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Bassam indoctrinated his followers with a puritanical interpretation of Islam, making the center a breeding ground for extremism.9 There was enormous pressure on students in the study groups to conform. Many girls walked in bareheaded, but within a week or two they were almost certain to be sporting a headscarf. Surrounded by Muslims who embraced a “pure” form of Islam, Malika donned the hijab and began her metamorphosis, first reading the Qur’an in French, then abstaining from drugs and alcohol. The rigid environment and strict code of conduct provided her with a welcome sense of purpose.10
Abdessater shared Malika’s worldview and politics. They both regarded Shi’a and secular Muslims with contempt. They considered Moroccan Islam overly traditional, superstitious, and sexist. In their view, colonial influence had poisoned the country, whereas the Salafi interpretation of Islam represented a true form, much closer to the ideals of the Umma, the Islamic Community of Believers. The most dynamic interpretation of Islam, in their view, was Osama bin Laden’s. The couple greatly admired bin Laden and followed his charitable deeds in Afghanistan while he fought the Russians. Bin Laden spent his own money, which in itself was worthy of their respect and love. Malika recalled the day bin Laden appeared on the news and Abdessater was deeply impressed. He said, “Look at his face, don’t you think it is beautiful?” Malika enthusiastically agreed. Bin Laden was combating injustice in Afghanistan and Abdessater was scared of dying without having done anything important for God or in the name of jihad. He felt that Osama was talking directly to him.11
Bin Laden’s example inspired the couple to travel to Afghanistan in 2000, to Al Qaeda’s ad-Darunta training camp in Jalalabad. Abdessater hoped to fight the Russians in Chechnya, but instead was recruited into bin Laden’s terror network. Within a few months, the couple was housed in the enclave reserved for bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants.12 It was in Afghanistan that Malika was launched into jihadi stardom. Housed separately in the camp for foreign women, she had hoped to open an orphanage but was unprepared for the poverty and devastation she saw around her. The ravages of war shocked her and she blamed American sanctions against the Taliban for the destitution of the Afghan people. As a good jihadi wife, she supported her husband’s decision to accept bin Laden’s leadership and to do his bidding.
On bin Laden’s instructions, Abdessater assassinated the Taliban’s chief rival, Ahmad Shah Massoud, on September 9, 2001. Together with a partner, Abdessater posed as a Moroccan journalist sent to interview Massoud. It was the partner, Rachid Bouraoui El Ouaer, who detonated an improvised device disguised as a camera in Massoud’s presence. Abdessater was shot and killed by Massoud’s bodyguards as he tried to flee the scene.13 Massoud’s death was bin Laden’s gift to the Taliban since Massoud, the so-called Lion of Panjshir, had been the only obstacle preventing their complete dominance of Afghanistan. More important, Massoud’s death paved the way for the 9/11 attacks, which took place just two days later, by giving the Taliban free rein in Afghanistan and guaranteeing that the Taliban would protect bin Laden from any retaliation that might follow.14
Malika was tried for complicity in Massoud’s death. There is evidence showing that a courier brought her five hundred dollars and a letter of congratulation from Osama bin Laden soon after the assassination, but, by playing the part of the grieving widow, she persuaded the court that she knew nothing of her husband’s plan. Belgian human rights organizations secured her release from the NATO prison in which she was held, and the government entertained the hope that they might turn Malika into a double agent.
But Malika really had aided in the attack on Massoud. She had returned to Belgium from Afghanistan, picked up Abdessater’s laptop computer, and delivered medicine and two envelopes full of cash to cover the costs of the operation. Once she was acquitted, her husband’s death propelled her to fame as the widow of a martyr—the pinnacle of achievement for a devout Muslim woman.
Malika soon found new love in a jihadi chat room and married Moaz Garsallaoui, a Moroccan man several years her junior. Moaz shared Malika’s fervent devotion to radical Islam. They moved to a small Swiss village where they ran four French-language pro-Al Qaeda websites that carried the unabridged speeches of Osama bin Laden and snuff videos of hostage beheadings in Iraq. Moaz, a radical since 1985, was under almost constant police surveillance. He was linked to Muriel Degauque—a Belgian woman who became the first Western female suicide bomber in 2005—through his friendships with Tunisian soccer star Nizar Trabelsi and Belgian jihadi Bilal Soughir. Malika greatly admired Muriel (whom she called Maryam), saying that she had a lot of courage to go to Iraq and kill Americans.
