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| Fifth Column |
| Al Qaeda’s Stealth Weapons |
| 2003-09-21 |
| The convicted terrorist has a hard-core moniker: "the blue-eyed emir of Tangier." But Pierre Richard Robert was once a French country boy, an athletic blond teenager living in a house built by his father among pastures here in the Loire region. Robert liked drinking and fast bikes more than school. He got interested in Islam when he played soccer at the Turkish cultural center in a neighboring industrial town. He said he wanted to convert because Allah watched over him as he sped downhill into town on his bicycle. Fourteen years later, though, Robert has hit bottom. A Moroccan court sentenced him to life in prison Thursday after convicting him of recruiting and training Moroccan extremists for a terrorist campaign. He joins an unlikely group of men with non-Muslim backgrounds that includes Richard Reid, the British "shoe bomber" convicted of trying to blow up an airliner; American Jose Padilla, an alleged Al Qaeda operative being held as an enemy combatant; and Christian Ganczarski, a German convert arrested in June by French police. Robert and Ganczarski were not just foot soldiers, investigators say. They represent a dangerous trend as police chop away at Islamic networks two years after the Sept. 11 attacks: converts who assume front-line roles as recruiters and plotters. The number of converts has grown as Islamic militants have struck a chord with young Europeans from non-Muslim backgrounds. These "protest conversions," as scholar Olivier Roy calls them, have less to do with theology than with a revolutionary zeal dating to Europe’s ultra-left terrorist groups of the 1970s and ’80s. "The young people in working-class urban areas are against the system, and converting to Islam is the ultimate way to challenge the system," said Roy, a director of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. "They convert to stick it to their parents, to their principal. They convert in the same way people in the 1970s went to Bolivia or Vietnam. I see a very European tradition of identifying with a Third World cause." Extremists of European descent worry police for the same reasons that Al Qaeda prizes them: their symbolic value, their Western passports and their fanaticism. "Converts are the most important work for us right now," a French intelligence official said. "They want to show other Muslims their worth. They want to go further than anyone else. They are full of rage and they want to prove themselves." Ganczarski and Robert were no generals, but they allegedly stepped up to plot attacks and recruit. And investigators say Ganczarski, 36, became a pivotal figure in Europe during the post-Sept. 11 period because of his alleged ties to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who turned increasingly to converts while on the run. Ganczarski is being held in a French jail as a suspected conspirator in the bombing of a Tunisian synagogue that killed 21 people, including French tourists, in April 2002. Although the Germans lacked proof to arrest Ganczarski, who denied involvement in the attack, the widening investigation soon involved French, Spanish and Swiss police. It revealed Ganczarski’s access to Al Qaeda’s "hard core," in the words of a Swiss intelligence report dated last December. The phone call intercepts also pointed to a Swiss convert, Daniel "Yusuf" Morgenej, who had befriended the German in Saudi Arabia. Swiss police questioned and released Morgenej. But Spanish and French investigators say he and Ganczarski remain suspected links in an intricate chain leading to the plot’s accused money man, a Spanish exporter. Ganczarski spent three frustrating years in Medina. He took special courses to overcome his lack of schooling, but failed to enter the university. Yet his zeal did not seem to waver. He traveled to Afghanistan in 1998 — the first of four sojourns — trained at an Al Qaeda camp and saw combat there and in Russia’s breakaway republic of Chechnya. Ganczarski met Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, who entrusted him with handling computers and communications. Bin Laden saw converts as "an especially potent weapon." Ganczarski found refuge for a time in Saudi Arabia, where he took his family last November. But after this year’s terrorist attacks on expatriate compounds in Riyadh put pressure on the Saudis, they expelled him to France. Under tough anti-terrorism laws, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere has accused Ganczarski in the Djerba attack based on his alleged ties to the plotters, and has at least two years to bring him to trial. Authorities are also interested in the fact that Ganczarski had phone numbers for two imprisoned members of the Hamburg cell that planned the Sept. 11 attacks. Ganczarski’s alleged access to the inner circle is not surprising. Al Qaeda has embraced true believers regardless of ethnicity. Just as many converts marry Muslim women, some terrorism suspects of Arab origin have European wives, who often equal them in ideological ferocity. "The Ganczarskis, the Roberts, they show that the radicalization is here, not just in the Middle East," said Roy, the French scholar. If Al Qaeda’s urbanized, globalized jihad continues to attract angry Europeans, the network could gain a "second wind," he said. Robert, 31, could be a case in point. Like Ganczarski, the Frenchman represents a breed of blue-collar convert — neither jailhouse recruit nor university radical. He went to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where in the mid-1990s he trained at a camp run by Al Qaeda. Robert’s aggressive ideas caused conflict even at fundamentalist mosques. He became an itinerant late-night preacher in housing projects. He also got involved in the used-car racket in which Islamic extremists are active, buying cars in Europe for resale in Morocco. That was nothing compared with his clandestine activity in Tangier, the Moroccan smuggling haven where Robert, by then a father of two, spent most of his time the last two years. He was convicted Thursday of recruiting several dozen young men for terrorist cells he set up in Tangier and Fez. Robert’s Al Qaeda credentials crossed cultural borders: The group made him its "emir." He led weapons training sessions in forests and deserts, according to the court’s verdict. Robert also wanted to bring his war home to France. He and Abdulaziz Benayich, a die-hard holy warrior with longtime ties to European terrorist cells, schemed about using a bazooka or rocket-propelled grenades on targets including a giant refinery and a plutonium shipment near Lyon, about an hour from Robert’s hometown. When Spanish police captured Benayich in June in Algeciras, across the strait of Gibraltar from Morocco, he had shaved off his body hair — as is done in a purification ritual that precedes suicide attacks. "He was preparing for an attack," a Spanish police commander said. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |
| #4 . . .Meanwhile, the FBI claims that it's impossible to infiltrate Al-Qaeda. . . And of course the Home-Sec warning about Defacating Flying Pigs™ should be observed sincerely. |
| Posted by: Anomalous 2003-9-21 7:27:04 PM |
| #3 Meanwhile, the FBI claims that it's impossible to infiltrate Al-Qaeda. |
| Posted by: A Jackson 2003-9-21 4:06:09 PM |
| #2 These converts seem almost to have entered a Jim Jones style transe. Society has always had its dangerous fringe ala John Wilkes Booth. If you trim the fringe, you create more fringe. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2003-9-21 12:01:45 PM |
| #1 The loonies are coming home. And the Phrench / Zeropean appeasement policies seem to be insufficient to mollify them. What ever will Chirac & Co do? Think there are stiffer penalties, perhaps even the Big D, on the horizon in the EU? Naw, me neither. Aris may, however, talk then to death. ;-> |
| Posted by: .com 2003-9-21 2:39:29 AM |