al-Qaida - Perfect soldiers: the hijackers: who they were, why they did it

H E WAS THE PERFECT SOLDIER: he went where you sent him, stayed where you put him, and had no idea of his own to keep him from doing exactly what you told him.

Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse

The Hamburg Group

Mohamed el-Amir aka Mohamed Atta: September 11 pilot, leader with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, of Hamburg group; Egyptian

Marwan al-Shehhi: September 11 pilot; Emirati

Ziad Jarrah: September 11 pilot; Lebanese

Ramzi bin al-Shibh, aka Omar: leader with Atta of Hamburg group, tried to become a pilot, coordinator of September 11 attacks; Yemeni

Said Bahaji: member of Hamburg group, fled before September 11; German-Moroccan

Zakariya Essabar: member of the Hamburg group, tried to become a pilot, fled before September 11; Moroccan

Mounir el-Motassadeq: member of the Hamburg group, accused of assisting the September 11 plot; Moroccan

Mohammed Fazazi: imam and mentor to the Hamburg group; Moroccan Mohammed bin Naser Belfas: mentor to Hamburg group; Yemeni-Indonesian

Mohammed Haydar Zammar: Al Qaeda possible recruiter of Hamburg hijackers; Syrian-German

Mamoun Darkazanli: Zammar associate, radical Islamist, mentor to Hamburg group; Syrian-German

Abdelghani Mzoudi: friend of Hamburg group, accused and acquitted of assisting September 11 hijackers; Moroccan

Abdullachman al-Makhadi: mentor of Ziad Jarrah, imam of Greifswald Mosque, friend of Belfas and Zammar; Yemeni

Mohammed Ragih: member of Hamburg group; Yemeni

Bashir Musleh: friend of Jarrah in Greifswald and Hamburg; Jordanian

Abbas Tahir: friend of Musleh and Jarrah; Sudanese

Friends and Acquaintances

Shadi Abdallah: friend of Hamburg group, member of al Tawhid, Jordanian terror group; Jordanian

Shahid Nickels: friend of Hamburg group, drifted away; German-South African

Ahmed Maklat: friend of Hamburg group, left Hamburg out of fear; Sudanese

Yassir Boughlal: college classmate and friend of Zakariya Essabar, resisted recruitment; Moroccan

Aysel Sengn: Ziad Jarrahs girlfriend; German-Turk

Al Qaeda

Osama bin Ladin: leader of Al Qaeda; Saudi

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: mastermind of the September 11 attacks; operational commander of Al Qaeda; Pakistani

Muhammed Atef: Osama bin Ladins lieutenant; Egyptian

Ayman al-Zawahiri: Bin Ladin lieutenant; Egyptian

Abu Zubaydah, n Mohammed Hussein Zein-al-Abideen: Bin Ladin lieutenant captured in March 2002; Jordanian

Tawfiq bin Attash, aka Khallad: Bin Laden lieutenant, coordinator of USS Cole bombings; Saudi

Hambali, aka Encep Nurjaman, Riduan Isamuddin: leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian terror organization and Al Qaeda coordinator in the region; Indonesian

Yazid Sufaat: Hambali deputy, assisted Moussaoui, Hazmi, Mihdhar, and Khallad; Malaysian

Ali Abdul Aziz Ali: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed nephew, funneled money to 9/11 hijackers from United Arab Emirates; Pakistani

Mustafa al-Hawasawi: financial facilitator of September 11; worked with Ali Abdulaziz Ali in UAE; Saudi

Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, aka Abu Dahdah: leader of Madrid cell; Syrian

Zacarias Moussaoui: accused 9/11 conspirator, awaiting trial in Virginia on suspicion of wanting to become a hijacker; French-Moroccan

Manila Air Bombing Campaign

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: mastermind of the September 11 attacks; Pakistani-Kuwaiti

Ramzi Yousef, aka Abdul Basit Abdul Karim: organizer of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; planner of Bojinka, the Manila airline bombing campaign; Pakistani

Mohammed Jamal Khalifa: Bin Laden brother-in-law, alleged terror financier in Philippines and elsewhere; Saudi

