Dorothy Hansen, was a retired factory worker.
There was further evidence to show his relationship with the hijackers went further than mere association. Relatives of Raissi have said he flew jets in the US for several years and was undergoing further training at Heathrow. Police spent two days searching his ground floor flat and took items away for further examination, including flying manuals. But Raissi's uncle, Kamal, has insisted he had no links with terror groups. 'Of course Lotfi has flying manuals at home - he is learning to be a pilot.'
The truth about Raissi's possible involvement in the American carnage may not be established for many years as long-winded extradition proceedings in Britain must precede any American trial. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to investigators on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe has played host to a sprawling network of terror groups whose activists were crucial to the 11 September terror, and who are currently planning to repeat their murderous actions. And key to many of the plans was Djamel Beghal - until he was seized at Dubai airport.
For Beghal, Dubai airport, the busiest in the Middle East, was perfect for his purposes. It allowed him to travel unremarked between Afghanistan and Europe, where he had established cells in several countries including Britain. This was a key transit point from the Far East and South Asia, and Beghal knew it was better to arrive from an Arab country than draw unwanted attention by coming straight from Kabul or Islamabad. As he waited for his flight to be called, he knew his terrorist cells were primed for action as soon as he touched down on European soil.
But Beghal had not counted on the vigilance of staff at passport control, who spotted he was travelling on false French documents. At first, the local intelligence officers who seized him had no idea of the coup they had pulled off. Calls to CIA officers and officers of the French foreign intelligence service - the DGSE, based in Dubai - set alarm bells ringing.
Excited French intelligence officials told them they had been tracking Beghal for almost a decade. He was, they explained, a known activist with Takfir-wal Hijra, which they defined as 'a radical hardline Islamist movement founded in Egypt as a splinter group from the Muslim Brotherhood'.
The story of Beghal and his friends, as it has emerged in the last few days, is the inside story of the secret war of Osama bin Laden and his allies in Europe against America and the West. It is the story of a coalition of nebulous anti-American Islamic fundamentalists. It is also the story of the fanatic who lived to tell his shocked interrogators of the full scope of their plans.
It is all the more compelling for the fact that while others implicated in the attacks and planned attacks - Lotfi Raissi included - have furiously denied their involvement in bin Laden's terrorist campaign, Beghal has described it in its most frightening details.
Beghal's story also tells of a failure of imagination and cooperation among US and European anti-terrorist specialists on a massive scale. If police and intelligence services had all the pieces of the jigsaw - as it has now emerged - they were unable, or unwilling, to make sense of them.
That 'vast picture' was described in graphic detail on Friday by FBI chief Robert Mueller: a terrorist network spanning the globe, a 'picture' that he added 'is nowhere near painted'. Alongside Mueller, Attorney General John Ashcroft significantly widened the frame of that picture beyond bin Laden and his network, saying the investigation 'has not ruled out the involvement of other individuals and other organisations in this attack'. He said the FBI and intelligence services were 'not just looking at the al-Qaeda network' but 'a series of networks all over the world'. Among them - it is now becoming clear - is the network commanded by Beghal.
Beghal's Takfir group has emerged as central to the wider terrorist plan to hit Americans throughout the world. Crucial to that plan were groups and individuals across Britain.
When Beghal left his flat at 112 Boulevard John Kennedy in Corbeil just outside Paris in October 1997, he was heading for London, where he was to emerge as a key figure in recruiting young Muslims for the Jihad - Holy War. He would travel around Britain's mosques and sometimes venture as far as Germany before returning to his London base.
Crucial to the case against Beghal and his associates is the extremity of his beliefs. Translated, Takfir-wal-Hijra means 'Anathema and Exile', adhering to an extreme fundamentalist view of Islam. Unusually for a religion that has historically tolerated Christianity and Judaism, this form of Islam regards even other Muslims who don't share its extreme ideals as 'infidels' who should be punished brutally, sharing an outlook with the Taliban's hardline clerics.
In London, Beghal naturally gravitated to the mosque at Finsbury Park, fast emerging as a magnet for Islamic extremists in Britain - despite the well-established moderate credentials of the mosque's leadership. And even among the extremists, Beghal stood out as one of the most dangerous.
Members of the Algerian community in north London have told The Observer that Beghal was a feared figure around the mosque. 'It is always the ones without beards who are the most dangerous,' said one moderate Algerian who met him. 'Members of this group would kill their own fathers if they caught them smoking or drinking.'
Indeed, one video doing the rounds at London mosques is a Takfir-wal-Hijra 'snuff movie', showing the execution of a member of the organisation judged to have committed a sin.
The group, once thought beyond the pale - even by bin Laden's al-Queda organisation - believes that everyone who does not adhere to their views, including less devout Muslims, should be counted as infidels and were legitimate targets in any Holy War.
One man who knew Beghal during his time in London said: 'This is the most terrifying group of extremists you are ever likely to meet. If you don't agree with them you are an enemy to Islam, and they believe it is legitimate to kill you.'
Beghal's voice, while extreme, was not a lone one among young Muslim extremists on the fringes of Britain's mosques during this key period. Many - including the police and intelligence services - were happy to write off their activities as that of a noisy but harmless group of hotheads playing at being Holy Warriors.
What they did not realise is that Beghal and others like him had long gone beyond talking and joined in an alliance with Islamic fundamentalists' terrorist-in-chief, Osama bin Laden, and his al-Qaeda group.
Evidence of those close links emerged in a Paris court case last week in evidence gathered by the DST, the French counter-terrorist service. One member of the network, Nacer Eddine Mettai, said: 'Bin Laden approved the ties between Takfir and the Algerian GIA (the Armed Islamic Group, responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Algerians). He agreed to finance Takfir as long as it helped him put his own programme into practice.'
Mettai's evidence has proved crucial to the understanding of bin Laden's methodology, revealing how terrorists from different countries and organisations - but all extreme Islamist and hostile to the West - have gathered under a flag of convenience. These are links, both financial and material, that the West's intelligence agencies have simply missed, allowing men like Beghal to operate almost with impunity.
By August of last year, Beghal had dropped off the radar of MI5 and other agencies which had been watching him in Britain, curious to learn more about his activities but lacking sufficient evidence to intervene and arrest him. What they now know is that he left for Pakistan to study with religious scholars before moving on to the training camps in Afghanistan to prepare for his eventual mission.
Though Beghal had disappeared, French intelligence officers keeping watch on his apartment outside Paris, still rented in his name, became curious about a regular visitor to Corbeil. Kamel Daoudi, a 23-year-old French-born computer specialist, shared Beghal's extremist sympathies. When the young man left his own home earlier this month and moved in permanently to Beghal's apartment, French investigators believed they had identified the new leader of a French extremist cell, dubbing him 'Commander of Corbeil'.
What is now clear is that Daoudi was a key player in Beghal's terrorist group. As well as being a computer expert, French intelligence believed he was also Takfir's master bomb-maker, and that he had been given the job of building the explosive device they believe would have demolished the US embassy in Paris and killed hundreds in another spectacular terrorist attack.
Alarmed that a huge atrocity was being planned, the French authorities finally decided to move against Takfir-wal-Hijra on Monday 10 September. They applied to anti-terrorist judges to begin proceedings, little knowing they had barely scratched the surface of a huge conspiracy that, within a day, would see four hijacked US jets attack America.
Within hours of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon alarm bells were ringing, not just at the headquarters of the French intelligence service but among police and intelligence services across Europe, all of which had been tracking similar groups and individuals, and catching hints of similar plots so appalling that they almost beggared belief.
Slowly, an appalling realisation began to dawn: the men they had been following, watching and waiting to make their move, were miles ahead of them. War had been declared by the terrorist months - perhaps years - before. And they hadn't noticed.
Twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, police in Belgium and Holland told the French they could not wait for their byzantine legal system to crank into action before acting against Takfir. They raided addresses linked to Beghal, unravelling a vast network of cells planning a series of attacks on prominent targets later in the year. All of these arrests were made possible because of information supplied by Beghal to French anti-terrorist officials who flew to Dubai last weekend.
Thanks to his evidence, the full scale and scope of what was intended finally began to become clear to police and intelligence agencies across Europe and the US. It consisted of a loose network of groups in Germany, France, Spain and UK, all with the same aim in mind: attacks on US interests across the globe.
Among the planned attacks, police now know, was one on the US consulate in Marseille, and a plot to kill President Bush and other G8 leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialised nations. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said last week his government provided information to the United States about possible attacks on the Genoa summit by terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden. 'There was a question of an airplane stuffed with explosives,' said Mubarak. 'As a result, precautions were taken. But no one imagined that Boeings full of passengers were going to crash into buildings.'
Last Friday French police finally smashed down the door of Beghal's flat in Paris. But Daoudi, the 'Commander of Corbeil', was not at home. Having been alerted to Beghal's arrest by an article in the French press he had escaped the raid on the flat. When police burst in at 1.30am they found mobile phones and bomb-manufacturing equipment but no Daoudi. The presumed number two of Takfir Wal-Hijra's French operation had fled, along with the simcards and chips for the cell phones used by the organisation.
