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UK House of Commons - Foreign Affairs Select Committee

Foreign Policy Aspects of the War against Terrorism

2 July 2006

Examination of Witnesses (Questions 142-159)

MR FRANK GARDNER, OBE

2 NOVEMBER 2005

Q142 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to this session of the Select Committee. We are delighted, Mr Gardner, that you have been able to join us today to give us your expertise and knowledge. Can I begin by asking you a general question because you have been closely following the issue of terrorism for some time. We had evidence given to this Committee a few weeks ago from Professor Paul Wilkinson and Mr Peter Taylor about changes in the nature of the terrorist threat that we confront. I would be interested to know your perspective on the current position with regard to developments and changes over recent years, since 9/11, and the kind of threats that we face.

Mr Gardner: How many days have you got? It is a very valid question. The major change of course to the al Qaeda threat came in the wake of 9/11. Osama bin Laden and his followers knew that there would be retribution for 9/11 even if it was not able to be pinned on them, so their logistical basis became scattered, and it became a much harder target for counter-terrorism forces to engage. The threat, as I see it, to western Europe and Western interests internationally is just as real as it was three years ago. I remember being accused by some commentator in a newspaper of being the BBC's "insecurity" correspondent because I said, "The threat is real and this is not just governments trying to stir up support; it had nothing to do with Iraq; the threat has been there for a very long time." I am going to stick my neck out here and say that certainly for the foreseeable future the threat of terrorism to the West has been raised dramatically by events in Iraq. That is my personal view, not necessarily a BBC view. You have just got to look at the statistics. I think that a mistake which our friends across the water in Washington make is to think of terrorism or the al Qaeda phenomenon as a supply-driven phenomenon: it is not; it is demand-driven. The idea that, "oh, it is great to have a conflict in Iraq because you draw out all the bad forces, and we can then engage them and eliminate them there", which is how I have heard one American official putting it, is absolute nonsense. Iraq has breathed new life into the al Qaeda phenomenon. The old al Qaeda is no longer; it is very much scattered and diffused. They are hiding out in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and there is not much left of the original network. However the idea that Bin Laden and Zawahiri generated that wake-up call to Muslims, saying, "you have got to wake up and defend your lands, our lands, from invasion" is an idea that is very much alive and kicking, and has been regenerated by what has happened in Iraq.

Q143 Chairman: How strong is al Qaeda and its associated network in Saudi Arabia, and how reliable is Saudi Arabia as a partner for us in combating it?  

Mr Gardner: The al Qaeda phenomenon in Saudi Arabia is relatively new. It only put its head above the parapet, as it were, in May 2003, when they carried out a triple suicide bombing on Western housing compounds in Riyadh. It took them several months to plan that. The organisation that did it calls itself the al Qaeda organisation in the Arabian Peninsula. It is relatively small. They have very grand ideas. They have an online magazine, Al-Batar, where they have issued advice and instructions to their followers on how to ambush princes and kidnap people. They are a small but extremely bloodthirsty organisation. They are heavily depleted; they have taken huge losses in the last couple of years, particularly in the last 10 months. Their leadership is very fragmented. A lot of the main leaders have been killed in the last two years; for the record, men like Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin, Salah Al-Oufi, Yousef Al-Ayeeri and Turki Nasser Al-Dandani. All these men have been killed in the last two years, so a lot of the brains at the top of this organisation are no longer there. However, there are still recruits coming into it. To a limited degree there is a kind of wellspring of anger, be it directed against the Americans because of what is going on in Iraq, or be it directed against the Al-Saud in some cases. The numbers are hard to put a figure on. There is no shortage of weapons. In Saudi Arabia it is very easy for insurgents to get hold of weapons across the border from Yemen, or from Iraq. But the Saudi authorities have had great success in trying to combat this. They have run a very effective hearts-and-minds operation, as well as physically combating terrorism through building up their counter-terrorist forces. How reliable a partner is Saudi Arabia? At the moment it is reliable. The co-operation between Saudi Arabia, Britain and the US is intense in the CT field in Saudi Arabia. It has not always been that way, and remember that this is often quite difficult for the Saudis to manage because there will be people at middle and low level who cannot stand the Americans and who do not think that we are much better because we are, in their eyes, crusading, occupying forces, who have gone in to try and re-colonise Iraq. That can potentially lead to divided loyalties. So far, to my knowledge, there have not been any cases of anybody infiltrating high up on the inside of the security forces and betraying people.

