Abdulaziz al-Muqrin [Abdulaziz Issa Abdul-Mohsin al-Moqrin] took over the Saudi operation after the previous leader was killed in a shootout with police in March 2004. Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin, defendant number one in the recently announced list of the 26 most wanted persons. Believed to be in his mid-30s, his nom de guerre is "Abu-Hajar." He trained with the Al-Qa'ida organization in Afghanistan during the period 1990-1994. Al-Muqrin transferred from Afghanistan to Algeria to fight on the side the Islamic Liberation Front (FIS) in the mid-1990s. He smuggled weapons from Spain to Algeria via Morocco. He then went to Bosnia-Herzegovina, working initially as a member of a training staff in a military camp. He was arrested and imprisoned in Somalia until he was deported to Saudi Arabia where he was imprisoned in 1999. A Saudi religious court sentenced him to four years in prison. He learned the Koran by heart, which prompted the Interior Ministry to commute his prison sentence by half. He was released from prison in 2001, and left for Yemen and arrived in Afghanistan. According to his own account, he took part in the last of the fighting against US forces when they invaded in 2001. Then he returned to Saudi Arabia. An adviser to Saudi Arabia's ambassador to London called al-Muqrin the "toughest" in a series of perhaps a half-dozen leaders who had headed the Saudi network. Abdulaziz al-Muqrin was editor of al-Battar magazine, the al-Qaida training publication. The al-Battar sword -- the "sword of the prophets -- was taken by the prophet Muhammad as booty from the Banu Qaynaqa. The magazine's name commemorates "Al-Battar" , the alias of Sheikh Yousef Al-Ayyiri. This former an Al-Qa'ida leader in Saudi Arabia was Osama bin Laden's personal bodyguard. He was killed in 2003 in a clash with Saudi security forces.

Usama Bin Laden and Abu Sulaiman al-Makki (Khaled al-Harbi)

Usama Bin Laden discusses the 9/11 suicide hijackings with Abu Sulaiman al-Makki

• Abu Sulaiman al-Makki (a.k.a. Shaykh Khaled al-Harbi, Khaled al-Saif) was born in Saudi Arabia in 1966 and first worked as a religious teacher at the Holy Mosque of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

• During the 1980s, Abu Sulaiman al-Makki joined the foreign guerillas gathering in Afghanistan and gained a reputation as a veteran and respected fighter. Al-Qaida documents indicate that Abu Sulaiman served in “the company of [the Martyr] Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.” Azzam was the initial founder of Al-Qaida and Usama Bin Laden’s first spiritual mentor.

• In August 1992, Abu Sulaiman al-Makki joined a group of Saudi Arab-Afghans and traveled to Bosnia-Herzegovina, ostensibly to help the embattled Muslims of the Balkans. Among his compatriots was Abu Abdel Aziz “Barbaros”, an infamous Arab-Afghan military leader who became the “amir” or commander of the Arab-Afghan mujahideen in Bosnia. At about this time, Abu Abdel Aziz
“Barbaros” told other senior Al-Qaida members gathered at a meeting in Zagreb, Croatia that Al-Qaida’s primary goal in Bosnia “was to establish a base for operations in Europe against al Qaeda’s true enemy, the United States.”

• In early September 1992, Abu Sulaiman al-Makki and Abu Abdel Aziz “Barbaros”led a group of 43 predominantly Saudi mujahideen into combat against Serb forces in central Bosnia. Among the other prominent members of this unit was Abu Asim al-Makki (Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal), now considered one of the central conspirators behind the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen.

• During combat operations near Tesanj, Abu Sulaiman al-Makki was “spraye”by automatic weapons fire as he dashed across the battlefield to recover the body of another “martyred” Saudi volunteer soldier. Though he was seriously injured and was near death, Abu Sulaiman was at last recovered by hiscompatriots and carried to safety. A few days afterwards, though he ultimately
survived his injuries, Shaykh Abu Sulaiman lost feeling and movement in his legs and was permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

• Following the end of the Bosnian war in 1995, Abu Sulaiman al-Makki reportedlystayed on in Bosnia and settled in the small local fundamentalist community of Bocinja Donja. He helped establish an Islamic “relief organization” in the Tuzla area, providing charitable and religious assistance to both local Bosnians and Arab-Afghan fighters based in the Balkans. Abu Sulaiman publicly stated in Bosnian media in 1996 that cells of Arab-Afghan mujahideen remained actively deployed in Tuzla, Zenica, Sarajevo, Konjic, and Bihac.

