"Spain is the bridge between the Islamic world and the West," Haizam Amirah Fernandez said, when we met in a conference room at Madrid's Real Instituto Elcano shortly after the train bombings. "Think of that other bridge to the east, Turkey. Both have been hit by jihadist terrorists-in the same week." In Istanbul, on March 9, two suicide bombers attacked a Jewish club, killing one person and injuring five others. "The whole idea is to cut off these bridges," Amirah said. "If the goal is to polarize people, Muslims and infidels, that is a way of doing it. Jihadists are the most fervent defenders of the notion of a clash of civilizations."
One evening, I went to a pub with some Spanish cops. "There is this legend that Spain and the Arab world were friends," a senior investigator said. He nodded toward the waitress and the customers at several nearby tables. "Here in the bar are five Arabs sitting next to you. Nobody used to think it was strange. Now people are reacting differently." He paused and said, "They want to smell the jasmine of Al Andalus and pray again in the Granada mosque. Can you imagine the mentality these SOBs have?"
On a splendid April day in Paris, I went to lunch with Gilles Kepel, the Arabist scholar, and Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the doughty French counterterrorism judge. Despite the beautiful weather, the men were in a gloomy frame of mind. "I am seriously concerned about the future," Bruguiere said, as we sat at a corner table under an arbor of lilacs that shed blossoms onto his jacket. His armor-plated Peugeot was parked on the street and his bodyguards were discreetly arrayed in the restaurant. "I began work on this in 1991, against the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria. These groups were well known and each had an understandable structure. The majority were sponsored by states-Syria, Libya, Iraq. Now we have to face a new and largely unknown organization, with a loose system and hidden connections, so it is not easy to understand its internal functioning. It appears to be composed of cells and networks that are scattered all over the world and changing shape constantly."
Bruguiere pointed to the Istanbul bombings in November 2003, and the March 11 bombings in Madrid as being the opening salvos in a new attack on Europe. "They have struck in the east and in the south," he said. "I think the next stop will be in the north."
"London or Paris," Kepel suggested.
"The principal target is London," Bruguiere declared.
Chechnya is playing a larger and more disturbing role in the worldwide jihad, Bruguiere said. At present, Al Qaeda and its affiliates operate on a rather low-tech level, but in Chechnya many recruits are being trained to exploit the technical advantages of developed countries. "Some of these groups have the capacity for hijacking satellites," he told me. Capturing signals beamed from space, terrorists could devastate the communications industry, shut down power grids, and paralyze the ability of developed countries to defend themselves.
"In 2001, all the Islamist actors in Madrid were identified," Bruguiere said. His own investigations had led him to the Spanish capital that June. He quickly informed the Spanish police that Jamal Zougam, the owner of the phone shop, was a major contact for jihad recruits in Europe and Morocco. But Zougam was not apprehended. French and Spanish authorities have a long history of disagreement over the handling of terrorism, with the Spanish accusing the French of giving sanctuary to ETA terrorists. Bruguiere said that when he arrived in Madrid he found that "the Islamic threat was underassessed." The Spanish police had made him wait a year before allowing him to interview Zougam. After Bruguiere went back to Paris, the Spanish police put Zougam under surveillance and searched his apartment, finding jihadi tapes and videos. The authorities briefly renewed their interest in him after the 2003 Casablanca bombings, but once again there was insufficient evidence to arrest him.
I asked Bruguiere if he thought that the Madrid attacks represented an evolution in Al Qaeda's operational ability, or suggested that the organization had lost control. He said that Al Qaeda was now little more than "a brand, a trademark," but he admitted that he had been surprised. "It was a good example of the capacity and the will of these groups to adopt a political agenda. The defeat of the late government and the agreement of the new government to withdraw troops-it was a terrorist success, the first time we have had such a result."
Later, Kepel and I discussed the reason that Europe was under attack. "The future of Islam is in Europe," he said. "It has a huge Muslim population. Either we train our Muslims to become modern global citizens, who live in a democratic, pluralistic society, or, on the contrary, the Islamists win, and take over those Muslim European constituencies. Then we're in serious trouble."
"I doubt whether anyone can seriously suggest that Spain has not acted in a way that suggests appeasement," Ramon Perez-Maura, the editor at ABC, told me shortly after Zapatero had announced plans to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq in May, without waiting to see if U.N. peacekeeping troops would become involved. Perez-Maura recalled a recent lunch he had had with the Iranian ambassador to Spain, Mortez Alviri. According to Perez-Maura, Alviri said that Miguel Angel Moratinos-Zapatero's pick for foreign minister-had approached the Iranians to negotiate with Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric, whose militia was engaged in savage urban warfare with Coalition troops. (Moratinos has denied this.) According to Perez-Maura, Alviri passed Morati-nos's message along, and, less than a day after Zapatero announced the withdrawal, Sadr said from Najaf that Spanish troops would be allowed to leave Iraq unmolested. That was a false promise. American and Spanish forces had to shoot a path through Sadr's militia in Najaf, which repeatedly attacked them.
On April 15, the voice of Osama bin Laden spoke again. "This is a message to our neighbors north of the Mediterranean, containing a reconciliation initiative as a response to their positive reactions," bin Laden said on the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya. Now it was the Al Qaeda leader who cast himself in the role of a rational political actor. "It is in both sides' interest to curb the plans of those who shed the blood of peoples for their narrow personal interest and subservience to the White House gang." He proposed a European committee to study "the justice" of the Islamic causes, especially Palestine. "The reconciliation will start with the departure of its last soldier from our country," bin Laden said-not indicating if he was referring to Iraq, Afghanistan, or the entire Muslim world. "The door of reconciliation is open for three months from the date of announcing this statement…For those who want reconciliation, we have given them a chance. Stop shedding our blood so as to preserve your blood. It is in your hands to apply this easy, yet difficult, formula. You know that the situation will expand and increase ifyou delay things Peace beupon those who follow guidance."
From bin Laden's perspective, he was offering to bring Europe into an unsettled middle ground called the dar al-Sulh. This is the land of the treaty, where Muslims live as a peaceful minority. European leaders rejected bin Laden's proposal almost immediately, seeing it as a ploy to aggravate the tensions in the Western alliance. "It's the weirdest thing in the world," a senior FBI official told me. "It shows he's on the ropes, desperate."