Hamza’s friends admired his soccer skills. “No ball entered his net,” one fellow player said. But off the field, he seemed adrift. He dropped out of high school and worked selling car parts in his father’s shop. His friend Younes Achbak made it further in his studies. He was also a gifted athlete, though he smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds a day. He promised his mother he would run the family’s shops once he graduated from college. But his heart was in Europe, she told me. He tried sneaking into Spain but was caught at the border and roughed up by the authorities.
Before the Madrid bombings in March 2004, Hamza, Younes and the Ben Abouds would chat casually about the day’s news. Their attention drifted from topic to topic. Sometimes it was soccer; sometimes politics. But after the bombings, they became consumed by one subject: the war in Iraq. They began meeting after the ishaa, or evening prayer, at the dusty entrance of a middle school around the corner from the Ben Aboud home, a young man with intimate knowledge of the group told me. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was one of Hamza’s best friends. He is also related to two of the men who left for Iraq. He said the friends became obsessed with the war. They traded details of the day’s news, stirring the anger in one another. They were outraged by the graphic deaths they saw on television and by the American contractors they heard were profiting from the occupation.
Muncif, the math student, came to find television coverage of the war inadequate. He began sitting at his computer late at night, surfing the Web for hours at a time, the friend said. Muncif discovered Web sites that showed footage of American soldiers bursting into the homes of Iraqis as women and children cowered. The links were sent to him by a Middle-Easterner he had met online. Muncif began posting them on his own Web page, which he shared with friends in Tetouan and Tangier. He collected books and CDs on jihad, which he bought from a Moroccan man who lived in Madrid and passed through Tetouan from time to time.
Muncif came to believe that defending Iraqis was an obligation of all Muslims — that the occupation of Iraq should be viewed as part of a global struggle. “If they do not have someone to help them, maybe this will happen to all Muslims,” a relative recalled him saying. “Maybe if Iraq doesn’t have sovereignty, Morocco will be the next country invaded.”
Muncif’s brother Bilal was soon talking the same way. He insisted that the war was not simply aimed at conquering Iraqis but also at defeating Islam. “The goal of the United States is to wipe Islam out,” he said, according to the relative.
Over the next year, people in the neighborhood noticed changes in the group. Hamza stopped going to the barbershop. His hair grew past his shoulders, and he began wearing a hat, tunic and sandals. Younes and Bilal started dressing the same way, styling themselves after the Prophet Muhammad. “When they became very religious, they did not sit and talk to us,” said 25-year-old Marwan Bilamri, who smuggles wine for a living. “They kept to themselves.”
Another young man began dressing like the Prophet, the barbershop owner recalled. This young man, Abdelmunim Amakchar Elamrani, had little in common with Hamza’s group. His family struggled. “We didn’t have money for books,” said his father, Ahmed, who trades sheep for a living. Abdelmunim kept going to school, bravely empty-handed. Finally he flunked out. After that, he would rise for the dawn prayer and then walk out the door, joining the stream of other men headed to Ceuta.
A tall, lumbering fellow, Abdelmunim had fallen into an especially perilous line of work. He bought car tires and bedcovers in Ceuta and stuffed them into plastic bags. He then waded into the Mediterranean and swam back to Morocco, pushing his bags through the ocean. He tried settling down a few years ago and married a conservative girl who wore a niqab and bore their first child. He was tender with his baby and wife. He helped her hang the laundry, she said, and knead the dough for their bread. But on his days off, he veered to more boyish pursuits, watching “Conan the Barbarian” and losing himself in PlayStation with his little brother. They played soccer on the roof of their house, dodging clotheslines as they struggled for the ball.
Abdelmunim had one certain connection to the others who would leave for Iraq: they worshiped at the same mosque. It sits across the street from Hamza’s house, a tower of concrete that reaches high above the boxy homes. The mosque has no official name and was never approved by the authorities. It is affiliated with Dawa Tabligh, a generally peaceful group of proselytizing Muslims who travel around Morocco. Strangers in silk tunics and caps passed through with such frequency that neighbors began calling it “the Afghani mosque.”
