The Secret Agents: Life Inside an al Qaeda Cell

Karim Bourti and Mohamed Sifaoui met in Paris in October 2002, at the trial of Algerian Islamist radicals who had terrorized the city with a series of 1995 bombings. Bourti, himself a militant Islamist, was attending the trial to support the defendants; Sifaoui, a journalist, was covering it for a Luxembourg newspaper. In furtive conversations at the hearings, the two men established that they had strikingly similar profiles: raised in the same neighborhood in Algiers, they had gone to the same high school and now both lived as exiles in France. Bourti took Sifaoui for a potential recruit; Sifaoui saw an opportunity to get a great story by infiltrating Bourti's circle, a cell of the al Qaeda-affiliated Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (known by its French acronym, GSPC).

Bourti was no big fish; he ran a lucrative traffic in fake brand-name clothes and pressured Parisian imams to let him collect funds in their mosques. Still, as a mid-level GSPC operative, he might also have recruited and hosted terrorists traveling through Europe, including the shoe bomber Richard Reid. So for more than three months in 2002, Sifaoui, posing as a fellow radical, attended meetings with Bourti's associates in Paris and in London. Mes Frères Assassins is the diary of his imposture.

Sifaoui sets out to depict the daily workings of a jihadist cell in a non-Muslim country. This might seem like a modest goal, but since many of the operatives involved in the September 11 attacks and in the broader jihad emerged from groups such as Bourti's, the shadowy world of the radical rank-and-file deserves close attention.

In some ways, what Sifaoui finds is underwhelming. Bourti's militants do provide funds and moral support to imprisoned terrorists and logistical help to would-be militants. More often, however, they peddle their dogma like salesmen, distributing free dinners spiced with jihadist messages to the needy or delivering a dose of comfort and militant Islam to the sick in public hospitals. Petty cadres in a vast community of immigrants, they scheme to get a cut of their fellows' wages. Sifaoui follows them as they collect the zakat, a religious tax, in front of a Parisian mosque at the end of the holy month of Ramadan. One man's two-hour take: €1,000.

Political Islam comes in many flavors, and this one has the bitter taste of exile. Composed of members of the Algerian diaspora radicalized by the civil war at home and by the success of Iranian revolutionaries and the Afghan mujahideen, the GSPC is not unlike Malaysia's Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) -- a group drawn from mostly Indonesian immigrants who have fled poverty and political oppression. Whereas Hamas, Hezbollah, and many other Islamist groups constitute armed wings of broad social movements, the GSPC and JI are much smaller and more self-contained. They operate with a few resolute members accountable to no broader constituency. Retaliatory blows after September 11, 2001, may have shaken the architecture of global Islamist terrorism, but small clusters like these are still dangerous. Empowered by modern technologies of communication and destruction, they are autonomous and strategically unfocused, and thus elusive and unpredictable.

THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE

The roots of the GSPC lie in the several million economic immigrants who began to leave northern Africa for Europe when decolonization began in the 1960s. Islamism came to France with this diaspora, but its current virulence cannot be explained by uprootedness alone. The GSPC gets its edge from the trauma of the Algerian civil war, which has pitted a repressive military regime against religious radicals and has accounted for more than 100,000 deaths since the early 1990s. Some of those who fled the violence brought its baggage with them. The intolerance they encountered in France fed their rage, while the peaceful majority in their new communities looked the other way and condoned the radicals' tactics. State terror and exile defined the basic matrix that bred Bourti's cell.

The militants' anger seems to have no deeper eschatological root. The ideological chatter exchanged in Sifaoui's meetings with his "brothers" consists of little more than gossip about Osama bin Laden and sound bites from Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, radical Muslim theologians from ages past. The militants care less about doctrinal depth than they do about Islamist symbolism -- a jihadist pop of sorts. They are obsessed with matters of style: the beard, a distinctive slang, open disdain for women, wearing one's watch on the right wrist rather than the left, an aversion to all jewelry, and an irritation with Sifaoui's beret (which they think makes him look Jewish).

Bourti's recruits are born-again Muslims and converts from non-Muslim societies. Some heard the call while jailed for crimes of delinquency; others were once students in France's secular universities who broke with their comrades and liberal middle-class families. Bourti himself admits that his men are so Westernized that when duty calls, they will have no trouble shaving their beards "and passing for preppies."