Daoudi's father, Tahar Daoudi, said last week that his son had lived a peaceful life in Paris's chic fifth arrondissement until, in straitened circumstances, the family of Algerian origin was forced to move out to the suburbs of Paris.
'He was a brilliant boy,' said Tahar Daoudi of his son. 'We arrived in France when he was five years old and in the following year he was brilliant in school. Later he started specialising in computer studies, but finally he decided he didn't want to work any more.
'When we moved he changed all his friends. He was very generous and they got a lot of money out of him - all the money that was supposed to pay for his studies.
'We were furious with him and threw him out of the house. I was furious with him for hanging around with kids who filled his head full of nonsense. I saw him for his civil marriage in 1999, but that was pretty much it.'
Yet this once generous computer whizz-kid was now on the run from international security services, with police closing in on his seven associates. Where would he go? Who could he turn to to offer him a safe haven? It appears there was only one choice - Britain, where a sophisticated Islamist support network operated in every major city.
A mile from the centre of Leicester on the Prospect Hill estate, Muslims in the predominantly Asian community were going about their everyday lives. Some were going to the local mosque in Asfordby Street, others were doing some early morning shopping at the nearby Hill View Stores or getting their children ready for school.
Four days after the Paris raids there was no reason for this quiet Leicester community to expect the events across the Channel were about to have any impact on them.
Just before 8am on Tuesday the sirens of dozens of police cars shattered the morning peace. Armed anti-terrorist officers surrounded the house where Daoudi was sheltering and, as the doors were smashed in with a battering ram, the area was sealed off. Three men were arrested, two from Prospect Hill and one from an upstairs flat in Rolleston Street around the corner.
Scotland Yard would not give any information other than that the arrests have been made in connection with the 'arrest of seven Arab suspects in Paris'.
One of the those arrested was described as an intense, serious man, tall and well-built and very protective of his wife, who always wore a veil.
The next day French television named the individual who had escaped the police raids in France and been caught in Britain. It was Daoudi. In four days, a man alleged to have been an explosives and computer expert for one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world had slipped quietly into the UK.
Despite these arrests in Leicester, British police were keen to dampen down fears that the country was a key base for Islamic terrorists. By yesterday Daoudi's run was over. France's most wanted terrorist was back in France, quickly extradited by the UK, and in the custody of the anti-terrorist police the DST.
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http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,560733,00.html
The secret war. Part 2
Police believe up to 30 more 'spectaculars' are planned
The secret war. Part 1
War on Terrorism - Observer special
Martin Bright, Antony Barnett, Burhan Wazir, Tony Thompson and Peter Beaumont in London; Stuart Jeffries in Paris; Ed Vulliamy in Washington; Kate Connolly in Berlin; Giles Tremlett in Madrid; Rory Carroll in Rome
Sunday September 30, 2001
The Observer
His name was Mohamed Atta and he would soon be notorious for flying a hijacked jet into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Three of the dead hijackers, police would quickly establish, had come from Hamburg.
A team of agents dispatched by the FBI to Germany has been focusing on the northern city of Hamburg, where three of the men who died in the planes and four others who were on the FBI's initial list of suspects studied at universities. Investigations have spread to other universities throughout the country thought to have links with the terrorist cell. In several German states, investigations were last week under way to uncover hundreds of suspected 'sleepers'.
What has emerged in the past week is that - like Beghal and his friends in both Paris and London - Atta was not unknown to the authorities.
Indeed he was under surveillance between January and May last year after he was reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives and for biological warfare. The US agents reported to have trailed Atta are said to have failed to inform the German authorities about their investigation.
The disclosure that Atta was being trailed by police long before 11 September raises the question why the attacks could not have been prevented with the mens' arrest. The German interior ministry has defended the police, saying there was never enough information to lead to arrests, although suspicions were growing about what the men were up to. Indeed, so alarmed were the authorities that last year federal police ordered state prosecutors to investigate the structure of the bin Laden cells in Germany.
And like the group around Beghal, Atta's organisation was also using Britain both as a way station on its route to commit terror in the US, and as an alleged home base for some of those suspected of supporting them. The FBI has revealed that 11 of the hijackers who died in the US had been in transit through Britain. More seriously, US officials believe, the group associated with Atta also used Britain. Among this group was the so-called 'twentieth hijacker', 33-year-old Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman whose brother has accused Islamic fundamentalists in Britain of brainwashing him.
Moussaoui crossed the Channel in 1992, living in Brixton and hoping to get a job in international commerce and earn a good wage. Nine years later he was cheering in his American prison cell as he watched television pictures of passenger jets crashing into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
In August Moussaoui had been arrested in Minnesota after instructors at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy told police of the peculiar behaviour of the pupil who did not want to learn how to take-off or land - only how to maneuver the plane in the air.
Moussaoui's time in Britain appears to have been crucial to his transformation from hothead to active terrorist, nurtured in Britain's Islamist fringe. His brother, Abd-Samad Moussaoui, said: 'He began to change when he went to Britain. It was there that he got drawn into an extremist group. All alone in London he found friendships within the Islamic fundamentalist groups littered around London's mosques. I noticed a change in his attitude when he came back to France. He became racist, a black racist,' said his brother.
'I saw how they operate when my brother came back to France with a friend he had met in Britain. He was indoctrinating the friend, just as he had been indoctrinated himself, and his aim was to control all aspects of his life. He had become a little guru.'
Abd-Samad last saw his brother in the mid-1990s, when he tried one last time to turn him against on fundamentalism. But to no avail. His younger brother walked out and went to train in bin Laden camps in Afghanistan and Chechnya. The next time Abd-Samad saw his brother was on a list of suspected hijackers responsible for the US atrocities.
And Moussaoui was not alone. Also in Britain was another key figure US and European investigators now believe was key to the US end of the plot. What has also become clear in the past few days is that the story of the German, French and British cells is a story repeated across Europe. In bedsits and shared apartments across a continent, quiet young men were studying, working and praying - and meeting to prepare the secret war against the West, ordered by bin Laden and his closest lieutenants or by the leaders of the groups in alliance with him.
The picture is of a vast and nebulous terrorist organisation of affiliated networks, each with largely autonomous cells, but all working to the same end: targeting US interests around the world, each planning 'a spectacular'.
It was a conspiracy protected by its investment in the principal of 'redundancy'. The police could intercept one, two, even a dozen cells, but other cells would still remain actively pursuing their targets. It was a redundancy built into the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon themselves. Multiple teams hijacking multiple aircraft would ensure at least one reached its target.
The planned attacks on the G8 summit and US targets across Europe, investigators in Italy now suspect, were the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, yesterday it was revealed that Italy's secret service believed that up to 30 more 'spectaculars' may be in the pipeline, including a number envisaging some sort of airborne assault, some of them aimed at London and other European capitals, including the Vatican
According to Rodolfo Ronconi, head of Italian Interpol, there was a possibility that those involved in the attacks on America used Italy as cover to enter Europe. 'We are talking about sleeper cells,' Ronconi said last week.
The picture that Ronconi and other European officials have painted of the network of cells across Europe has been consistent with the methodology of bin Laden, the patient planner ready to invest years in setting up attacks, and allowing his men wide operational autonomy.
Indeed, a spate of terror scares which rattled Italy earlier this year is being revisited by intelligence agents to see if they can detect the hand of Osama bin Laden.
In January the US Embassy in Rome had its first security closure in a decade because of an alleged plot by three Algerians to launch a suicide attack. In April Italian police smashed what they said was another Islamic fundamentalist plot to bomb the European parliament in Strasbourg, France. An alternative target was said to be the cathedral in Strasbourg. Five suspected members of a terrorist group - all Tunisian and believed linked to Osama bin Laden - were arrested near Milan while German police seized another suspect in Munich.
'For the first time, we believe we can determine a direct link between Islamic terrorist cells and training camps in Afghanistan,' said Stefano Dambruoso, an investigating magistrate. The Milan cell allegedly recruited volunteers in Europe to be trained as mercenaries, trafficked arms and provided false identity papers.
In Spain, too anti-terrorist police were last week busy moving against other 'sleeper cells', descending on five towns and villages and arresting six Algerian migrant workers. The six men, allegedly members of the bin Laden-backed Group for Call and Combat, are likely to be charged with membership of an illegal armed group.
'This was a sleeper unit,' explained Spain's national police chief Juan Cotino last week. He described the group as also a support unit for other cells linked to bin Laden across Europe, providing forged documents, passports and credit cards.
Among those arrested in Cascante, a small town in northern Navarre, was 26-year-old Mohamed Belaziz, who was detained at the nondescript flat he shared with other Algerian migrant workers. Among his possessions - seized by police - was a diary, roughly scribbled in bad Arabic and even worse Spanish, which they claimed was proof of his contacts with a Europe-wide Islamic terror network.
A list of contacts included names in Britain, Ireland, Rome and Frankfurt. It also referred to a trip made, or due to be made, to London and Ireland. Police claimed Belaziz was a suicide bomber in the making.
The jottings in his diary certainly showed him to be depressed. 'All is emptiness. I hate life,' he wrote. 'They hate us. I am going to hold on, in Allah's name, but one day...' he adds, before trailing off in illegible Arabic.