The young men who prayed at this mosque were taken with its imam, Abdelilah Fathallah. He sang verses of the Koran with a melodious voice and struck his people as warm and youthful, a refreshing departure from the older imams in the neighborhood.
He would sit chatting with his congregants well into the evening. But if he was popular inside the mosque, he had a reputation of intolerance outside it. One day last year, the imam walked into the Coiffure Cyprus barbershop to have his beard trimmed. The talk turned to the situation in Lebanon, and the owner of the shop, Ali, asked the imam what he thought of Hassan Nasrallah, the Shiite cleric and leader of the Hezbollah movement there.
“Shia are unbelievers,” the imam declared, according to a barber in the shop.
Moroccan officials told me that at some point in 2006, the imam began talking to young men in the neighborhood about making jihad in Iraq. He acted as their recruiter and helped arrange their travel, a senior Moroccan intelligence official, Abdelhak Bassou, told me. He added that the men also got help from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an Algeria-based group. When I asked Bassou how the imam operated, he outlined a general process that he said applied to the Jamaa Mezuak cell. Recruitment starts in the mosque, he said. The recruiter looks for people who are easy to approach and gives them books and CDs on Islam and then shows them jihadi Web sites. Eventually they become convinced.
But in describing what happened to the men of Jamaa Mezuak, Hamza’s close friend offered almost the opposite narrative. They became interested in jihad on their own, he said, and then found a way to get to Iraq, possibly through the imam. “They weren’t recruited,” he said.
According to a sealed Moroccan court document I obtained, the imam first raised the idea of going to Iraq with Younes, the chain-smoker. The imam also discussed it with Muncif and Abdelmunim, who had quit his job as a smuggler that year after the authorities caught him pushing bags through the ocean. The imam introduced the three young men to a shoe vendor in Tetouan who was raising money for the travel of jihadi volunteers, according to the document. It details the confessions of 29 people, including the imam, who were charged with participating in a Moroccan terrorist cell that recruited, financed and sent volunteers to Iraq. (The veracity of the document is questionable. Moroccan prisoners are sometimes tortured into giving confessions and often retract them later, according to Moroccan defense lawyers and human rights groups.)
In the months before they left for Iraq, Muncif, Bilal and the others became secretive. But a few clues slipped out. One afternoon, Bilal and Hamza walked up to Bilal’s friend Dayday and some other men. Dayday hardly recognized Bilal anymore. He no longer wrote comedy sketches. He had grown a beard and lost his easy laugh. The men began chatting when someone in the group joked about doing jihad in Iraq.
“You don’t need to,” Bilal replied. “I’m going with my friend Hamza.” Dayday thought he was kidding. Plenty of young men talked that way. Bilal just did it more forcefully, Dayday thought. “Our brothers are dying, and we have to help them,” he recalled Bilal saying. “Islam orders us to do jihad.”
In preparing to leave, Bilal burned his nonreligious belongings, including a recording of the song he wrote, a close friend said. Bilal and the others made a secret plan. They would travel in pairs, using aliases, shaving their faces and wearing Iraqi clothes to try to fit in, the friend said. They bought one-way plane tickets from Casablanca to Istanbul. They planned to cross over to Syria by land, American intelligence analysts told me, and would then continue to Iraq.
Younes was the first to leave. He walked out of his house in June 2006 without saying goodbye to his mother. Fearful of government surveillance, his friends stopped meeting at their usual spot by the school.
Muncif left in July, telling his mother he was going to Mauritania. Three days later, he called home and asked for his parents’ forgiveness. He was already in Syria.
Abdelmunim left on a Friday morning in September. He kissed his wife on the cheek and told her he would be spending the week in Ceuta. His little brother, Usama, remembered that he left quickly, without a farewell.
Bilal and Hamza disappeared the following month.
A few days before he left, Hamza asked a friend to take his photograph. In the picture, Hamza is wearing a striped tunic and a black prayer cap. His long hair is tucked behind his ears. He stares intently at the camera, his mouth slightly agape, like a child’s.
The day before Bilal left, he ran into Dayday at a busy indoor market in Tetouan. Bilal had shaved his beard, Dayday recalled, and was carrying a yellow travel bag. He said he was going on a trip. They hugged.
