Posted on 12/11/2001 7:10:04 PM PST by father_elijah
TUNIS — The young man left his home here with the same dreams that have propelled thousands of Tunisians across the Mediterranean to Italy: a job, adventure, a taste of freedom.
After a few years of scraping by with tough day jobs, he found a bigger dream: to be a soldier of God, righting the wrongs perpetrated against Muslims across the world.
The young man found Muhammad Saidani, a Tunisian émigré who led prayers at a mosque in Bologna, who infused him with a sense of mission and sent him, the man said later, to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan run by Al Qaeda.
"Saidani always talked about the purity of our religion and he made a cell around him," the young man told Tunisian security officials four years ago, after he was arrested on a trip home and charged with membership in a terrorist group. "We studied the press, the situation in Arab countries and organizing jihad."
Tunisian authorities have since seized and convicted Mr. Saidani, 35, who was deported from Italy earlier this year. He may not have been a significant player in Al Qaeda, but Tunisian authorities considered him an important link in a loose network of North African immigrants in Europe inspired by Osama bin Laden.
Few details about Mr. Saidani have been released, other than his rather typical trajectory, which sent him to Italy in 1988, at age 22, apparently in an attempt to escape the poverty and political tumult at home.
But the story of the young men who followed him provides a case study of how extremists burrowed into Western societies and espoused a violent anti-Western vision of Islam that would have led to jail in their home countries.
Over the past year, investigators have dismantled a number of suspected terror cells dominated by first- and second-generation North African immigrants. Some were veterans of Islamist movements in their own countries and left in the great exodus in the late 1980's, when Arab governments in Tunisia, Algeria and elsewhere began to crack down on fundamentalists.
In other cases, the young recruits appear to have drifted into militancy after leaving home, drawn to clandestine knots of fellow immigrants by their sense of alienation.
"In the European mosques, they tell these people they just want a return to Islamic tradition," said Amami Abdullah, a Tunisian who has written extensively on Islamic political movements. "But it's a Trojan horse, a way of recruiting. What they are really peddling is a rejection of Western culture."
Dozens of Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Libyans have been arrested recently on charges of forging and stealing passports, arms trafficking, possession of explosives and plotting deadly bomb and chemical attacks against Western targets.
In California this year, an Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, was convicted of a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. In Europe, North Africans have been charged with planning to blow up the United States Embassy in Paris and attacking a busy Christmas market in Strasbourg, France. Several of those arrested have also been accused of providing logistical support to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Although the suspects had no direct contact with Mr. bin Laden, as far as the investigators know, they considered themselves part of his declared war on Christians and Jews. As an Algerian man put it in one phone call recorded by the Italian police, "Now we are mujahedeen muhajirun," or immigrant holy warriors.
The predominance of Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Libyans among the suspects is due partly to demographics. North Africans account for the largest number of immigrants in Italy, Spain and France. But events in their homelands and the tremors in the Muslim world may have played a role in their radicalization. Around the time that Mr. Saidani was first recruiting young immigrants for his jihad classes, Muslims were under siege in Bosnia. The Muslims of Chechnya were starting their uprising against Russia. During the Persian Gulf war, American troops settled into bases in Saudi Arabia, prompting Saudi dissidents like Mr. bin Laden to question the legitimacy of the ruling family. In Egypt, Islamic militants assassinated intellectuals and officials of a government they thought too secular.
The fundamentalist convulsions touched North Africa as well, prompting a harsh backlash from security forces.
Algeria plunged into civil war in 1992, after the military canceled parliamentary elections when it seemed certain Islamic militants would win. The fighting has continued, claiming an estimated 100,000 lives.
Tunisia also faced down a domestic challenge from a homegrown Islamist movement. The government jailed thousands of suspected fundamentalists, locked its mosques (except for prayers) and passed laws that make it a crime for any Tunisian to incite religious fanaticism.
"You can be a fundamentalist," said Sadok Chaabane, the former minister of justice who helped draft the laws. "You can wear a beard. But the moment you begin to draw in other people, write in the press, hold meetings or incite people, that's it."
That approach may sound harsh, he acknowledged. But he offered no apologies. "When we started, we had 1,000 people in the prisons," he said. "But it's better to have that than 100,000 dead, like in Algeria."
Human rights groups have consistently criticized Tunisia for its harsh treatment of Islamists, accusing the government of exploiting the threat of extremism to suppress moderate as well as militant critics.
Others said Tunisia has used too broad a definition of terrorism to lock up its citizens.
"There are people who are not with Osama bin Laden, but who went to Bosnia and other places out of conviction," said Samir Ben Amor, a lawyer in Tunis who represented Mr. Saidani as well as the young man who was arrested on his return to Tunisia in 1997.
But some Tunisians say people like Mr. Saidani and his disciples were part of a multilayered terror organization, that he was the link in Italy to more senior cell leaders like Sami Ben Khamais Essid, who was arrested in Italy in April after the police reported that their wiretaps had picked up his conversations about how to prepare chemical attacks.
Mr. Essid, according to investigators in Europe, was a confidant of Tarek Maaroufi, a Tunisian dissident with Belgian citizenship who maintained contacts with Mr. bin Laden's deputies in Afghanistan. Mr. Maaroufi is now the subject of a warrant issued by Italian investigators.
Tunisian officials thus say they feel even more vindicated in their approach toward Islamists after Sept. 11. "We've been telling people since the 80's about Afghanistan as a nest of terrorists," said Habib Ben Yahia, the foreign minister. "But people didn't want to listen because they were confusing those terrorists with defenders of human rights and democracy."
elijah+
There is no God but God,
and Jesus Christ is God's only-begotten Son.
Ping.
Whenever people speak of stable democracies in the European Union they need to have a long 're-think' about that -- how easy it would be for France to be turned into a Muslim war zone. It is hard to imagine a more fanatical concentration of Muslims than those who live in that great Islamic city London.
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