Belaziz is believed to have been the right-hand man of Madjid Sahouane, owner of the Albadil, the only Islamic 'halal' butchery in nearby Pamplona. His workers yesterday insisted police had got the wrong man.
Sahouane, however, was often away, travelling in his white van, supposedly to buy produce in both Spain and France. Police suspect he was often on other business, following the instructions of the Salafist cell's leader, Mohamed Boualem Khnouni, alias Abdallah.
Boualem Khnouni's operations were based in the eastern town of l'Alcudia de Crespins. Like most of those arrested, he lived the life of an immigrant labourer, changing jobs and never appearing to be wealthy - although his flat was stuffed with computer and forgery equipment.
Spanish police said they had been watching him for nearly two years. He had moved into an apartment that had previously belonged to suspected members of Algeria's GIA group - which is, in turn, close to the Salafists. Banned in Britain, the Salafists were also on the list published last week of 27 groups and individuals whose funds the US wants to freeze.
With no proof that he had broken any laws, they had decided not to arrest the man they now say was in contact with some of Europe's most dangerous terrorists. When they finally acted, it was at the insistence of the Belgian investigating magistrate dealing with Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian suspected of plotting to blow up the Nato headquarters in Brussels. Trabelsi, the judge said, had travelled to Spain in July for meetings with the Salafists.
Not only had they been in contact with Nizar, but police said they had also provided support to another potentially lethal bin Laden cell, known by the codename 'Meliani'. This cell - broken up by police in Frankfurt, Milan and the Spanish city of Alicante over the past year - was made up of north Africans who had been through training camps in Afghanistan. They were armed with machine pistols, grenades and explosives. The Meliani cell's 12 members had been planning a bomb attack on Strasbourg Cathedral and another attack on the US embassy in Rome. Cell leader Mohamed Bensakhria was arrested in June in Alicante. He was described at the time as 'one of the most wanted men pursued by Western security services.'
In a crowded corner of the prayer room in Finsbury Park Mosque last night, Muslims huddled together to speak of Tafkir-wal-Hijra. The group, around 20-strong, are a regular presence at the mosque -Tafkir members regularly stand watchfully outside on Friday afternoons, distributing anti-Western literature. 'I remember them as hard line fundamentalists,' says Abu Saeed, 25, a Finsbury Park Mosque regular. Saeed, a self-described orthodox Muslim, says even he was surprised by the strength of Tafkir's anti-Western sentiments. 'But they don't look like fanatics as we know them,' he says. 'They're dressed like Westerners, have polite manner, but used to hand out literature saying that smoking and alcohol is punishable by death. Even by the standards of Finsbury Park Mosque, they were an extreme lot.'
Other visitors to the mosque recalled the group trying to recruit young men into their organisation. 'It's not like we think they are recruiting to fight a Jihad,' says one man. 'But they are asking young men to take a stand against what the Americans are doing to the Muslim Ummah.'
That 'stand' - for some at least within the group - envisaged mass murder.
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MIM: In a report on the case mentioned in the "Rotten" website above the 4 men arrested in Michigan in 2002 as part of a sleeper cell were labelled as Takfiris. The article below calls them Salafis which is only partially correct. Al Qaeda see themselves as Salafis. and the Takfiri sect is connected to both groups . The designation of Takfiri means those who totally assimilate often for years, and suddenly strike using their 'normal' identities as a cover.
.S. says 4 men plotted world terror from Detroit
Combat cell is tied to stolen IDs, data on airports
August 29, 2002
BY DAVID ASHENFELTER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
A federal grand jury in Detroit charged four Middle Eastern men Wednesday with operating what prosecutors called a sleeper combat cell that conspired to help plot terrorist attacks in the United States and overseas.
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The 24-page indictment said the men operated the cell from apartments in Dearborn and Detroit and provided stolen IDs, phony licenses and airport security information to help terrorists plot violent attacks in the United States, Jordan and Turkey.
Among the possible targets, the grand jury said, were Disneyland in California, the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, a hospital in Amman, Jordan, and an American air base in Incirlik, Turkey, from which U.S. warplanes patrol northern Iraq.
As the Detroit indictment was unveiled, prosecutors in Seattle also charged one man with trying to set up a terrorist training camp to support Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
U.S. officials said they expected several more such indictments in coming months as the FBI and other federal agencies attempt to halt the flow of money and support from the United States to terror groups overseas.
Charged in the Detroit indictment were Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 22; Ahmed Hannan, 34, and Karim Koubriti, 24, who were arrested six days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when federal agents raided their flat in southwest Detroit. Hannan and Koubriti have been in custody for nearly a year. Ali-Haimoud was released, but was arrested again in March and is now in custody.
Also charged was their alleged handler, a mystery man from Chicago known only as Abdella, who was indicted with the three men for misuse of fraudulent immigration documents in March, but who remains at large. A fifth man, Youssef Hmimssa, 37, a former roommate of Hannan and Koubriti, is named in the indictment but is not accused of any crime. He still faces fraudulent document charges from September.
Ali-Haimoud's lawyer, Kevin Ernst of Detroit, accused the government of building a bogus case against his client, Hannan and Koubriti in a desperate attempt to show progress in the war on terror as the Sept. 11 anniversary approaches. The government appears to be building its case on Hmimssa, Ernst said.
"As far as I can tell, it's based on this uncorroborated debriefing of this snitch, Hmimssa," Ernst said. "What's kind of scary about this is that basically every Arab person in this country is one snitch away from being on the business end of a terrorism indictment."
The government's chief prosecutor in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Convertino, denied that.
"Those comments were unwarranted, purposefully inflammatory and wholly untrue," Convertino said. "The government intends to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law and not through the press."
Prosecutors said the terrorist cell began to take root in Dearborn in February 1998. The indictment suggested the men were involved with an Islamic extremist movement known as Salafiyya, which became associated with Al Qaeda.
In the spring and summer of 2001, according to the indictment, Koubriti, Hannan and Ali-Haimoud obtained jobs with food vendors at Detroit's Metro Airport, where they scouted for security lapses that would allow access to planes.
Someone kept a day planner -- found during the Detroit raid last September -- that had drawings apparently depicting plans for attacks on the air base in Turkey and the hospital in Jordan, the indictment said. Agents also discovered videotapes that appeared to depict surveillance of Disneyland and the MGM casino in Las Vegas.
The indictment charged that the men were part of a worldwide plot to wage a jihad, or holy war, against the United States. It said the four men operated as a "covert underground support unit for terrorist attacks within and outside the United States, as well as a sleeper operational combat cell."
Their goal, the indictment said, was to inflict economic damage against the United States by recruiting, indoctrinating and training others in their cause. They allegedly set up safe houses and mail drops, collected intelligence information about potential terrorism targets and obtained weapons and false documents to assist with terrorist attacks that were planned in Jordan, Turkey and the United States. No known attacks were carried out.
The indictment said Ali-Haimoud, Hannan and Koubriti, who lived together in homes in the 1300 block of Riverside in Dearborn and 2600 block of Norman Street in Detroit, worked for Abdella. The indictment described Abdella as an expert in airport security operations, the fraudulent use of telephone calling cards and the manufacturing and acquisition of false identification. Abdella used many aliases, the government alleges, including Jean Pierre Tardelli, George Labibe, Hussein Mohsen Safiddine and Nabil Hayamm.
Ali-Haimoud, Hannan and Koubriti met with an unidentified man, possibly Hmimssa, in their apartment on Riverside in June 2001 to try to recruit the man to participate in the jihad, the government alleges.
The indictment said the trio planned "to elicit the other individual's assistance in bringing like-minded brothers into the United States by creating false documentation to facilitate their illegal entry into the United States and travel abroad."
When agents arrested Koubriti, Hannan and Ali-Haimoud last September, the three had not been in the agents' sights. They had gone to the flat in search of Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston cabbie,who was on the FBI's watch list of suspected terrorists. Almarabh, who was described by authorities last fall as an associate of bin Laden, had moved out of the apartment two weeks before agents arrived.
During the search, Koubriti told agents he was holding fraudulent immigration documents left by Hmimssa, a former roommate. The documents included a forged passport, visa and INS identification card. Some of them bore a Hmimssa alias -- Michael Saisa.
Although U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a news conference Oct. 31 that Ali-Haimoud, Hannan and Koubriti had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, he later retracted the statement. Wednesday's indictment is the first time the government has officially accused the men of terrorist activities.
Lawyers in the case met with U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen late Wednesday and agreed to postpone the trial, set for Sept. 17, for the four men.
The men were previously charged in indictments in September and March with multiple counts of committing fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other immigration documents. Those charges carry maximum penalties of 5 to 25 years in prison and $250,000 fines. The latest charge, providing material support or resources to terrorists, carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. If the government can prove anyone died as a result of the activities, the maximum sentence is life in prison.
Hmimssa, the man thought to be cooperating with prosecutors, was arrested in Chicago in May 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks, in an alleged credit-card fraud scheme. He is accused of persuading a waiter at a Chicago-area restaurant to scan credit card numbers of customers, which Hmimssa allegedly downloaded into a computer. Hmimssa allegedly used the credit card numbers to buy more than $100,000 worth of computer equipment and other merchandise.