“If he had told me where he was going, I could have gone with him,” Dayday told me. “Or stopped him.”
I asked which it would have been.
“I would have stopped him,” Dayday said. “But maybe he would have convinced me to go with him. He knew how to convince people.”
The Choice
Dayday seems to walk along a precipice. Some days he is tempted to jump, to leave for Iraq himself.
“If I found someone to take me, I would go tomorrow,” he told me one afternoon in June.
In some ways, Dayday believes that Bilal was right to leave for Iraq. All Moroccans have a duty to defend other Muslims under attack, he says. He spends hours listening to the pirated CDs of incendiary sheiks. He can tick off the requirements of jihad like a grocery list: You must ask your parents’ permission; you must pay your debts. He breathlessly defends suicide bombings as a necessary weapon against the American forces in Iraq. When a Muslim land is occupied, he argues, Muslims must rise up to defend it. This vocabulary has entered the realm of his personal life. When his mother tells him he can’t marry Leila, his lifelong love, he threatens to “go do jihad in Iraq.”
But something always holds him back. He has seen too many images of Muslims dying at the hands of other Muslims. Most suicide operations in Iraq are now targeted at Shiites or Sunnis, he says, not at the American soldiers whom he would gladly face. “You can’t know who you’re going to kill,” he told me. That critique of suicide attacks in Iraq is often heard around Jamaa Mezuak these days.
Dayday’s thinking reflects his moods, which swing with the highs and lows of an uncertain life. He earns about $6 a day by selling smuggled goods at the market. It will take years for him to save enough money to build a floor atop his parents’ ramshackle house. And that is the prerequisite for marrying Leila.
Dayday sings her name sometimes. She lives in a village high in the Rif Mountains. They rarely see each other, and time is running out. He is sure that someone else will marry her first. And yet there is no solution. It is his obligation, as a Muslim man, to provide a home for his wife. Every night, when Dayday returns to the cramped dwelling he shares with a dozen relatives, he is reminded of his failure. “You want to feel like a man,” said Dayday, who has a soft beard and tired eyes.
So why has Dayday not followed Bilal’s path? The question of what drives someone to terrorism has given rise to a cottage industry of theories since Sept. 11. None may fully explain what happened in Jamaa Mezuak: why some of its young men chose to become terrorists when most have not. The notion that poverty is to blame has been debunked again and again. And while religious extremism can feed militancy, many experts prefer to emphasize the anger generated by political conflicts, like the war in Iraq or the Arab-Israeli struggle.
Many may sympathize with a cause, but few ever turn to violence. Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. case officer, holds that people prone to terrorism share a sequence of experiences, which he outlines in his forthcoming book, “Leaderless Jihad.” They feel a sense of moral outrage that is interpreted in a specific way (the war in Iraq, for example, is interpreted as a war on Islam); that outrage resonates with the person’s own experiences (Muslims in Germany or Britain who feel marginalized might identify with the suffering of Iraqis); and finally, that outrage is channeled into action.
This process, Sageman told me, is rarely a solitary one. He and a growing number of law-enforcement officials and analysts argue that group dynamics play a key role in radicalization. While ideology may inspire terrorists, they say, it takes intimate social forces to push people to action. Friends embolden one another to act in ways they might not on their own. This might be called the peer-pressure theory of terrorism. Experts in the field refer to it as the BOG, for bunch of guys (or GOG, for group of guys). “Terrorism is really a collective decision, not an individual one,” said Sageman, who coined the theory. “It’s about kinship and friendship.”
Kinship can also work to opposite effect. It is certainly part of the reason why Dayday has not left Tetouan. Most of the men with whom he prays and works admire Bilal’s courage in going to Iraq but prefer a different kind of jihad, or struggle, for themselves. They want to improve their lives. “I’m working to support my family,” one of Dayday’s closest friends, a merchant in his 30s, told me. “If I go, who will support my family?”
