Montpellier, France – The two immigrants left Europe for Iraq, the new land of jihad. Then, police say, they brought the jihad back with them.
In June, anti-terrorism police in this Mediterranean university town arrested Hamid Bach after dawn prayers and allegedly found bomb-making materials in the spacious, government-subsidized apartment where the Moroccan lived with his family.
Bach confessed that he had set off to fight in Iraq but instead came home with orders to help carry out a bombing in Italy, police say.
The call to battle reached Wesam Delaema in Amersfoort, a medieval Dutch town where he was captured in May in a raid that turned up homemade propaganda videotapes of a remarkable odyssey.
The Iraqi had driven his Opel Omega from Amersfoort more than 2,500 miles to his native Fallujah. A video showed him with masked fighters planting explosives to ambush an American convoy, say U.S. prosecutors, who won an indictment against him this month.
Bach and Delaema came from unexpected hotbeds of holy war: small, provincial cities that epitomize the comfort and serenity that draw immigrants to Western Europe. But stories like theirs are spreading across the continent.
In early 2003, extremists started moving fighters from Europe to Iraq, raising fears of what would happen if and when they came back.
Now militants are beginning to return with combat experience, guerrilla-war skills, ideological fervor and leadership status, European and U.S. officials say.
“It’s a huge concern,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official who had been in contact with European counterparts. Like others interviewed, the official asked not to be named for security reasons.
“It’s at the top of the agenda. Everyone’s working on the returnees. What are they doing? Who are they?”
Early this year, U.S. intelligence agents issued an alert that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose network is believed to extend far beyond Iraq, had dispatched teams of battle-hardened operatives to European capitals.
Although the London transit bombings in July apparently did not involve Iraq veterans, they were the first suicide attacks in Western Europe – a grim precedent that might encourage others.
Iraq has become a superheated, real-world academy for lessons about weapons, urban combat and terrorist tradecraft, said Thomas Sanderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Extremists in Iraq are “exposed to international networks from around the world,” said Sanderson.