On June 1, 2001, a federal judge released Hmimssa on a $25,000 unsecured bond in the Chicago case and he disappeared. In late September federal agents arrested him in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Ali-Haimoud, Hannan and Koubriti are being held in the Wayne County Jail and Hmimssa is at the federal prison at Milan.
The original target of the Detroit raid, Almarabh, was arrested Sept. 19 at a convenience store near Chicago. Although federal authorities initially said Almarabh was a close associate of bin Laden, they said in July that he wasn't involved in the terrorist attacks. Immigration officials have decided to deport him to Syria. He remains in custody in New York.
Federal officials haven't said what caused them to change their mind about Almarabh or whether he actually knew bin Laden.
Almarabh had been in the Detroit area since at least the summer of 2000, obtaining five Michigan driver's licenses in 13 months. He trained in Dearborn to drive big trucks, and earned a commercial driver's license and a permit to haul hazardous cargo.
In the Seattle case, American citizen and Muslim activist James Ujaama was accused in a two-count indictment Wednesday of trying to set up a training camp and providing support to Al Qaeda.
Ujaama's indictment came weeks after he was first arrested in Denver and held as a material witness in the terrorism investigation. He has maintained his innocence.
Investigators in Detroit and Las Vegas are looking into whether there is a connection betweenthe men indicted in Detroit Wednesday and a case unfolding in Las Vegas.
During the September raid in Detroit, agents found what they say appeared to be a surveillance video of the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. In June, 10 men were arrested in Las Vegas after attempting to cash counterfeit checks at the MGM casino. Then in July, federal authorities arrested Omar Shishani, 48, of Dearborn, at Detroit Metro Airport as he got off a plane from Indonesia. He was carrying $12 million in similar phony cashiers' checks in his bags, officials said.
None of the men in Las Vegas has been charged with terrorism-related crimes, said Natalie Collins, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office there.
Collins said she could not comment on whether a connection exists between the arrests there and Wednesday's indictments.
Contact DAVID ASHENFELTER at 313-223-4490 or [email protected]. Staff writers Tamara Audi, Ben Schmitt, Kim North Shine, Dan Shine and Niraj Warikoo contributed to this report. The Associated Press also contributed.
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/story/0,9171,1101011112-182881-4,00.html
Monday, Nov. 12, 2001
Hate Club
An in-depth look at al-Qaeda, the sprawling terror network through which Osama bin Laden exploits the borderless globe with a secret army driven by a ruthless new brand of extremism
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT
"You know that al-Qaeda exists from Algeria to the Philippines...it's everywhere." --from a conversation secretly taped by the Italian police on March 22; the speaker was Essid Sami ben Khemais, a Tunisian arrested the next month for alleged terrorist offenses
It was the worst crime in American history, and it has triggered the greatest dragnet ever known. The investigation into the atrocities of Sept. 11 has involved police forces across the U.S. and around the world. From Michigan to Malaysia, from San Diego to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, law-enforcement agencies have been trying to figure out how the terrorists carried out their attacks, who helped them--and what they might do next. Along the way, the American public has been introduced to a confusing mass of names and faces and has learned of more links between them than any but the most nimble fingered could ever untangle. After nearly two months, there is much that we know about the global terrorist network that goes by the name of al-Qaeda--but an awful lot that is still hunch. Still, an international investigation by TIME into al-Qaeda's structure reveals that it is more global in its range, and more ruthless in its ideology, than all but its most dedicated students could have ever imagined.
The essential story of Sept. 11 is straightforward. A group of 19 men spent months in the U.S. preparing for the hijackings. The cell had earlier been headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, where its alleged ringleader, an Egyptian named Mohamed Atta, 33, had lived off and on for eight years. Atta is thought to have piloted Flight 11, the first to make impact; two of the other suspected pilots, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, were also residents of the Hamburg region. The Hamburg cell, in turn, is thought to have been an operating unit of a worldwide network of terrorists called al-Qaeda, the name of whose reclusive leader is now known all over the world: Osama bin Laden.
Al-Qaeda had its origins in the long war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After Soviet troops invaded the country in 1979, Muslims flocked to join the local mujahedin in fighting them. In Peshawar, Pakistan, which acted as the effective headquarters of the resistance, a group whose spiritual leader was a Palestinian academic called Abdallah Azzam established a service organization to provide logistics and religious instruction to the fighters. The operation came to be known as al-Qaeda al-Sulbah--the "solid base." Much of its financing came from bin Laden, an acolyte of Azzam's who was one of the many heirs to a huge Saudi fortune derived from a family construction business. Also in Peshawar was Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who had been a constant figure in the bewildering mosaic of radical Islamic groups since the late 1970s. Al-Zawahiri, who acted primarily as a physician in Peshawar, led a group usually called Al Jihad; by 1998, his organization was effectively merged into al-Qaeda.
In 1989, while on his way with his two sons to Friday prayers in Peshawar, Azzam was killed by a massive explosion. His killers have never been identified; Azzam had many enemies. But by the time of his death, the group around al-Qaeda were debating what to do with the skills and resources that they had acquired. The decision was taken to keep the organization intact and use it to fight for a purer form of Islam. The initial target was not the U.S. but the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which al-Qaeda claimed were corrupt and too beholden to the U.S. It was only after the Gulf War, by which time bin Laden had moved his operations to Sudan (he would later be forced to shift back to Afghanistan), that he started to target Americans. To all but insiders, he first became notorious in 1998, when al-Qaeda operatives exploded truck bombs at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 12 Americans and hundreds of locals. Since then there has been a steady drumbeat of attacks linked to al-Qaeda--some successful, some not--on American targets and those of U.S. allies around the world.
Al-Qaeda has its headquarters in training camps in Afghanistan. In addition to directing its own attacks, it acts as an umbrella group, financing and subcontracting operations to local networks like Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (gia), a terrorist organization active throughout Europe. The camps in Afghanistan play a vital role. Whatever network they may originally have been aligned with, visitors to the camps meet men from other groups, forge relationships and acquire the stature of soldiers in a holy war. The high command of the group includes bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian who was identified in an American court case in July as the organizer of the camps and who investigators believe may be al-Qaeda's director of international operations.
Some of the best leads on al-Qaeda's directorate now seem to be coming from Djamel Beghal, a French-Algerian who is suspected of being an al-Qaeda ringleader and who was arrested in Dubai in July on his way from Pakistan to Europe. After being convinced by Islamic scholars in Dubai of the evils of terrorism, Beghal started talking. (He is now back in France and has attempted to retract his confession.) Beghal has said that while in Afghanistan in March, he received instructions from Abu Zubaydah on a bombing campaign against American interests in Europe, including the Paris embassy. "He's talking about very important figures in the al-Qaeda structure, right up to bin Laden's inner circle," a European official told TIME. "He's mentioned names, responsibilities and functions--people we weren't even aware of before. This is important stuff."
Though al-Qaeda has its roots in Afghanistan, investigators now think that the "Afghan" nature of the group is subtly changing. The war against the Soviets ended in 1991. Increasingly, al-Qaeda's captains in the field are too young ever to have fought in Afghanistan, though some may have joined Islamic brigades in Chechnya--or in Bosnia, as Abu Zubaydah did. Many of the new fighters were born and raised not in the Arab lands but in the Muslim communities of Europe, around which they travel with ease. And there is a growing sense that a number of them are "Takfiris," followers of an extremist Islamic ideology called Takfir wal Hijra (Anathema and Exile). That's bad news: by blending into host communities, Takfiris attempt to avoid suspicion. A French official says they come across as "regular, fun-loving guys--but they'd slit your throat or bomb your building in a second."
In addition to the ruthless nature of al-Qaeda's soldiers, investigators now also appreciate just how extensive are its tentacles. In mid-October, for example, NATO forces in Bosnia foiled a plot to attack U.S. and British targets there. Bensayah Belkacem, an Algerian thought to be at the center of a Bosnia-based terror group, had the number of Abu Zubaydah on a chit of paper in his apartment. On Oct. 28, Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group in the Philippines that authorities believe has been supported in the past by al-Qaeda, bombed a food market, killing six people. And the Ugandan government announced that it had detained eight men on suspicion of belonging to al-Qaeda. How did one organization with an extremist ideology manage to acquire a reach that trembles governments from Bosnia to the Philippines to Uganda?
The Borderless World
"Globalization means interdependence," says Edmund Hull, U.S. ambassador to Yemen and former State Department counterterrorism chief. "We have previously seen the benefits of this interdependence. Now we are seeing its risks." That goes to the heart of any attempt to understand al-Qaeda. For the past decade, globalization has been understood as an economic process, rooted in the trade of goods and services. But the defining characteristic of our new world is not the movement of products or money but of people. Cheap air transport, the effects of decolonization and a population explosion in the poorer parts of the world have combined to create an unprecedented movement of humanity from one nation to another. Travel and emigration have broadened the mind and brought unparalleled opportunities to countless families. But they have also helped create havens for those seduced by the romance of terrorism.
French investigators believe Kamel Daoudi is one such recruit; his tale illuminates both the nature of modern terrorist cells and their global reach. Daoudi was the kind of child that immigrant parents dream of having. The son of Algerians who had immigrated to France, he took the tough post-high school exams a year early and started to study computer sciences at a university in Paris. But he found the courses difficult, and according to reports, a family row exploded in 1999 when Daoudi's father found evidence of his son's appointments with psychiatrists. Daoudi left for Britain, his pockets bulging with the $11,000 his family had saved for his education.