Abdul Hakim Murad: participant in Bojinka, the Manila airline bombing campaign; Pakistani

Wali Khan Amin Shah: participant in Bojinka, Manila airline bombing campaign; Afghan

Afghanistan

Abdullah Azzam: Palestinian leader of the Afghan Arabs; Palestinian

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: fundamentalist warlord; Afghan

Abdur Rasul Sayyaf: fundamentalist warlord; Afghan

Zahed Sheikh Mohammed: Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds brother, head of Kuwaiti charity Lajnat al-Dawa Islamia; Pakistani-Kuwaiti

Abed Sheikh Mohammed: Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds brother, killed in Battle of Jalalabad; Pakistani-Kuwaiti

Aref Sheikh Mohammed: Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds brother; Pakistani-Kuwaiti

Burhanuddin Rabbani: fundamentalist, ethnically Tajik political leader; Afghan

Mullah Omar: Taliban leader; Commander of the Faithful; Afghan

September 11, 2001

American Airlines Flight 11, Attacked the North Tower of the World Trade Center

Mohamed Atta: pilot, Egyptian

Abdul Aziz al-Omari: Saudi

Satam al-Suqami: Saudi

Wail al-Shehri: Saudi

Waleed al-Shehri: Saudi

United Airlines Flight 175, Attacked the South Tower of the World Trade Center

Marwan al-Shehhi: pilot, Emirati

Ahmed al-Ghamdi: Saudi

Hamza al-Ghamdi: Saudi

Fayez Banihammad: Emirati

Mohand al-Shehri: Saudi

American Airlines Flight 77, Attacked the Pentagon

Hani Hanjour: pilot, Saudi

Majed Moqed: Saudi

Salim al-Hazmi: Saudi

Nawaf al-Hazmi: Saudi

Khalid al-Mihdhar: Saudi

United Airlines Flight 93, Intended to Attack the Capitol, Crashed in Pennsylvania

Ziad Jarrah: pilot, Lebanese

Ahmed al-Nami: Saudi

Ahmad Ibrahim al-Haznawi: Saudi

Saeed al-Ghamdi: Saudi

I N NOVEMBER 2001, on a blustery winter day in Hamburg in northern Germany, a young woman, the wife of one of Mohamed el-Amir Attas old roommates, talked about an image she couldnt get out of her head. When the American war against Afghanistan had started that autumn, when the bombs began falling and people began dying by the score, she would sit in front of her television, staring in disbelief, unable to comprehend that the conflict in a very real sense had been set in motion by her husbands old roommate, Mohamed.

Watching the explosions, she would try to match them, the war, everything that had gone on in the world since September 11, to her memory of the slight young man padding around his student apartment in his shower shoes. It didnt fit. Mohamed was a tough guy to figure and she never liked him, but this, all of this because of Mohamed? Its impossible, she told herself. Not little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.

There is much about Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers, and his brethren we cant now know. But when a person moves through the world, he leaves a path that can be traced, however faint parts of it may grow. In the Atta traces, the image that lingers is of a man who was far too small to accomplish the huge thing he did. There is something deeply unsatisfying about this. We want our monsters to be outsized, monstrous. We expect them to be somehow equal to their crimes. More than anything, we want them to be extraordinary, to allow us to believe the horrible thing they did is unlikely to be repeated. In its own odd way, this is a comforting thought. When we go looking for people capable of inflicting such great harm, the last thing we expect to find is little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.

This is, foremost, a reported book about the men who executed the September 11 attacks against the United States. The aim of the reporting was to discover and attempt to understand those men and the places, people, and ideas that shaped them. Not unusually for a large news event, a narrative of the attack and attackers was constructed with astonishing speed: by the end of the first week after the attacks, the central story had been set and the characters cast. The September 11 attackers were caricatured either as evil geniuses or as wild-eyed fanatics. Unfortunately, as is also usual in big news events, much of the initial information was either factually wrong or, more commonly, irrelevant and misconstrued. While there might well be elements of both of these extremes in some of the men, they were largely neither of these things. The intent of this book is to try to come to a better understanding of who these people were, and thereby understand why they did what they did.