In 2005 Malika el Aroud was convicted for supporting a terrorist organization, distributing propaganda over the Internet, publishing images of executions and mutilations, and operating jihadi websites,15 but received only a six-month suspended sentence. She was detained again in December 2008 for plotting domestic terror attacks against the EU summit meeting in Brussels and, specifically, against British prime minister Gordon Brown.16 Belgian law required that she be released within twenty-four hours if no charges were filed against her. When police searches failed to turn up weapons, explosives, or any incriminating evidence, she was freed once again. However, that arrest and the follow-up operations, which included the May 2009 arrest of two members of her so-called kamikaze network for smuggling suicide bombers to Italy, struck a major blow to Malika’s fund-raising and recruitment efforts.17 She was arrested several more times for her alleged involvement in terrorism, but until 2010 had always been able to evade jail.
At her 2010 trial, the government took no chances and instituted extreme security measures, including masked agents, metal detectors, and roadblocks on the streets to and from the courthouse. Malika faced an eight-year sentence for advocating terror and for indirect responsibility for the deaths of several European Muslims killed in Afghanistan. Her husband, Moaz, was sentenced in absentia, having rejoined the jihad in Afghanistan and claimed to have personally killed at least five Americans.18 To Malika’s website he posted a chilling message in May 2009: “If you thought you could pressure me to slow down by arresting my wife, you were wrong. It will not stop me from fulfilling my objectives. My wife’s place is in my heart and the heart of all mujahideen and it is stronger than ever. There are surprises in store in the days ahead. Those who laugh last, laugh more.”19
A MARTYR’S WIFE
Malika, often known by her nom de guerre, Oum Obeyda, is one of the new women of Al Qaeda. Unlike the women of JI, these women comprise a group that includes supporters, propagandists, recruiters, and suicide bombers, and that reflects the diversity of the organization itself. Unlike the women of JI, their agenda is not specifically local, but encompasses a view in which the House of Islam (Dar al Islam) opposes the House of War (Dar al Harb).
Malika has claimed in interviews that she did not know about Abdessater’s mission. He had told her that he was being sent to film the jihadis on the northern front. In fact, bin Laden had selected Abdessater for a top-secret suicide mission. Malika learned of her husband’s death when she stepped out of her house and someone congratulated her on being the wife of a martyr. She told CNN’s Paul Cruickshank that her heart jumped. Over the next few days several visitors came to see her and congratulate her, although she claims that she was grief-stricken. Eventually, a courier from bin Laden arrived with a check and a video that Abdessater had made for her, breaking the news about his mission. Abdessater had hoped that the video would arrive before she found out from anybody else.20
After Abdessater’s death, the “Voice of the Oppressed” website described Malika as a female holy warrior for the twenty-first century. Malika was transformed into a role model for jihadi women all over the world. For Malika, it is not a woman’s place to set off bombs. It would also be out of the question for her to personally participate in an attack. Yet she has a potent weapon at her disposal: her pen, or rather her laptop, was mightier than any sword. Her mission is “to wri
te, to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”21
Malika acknowledges that if the act of disseminating information about the massacres of her Muslim brothers and sisters in Iraq and Afghanistan means that people label her a terrorist, then yes, she is a terrorist.22 However, she does more than report on the events of the war; she also urges men to go there on jihad and encourages women to support them. Her website is a place where she can express her own convictions and a personal platform calling for Islamic resistance. “There is a war going on, and it is necessary for each one of us to chase the occupier out of our land. Those countries that have invaded Muslim lands are pigs and dogs and their presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, or in Palestine is only a matter of time.”23 For Malika, resistance against the occupation is an obligation. Remaining silent is cowardice, if not complicity. She knows people call her radical, and she embraces the term. God willing, she waits for Afghanistan to be purified of those “pigs’ stains” (the soldiers of the Coalition and the current government of Hamid Karzai) so that she may someday return again and join Moaz in jihad.