Q144 Sir John Stanley: Mr Gardner, would we be right to conclude from what you have said that the government's counter-terrorist forces are winning against terrorism in Saudi Arabia; or would that be a misconstruction of what you said?  

Mr Gardner: I think that would be accurate. There will be more attacks. Everybody I have spoken to—and I have followed this subject professionally anyhow because I am still the BBC's security correspondent, but also from personal interest—and the inquest into the attack on us is still going on and will draw to a conclusion fairly shortly, so I have followed this fairly closely—thinks that there will be more attacks. However, the ability of al Qaeda's adherents in Saudi Arabia to launch big spectacular raids, such as they did in Al Khobar in June last year, is probably limited. Remember that even though they were able to strike in Eastern Province, where the oil facilities are concentrated, they have not so far dealt any kind of a blow to the oil industry per se. They have also failed to assassinate any members of the Al Saud ruling family. They will probably have a go. Amidst all of this good news—you are probably going to ask me about this, but I should say straight away that there is a very ominous dark cloud on the horizon, and that is what the CIA refer to as "bleed-back", the return of militants who have gone to fight in Iraq who have come back to Saudi Arabia; and there is an organisation for this, a pipeline to bring them back. The latest estimate I saw for the number of Saudi Mujahideen, as they call themselves, who have gone to fight the coalition and the Iraqi Government in Iraq, is about 350. I suspect that that is probably an underestimate and that the numbers are probably bigger than that. Obviously, some of these people do not come back. They think they are going to Paradise, and blow themselves up. However, there are those who are coming back, and there are indications that a recent shoot-out in Dammam in Eastern Province involved some Saudi militants who had come back from Iraq. Remember that these are people who are going to come back utterly brutalised, with all sense of humanity, as we would know it, dissipated. These are people who have watched beheadings first-hand, and possibly have even done them themselves. The normal restraints of human behaviour and decency that you get in the vast majority of Saudi society—and I want to put in a plug for Saudi Arabia because it gets a bad press, but most Saudis are very decent, honest, kind and charitable people, and they are not by nature violent people. We are only talking here about a tiny minority, but they are a dangerous minority, and they are starting to filter back. It is something that the Saudi, British and American Governments are very concerned about.

Q145 Sir John Stanley: Would you say that the political objective of the terrorists in Saudi Arabia is still to remove the ruling family, and does that objective any longer have any credibility in their organisation, given the lack of success so far, as they would see it?  

Mr Gardner: They have a number of objectives. They seem to slightly move the goalposts. Originally, when Osama bin Laden was setting up in Afghanistan, his big beef was with the presence of US uniformed forces in Saudi Arabia, in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques. He objected to the presence of 5,000 US Airforce men and women at Prince Sultan Air Base; and they were there from 1990 right the way through to late 2003. They have gone, so that particular aim is no longer there. There are those who support al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, who consider that their entire peninsula needs to be cleansed of non-believers, of "Kuffar", as they call them. I think that that was certainly the aim of the people who attacked us. Here was a chance to have a pop at some Westerners, scare others into leaving the country, and embarrass the Saudi Government. Ultimately they want to turn the Saudi Kingdom into something that is much more approaching a theocratic Islamist state. They do want to get rid of the Al Sauds. They have different reasons for this. In some cases, it is economic frustration; in some cases it is political frustration. As Prince Turki once joked, "We have a very democratic system in Saudi Arabia; all political parties are banned; we treat them equally." That is still the case, although as Dr Mai Yamani will tell you afterwards, there are signs of movement on the political and democratisation front.

Q146 Sir John Stanley: Would you say that the nexus, such as it exists, between al Qaeda-leaning terrorists and Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden and what remains of his group, is stronger with those of Saudi Arabia than elsewhere, or are they now as detached as all the other very detached al Qaeda-leaning organisations in 60 odd countries where they are operating? Is it just the same in Saudi Arabia, and the degree of detachment there?  

