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Though these sites have become an ideological home for many Muslims, for most Arab immigrants Europe has provided comfort and support, while at the same time allowing them the freedom to maintain their Islamic identities. Three Moroccan immigrants died on the trains on March 11. One was a devout thirteen-year-old girl, Sanae Ben Salah, for whom the M-30 mosque was said to have been her "second home." Another, Mohamed Itabien, twentyseven, was an illegal immigrant who taught Arabic classes at a mosque in Guadalajara. He was the sole source of support for his family, including eleven siblings, most of whom lived in a tiny town in Morocco where there were no telephones. The third, Osama el-Amrati, was a builder who was engaged to a Spanish woman. "Europe has given us opportunities our own countries didn't give us," Mustapha el-M'Rabet, the head of the Moroccan Workers and Immigrants Association, told me in Madrid. "Our children are in school, and we are working. Thousands of families in Morocco can live with the money we get here." When I asked M'Rabet if Al An-dalus was part of the lure for Moroccan immigrants, he said, "Nobody with common sense could talk about going back to that. It's madness. It's a disease."
Under Aznar, relations with Morocco deteriorated to the point where, in 2002, the countries broke off diplomatic relations over various problems, including territory disputes, immigration, and the flow of drugs into Europe through Spain (according to the United Nations, Morocco exports twelve billion dollars' worth of marijuana each year). Eventually, the governments returned their ambassadors, without resolving the disputes that had led to the rupture. When twelve suicide bombers struck in Casablanca in May 2003, killing forty-five people, one of their targets was a restaurant called Casa de Espana.
"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 co
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 a