In Malika’s 2003 autobiography, Les Soldats de la Lumière, she likened the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan to “soldiers of light” fighting the Western soldiers of darkness. She writes that she was on the battlefield with her brothers and can vouch that they were proud and brave. She pays tribute to the warriors who died defending the honor of their sisters, and to those who are imprisoned in Guantánamo. She writes: “My ancestors’ blood flows in my veins … which boils in me, I want to say today: Today I am proud to be the granddaughter of the mujahideen … the wife of a mujahid … the sister of the mujahideen!” She triumphantly concludes: “The criminal President George Bush spent billions of dollars to extinguish the light, but could never extinguish the light of Allah.”24
As a self-proclaimed mujahid, Malika boasts that she is a woman of Al Qaeda.25 Her propaganda efforts have promoted suicide terrorism in Iraq and supported domestic terror cells in Europe. According to a counter-terror official in Europe, “Malika is a role model, an icon who is bold. She plays a very important strategic role as a source of inspiration. She’s very clever—and extremely dangerous.”26 For jihadi women, Malika is a source of inspiration because she is telling women to stop sleeping and open their eyes. Wherever she goes she inspires other jihadis with her charismatic personality.
Malika balked at wearing a burqa while at the women’s training camp in Afghanistan. In principle, she understands that men are stronger than women, but her resistance and activism are a personal testimony to Allah. Her mantra is: “People resist, people fight, and people should be ready to die … It is better to die than to live in humiliation.”27 It is important that Muslim women participate in the struggle. As is the case with so many other terrorist groups, part of the logic for women’s participation is to shame men into joining the struggle. Malika acknowledges that there are men who don’t speak out because they are afraid. She speaks out for them. In doing so, she has been at the center of every major attack or terrorist plot in Belgium in the past ten years.
Malika managed to avoid long-term incarceration for so long because she played the European legal systems. She knew the rules and just how far she could go before actually being convicted for committing a crime. She once told a Swiss court: “I know what I’m doing. I’m Belgian. I know the system.”28 While she hosted Internet chat groups and encouraged European Muslims to go to Iraq, she also claimed unemployment benefits from the Belgian government, which paid her $1,100 a month. For counter-terrorism officials and police, the situation was galling. It was only when she convinced a young French Muslim, Hamza el Alami, to go on jihad to Waziristan, on the Afghan border, and kill NATO troops that Malika made a crucial error. Belgium is a NATO member, so her recruitment of Muslims to fight against NATO troops in Afghanistan was considered an act of treason. Furthermore, el Alami was not completely sure that he wanted to go. Malika pressured him and when he died, she became an accessory after the fact. For the judges, she bore sweeping responsibility for the young man’s death.29 Head judge Pierre Hendrix said she had been “trapped in a sickening logic of a conflict that did not concern her in any way” and even wondered whether she was sane.30
THE NEW GLOBAL JIHAD
Malika el Aroud is a representative of the new global jihad. A Muslim expatriate living in Europe, she communicates her messages of resistance over the Internet to a worldwide audience of true believers. Her words inspire men to travel thousands of miles to become suicide bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan. This new Al Qaeda has no return address—it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Al Qaeda is unlike traditional terrorist groups. Rather than being formally linked, many Al Qaeda terrorists find themselves in a loose network of affiliated groups. For the most part, Al Qaeda is a source of inspiration rather than a formal organization with a hierarchical structure and clearly identified leaders. Its amorphous structure helps to explain why it is so difficult to defeat and why it seems to be spreading throughout the world.
The majority of Al Qaeda’s members are men, and its power base is decidedly masculine. At present, there are no women in the core leadership of Al Qaeda al Sulba, the main core of the organization and the heart and soul of the global jihad. Beyond this core is a nebulous movement with loosely connected offshoot organizations in countries all over the world and sympathizers who do not always engage in violence. Women are among its most fervent supporters, and some participate in the affiliated organizations, but it is rare for them to be on the front lines.31 Instead, they form an army of organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators, and fund-raisers, who either enlist with their husbands or take the place of those who are jailed or killed.