On Sept. 21, he made the same trip; this time, running not from his family but from the law. Daoudi slipped away from his apartment on the Boulevard John F. Kennedy after police across Europe started to round up the network that Beghal had assembled for his operations. (French investigators think Daoudi was the computer-and-communications whiz kid of the group.) Daoudi knew Britain well. He and Beghal had hung out there with Jerome Courtailler, one of two French brothers who had converted to Islam. For a while, Courtailler lived in south London with Zacarias Moussaoui, another French child of disappointed immigrant parents. Moussaoui grew up in the southern French town of Narbonne but left for Britain in 1992 and took a degree at London's South Bank University. Earlier this year, he enrolled in an Oklahoma flight school that had been visited by two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and German authorities say he had called the house in Hamburg used by Atta. In August, after suspicious behavior at another flight school in Minnesota, Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges. Today he is incarcerated in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, refusing to speak to investigators. Daoudi, who was picked up in the British town of Leicester, sits silent in a French jail. "He isn't giving an inch," says a French official. His lawyer denies that Daoudi has ever been involved in plotting terrorist attacks.
Children of immigrants, Muslims in Europe, highly skilled, Daoudi and Moussaoui epitomize the kind of person investigators now think provides some of al-Qaeda's key recruits. Above all, both men were true global citizens; Moussaoui, a child of the warm south, ended up in the state where ice fishing is a favorite sport. As they dig deeper, law-enforcement agencies are beginning to understand just how effectively globalization has spread terrorism around the planet.
Consider two countries half a world apart and far from the Islamic heartlands: the Philippines and Britain. It was in Manila, that most Catholic of cities, that Mohammed Sadeek Odeh found his vocation. Sentenced to life imprisonment on Oct. 18 for his part in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Odeh seemed to have lived the predictable life of an al-Qaeda operative--he was born to exiled Palestinians in Saudi Arabia and grew up in Jordan. Yet he turned to radical Islam while studying engineering in the Philippines. It was there that Odeh first saw and heard videos and taped messages from Abdallah Azzam. In 1990 Odeh moved to Pakistan, and from there to the camps in Afghanistan and a new life as a soldier in al-Qaeda.
Other Muslims who had studied in the Philippines maintained links there. It was from Manila that Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, hatched a plan to blow up 12 American airliners as they flew over the Pacific. In the mid-1990s, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, married to one of bin Laden's sisters, allegedly funded Islamic schools in the south of the country, where Muslim insurgents have been fighting for years. The Filipino government has long claimed that Abu Sayyaf, the most bloodthirsty of the groups--its specialty is beheadings--has been supported by al-Qaeda. Abdurajak Janjalani, the group's late founder, fought in Afghanistan, reportedly with bin Laden and Yousef. The links may be a thing of the past; these days Abu Sayyaf's style runs more to kidnapping and ransom than to jihad. Still, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo recently said Khalifa had offered to secure the release by Abu Sayyaf of 18 hostages, including an American missionary couple.
About the only thing that Manila has in common with London is damp--that and a reputation for giving succor to terrorist supporters. Britain has always had a habit of providing safe haven to political refugees; that's why Karl Marx is buried in Highgate cemetery. But in the past 20 years, says Neil Partrick, a Middle East analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, London has become "the capital of the Arab world." As they used to say in Britain: Whoever lost the Lebanese civil war, London won it. With Beirut in ruins, banks relocated from Lebanon; they were followed by Arabs from Saudi Arabia and the gulf who summered in Kensington Gardens, journalists, members of opposition groups--and radical Islamic clerics.
One such preacher, Abu Hamza al-Masri, arrived in 1981, having left one eye and both hands in Afghanistan. He was granted British citizenship in 1985, and his mosque in Finsbury Park, tucked among Victorian row houses one tube stop from Arsenal's soccer stadium, has become famous worldwide for preaching jihad. Moussaoui, the Courtailler brothers and Beghal all attended prayers there. Beghal is said also to be a follower of Abu Qatada, a radical who preached jihad from a community center on Baker Street and whose bank account, allegedly with $270,000 in it, was frozen by the Bank of England in mid-October.
London's dirty secret is that it has long been a recruiting ground for terrorists. French authorities moan with frustration at the lack of British cooperation. For years the French were unable to get London to extradite suspected members of the Algeria-based gia, responsible for a wave of bombings in Paris in the mid-1990s. The U.S. hasn't always had better luck; Americans have been trying to get their hands on Khalid al-Fawwaz, a London-based Saudi alleged to have set up an office for bin Laden in 1994 and now wanted for trial in relation to the African embassy bombings. (Al-Fawwaz's legal maneuverings have just reached Britain's highest court.)
The gears of British justice are starting to grind more quickly. London has detained and questioned a number of Sept. 11 suspects, including Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian alleged to have helped train the suicide pilots in the attacks. And last week Yasser al-Siri, whose bookstore and website are well known in London, was charged with conspiracy to murder Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban Afghan Northern Alliance. Massoud died after assassins bombed his headquarters on Sept. 9.
But al-Siri's case demonstrates the oddities of the international legal system. He is in Britain on asylum from Egypt, where he was sentenced to death for the attempted murder of the Prime Minister in 1993, a charge he denies. "That was a military court," he told Time before his arrest. "I'm a civilian." Governments across Western Europe, their feet held to the fire by strong civil-liberties groups, have been protective of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. And while the European Union has demolished barriers to the movement of goods and people, its 15 nations have been slow to develop common institutions of criminal justice and investigation. For Atta and his cell of alleged conspirators in Hamburg, the characteristics of modern European life were a godsend. In addition to the hijackers known to have lived there, other men alleged to be part of the Hamburg cell have had arrest warrants issued for them: Said Bahaji, Zakariya Essabar and Ramzi Binalshibh. German officials believe that last spring both Essabar and Binalshibh tried to get to the U.S. to take flying lessons. The three almost certainly arrived in Pakistan from Germany on Sept. 4 and have since gone to ground--possibly in Afghanistan.
Hamburg was an ideal long-term base; 1 in 7 of the city's population is foreign, as is 1 in 5 of the students at Atta's college. (Foreign students pay no tuition in Germany.) Atta and his friends could have stayed as long as they liked--Germany invented the perpetual student--since they had legal residence, could travel freely around the E.U. or leave it for a period, without arousing suspicion. It is hard to think of a way of life that so epitomized the promise of a borderless world and then perverted globalization to such an evil end.
Young and Ruthless
After seven weeks of investigations there is no hard evidence that links the Hamburg cell to any other. There are fragments of a puzzle--Atta made a 10-day trip to Spain from Miami in July that continues to bother investigators, while French sources still think that Moussaoui may be connected to the Hamburg cell--but many pieces are missing.
For example: Was Mohammed Bensakhria, an Algerian arrested in June by Spanish police, bin Laden's key European lieutenant? If so, is there an American equivalent--and has he been picked up in the dragnet after the attacks? Did al-Qaeda's reputed training-camp chief Abu Zubaydah leave Afghanistan before Sept. 11, as European officials believe, and if so, where is he and what is he doing?
On one matter, however, European investigators are clear: there is something truly ruthless about the suspected terrorists they are finding. After six Algerians were picked up in Spain in September, police found videotapes in the apartment of one of the men. One tape showed four Algerian soldiers, with their throats cut, dying in a burning jeep.
For experts in terrorism, such incidents are suggestive. In Egypt in the 1960s, the Islamic ideology Takfir wal Hijra began to win adherents among extremist groups. One of them, the Society of Muslims, was led by Shukri Mustafa, an agricultural engineer. Mustafa denounced other Muslims as unbelievers and preached a "withdrawal" into a purity of the kind practiced by the Prophet Muhammad when he withdrew from Mecca to Medina. The ideology is particularly dangerous because it provides a religious justification for slaughtering not just unbelievers but also those who think of themselves as Muslim. Intensely undemocratic--for to accept the authority of anyone but God would be a blasphemy--Takfir wal Hijra is a sort of Islamic fascism.
European analysts now believe that Takfir thinking has won converts among terrorist groups. Beghal is Takfiri, and Daoudi is thought to be. Roland Jacquard, one of the world's leading scholars on Islamic terrorism, says flatly, "Atta was Takfiri." It is not just soldiers of al-Qaeda who may be following the Takfir line. Mustafa was executed in 1978, but his ideas lived on; the beliefs of al-Zawahiri's Al Jihad were dominated by Takfiri themes. Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, says of Zawahiri, "He is their ideologue now...His ideas negate the existence of common ground with others."
Bin Laden and al-Qaeda may have learned, by violent experience, to pre-empt and harness the new fanaticism. In late 1995, bin Laden's compound in Khartoum was attacked by gunmen believed to be Takfiri. A Sudanese friend of bin Laden's who questioned the surviving attacker said, "He was like a maniac, more or less like the students in the U.S.A. who shoot other students. They don't have very clear objectives." By the time al-Qaeda had resettled in Afghanistan, ideological training was an integral part of the curriculum, according to a former recruit who went on to bomb the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. Students were asked to learn all about demolition, artillery and light-weapon use, but they were also expected to be familiar with the fatwas of al-Qaeda, including those that called for violence against Muslim rulers who contradicted Islam--a basic Takfiri tenet. French terrorism expert Jacquard describes Takfiri indoctrination this way: "Takfir is like a sect: once you're in, you never get out. The Takfir rely on brainwashing and an extreme regime of discipline to weed out the weak links and ensure loyalty and obedience from those taken as members."