Mr Gardner: The nexus is weaker than it was. There was an intercept by Western intelligence collectively. I do not know whether it was the NSA or GCHQ, but there was an intercept in January 2003—this is public knowledge—of a communication from the hills of Waziristan in Pakistan, where some of al Qaeda's fugitive leadership were hiding out and still are, and their followers in Saudi Arabia. That communication said: "It is time to start the insurgency." The Saudi would-be insurgents said, "Hang on, we are not ready yet; we are not organised yet; we can get the weapons, but we are not ready." They said: "No, this is an order; you have got to start." Four months later they drove three suicide truck bombs into the compounds in Riyadh and killed 35 people, so it began. Until that moment—and I am going back here to an earlier question—I do not think that the Saudi authorities had taken al Qaeda seriously. Only a few weeks before that, Prince Naif, the Interior Minister, had boasted and said: "We do not have any al Qaeda sleeper cells here; if we did, we would have woken them up long ago." There was an element of "head in the sand"; al Qaeda was somebody else's problem. They disapproved of it, but this was not something which was going to happen in Saudi Arabia. It was a massive shock to everybody. The Saudi's say, "This was our 9/11." On the technical side, in terms of communication, there has been quite close co-operation between the Americans and the Saudis in terms of trying to trap the terrorists. I do not know if any of you have seen the film that I submitted to the Committee in advance, but if you look at it you will see that two years ago I managed to get access officially into their DNA labs in the counter-terrorism centre they had in Riyadh. They had quite a sophisticated operation; they were able to do DNA-mapping. If, for example, they know that a certain terror suspect spent the night in this house in Riyadh, and they are able to raid it afterwards and take fibre analysis; then they know that three days later he moved to Jeddah, and this is where he passed through—they are able to plot where somebody has been. They are also able to track and trap people through the use of mobile phones. That has made it very difficult for al Qaeda to communicate. They tend to communicate either by messages passed by hand or through the Internet. That is still the preferred means of communication. When I was Middle East Correspondent I covered the story about how they were trying to control ordinary Saudis' access to the Internet through a node, through a thing called the King Abdul Aziz Centre for Science and Technology. They have not been able to control it. People are able to circumvent controls, and al Qaeda is able to publish online various claims and biographies of heroes, as they see it; and that is their main means of communication.

Q147 Mr Keetch: Mr Gardner, you said that Iraq had breathed new life into al Qaeda, and you mentioned the bleed-back. CSIS in Washington say that that bleed-back is in the early thousands, not just hundreds. Is there any sense that there is a bleed-back also from insurgents being—not trained, but gaining combat experience in Iraq—not just going back to Saudi Arabia but also going into other parts of the world, maybe even back into Europe?  

Mr Gardner: Are you talking about Saudis coming out of Iraq?

Q148 Mr Keetch: Saudis or others.  

Mr Gardner: This is a question which I have been very interested in myself. I have been asking a lot of people this. There is evidence that Europe-based jihadis have started to filter back from Iraq. We are talking here mainly about people of ethnic North African origin, usually Algerians but also some Moroccans and Tunisians, who were based in Europe, often with European Community passports but who had gone down the pipeline—and there has been quite an efficient pipeline to channel people from European countries, usually through Syria, and then feed them into the insurgency, whether through al-Qaem in the north-west of Iraq, or other parts. I am not seeing Saudis doing that, other than coming back to Saudi Arabia itself. There is no evidence that I have seen that there are large numbers doing this. The Saudi authorities, who have become much more organised in the last two years in counter-terrorism, were quite surprised and shocked to find that at a big shoot-out they had at a place called al-Ras in April this year, they found that they had killed in the shoot-out somebody called Abdul Karim Majati, who was a Moroccan. They did not even know he was in the country. He was instrumental in the Casablanca bombings of May 2003 in Morocco, and is thought to quite possibly have had a hand in the Madrid bombings, through connections to Moroccan extremists. They did not even know he was in the country, so he was hiding out in a safe house north of Riyadh. I have been there, and it is an area known as Qasim, and it is a bastion of support for radical Wahhabism—I think that is probably the right way to put it. It is a pretty hard-core part of Saudi Arabia, and it is making them wonder how many other international jihadis might have come back to Saudi Arabia and be hiding out there. It is interesting that on the latest list of 36 most wanted people that has been published in the Saudi Kingdom, that includes people who are not Saudis and include Sahalian North Africans, Chadians, and people like that.

Q149 Mr Keetch: You have answered my second question. Although Saudis are not directly involved, there is a linkage and clear pipeline of communications between international al Qaeda people using Iraq, and also Saudi Arabia. There is a bleed-through both ways in a sense.  

Mr Gardner: Yes, but Saudi Arabia is not an ideal base for al Qaeda because even before May 2003 the Mubahith, the Saudi secret police, for want of a better word, were pretty efficient at interrogating people and finding things out. Saudis have always resented the term "police state" but it is quite an authoritarian country, so it is not a natural base, whereas Iraq, in its present state, is a natural base for al Qaeda and very much the locus of al Qaeda has shifted from Afghanistan three or four years ago to Iraq now. It is sufficiently chaotic in Iraq that al Qaeda cells are able to go there, train, undertake martyrdom operations, suicidal bombings, and make connections.

