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Madrid, One Year On

Europe Continues to Stumble in its Fight against Terror

By Dominik Cziesche, Marion Kraske, Holger Stark and Helene Zuber

The terrorist attacks in Madrid struck at the heart of Europe. Almost 200 people died, over 2,000 were injured and thousands more traumatized. Europeans quickly swore they would fight terrorism together. But one year later, only a few parts of the plan have been implemented. And experts believe the next major attack will also be in Europe.

It is impossible to say, today, whether such a law could have hindered the March 11, 2004 attacks in Madrid -- whether the 191 people killed would still be alive, and whether the attackers could have been captured before they managed to blow up commuter trains in the middle of rush hour in Spain's capital one year ago. But one thing is clear. A legal framework, allowing and encouraging European investigators to work together across international borders as efficiently as terrorist groups do, would have placed a challenging hurdle in the path of the Madrid terrorists.

Take the case of alleged Madrid co-conspirator Rabei Osman Ahmed. Known as "Mohammed the Egyptian," Ahmed wasn't unknown to the police prior to the attacks, but he had proven to be elusive. As early as 2000, Ahmed had attracted attention as a vocal lay preacher of Islam in Germany. He was investigated and judged not to be dangerous but his case file was saved. Following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States, his file was looked into once again and it was discovered that he had left Germany for Spain. It was decided that further investigation into his case was needed.

But in the following months, the flow of information between Germany and Spain was scant at best. It was only in February 2003 that the Spanish instigated a more intensive exchange of information, but it was too late. In the same month, Ahmed traveled onwards to Paris, and there, amid confusion as to whether the Germans, the Spanish or the French were responsible for the case, the authorities lost his trail. One year later, the bombs went off in Madrid.

Hoped for anti-terror reform never happened

Ahmed's case is symptomatic of the weaknesses hindering the European fight against terror. The borders within the European Union are open, but a joint strategy guiding the cooperation of Europe's different law enforcement authorities remains, at best, in the form of a preliminary sketch. For police and secret service agencies, this state of affairs is a huge obstacle. Indeed the violent attacks in Madrid were seen by many as the needed catalyst that would force Europe to finally knit together its myriad law-enforcement agencies. Europeans felt that the reform process would be injected with a sense of urgency -- rather than allowing the fight against terror in Europe to continue along the same bureaucratic path as the guidelines for determining the amount of fat allowable in milk.

One year later, it is clear that the desired urgency never materialized. The implementation of European-wide resolutions adopted at the European Union level is often delayed at the national level, secret service data is still not being shared freely with the joint law-enforcement body Europol, and the exchange of information among EU members has proven slow at best.

At the same time, the situation in Europe has never been more dangerous -- the entire continent has become an anti-terror battlefield. "I think that it is only a question of time before an attack happens in Italy or England," says one highly placed German security officer. American experts also predict that the next large attack will take place in Europe.

EU anti-terror coordinator Gijs de Vries also has no illusions about the dangers facing Europe. "No country in Europe can consider itself safe. A number of planned attacks have already been averted."

Even more worrisome, the attacks that are being planned are homemade -- the terror cells in Europe have become indigenous and they are planting bombs directly in front of their own front doors. The terror cells from Madrid are a prime example -- far from being remote controlled from the mountains of Afghanistan, they were immigrants who had been living in Europe for years. Terrorists in Europe are, to be sure, supported by an international logistics network, according to the French domestic secret service agency DST. But to a large degree, al-Qaida and its allies have decentralized the holy war and today, bin Laden's fiefdom of terror is made up largely of numerous, mostly autonomous groups scattered across the globe. They choose their targets themselves and operate primarily in the countries where their members live. Many of them are in Europe.

"Terrorism is coming home," is how Guido Steinberg, who works in the German chancellor's office, explains the situation. "Battleground Europe," is Islam expert and Paris political scientist Gilles Kepel's preferred description. And the American terrorism expert Steven Emerson darkly predicts, "I don't doubt that Germany should fear an attack."

International terror at home in Europe

The Madrid attack -- and the Dec. 2004 murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who made the controversial, anti-Islam film "Submission" -- also disproved an old axiom: Immigrants will not attack their adopted homeland. The axiom had held for a long time and jihadists seemed only to be interested in the conflicts taking place in their home countries. Funded by Saudi money, they fought against the regimes in Morocco, Algeria or Egypt. But the fight spread and the mujahedeen became increasingly likely to take up the global jihad in places like Chechnya, Afghanistan and Bosnia.

Indeed Bosnia, where an estimated 5,000 foreign jihadists fought during the civil war, is still considered to be a potential training ground of international terror. Money is being pumped into the former war zone by wealthy Saudi Arabians and the money is being used to build stately mosques in isolated villages. But in brand new school complexes built along with the mosques, the next generation is being versed in texts of Wahhabism -- an extreme school of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. The EU is keeping an eye on the potential future crisis, but other than offering reconstruction aid in the form of troops and police overseers, there is little it can do.

There will likely be dire future consequences. The next generation of young radicals is already clustering around and learning from the mujahedeen who fought in Bosnia or Afghanistan. And they aren't just content to stay in the Balkans. In Spain alone, investigators say there are 300 people who are connected to terrorist organizations -- in Germany, the numbers are comparable.

Quite a number of those from this young generation are well educated and speak several languages fluently, which makes it easier for them to blend in to European society. Serhane Ben Abdelmajid Farkhet, one of the Madrid co-conspirators, provides a telling example. For a long time, he lived an uneventful middle-class life in Spain. The 36-year-old Tunisian studied economics in Madrid, was married to a Moroccan and seemed destined for success in the West. He was a regular top seller in the real estate company where he worked.

But Farkhet was a friend of Ahmed, the fearless March 11 conspirator who police lost track of when he moved to France. Under his influence, Farkhet, who was known as "the Tunisian," became more radical. Soon, he was no longer selling houses, but terror. He went to Istanbul where he met with al-Qaida operatives and in Spain he helped the bombers organize the attack.