• In late 1997, Bosnian authorities issued arrest warrants for 19 men wanted in connection with recent acts of violence. Abu Sulaiman al-Makki, named as one of the 19, was accused by the Bosnians of having provided refuge and a safehouse to several dangerous fugitives. The alleged terrorists included an Algerian national later implicated in a plot to suicide crash private aircraft into NATO military bases in the Balkans and southeastern Europe.

• In December 2001, Abu Sulaiman suddenly reappeared in a videotape produced by Usama Bin Laden in which the latter took credit for organizing and financing the September 11 suicide hijackings. The two men, sitting on the floor together in a plain white room, discussed the intricate details of the 9/11 plot. After a grinning Bin Laden explained how he had schemed to crash commercial
airliners into the World Trade Center, Abu Sulaiman chimed in and spoke of his joyous reaction when he heard “the news”:

“That day the congratulations were coming on the phone non-stop… No doubt it is a clear victory… Thank Allah America came out of its caves. We hit her the first hit and the next one will hit her with the hands of the believers, the good believers, the strong believers. By Allah it is a great work. Allah prepares for you a great reward for this work… I live in happiness, happiness, I have not experienced, or felt, in a long time… In these days, in our times, that it will be the greatest jihad in the history of Islam.”

After Bosnia, Al Qaeda Network spread all over the Europe

Bin Laden's Terror Networks in Europe

[INTRODUCTION] [1. The Killing of Massoud] [2. The Netherlands & Belgium] [3. France] [4. Spain, Italy and the Balkans] [5. Germany] [6. Concluding Observations] [TOP of PAGE]

Editor's Introduction

In her last book Thieves' World, the late Claire Sterling described the failing efforts of the Western democracies in addressing organized crime thusly:

"...sovereign states cannot do anything simply. If they go down to dismal defeat in the war against crime, it will be largely because they are hampered by all the baggage of statehood -- patriotism, politics, accountable governments, human rights, legal strictures, international conventions, bureaucracy, diplomacy -- where the big criminal syndicates have no national allegiences, no laws but their own, no frontiers."

Her words are just as applicable to the Western World today and to the similar threat that confronts it.

The attacks of September 11th killed over 3,000 innocent ordinary people, mostly but certainly not exclusively American, in four connected attacks over a period of three hours. The direct damage in terms of lost lives, businesses, aircraft and buildings is probably around $90 Billion and the indirect economic losses will be many times that.

The Americans lost a similar number of people on December 7th, 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Navy pushed the United States into the centre of the Second World War. The psychological impact of these two attacks was similar, but the response was not. The attacks of sixty years ago were undertaken by a clearly identifiable military force, acting under the directions of the Japanese government. When President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress "What kind of people do they think we are?" it was already clear that the US was going to commit itself to war with all the power and fury it could muster.

Things are not so easy with the September 11th attacks. The enemy that killed so many people and caused so much destruction is nowhere near as tanglible as a nation state. Hidden away among a mass of people in the Muslim World the Islamicist Fundamentalists are difficult to detect and -- except in their Afghan sanctuaries -- are almost impossible to attack.

Worse still are the networks of al-Qaeda terrorists working inside the Western World. They are a poisonous threat both to the greater majority of ordinary Muslim immigrants and to the innocent trust extended to these immigrants by the other citizens of the West. Nor is the ability of al-Qaeda to recruit disaffected Westerners a danger to be lightly dismissed.

The global networks of Islamic Fundamentalists are a threat that must be defeated, but without destroying our own freedoms, the 'baggage of statehood' and our sense of community in the process. One of the foundations of security is intelligence; understanding how al-Qaeda and other Fundadamentalists are organized, how they recruit new members and how they operate is vital.

Emerson Vermaat was born in 1947 and studied law at the State University of Leyden, the Netherlands. He is a senior television reporter who specializes in reporting on terrorism, trans