They have found an especially significant outlet for the dissemination of radical ideologies online. The Internet has afforded jihadi women like Malika the opportunity to participate in jihad without affecting their inferior status in society. In Italy, Umm Yahya Aysha (Barbara) Farina directs the website and blog, Al Muhajidah Magazine. The October 2001 edition (posted immediately after 9/11) featured an editorial entitled “I Support the Taliban” and featured a picture of President George Bush with the caption “Wanted dead or alive, commander of crusade.”32 Farina regularly posts her blogs to Malika el Aroud’s websites. American Colleen Renee LaRose, more commonly known as Jihad Jane, showed how infectious the use of the Internet and YouTube has become. Arrested in October 2009, LaRose was indicted in March 2010 for conspiring to commit murder and providing material support to terrorists. She boasted on the Internet of her readiness to help terrorists, recruit men and women for jihad, and raise money for operations in the United States, Europe, and Asia, according to her indictment.33 LaRose was arrested specifically for encouraging jihadis in Ireland to kill cartoonist Lars Vilks in Sweden after a series of insulting drawings in 2007 made Vilks public enemy number one in many Islamic circles and Al Qaeda offered $100,000 for his death.34 The arrest and investigation into Jihad Jane (and her accomplice Jihad Jamie) demonstrated that the Internet, combined with women’s ability to mobilize new recruits, has become a force to be reckoned with in the globalized jihad.
Back in 2004 Al Qaeda created a Web-based women’s magazine, Al Khansa’a—named for the pre-Islamic female poet and convert who wrote lamentations for her brothers killed in battle. When Al Khansa’a received the news of her sons’ deaths, she did not grieve, but exclaimed, “Praise be to Allah who honored me with their martyrdom. I pray for Allah to let me join them in heaven.”35 The webzine is published by the Women’s Information Office in the Arab Peninsula, and its contents include articles on women’s appropriate behavior, exercises for getting physically fit, how to support male jihadi relatives, terrorist training camps, and even the occasional recipe. Its first issue, with a bright pink cover and gold lettering, appeared in August 2004. Its lead article was “Biography of the Female Mujahid.” Though some of its articles discussed military
training for women, the magazine’s authors did not call on women to take part in combat. However, they did admonish women to watch their weight and advised them to stay physically fit (including the occasional fast) to be ready for jihad. The lead editorial promises, “We will stand up, veiled and in abayas, arms in hand, our children on our laps and the Book of Allah and Sunnah of the Prophet as our guide. The blood of our husbands and the bodies of our children are an offering to God.”36
The use of women in terrorist attacks carried out by Islamist organizations remains rare. It is, however, on the rise. Militant jihadi women have emerged in groups affiliated with Al Qaeda rather than in the core organization, because the core ideologues continue to oppose women’s participation. The affiliated groups have been more practical and flexible with respect to this issue. In instances where women are more likely to succeed than men, conservative ideologies go by the wayside. Hence the increased use of women bombers in Palestine, Chechnya, North Africa, and Somalia, which contradicts traditional Islamic ideology.
Al Qaeda has merged on a number of occasions with other like-minded groups. Bin Laden established the Maktab al Khidmat, commonly known as the Afghan Services Bureau, in 1984. In 1988 he established a new organization called Al Qaeda, and in late 1990, he merged with Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al Takfir Wal Hijra to create a new organization. Different attitudes about women can be an unintended consequence of these mergers.
In 2004, after years of competition and rivalry, bin Laden combined with Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s al Tawhid wal Jihad insurgent group to create what later became Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). At the time of the merger, Zarqawi was conferred the title “Emir of Al Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers.” It has been suggested that Zarqawi achieved prominence only because American officials exaggerated his importance. Whether or not this is the case, the brief collaboration between Zarqawi and Al Qaeda allowed the introduction of female suicide bombers into the Iraqi theater of operations—something that neither bin Laden nor Al Zawahiri (Al Qaeda’s main ideologue and number-two leader) enthusiastically supported. The merger also expanded al Qaeda’s links in Europe: Zarqawi had operatives throughout the continent and in the United Kingdom providing funds and recruits. The alliance ultimately proved fragile because Zarqawi acted independently of directives and irritated the leadership by instigating outrageous acts of violence and focusing on Iraqi Shi’as rather than the forces of occupation.