The results of the boot camps are die-hard but undetectable soldiers of the movement. "The Takfir," says Jacquard, "are the hard core of the hard core: they are the ones who will be called upon to organize and execute the really big attacks." French officials think that Takfiri beliefs have bred a distinct form of terrorism. "The goal of Takfir," says one, "is to blend into corrupt societies in order to plot attacks against them better. Members live together, will drink alcohol, eat during Ramadan, become smart dressers and ladies' men to show just how integrated they are."
For law-enforcement officials, the Takfiri connection is terrible news. By assimilating into host societies--some won't even worship with other Muslims--it's easy for Takfiris to escape detection. Those stories of the Sept. 11 hijackers drinking in bars and carousing in Las Vegas may now have an explanation. Jarrah's cousin Salim, who lives in the German town of Greifswald, claims that they "used to go to church more than to the mosque." Jarrah, says Salim, loved discos--"We didn't need veiled women and all that"--and sneaked shots of whiskey during a family wedding. He makes Jarrah sound like a normal guy, and normal guys aren't easy to catch.
Bolting the Door
Those charged with catching terrorists won't stop trying. And governments are reassessing their policies on immigration, asylum and open borders. New legislation is promised in Canada, Britain and Germany; the talks this year when Mexican and American officials seriously considered not tightening, but liberalizing, their immigration policies now bear the sad echo of a lost world.
The American refugee program, which had been responsible for bringing about 80,000 people into the U.S., is barely alive; President Bush hasn't signed its annual authorization. Last week Bush announced further measures to bolt the nation's door, including the formation of a Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force to coordinate federal efforts to keep terrorists out and hunt them down if they slip in. Authorities will now check to see that those who enter the U.S. on student visas actually attend school. But there is an air of desperation to the proposals. "This was not an immigration failure; it was an intelligence failure," says Charles Keely, professor of international migration at Georgetown University.
In Washington, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is regarded as a mess; even its spokesman, Russ Bergeron, says it has "languished for decades." In 1996 Congress told the INS to set up a computer system to track those who come into the U.S. on student visas; but with some 600,000 such people in a country with more than 22,000 educational institutions, the system is not yet up and running. Only one of the 19 hijackers entered on a student visa. Can screenings in foreign countries be tightened? Maybe, but all 19 were run through a computerized "watch list" of suspected terrorists when they applied for visas (at least six were interviewed personally). Nothing turned up. In any event, as Kathleen Newland, co-director of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, says, "The facts remain the same." Globalization will continue to spin people around the world. The U.S. will continue to have two enormous land borders with peaceful neighbors; we're never going to see watch towers along the 49th parallel. Each year, says Newland, there are 489 million border crossings into the U.S., involving 127 million passenger vehicles; each year, 820,000 planes and 250,000 ships enter U.S. airspace or waters. However terrorism is beaten, it won't be by American border controls.
Will it be by war? In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, there was a hope that police work might be able to rid the world of al-Qaeda and its associates. But the more we know of bin Laden's group, the less that seems likely, and not just because its operatives are ruthlessly fanatic.
Perhaps the single most important truth learned in seven weeks is the existence of a creepy camaraderie, an international bond among terrorists. Those ties are forged in Afghanistan. "The one thing that absolutely everyone involved in terrorist groups has in common," says a European official, "is passage through the al-Qaeda camps. When leaders are sent from Afghanistan to start organizing people, there are no questions asked: the camp experience allows everyone to recognize the bona fides of jihad." The B-52s pounding away from 40,000 ft. may not look like sleuths and cops. But if al-Qaeda's sinister appeal and global reach are ever to be broken, the bombers too must play their part.
With reporting by Reported by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Helen Gibson and James L. Graff/London, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Viveca Novak/Washington, with other bureaus
MIM: Information on the founder of Al Takfir Al Hijra :
http://www.pwhce.org/shukri.html
Biography Shukri Mustafa was born on 1st June 1942, in the village of Abu Khurus, 30 kilometres south of Asyut in Middle Egypt, a short distance from the Qutb family home town of Musha. The area has been described as a breeding ground for Islamists, and in the rare occasions that Egyptian police penetrated to Abu Khurus, the villagers hid in caves near the village. In his youth, Shukri was relocated to Asyut, after his father repudiated his mother.1 1 Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt, p73. In 1965, while studying agricultural sciences at an Islamic-run agricultural college, Shukri was arrested for distributing Muslim Brotherhood literature.2 The Muslim Brotherhood is a Salafi organisation that was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928 with the goal of establishing an Islamic State in Egypt as a prelude to a pan-Islamic Caliphate. 2 Kepel, p74. Jama'at al-Muslimun aka Takfir w'al-Hijra During his stay in Abu Zubal prison, Shukri was part of a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group, Jama'at al-Muslimun (Muslim Society), which implemented a particularly radical interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's text Ma'alim fi'l-Tariq (Milestones on the Road). The group separated itself from the other prisoners and declared them to be infidels on the basis that they were willing to collaborate with the regime of Gamal Abd al-Nasser against Israel.3 Although the group broke up when its leader was convinced by scholars that he was in error, Shukri Mustafa re-founded the group outside prison in 1971,4 after the Egyptian Government liberalised its policies towards Muslim radicals under President Anwar Sadat. 3 Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, 1990, p16. Shukri's Jama'at al-Muslimun practiced a radical withdrawal from jahili5 society, rejecting the allegedly corrupt practices of contemporary Egyptians. According to Shukri's group, their nascent 'true' Islamic society (jama'at) was in a 'phase of weakness' analogous to that experienced by Muhammad during his period of Da'wa (preaching) in Mecca. Before direct action could be brought to bear by the group, it had to build its strength in isolation, which necessitated migration (hijra) away from the corrupting influence of jahili society. 5 Jahiliyya means the state of pagan pre-Islamic ignorance. The definition of jahiliyya was expanded in the works of Ibn Taymiyya and still further by Maulana Maududi, to encompass all of 'apostate' society. The name al-Takfir w'al-Hijra was applied to Jama'at al-Muslimin by journalists after the group became publicly known. As a descriptive name Takfir w'al-Hijra has far more utility than Jama'at al-Muslimin. Takfir is a verb which means to declare kufr (infidel), that is, to excommunicate. The Hijra is the flight or migration of Muhammad and his jama'at from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) in 622 AD. Takfir w'al-Hijra's modus operandi during the 'phase of weakness' is summed up by Shukri's statement: If the Jews or anyone else came, our movement ought not to fight in the ranks of the Egyptian army, but on the contrary ought to flee to a secure position. In general, our line is to flee before the external and internal enemy alike, and not to resist him.6 6 Kepel, pp83-84. This quote sums up the aspects of Shukri's ideology that Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj emphatically rejected. The next few paragraphs will explore the different ideas embedded in the quote. Takfir wa'l-Hijra's migration took three forms. · Initially, the group travelled to caves in the mountains, away from populated areas. · Some men in the group travelled to oil-bearing states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, to earn money and enrich the organisation. After such a tour, the man was entitled to take a wife. · Married couples in the group lived communally in rented 'furnished apartments', in which they attempted to create an ideal Islamic community.7 7 Kepel, pp89-90. Takfir wa'l-Hijra's I'tizal or separation from Egyptian Society, which was expressed by the doctrine of hijra, remains important to radical Islamists today. It was also tied up with the idea that the supposedly jahili Egyptian state and society were a polluting influence to be avoided. Unlike the more 'moderate' heirs of the Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with the Egyptian regime, the takfiris considered the Egyptian state to be at least as objectionable as Israel.8 This distinction between takfiri radicals and collaborationist reformers continues to be an important division in Salafism. Ayman al-Zawahiri's early pamphlet, The Road to Jerusalem Passes Through Cairo, was an example of the takfiri emphasis on attacking the "near" or "internal" enemy (the apostate state) before the "far" or "external" enemy (Israel or the West). Al-Qaeda's break from the "Egypt first" policy during the 1990s created controversy amongst takfiri Salafis for this reason. 8 Kepel, p84. Ijtihaad and Maddhabs Another aspect of Shukri Mustafa's creed that is quintessentially Salafist is his rejection of the traditional schools of Sunni Islam, the Maddhabs. Mustafa believed that the Great Imams, the four ninth century scholars whose study of the sources of Islamic law had established four schools of mainstream Sunni Islamic law, had in fact placed themselves between man and God, usurping His prerogatives. The closure of the Baab al-Ijtihaad, or gate of interpretation, that followed the death of the last Great Imam, was decried by Mustafa. He proposed that the Qur'an and Ahadith4 be directly interpreted by Muslims, re-opening the baab al-ijtihaad. His radical theory is illustrated by this quote: We would like to call your attention to the following fact: Islam has been in decline ever since men have ceased to draw their lessons directly from the Qur'an and the Sunna, and have instead followed the tradition of other men, those who call themselves imams.9 9 Kepel pp79-80. Education and Science Shukri Mustafa's creed rejected modern education and science on the basis that there is no science except in God. He said that The Muslim is obligated to seek his path and knowledge before God alone, and so-called knowledge, which is actually no knowledge at all because it is not founded in the Lord, is forbidden. This marked an important point in Salafism's gradual turning away from modernist rationalism. Placed alongside his views about rationalist interpretation of the Qur'an, this point of view reveals the contradictory nihilism of contemporary takfiri radicalism, which, by rejecting both modernist rationalism and traditionalism, is left with no rudder but the most base of human instincts, resulting in a descent into violence and alienation from humanity. In the hands of takfiri Salafism, the enigmatic living religion of Islam becomes merely an instrument of politics. Although Mustafa Shukri's rejection of modern, western, scientific modernism may seem to lend support to the common perception that Islamic radicalism can be cured by increased education, particularly in the western sciences. However, ironically, around 80% of Takfir w'al-Hijra members were University educated, frequently in western 'professional' disciplines. Demise In mid-1977, the Egyptian authorities got wind of Takfir w'al-Hijra's activities, when an early 'raid' by the group was foiled. The organisation was rapidly wound up and Egyptian society was scandalised, as it became clear that many impressionable young people, often from well-to-do backgrounds, had been caught up in this strange sect. Shukri Mustafa's court testimony did little to assuage this scandal. Demise Shukri Mustafa was executed on 19th March 1978.10 In terms of its objectives, Mustafa's model failed. His group had failed to go beyond the initial 'phase of weakness', much less launch a wide-ranging jihad toppling the apparatus of state. Amongst those who agreed with Qutb's excommunication (takfir) of Egyptian society, the doctrine of migration (hijra) and separation from society during the stage of weakness had received a blow. It was roundly rejected by influential Egyptian Islamic takfiri Salafis such as Faraj. However, the doctrine of hijra was not forgotten by other thinkers. Al-Qaeda mastermind al-Zawahiri synthesised Mustafa's and Faraj's ideologies in Afghanistan to produce al-Qaeda's doctrine of hijra, which is the paradigm for most Salafi terrorist groups today. Further Research Although all the books listed in the bibliography are useful sources on Egyptian Islamic radicalism, readers wishing to know more about Shukri Mustafa, Takfir w'al-Hijra and contemporary Egyptian Islamic radicalism should start with Gilles Kepel's excellent book, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh.