Q150 Mr Keetch: We have been told in recent weeks by your colleague Peter Taylor, for example, and by Paul Wilkinson from St Andrews, that the Iraq situation is being used as a recruiting ground, using videos on the Internet, to recruit people—we need to be careful what we say about them in the UK—here and throughout Europe. Again, you have seen evidence of that and you would agree with that.  

Mr Gardner: Yes. In fact Peter Taylor's film made it very clear. I know why we have to be careful about it, but the idea of using jihadi videos for recruitment dates back to Algeria in the early nineties, when this first started to be done. The GSPC and the GIA, the two main insurgency organisations in Algeria in the nineties, would film some of their ambushes and attacks on Algerian conscripts, on Algerian Army convoys, and they were horrific. They would take the   camera—it would be very shaky—and film themselves slitting people's throats. I have personally seen films from Chechnya that have been circulating underground in Birmingham, that have been very well-produced technically. Al Qaeda is becoming increasingly sophisticated in its use of the Internet and technology for recruiting and for propaganda. These types of videos have been around for quite a while. Certainly they are being put on to the Net extremely quickly in Iraq. The standard thing is that out of vision you hear voices in Arabic saying, "here we go, here we go; just wait, just wait", and you will see in the distance a Humvee usually, a US convoy, approaching a bridge, and then "bang" goes the improvised explosive device, and they all shout "Allahu Akbar"—"God is the greatest" and then there is a big flash, and up it goes. This sort of thing is very successful in recruiting people to take part in the insurgency in Iraq, although in relatively small numbers still. The big difference now between Iraq and Afghanistan is that there were al Qaeda camps all over Afghanistan in the late nineties, and it is estimated that somewhere around 15,000 recruits pass through these camps. Hundreds went from Britain, but it was relatively harmless. They went there and got to fire a few rounds of Kalashnikov and maybe and RPG; they attended a few sermons and made a lot of contacts and connections, and then they came back. In most cases, people did nothing with it. Some people, like Hambali, went on to then become the main link between al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah in south-east Asia; but most people did not do anything with their experience: they grew up, passed into their thirties, got married, settled down and had jobs. Iraq is a very different situation. This is not a training camp; this is a real war, and anybody who does go to Iraq should realise that they are quite possibly not going to come back.

Q151 Mr Horam: You stressed how strong the Saudi reaction had been to their own problem in 2003 and how effective their counter-terrorism measures had been. Is this because they have been able to deploy all the powers of a strongly authoritarian state—you said a police state? Second, do you think they are now on top and going to stay on top of it?  

Mr Gardner: The Saudis have been successful so far in their counter-terrorism efforts because they have employed a number of methods. They have not just used physical force. When I went there soon after the May 2003 bombings, they were starting a programme of moderating some of the more outspoken imams. They needed to change the mindset of a lot of people. One of the problems in Saudi Arabia is that the education system has been very much geared towards bringing up young Saudi children to thinking that all non-Muslims are bad people. That has changed, or is changing, and they have gone to some efforts to do that. They have also removed a lot of the most anti-Western preachers, imams.

Q152 Mr Horam: How has this gone down with the Wahhabi leaders?  

Mr Gardner: Not too bad. The more extreme ones would see it as co-operating or doing the bidding of the Americans, which is not popular. Generally, the Saudi population is very anti-terrorism, and the Saudi authorities have been able to reach out to them. They have employed some quite controversial methods. They have talked to the families of militants, and in some cases pulled the families in for questioning, and said: "You put pressure on young Abdullah; bring him back in and talk to him." You could see that as a subtle way of applying pressure or as essentially holding the family to ransom, in a way.

Q153 Mr Horam: They are pretty ruthless about killing some people too.  

Mr Gardner: They have not taken that many prisoners, it has to be said. In fact, the man who is in charge of the counter-terrorism effort in Saudi Arabia is Prince Muhammed bin Naif, one of the sons of the Interior Minister. He is very highly rated by both Saudis and Western diplomats. He views it that physical measures are less than half the battle. They have got to win over the hearts and minds. In a way, the insurgents have scored quite a lot of own goals. I do not know if you remember in 2003 the triple bombings in Riyadh in May, but then in November al Qaeda went and hit what was called the Muhaya complex and they killed a lot of Arabs, mainly non-Saudi Arabs, but Lebanese and Syrians. These were expatriate Arabs, living and working in Saudi Arabia. That cost them a lot; it was a complete blunder. In April 2004 they hit a police headquarters, blew it up and killed five people. A lot of Saudi policemen are dying at the hands of these insurgents, and these people have got brothers and families, and the tentacles from those spread deep into Saudi society. This is not something that Saudis approve of at all.

