He then went to a cupboard in the corner of the room and took out a keffiyeh, an Arab headdress, and a torn jacket. He said his father was wearing them the day he was assassinated. He pointed out some dark stains. ‘This is the blood of my father,’ he said. Hutheifa had been with his father when he died, and holding the jacket and headdress clearly brought back painful memories. He explained that he had been in a car with his father in a motorcade heading for the mosque in Peshawar. His father changed vehicles a few minutes before the bomb went off. Why he did this, Hutheifa did not know. I asked who he thought was responsible. ‘The Mossad,’ he said without hesitation.
Although it was now getting very late, I wanted to talk about Abdullah Azzam’s views on jihad and his rulings on its meaning, given that he was regarded as not only the Father of Jihad but its leading spiritual interpreter. Hutheifa got up and left the room again. This time he returned with two or three massive volumes of his father’s writings, not just on jihad but on a whole range of Islamic issues. Every page was neatly written by hand in immaculate Arabic script. He flicked through one of the books, muttering quietly to himself until he found the relevant page. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a passage with his finger. ‘The rules of how a mujahid, a freedom fighter, should fight jihad. “Don’t kill any child or any woman,” it says.’ He said his father would never have sanctioned the Madrid train bombings of 2004, or the attacks on London’s transport system in 2005. He went on to explain that his father believed it was lawful to fight the invaders of Muslim lands, and that he himself could understand why young men were prepared to become shaheeds, martyrs or suicide bombers: ‘The nearest way to heaven, to Paradise, is by being mujahideen, being killed in battle with the non-Muslim occupiers, the attackers.’
Just before we said goodbye in the early hours of the morning, Hutheifa left me with an unequivocal message. ‘Let me tell you clearly. America won’t win the war. Hundreds of millions in the Muslim countries are ready to be terrorists because of America’s policies. The problem started in Palestine, spread into Afghanistan and is now spreading into whole countries.’ He said that if the United States changed these policies, there would be no problem. ‘Just be fair,’ he said, referring to American policy. I knew it wasn’t quite as simple as that.
I thought of my meeting with Hutheifa when I later talked to one of the young, wannabe shaheeds he had referred to and said he understood. To meet a shaheed face to face was a chilling exposure to the murderous power of his determination to blow himself up, slaughter those around him and thereby, he believed, enter Paradise as a martyr. It felt a million miles from talking to the IRA. I met him secretly in a middle-class home that sympathisers had made available for the interview. He was, I guess, in his late teens or early twenties, and very nervous. He covered his face with a keffiyeh so that only his eyes were visible. His host told me his story. He’d tried to get into Iraq via Syria, and been turned back at the border, but remained determined to try again. ‘I planned to go to Iraq to support our oppressed brothers, raise the banner of Islam and jihad and send the usurping, renegade enemy out of Muslim lands and fight in the name of God asking for entry to Paradise,’ he told me through an interpreter. ‘This is an order that God obliges us to follow. The important thing is to be killed as a martyr.’
The more I read the last testaments of suicide bombers, and the more interviews I saw with them on the internet recorded before they embarked upon missions from which they never returned, the more convinced I became that they had to believe that the gates of Paradise, with all its pleasures and delights, would be opened for them in order to give them the courage to press the button and blow themselves to pieces, and many others with them. However, there is, contrary to popular assumption, no reference in the Koran to the seventy-two virgins who await the pleasure of the new entrant.v I asked the young man if he had received any training. ‘The training operation was going to be in Iraq,’ he told me. ‘There men are prepared physically and ideologically, and then sent to fight.’ Why didn’t he want to live a normal life, instead of being prepared to go to Iraq and die? ‘This life is cheap,’ he said. ‘It lasts for a moment, and after it there is death. And what is after death? Nothing. But if you fight on behalf of God, in the afterlife there are many gardens of Paradise and a higher Paradise joining [the Prophet] Mohammed and all the Muslims to whom God has promised Paradise.’
I later wondered what had happened to him. Had he succeeded in getting into Iraq, joined the resistance, blown himself up and gone to Paradise? Had he added to the long list of terrorist victims, whether blown up by suicide bombers or living the nightmare of being hijacked by Islamist extremists? I never found out.
Chapter Three
Talking to Hijack Victims
Talking to terrorists is not just about governments or their intelligence services engaging in dialogue with their enemies. Innocent citizens have found themselves in situations where they have come face to face with terrorists, in a siege or aircraft hijacking, and talked to them in the hope of securing their survival and release. They too are the victims of terrorism: the experience of staring death, and the terrorists, in the face often colours the rest of their lives. In such circumstances, talking to terrorists can be a matter of life or death. The hijacking of an Air France Airbus by four Algerian Islamist extremists on Christmas Eve 1994 provides a unique insight into the mindset of the terrorists who carried it out, and the political situation from which they emerged. It was also a prophetic event. The Berlin Wall had fallen five years earlier. The Cold War was over. Few foresaw the emergence of the new threat that was to overshadow the next two decades: Islamist extremism and the rise of political Islam. In Algeria, the conditions were ripe for both, and it is in Algeria that we first see the emergence of the phenomenon.
The hijackers of the Air France Airbus had possibly never even heard the name Al Qaeda. In 1994 Osama Bin Laden was exiled in Sudan, building his organisation and extending its global reach. Nevertheless, the hijackers did regard themselves as mujahideen, adopting the mantle of their Algerian brothers who had fought jihad against Soviet troops in the 1980s – Algeria had provided one of the largest contingents of Arab mujahideen. When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and many of these Algerian veterans returned home, few had any notion of global jihad. Their cause was indigenous. Jihad was primarily about local regime change. The target was the military government of the FLN – the Front de Libération Nationale.
The social and political conditions in Algeria were slow-burning incubators for revolt. By the late 1980s, 40 per cent of the population of twenty-four million were under the age of fifteen. Many were in school, being educated for jobs that didn’t exist. They became known as the hittistes, ‘those who prop up walls’. They were a potential reservoir of recruits for revolution.
France had been the colonial power in Algeria since 1830, when it invaded the impoverished North African country and scorched its earth to stamp out resistance and ensure the subjugation of the native population. In 1954 insurgents embarked upon a savage guerrilla war in which atrocities were committed by both sides, graphically illustrated in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film masterpiece The Battle of Algiers. The insurgents of the FLN were the ultimate beneficiaries, taking power when France granted Algeria her independence in 1962. But for most of the country’s impoverished people the sweetness of independence soured over the years. Growing discontent among the urban population in Algiers and elsewhere resulted in strikes and demonstrations. There was little work, no regular water supply,