Zohurul Bari, Re-Emergence of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, p69.
4 Kepel, p105.
Mustafa's radically 'reformationist' Salafism was typified by his assertion in court that the only help a man needs to understand the Qur'an is a dictionary.
MIM: Dutch postings on an internet forum about Takfir Wal Hijra
Kijk voor het MAROKKO.nl Nieuws archief op nieuws.marokko.nl
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http://forums.marokko.nl/archive/index.php/t-395174.html Nimr 23-10-2004, 02:26 Wat een groot tegenstelling is er tussen diegenen die naar de arena's van voorbereiding en slagvelden van Jihad kijken als een ontbering en afscheiding van vaders ,zonen en een gevaar voor het leven en rijkdom; in tegenstelling tot diegenen die naar de slagvelden van Jihad kijkt als de markten van het Paradijs , met open deuren, vrezend dat hij een uur te laat zou zijn en zij zich zouden kunnen sluiten zonder hen ."
abu hafs 23-10-2004, 02:47 Wat een groot tegenstelling is er tussen diegenen die naar de arena's van voorbereiding en slagvelden van Jihad kijken als een ontbering en afscheiding van vaders ,zonen en een gevaar voor het leven en rijkdom; in tegenstelling tot diegenen die naar de slagvelden van Jihad kijkt als de markten van het Paradijs , met open deuren, vrezend dat hij een uur te laat zou zijn en zij zich zouden kunnen sluiten zonder hen ."
salam oe3likoem
je bent een zielige tekvieri
najibsri 23-10-2004, 03:07 salam oe3likoem
je bent een zielige tekvieri
Online :confused: :confused: :confused: ??????????????????????
najibsri 23-10-2004, 03:08 Online :confused: :confused: :confused: ??????????????????????
Oh nee jij bent die ABUHAFS NIET...Excuse me... debiel
Zwaard 23-10-2004, 13:19 Wat een groot tegenstelling is er tussen diegenen die naar de arena's van voorbereiding en slagvelden van Jihad kijken als een ontbering en afscheiding van vaders, zonen en een gevaar voor het leven en rijkdom; in tegenstelling tot diegenen die naar de slagvelden van Jihad kijkt als de markten van het Paradijs, met open deuren, vrezend dat hij een uur te laat zou zijn en zij zich zouden kunnen sluiten zonder hen."
La hawla wa la quwatta illa billah! Magnifiek..
SjeikhAzzam 23-10-2004, 15:12 salam oe3likoem
je bent een zielige tekvieri
Iedereen die van Bin Laden houdt is een takfieri toch? JIJ ben echt zielig.
khadisja25 23-10-2004, 16:45 Wat een groot tegenstelling is er tussen diegenen die naar de arena's van voorbereiding en slagvelden van Jihad kijken als een ontbering en afscheiding van vaders ,zonen en een gevaar voor het leven en rijkdom; in tegenstelling tot diegenen die naar de slagvelden van Jihad kijkt als de markten van het Paradijs , met open deuren, vrezend dat hij een uur te laat zou zijn en zij zich zouden kunnen sluiten zonder hen ."
Macha allah!!!!!!!!!! Pagina's : 1 [2] 3 4
khadisja25 25-10-2004, 15:17 men weet dat Osama bin Laden een khariji is, Shaikh alFawzan (hafidahullah) nog gezegd van hem, dus in welk opzicht wij houden van hem ?
en wat betreft takfir, hij is duidelijk de man problematisch maken met takfir, dus eenieder houden van hem vanwege zijn onrechtmatige takfir hoezo niet takfiri ? al-Walaa wal-baraa houd ook de in van je haat zonden en bidah
wij houden van de man vanwege zijn islaam maar wij haten van de man van zijn zonde en bidah
en moge Allaah ons leiden
Ik HEb laatst in een topic hier gelezen dat er ook zat geleerden zijn die hem prijzen. Zijn die geleerden dan ook onnoveerders en/of zondaars? Weten die geleerden dan ook niet wat al-walaa wal-baraa inhoudt? Waarom zou het woord van Fawzaan zwaarder wegen tegenover de andere geleerden? Leg 's uit?
Aboe Qataadah 25-10-2004, 15:27 men weet dat Osama bin Laden een khariji is, Shaikh alFawzan (hafidahullah) nog gezegd van hem, dus in welk opzicht wij houden van hem ?
volgens saalih luhaydane niet
Akarzyan 25-10-2004, 16:29 Je hebt ze op een kundige wijze de mond gesnoerd, Famailysalafy! :hoedaf:
khadisja25 25-10-2004, 16:30 En nog een vraagje, weet je wie Shaikh Salih alFawzan hafidahullah is?
Salam alaikum
Fawzaan was toch de leerling van sjeikh Hammoed Al Uqla Asjoe'aibi? En sjeikh Hammoed Al Uqla Asjoe'aibi heeft de aanval van 11-9 wel geprezen, toch?
Family_Salafy 25-10-2004, 16:44 Salam alaikum
Fawzaan was toch de leerling van sjeikh Hammoed Al Uqla Asjoe'aibi? En sjeikh Hammoed Al Uqla Asjoe'aibi heeft de aanval van 11-9 wel geprezen, toch?
Wat heb ik nou gezegd, het is de Jarh wa Ta3deel die ik gezegd heb, geen inhoud daarover ?
Als de lering is ten opzichte van Jarh wa Ta3deel dan zou mij zeggen van, ok is goed, ahsanti, maar de zicht is slechts beperkt op het niet weten waarom men dat zegt.
ok alles op een rijtje:
aanval 11-9 hadden we het niet eens over !!!! dat was aan Aboe Qataadah gericht ten opzichte van Allamah Luhaydan.. moest dat beter onderzoeken wilden ze begrijpen wat de werkelijkheid daarvan is.
dus ok, sjeikh Hammoed al Uqla Asjoeaibi geprezen de 11-9 ? Wat nu ? ga maar lekker in een hoekje huilen
het zijn de geleerden die allen over eens zijn aanval 11-9 fout was, ga maar nakijken, en als er even een student van de kennis prijst de 11-9 wil dat gelijk zeggen wij volgen hem en kijken niet meer naar geleerden? Sobhan Allah
Fawzan = leerling Sjoeaibi
ik heb ook als leraar mijnheer Jansen gehad, maar ben geen christen
evenzowel goed, dan begrijpt de mevrouw dat ze word gevoerd door simpele zielen die worden gevoerd door simpele zielen. Hoe zielig !
Akarzyan 25-10-2004, 16:45 Salam alaikum
Fawzaan was toch de leerling van sjeikh Hammoed Al Uqla Asjoe'aibi? En sjeikh Hammoed Al Uqla Asjoe'aibi heeft de aanval van 11-9 wel geprezen, toch?
Speculeren.
