Lexington Green points to Adam Shatz’s London Review piece, Laptop Jihadi, on the recent book, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri by Brynjar Lia:
Abu Musab al-Suri never received an advance for his magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, written in safe houses after the fall of the Taliban and published in December 2004 by a clandestine press. But a few weeks before his book appeared, the Bush administration bestowed an honour on him more valuable than anything the jihadi market had to offer: the announcement of a $5 million reward for his capture.Abu Musab al-Suri is the nom de guerre of the Syrian jihadi Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar, al-Qaida’s most formidable and far-sighted military strategist. Al-Suri played a key role in the 1990s in establishing al-Qaida’s presence in Europe and forging its links to radical jihadis in North Africa and the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, South and East Asia. He was a spokesman for the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé, a press attaché for Osama bin Laden in London and an adviser to Mullah Omar in Kabul, and he appears under a variety of aliases in books by foreign correspondents he escorted to meet the man in Tora Bora. Until he was captured in Quetta by Pakistani intelligence agents in October 2005 and handed over to the CIA, he went wherever the jihad travelled. Indeed, it was al-Suri who first argued that in order to survive, al-Qaida had to become a kind of travelling army based on mobile, nomadic, flexible cells operating independently of one another, unified by little more than a common ideology – and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention.
Some of the details of al-Suri’s life are not what you might expect:
Madrid, where al-Suri made a living selling second-hand furniture at a flea market, proved a comfortable base. With his red hair, green eyes and pale complexion, al-Suri passed easily for a European and soon enough he was one: in 1987 he married Elena Moreno Cruz, a left-wing student of philology who converted to Islam and helped him become a Spanish citizen. They moved to Granada and began to raise a family. Al-Suri opened a giftshop but found his true vocation as a jihadi author.
It guess it comes as no surprise that we should have been paying more attention to what Islamic terrorists were up to in the 1990s:
The GIA, however, thought al-Suri would be more useful in London, so in 1995 he moved there with his family and settled in Neasden. He became a staff writer for the GIA newsletter, al-Ansar, and travelled throughout Europe promoting the cause. The GIA was taking the war to France. It hijacked an Airbus in Algiers on Christmas Eve 1994 with the intention of flying it into the Eiffel Tower (the plane was stormed by gendarmes while refuelling in Marseille), and planted bombs in the Paris Metro the following year. Al-Suri praised these operations as efforts to punish France for supporting the military regime and to ‘expose the hidden hand of the West’. What neither al-Suri nor Qutadah knew at the time was that Algeria’s Sécurité Militaire had agents inside the GIA, and that they were probably encouraging the attacks on French soil in order to expose the barbarous face of the Islamist opposition and thereby persuade France that defending the military was in its national interest. Eventually, however, the GIA went too far even for al-Suri, when it began to execute many of its own leaders and to kill wavering supporters in order to ‘purify’ Algeria. Al-Suri resigned from the party and began looking for other work.
We also probably should have been paying more attention to the situation in London:
He didn’t have to look for long. London, as he later wrote, was ‘the centre for communications between Islamist groups and groups opposed to the governments of their own countries’, and there was no lack of opportunity for a ‘media jihadi’ like al-Suri. Still reeling from the Rushdie affair, the British government looked the other way, and showed particular indulgence towards jihadis who shared a common enemy with the Foreign Office, notably the Libyan jihadis conspiring against Gaddafi. British hospitality led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British journalists and the jihadi movement. He was remarkably industrious – and successful – in his efforts to attract British attention.
[...]
He felt betrayed: ‘When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he tore up the unwritten understanding and stabbed the mujahedin in the back by changing the laws and harassing us.’ Britain had lost its ‘democratic virginity’ to ‘the American cowboy’.