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Didactic presentation of ideas, conjectures or hypotheses, based on proven current events – not necessarily of the day – that are reflected in the text itself. It excludes value judgments and is closer to the genre of opinion, but it differs from it in that it does not judge or predict, but only formulates hypotheses, offers reasoned explanations and relates scattered data.
The activity of the Salafist cells left, since the late 1990s, many signs that Spain was an objective, which were viewed with skepticism.
Twenty years ago, almost no one in Spain believed in the jihadist threat. A thousand-headed monster that developed during the eighties and nineties of the last century, with effervescent activity, and grew like a hydra in the face of the blindness and passivity of the secret services and the police. A threat that governments, the judiciary and the entire political class observed in profile, with skepticism and absolute indifference.
Salafism was among us long before 11-M. Its actors walked through the Spanish streets and met in butcher shops, parlours, and in some mosques. Some were undervalued and reached the peak of horror. From the seed that they sowed with patience, the foundations were born that caused a transcendental change in their strategy: going from the silent and consenting proselytism and financing in Spanish territory to the dream of carrying out an attack.
Before 11-M, multiple and disturbing signs of danger arrived. Some in writing and without shortcuts. Indications that warned of plans to turn Spain from a rearguard into a vanguard of jihad. The letters dated 2001 from Mohamed Achraf, an Algerian imprisoned in the Topas prison (Salamanca), to one of his acolytes are eloquent: “I smell that jihad is near. I have good news. We have formed a group of good brothers who are ready to die at any time for the cause of God. They just need to come out and so do we. We have men, weapons too and you will be with us.” He dreamed of immolating himself at the wheel of a truck bomb against the National Court building in Madrid, to destroy the files of his detained colleagues. Then, in the police files there were other letters, insults and telephone interventions with similar threats.
The judge and the prosecutor of 11-M, before the great hoax
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Many years before these letters and threats, in Spain the jihad had already left a mark of 18 corpses in the first attack of its kind in Europe. The El Descanso attack in 1985 was the first big sign. Observe the extraordinary similarity between the robotic portrait that the police made with the testimonies of the survivors and the photograph of Mustafa Setmarian, Abu Musab al-Asuri, a Spanish Syrian married to a Madrid woman, produces chills. The man with the mustache who had a beer at the restaurant counter and left a backpack on the floor, and the attractive redhead in the portrait are like two drops of water.
By the end of the nineties, this seemingly harmless man had gone from his position as a salesman at Madrid’s Rastro to running training camps in Afghanistan. He came to the leadership of Al Qaeda and taught in Kabul at muyahidin in which he explained how to hijack a plane and launch it against a target. A friend of Mullah Omar, he worked for the Taliban government. While he trained fighters for jihad, his wife, Elena, gave birth in Islamabad. After 9/11 in 2001, he was commissioned by Osama Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora (Afghanistan) to organize the new jihad: chemical and bacteriological warfare. The lone wolves who carry out attacks around the world, the so-called individual jihad, are his great legacy.
The farewells at the Madrid-Barajas airport to the Soldiers of Allah Those who traveled to Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya to join the jihad were more than a symptom in the 1990s. Those who returned injured recovered upon their return in Social Security hospitals without being detected. Nobody asked about them. Activities organized by Imad Eddin Barakat, Abu Dahdad, another Spanish Syrian disciple of Setmarian, whose cell fell after 9/11 and served a 12-year sentence for collaboration with Al Qaeda. A capital character to understand the growth of the jihadist hydra in Spain. A seemingly irrelevant Syrian who sold t-shirts in the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés and at the same time rubbed shoulders in London with the cleric Abu Qutada, the icon of the perpetrators of 9/11, the epicenter of Salafism in Europe.
Amer El Azizzi, a Moroccan linked to the perpetrators of 11-M, is another example of the level on the scale of terror that some characters in Spain reached. He went from living with his Spanish wife in a house without an elevator next to Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de las Ventas, to being the shadow of Hamza Rabia, head of foreign operations for Al Qaeda. He was killed by a drone in 2010 in the mountains of Waziristan (Pakistan). His wife Raquel Burgos and his children remain linked to the organization.
The Algerian Alekema Lamari, Yasin, who committed suicide with the rest of the 11-M cell in the apartment in Leganés (Madrid), had a long history of jihadist activities and stays in prison. He was a radical obsessed with his purity and virginity, with abundant literature in confidential reports from the CNI and the Police. During his stays in prison he left a trail of hatred similar to that of his countryman Achraf, the man who dreamed of dying buried in the archives of the National Court. More discreet, but just as radicalized, was Jamal Zugam, one of the material authors of the massacre, an old acquaintance of the French and Spanish police.
These five characters, whom the police and secret services underestimated, are a brief sample of the monster that was not detected. Salafis who roamed freely and created the network and climate necessary for the success of the attack.
The connection with New York’s 9/11
The threatening signals also came from the top of global jihadism. The Egyptian Mohamed Atta, the head of the command that carried out 9/11, had traveled to Tarragona in July 2001 to meet with his roommate in Hamburg (Germany) Ramzi Binalshibh and communicate the objectives. In Spain they had a network of collaborators who provided false passports and a safe place for the meeting. A territory so armored that the Yemeni Binalshibh, probably the only man in Europe who knew the date and objective of the attack, flew to Madrid on September 5. He slept in a pension on Gran Vía and traveled on the 7th to Afghanistan, where he arrived shortly before the Twin Towers fell. After the attack that shocked the world, the name and surname of Barakat, the Spanish Syrian who sent mujahideen to Al Qaeda camps, appeared in a diary in Atta’s apartment in Germany. From the remains of his cell, dismantled in Madrid weeks after 9/11 in 2001, the group that three years later took part in 9/11 was born.
And from the signs we moved on to action and the singling out of Spain as a target. In May 2003, the House of Spain in Casablanca (Morocco) suffered a jihadist attack with fatalities in a wave of suicide attacks. Five months later, Bin Laden, in a 16-minute message and with his incendiary rhetoric, put Spain in the target of its enemy countries for the Government’s support for the Iraq war.
Too many calls for attention for too many years that neither the police, nor the Civil Guard nor the National Intelligence Center, with tiny equipment and resources, valued with due importance.
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About the signature
He is head of Research. A specialist in ETA terrorism and a jihadist, he worked at El Globo, Cambio 16 and Diario 16. For his investigations, especially the Roldán case, he has received numerous awards, including the Ortega y Gasset and the King of Spain International Award. He has published five books, the latest “El Agujero”, about 11-M.
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