Jihadi groups, like most social circles, tend to rely on frequent, sustained interaction, Sageman told me. People are drawn together by a common activity, like soccer, or by a common set of circumstances, like prison. Often they meet in the temporary spaces born of immigration. Tetouan, in its own way, is a diaspora setting, with families in constant migatory flux. In groups predisposed to violence, there is often a shared grievance around which members first rally. In the case of urban American gangs, the grievance could be police brutality. For the Hamburg cell behind 9/11, it was the war in Chechnya.
Law-enforcement agencies have begun changing their approach to counterterrorism in tandem with their heightened awareness of the role that groups play. Investigators in Europe, Canada and the United States are now conducting surveillance of suspects for longer periods of time, in part to observe the full breadth of their social networks.
Yet in Jamaa Mezuak, the notion that groups play an important role in radicalizing young Muslims is nothing novel. “It’s the problem of friends,” said Ahmed Asrih, the father of the candy seller who was linked to the Madrid bombings. “If you’re friends with a good person, you’re good. If your friend is a pickpocket, you become a pickpocket.”
The Aftermath
Bilal tried to sound calm on the phone from Syria. But he called again and again, five or six times. He asked trivial questions, as if pretending everything was fine. Had his little brother done his homework? How were his parents? On the other end of the line, they were frantic. When the calls stopped, the house fell quiet, except for the occasional wail of grief. Only three of the five Ben Aboud boys remained.
That week, the youngest son went hunting for his passport. When he found it, the skinny 19-year-old quietly approached his father.
“Take it and hide it,” he told his father, “so you can have some peace.”
When news of the men’s departure first circulated in Jamaa Mezuak, people experienced a familiar wave of shock. The authorities raided the imam’s house and took him away. By then, three men from other neighborhoods in Tetouan had also departed.
Their journey to Iraq appears to have been well planned. American intelligence analysts familiar with the case told me that the men from Tetouan headed to Damascus, where they bought cellphones under the instruction of two Moroccan men living in Scandinavia. The Tetouan men then e-mailed the phone numbers to the men in Scandinavia, who forwarded the numbers to a person in Damascus with links to militant networks in Iraq. That person contacted the volunteers to arrange their voyage into Iraq.
Bilal and Hamza did not make it that far, according to the analysts. They were arrested and held in Syria, possibly awaiting extradition to Morocco, though the news had not reached Jamaa Mezuak when I was there. Moroccan officials told me that one of the other men from Tetouan, Said Oulad Akchine, died in Iraq, but they offered no details.
The fate of the five other Tetouan men — including Muncif, Younes and Abdelmunim — remains unknown. But a recent American military operation in Iraq offers some clues. In early September, soldiers raided a suspected militant safe house and seized a trove of documents related to the foreign-fighter network in Iraq, a senior military official told me. The material included what amounted to intake forms for foreign fighters arriving in Iraq, with their names, countries of origin, how much money they had and details about their families. Such forms were found for at least some of the eight men who left Tetouan for Iraq, the official said. He would not identify the men but said they are probably dead or in military custody.
Since the start of the war, a few thousand foreign jihadis have heeded the call to join militant networks in Iraq. Most are men in their 20s. Typically, they fall under the influence of an imam who helps them contact intermediaries for the insurgents in Iraq, the American official told me. They go off expecting to fight a heroic battle but often find out after arriving in Iraq that they are to be deployed instead on suicide missions targeting other Muslims, the official said. Based on the accounts of captured fighters, even when they protest, they are sometimes given no choice. “At the end of the day, nobody cares about these kids,” the official said. “They are Al Qaeda precision-guided munition.”
The numbers of foreign fighters entering Iraq have dropped substantially since this spring, the official said, at least in part because would-be jihadis have become more aware that the majority of suicide attacks are aimed at other Muslims. Military officials also gleaned information from the raid in September that indicates a shift: fewer jihadis are coming from Saudi Arabia, while more are arriving from North Africa, an estimated 40 percent of the roughly 60 to 75 fighters who land in Iraq every month. The shift happened in the summer of 2006, when the first men from Jamaa Mezuak began leaving for Iraq.
None of them, it appears, left behind videos explaining their decisions, as is common for suicide bombers in some Arab countries. There are no posters in the neighborhood exalting them. “It’s forbidden,” Hamza’s friend said. “Maybe you can feel it. But you cannot show it.”