Bovendien gaat het erom of de geleerden NU zulke aanvallers steunen! ;)
Aboe Qataadah 25-10-2004, 16:46 Niet gek gaan worden Aboe Qataadah, sinds wanneer zie jij de Allamah Saalih alLuhaydan als geleerde ?
Nee wat ik wil laten zi8en is dat er binnen de Sekte van jullie verschillende dingen hoor zo te zien is er geen eenheid jammer, dit is echt spelen een zegt hij is een Kharidjie en een zegt nee hij is van Ahloe-us-Soennah dit is echt groot verschil..
n oke, neem de Allamah Saalih alLuhaydan, wat heeft deze gezegd over de vliegtuigaanvallen van 11 september 2001 in de Amerika? Heeft hij gezegd dat ze gezegend waren ?
de leraar van Saalih Al-Luhaydaan en de leraar van fawzaan heeft de gezegende aanvallen goedgekeurd, namelijk `allaamah Hammud Ibn al-`uqla en allaamah ali khudair en naaser al-fahed en muhadith al-`allaamah sulamain Ibn Naasir al-`ulwaan en sheikh Yusuf Al-Uyayri en sheikh abu qataadah hebben ook deze Jihad-Operaties goedgekeurd, allemaal `ulamaa van Ahloe-us-Soennah wal Djamaa`ah...allemaal geleerden van nu.
OH, maar nu begrijp ik het, je bent een beetje in de war, geeft niks hoor broedertje, goed leren, dan komen zij er wel
khayran
dan:
leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer al-Walaa wal-baraa,
leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer al-Jarh wat-Ta3deel,
dan begrijp je het misschien
als je zo doorgaat bij de groeperingen van die en die dan zul je nooit de waarheid zien
de fake-selefies geleerden zijn in de war er is geen eenheid bij hen ze doen de Islaam geen eer aan. Zoals ik zei eentje zegt hij is een kharidjie een hond van de hel en eentje zegt hij is van Ahloe-us-Soennah zo ken je zien wat voor fitna gaande is.
Geef je die advies ook aan je zelf want volgens mij heb je niks begrepen van de `aqeedatul walaa wal baraa.
En over de Takfeer van sahab.org over ameer abu mus`ab al-zarqawi (hafidahullah wa ra3aah) zal ik later geven ik had hem al eerder geplaatst hie rop Marokko.nl zodra ik thuis ben zal ik er op zoek gaan.
khadisja25 25-10-2004, 17:08 Is deze uitdaging alleen voor hem of...?
Jij hebt de tekst van je broeder Qatada vast niet gelezen anders zou je zelf al zijn onzin verwerpen!
Ik vertrouw eerder op de geleerden die abu qatadaah heeft genoemd dan jouw reactie... :p
khadisja25 25-10-2004, 17:21 de eerste van is heb geen zin om in een eindeloze discussie te komen, heb beters te doen, aangezien jullie niks beters te doen hebben dan eindeloze discussies te houden, zou ik zeggen, ga eens lekker tegen elkaar discussieren, kom op man, er zijn vast nog wel punten waarover jullie verschillen, ja jij en aboe qataadah precies ja, nou als jullie dat zo leuk vinden ga ervoor zou ik zeggen.
Wat betreft de reactie van aboe qataadah, deze is nog niet klaar zoals hij zelf al aangaf, dus niet te vroeg juichen !!!
ik ga niet beginnen met een weerlegging alvorens zijn post helemaal klaar is de begrip is bij u hopelijk, begrijpt u ?
Noem mij er 1 (levend en van ahlus-sunnah)
Waar blijft je vredesgroet? Of ben je niet van ahloe-sunnah?
Abu qatadaah heeft je sterk weerlegd. Je hebt niet inhoudelijk kunnen reageren. En de grote geleerde van ahlu-sunnah (sjeikh Hammoed Al Uqla Asjoe'aibi) heeft de aanvallen geprezen, de leraar van o.a. fawzaan en uthaymeen. Is voor mij voldoende om achter Bin Laden te staan. Of weet jij het beter dan deze grote geleerde?
salam alaikum
khadisja25 25-10-2004, 17:22 kun je ons trouwens ook uitleggen WAAROM je op de namen vertrouwd die abu kakkerlak heeft genoemd
Waar blijft je vredesgroet? Of ben je niet van ahloe-sunnah?
Abu qatadaah heeft je sterk weerlegd. Je hebt niet inhoudelijk kunnen reageren. En de grote geleerde van ahlu-sunnah (sjeikh Hammoed Al Uqla Asjoe'aibi) heeft de aanvallen geprezen, de leraar van o.a. fawzaan en uthaymeen. Is voor mij voldoende om achter Bin Laden te staan. Of weet jij het beter dan deze grote geleerde?
salam alaikum
Zwaard 25-10-2004, 17:40 .
Abu Kakkerlak ? Zeer jammer hoe Islamitische-zaken op spottende wijze aan de kaak worden gesteld!
Aboe Qataadah 25-10-2004, 18:04 broeder Familiy Salafy,
Blijf met respect praten ok?
En de levende shoyookh die deze amaliyaat goed heben gekeurd zoals ik eerder had aangegeven zijn:
Muhadith Sulaiman Ibn Naasir Al-`Ulwaan.
Sheikh Ali Khudair
Sheikh Naaser Al-Fahed
sheikh Abu Baseer Mustafa haleemah Al-tartoosi
Sheikh Abdel Aziz Al-Jarboo3.
Sheikh Abu Qataadah Al-Filisteeni
Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Saalim
Sheikh Hamd Al-Humeedi.
En deze `ulamaa hebben ook de grote Mujahid Sheikh Usama Ibn laaden geprezen
en zoals Sheikh Hammud Ibn Uqla (rahimahullah) zei:
Usama is een mujahid die strijdt op de Weg van Allaah volgens de Koraan en Soennah.
En je zegt hij is van Khawaaridj?
Noem mij aub 1 fundament van Usama die hij van de Khawaarij heeft.
Ik zal het alvast wat makkelijk maken.
Enkele oesoel al-Khawaarij:
verklaren degene die grote zondes pleegt als een Kaafir , dus bijv als je baard weghaalt of zinaa hebt gepleegd of rookt, of alchohol drinkt dan ben je een kaafir volgens hen
Usama doet dit niet!
Zij doden de Moslims en laten de Koeffaar met rust.
Usama strijdt tegen de Koeffaar en niet tegen de Moslims, steker nog als je ziet hoe die fake-selefies bezig zijn ze zijn alleen gericht tegen de Moslims, ze doen als of Koeffaar geen gevaar zijn, triest
Ontkennen van Asmaa wa Sifaat
Usama doet dit niet
Dit zijn een van de belangerijkste fundamenten van de Khawaarij.
En de saudische regering die lijken pas op Al-Khawaarij en de andere regeringen. Helpen de Koeffaar tegen hun eigen Moslimbroeders.
Zelfs onder dwang mag dat zelfs niet .
Imaam Al-Qurtubi rahimahullah zei:
Zelfs onder dwang, excuseert je niet om te vechten tegen je eigen Moslims broeders.
(tafseer Al-Qurtubi, volume 5 bladzijde 349)
Kijk naar Abu hajar A-Muqrin hij was gedood en 3 andere broeders door de Saudische regering om 1 kaafir! die kaafir was een enigeneer van Apaches helikopters van de amerikanen.
terwijl de profeet (sallalahu `aleihi wasalam ) zei:
Een Moslim mag niet gedood worden voor een Kaafir.
Wie heeft nu de fundamenten van de Khawaarij? de "Salafi" regering van "saudi" arabie of de Mujahideen die strijden tegen de Koeffaar>?
En oook al was Sheikh Usamaa niet op de juiste Manhaj we moeten aan hem kant staan en niet aan de kant vcan de Koeffaar
Ik heb diep respect voor deze grote Mujahid een voorbeeld voor alle Mujahideen.
Hij slaapt in de zand in de bergen in Afghanistan en heeft zijn eigendommen weggeven op de weg van Allaah hij kon ook lekker een mooie auto, meisjes een rustig leven leiden, maar nee hij heeft alles opgegevven om voor ons allen te strijden.
Wat hebben wij gedaan op de weg van Allaah? Helemaal niks en dan gaan wij vanuit onze luie stoelen deze Mujahideen bekritiseren?
Itaqoellah fie Sheikh Usama Itaqoellah!!
Wa salaamu `aleykoem
khadisja25 25-10-2004, 19:24 Barakallahufiek abou qatadah!:)
elmoettaqi 25-10-2004, 23:05 discussie die door gaan en never tot een eind komen
abou qatada je moet sheikh fawaz horen zijn doe3a brother wallahie akhie je gaat kapot huilen echt noer in zijn uitspraak van woorden van allah en zijn boodschapper vrede zijn met hem
Ahloel_Ather 27-10-2004, 01:08 Moge Allah swt cheikh osama beschermen
amine!
Moge Allaah hem leiden naar een oprechte inkeer, Amien!
Agie? Talbies is niet van Manhaj-us-Selefie, vrees jouw Heer
Nimr 27-10-2004, 06:51 Moge Allah swt cheikh osama beschermen
amine!
Allahuma ameen!
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