Q154 Mr Horam: What is al Qaeda's reaction to this? They seem to be losing the battle.  

Mr Gardner: They are. I think what we will see is a switching of targets. Who knows! They could try to aim for more senior figures in the al-Saud ruling family. They could try to concentrate entirely on Westerners.

Q155 Mr Horam: What about oil? Is that a target?  

Mr Gardner: I have been several times to the oil facilities and they are very well guarded. They would need a light aircraft or something like that, and even then they have got anti-aircraft defences. Last year, to get to Ras Tanura, which is the main loading terminal for Saudi's oil exports to bring them out to the Gulf, I had to pass through six checkpoints, where we were checked very thoroughly. However, where there is a will, there is a way, and it is always possible. One thing we should be careful of is that there may well be more attacks in the oil-producing area of Saudi around Al-Khobar. That does not mean to say that they have hit the oil industry. When they raided the Oasis compound in Al-Khobar in May last year and killed Michael Hamilton of Apicorp in Dhahran, that was not a direct attack on the oil industry per se. The oil industry is very spread out and they would have to do a lot of co-ordinated simultaneous attacks and have to have a lot of help on the inside for it to be effective.

Q156 Mr Horam: Turning to Saudi funding of terrorism, Professor Wilkinson said to us that there is more to be done in suppressing the financial assistance that comes from wealthy Saudi supporters of al Qaeda. Would you agree with him?  

Mr Gardner: Yes, I would agree with that. Saudis are generally very generous people—they have not been generous enough to pay any compensation to me yet, but maybe it will come. The way it often works is that somebody will literally sign pretty much a blank cheque for what he thinks is a charitable cause—an orphanage in Bosnia, a madrassa in Pakistan, a blind charity somewhere—and the problem has been that in giving this charity Saudis have not been nearly strict enough with themselves in asking questions as to where it is going. A lot of the funds that people thought were going to genuine charitable causes were ending up in the hands of al Qaeda—in Afghanistan in the past. There are also signs that people, not just in Saudi Arabia but in other Gulf States have even unwittingly funded al Qaeda people in positions of authority.

Q157 Mr Horam: What is the government doing about that?  

Mr Gardner: One of the measures they have done is to try and control things through SAMA, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, which is the equivalent of a central bank. I am fairly certain that any foreign donations above a certain size have to be approved by the foreign ministry inside Arabia. The trouble is that you cannot control it completely, and terrorism is cheap—9/11 cost half a million dollars; Madrid cost $50,000. This is nothing; it is peanuts; this is pocket money to some of the people who come to Bayswater in the summer. This is not a lot of money. Personally, I think that the financial war against terrorism is a bit of a red herring. I have attended one of the plenary sessions of the Financial Action Task Force, which is a 33-nation task force that meets all over the world and has these sessions in trying to choke off funding, and in terms of combating al Qaeda's funding straight after 9/11 they were initially quite successful. They seized about US$125 million in the first few weeks; and then two years later it was still only up to US$133 million—talking globally—and this is tiny money really. I personally do not spend a lot of time worrying about the financial side of it because it will always be relatively easy for them to get hold of funds to do conventional style attacks. Nuclear or weapons of mass destruction are different and would take a lot more money. The media estimates of Osama bin Laden's own wealth, I should say, were vastly overstated. Many people said he had $300 million, but it is closer to 30.

Q158 Chairman: Can I ask you about the relationships between Wahhabism within the Saudi regime and the al Qaeda element of Wahhabism? You mentioned Wahhabism as an element, but could you clarify? Is it Wahhabism per se that is the problem, or is it a perverted form of Wahhabism or particular strand of Wahhabism?  

Mr Gardner: This is certainly one I recommend you ask Dr Mai Yamani, who probably knows more about it than I do. Wahhabism comes from a marriage of convenience, as it were, in the eighteenth century between a Saudi cleric, Mohammed Abdel Wahhab and the al-Saud family. That alliance has survived into this century. Wahhabism, as I am sure you know, is a very ascetic, rather puritan view of Islam. A lot of the adherents of Wahhabism bitterly opposed the introduction of television in Saudi Arabia, and King Faisal in the sixties had a lot of difficulty in persuading and bringing people around to this idea that women should be educated as well. You can see that there was a natural alliance there with the Taliban, and there were close links between Saudi Arabia and the Taliban until relatively recently. Not all Saudis follow Wahhabism, but the area of Saudi Arabia where you get the most concentration of very devout, very fundamentalist adherents of Wahhabism, tends to be Qasim Province, north-west of Riyadh, places like Buraidah for example. These are people who dress as people dressed at the time of the Prophet Mohammed, fourteen centuries ago. They wear slightly shorter clothes. They do not wear the black camel rope "agaal" which goes round there because they pray so often they often have a brown "zabib", what the Egyptians rather irreverently call "a raisin"—the brown spot here, from touching their head to the floor in prayer so often. They have wispy, unkempt beards. These people, but not all by any means, are often quite isolated in the sense that they do not have a lot of contact with Westerners, and they tend to believe that by default most Westerners are bad news. That is not all Wahhabis. I do recommend that you ask Dr Mai Yamani about that as well.

Q159 Ms Stuart: We are getting a pretty clear picture as to what the problem is, but I am trying to grapple with where the solutions are, given the history. You said that there was a recognition particularly within Saudi Arabia that this is as much a battle of hearts as it is a physical battle. Is there something more which we could do, that is the liberal democracies of the West telling their story, because I get a sense that there is no dialogue here; that there is only one story. What would your view be therefore on the World Service proposed introduction of an Arabic television channel? Would that be helpful not as a propaganda tool but simply in terms of having a dialogue and an alternative story? The second thing is that when we went to Morocco we thought the use of liberal imams to be a positive development. They tell their own alternative story. How successful do you think that might be in Saudi Arabia?  

Mr Gardner: To some extent they are doing this already. There are a number of projects underway in Saudi Arabia to try and take the sting out of jihadism to try and make people less suspicious and distrustful of Westerners. I have to say that the state itself has a lot to answer for here, having fostered and allowed an education system for decades that bred this hatred of non-believers, as they call it, particularly of Jews. I have been to every Arab country and have spent much of the last 25 years in the Arab and Islamic world, and it is really only in Saudi Arabia that I have encountered this xenophobia. I have met very devout Egyptians, for example, who have said: "You are a Westerner; you are at this party; if you want a beer, that is not a problem." One thing that the Yemenis that have done, which the Saudis are also doing, is to use scholars, experts, people who know the Islamic scriptures inside out, to try and persuade deviants, as they put it—militants—to renounce violence and to turn their back on it and of course to betray some of the people in their organisation. This has had some success. I went down to Yemen just under two years ago and interviewed somebody called Judge Hamoud Al-Hattar, who the Foreign Office invited over here—so you have probably met him. He introduced me to some of the people who he had recently got to repent and turn their backs on violence in prison. I have no means of knowing if they were genuine or not. They had had to sign certain pledges. They certainly did not like me very much, as a Westerner and a journalist; they were not exactly saying, "now I am repented I am fine with you being in the room"! They were still pretty hostile to the West. It is a result of Western policies. I have said this many times, that Arabs have grown quite cynical over the last hundred years because, to be perfectly honest, we, the West, had messed around in their part of the world for a long time. The big mistake which the US administration makes—and I have often heard President Bush say this—is to say, "they don't like us because they don't like our way of life". That is absolute nonsense. Al Qaeda could not give a stuff what Americans do in America; they really could not care less. What they object to is Western military ventures in their heartland, as they put in, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq or whatever. It is a slightly flawed argument because the Taliban would not hand over bin Laden, and so therefore there was an invasion, but on 11 February 2003, al Jazeera broadcast an audio statement by Osama bin Laden, in which he appealed to all Muslims all over the world, saying: "Wake up. You have got to come and defend the Holy Land of Mesopotamia, seat of the former Abbassid caliphate. It really does not matter if those usurpers, ie, the Baathists—survive or not. That is not the point. You have got to go and defend this land because these neo-crusaders and Zionists will simply go and occupy it, and then they will not leave." You can dress it up any way you like, but the bottom line is that we are still there in Iraq, and that allows bin Laden's supporters and sympathisers to say, "look, the Sheikh Abu Abdullah was right; he knew what he was talking about and his words have come true." For most of the nineties bin Laden and Zawahiri's ideology was way out on a limb, but a lot of things that they have been saying have proved to be correct. That has allowed al Qaeda to recruit more people. Unfortunately, Iraq is going to continue to be a problem there.