1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Riva Kastoryano. Title: Burying Jihadis: Bodies Between State, Territory, and Identity / Riva Kastoryano.
Description: Oxford [UK]; New York: Oxford University Press, [2018]
ISBN 9780190889128 (print)
ISBN 9780190934644 (updf)
ISBN 9780190934866 (epub)
LIST OF MAPS
1. Paris Attacks, 13 November 2015: Trajectories of the ten terrorists 54
2. Paris Attacks, 13 November 2015: Burial of the ten terrorists 55
3. New York Attacks, 11 September 2001: Trajectories of the four hijacker-pilots 84
4. New York Attacks, 11 September 2001: Trajectory of the organizer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 85
5. Madrid Attacks, 11 March 2004: Trajectories of the two organizers and the seven terrorists who committed suicide three weeks after the attacks 136
6. Madrid Attacks, 11 March 2004: Burial of the seven terrorists who committed suicide three weeks after the attacks 137
7. London Attacks, 7 July 2005: Trajectory of the four suicide bombers and the recruiter 175
8. London Attacks, 7 July 2005: Burial of the four suicide bombers 176
9.A typology of the use of space 210
INTRODUCTION
This book addresses the question of space and territory in globalization. It takes as a case study the jihadis who declared jihad, a global war, on states. Through an analysis of the trajectories and burials of the suicide bombers who carried out the attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York (9/11), 11 March 2004 in Madrid (11-M) and 7 July 2005 in London (7/7) (and updated with the Paris attacks of January and November 2015), this study highlights forms of spatiality in globalization, underscoring the nature of the issues states are now obliged to face: global, transnational and diasporic. The issue is global when suicide bombers move freely from place to place, leaving no trace, as was the case for 9/11. It is transnational when the jihadis are firstgeneration immigrants and maintain permanent relations with their country of origin, such as the perpetrators of the Madrid bombings. And it is diasporic when young jihadis are recognize as “homegrown”, born in the country of immigration, socialized and radicalized in the country where they hold citizenship, coming and going between their real “ancestral” land—or an imagined one, such as Pakistan or Syria— and their country of citizenship, as was the case of the London bombers and the attackers in Paris.
Their burial, taken as the state’s response to their use of global space, completes the elaboration of these issues. The burial of suicide bombers increases the tension between globalization and state sovereignty, in which each case corresponds to a different reaction. States do not recognize suicide bombers as warriors; their burial is thus neither a legal, nor a political nor a diplomatic issue. On the contrary, it is an unwel-
come, embarrassing question, usually ill-received by public officials and even more so by victims’ families and public opinion. What matters more to the state is identifying the perpetrators of a suicide attack, retracing their itinerary, situating their environment, and tracking their connections with the organization they belonged to. As in classic warfare, the aim, to paraphrase Clausewitz, is to control the territory and the people who live there, even if jihadi warfare is not territorial.
Jihadis do not request burial. They express no particular wishes in this regard prior to committing suicide attacks. They are convinced that their sacrifice will be rewarded after their death even if they are not buried. Jihadis imagine they will find glory in death and play a game of enacting their funeral.1 They are drawn into a single narrative of belonging to the ummah—the reimagined worldwide Muslim community in which national, religious and worldly attachments are all jumbled together. They have been convinced of their moral obligation to wage jihad as long as the ummah is in danger, just as men feel it their duty to go off to war when their nation and its army come under attack.2 Only the websites that played a role in these individuals’ indoctrination display their portraits, Kalashnikov in hand. It is through such websites that young people become familiar with the rhetoric of radical Islamic leaders who have drawn them into a single narrative of belonging to the ummah. These sites also post images of the martyr, his body like a weapon ready to explode.
States’ reactions to these bodies have primarily a symbolic significance. Dick Howard sees here the symbolic question as primarily one of identity. According to him, “it could be that of the jihadis as individuals, or that of the networks without which they do not exist. It could be that of the nations after they have been affected by the action. Or perhaps it is that of the ummah, that imaginary territory without limits that they have made into the root of their self-identity.”3 These various levels of identification correspond to the jihadis’ subjectivity in their use of space and the issues facing states.
NewYork, Madrid and London … and Paris
This book analyzes and compares the responses of the United States, Spain and Great Britain in relation to the matter of burying the human
remains of the suicide attacks in New York City and against the Pentagon in 2001 (9/11), in Madrid (11-M), and in London (7/7). These three attacks took place in the West and were claimed by Al-Qaeda, which declared a non-territorial war against the United States and its allies. But the itineraries of the perpetrators of the attacks in these three countries were not identical. The handling of the bodies, or their remains, which varied from one country to another, evinces a link between, on the one hand, the jihadis’ trajectories, their movements, their networks of relations at the local, regional and global level as proof of their use of space; and on the other, the states’ reactions with regard to their burial.
Eac h case raises different questions and brings different issues into play. For the United States, the attacks targeted two of the most prominent symbols of the country’s wealth and power and of its military capabilities—the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon building, the Defense Department headquarters, respectively. These spectacular attacks were carried out by nineteen young jihadis of different nationalities, social backgrounds and educational levels, who had travelled worldwide prior to blowing themselves up in the south of Manhattan, in Washington and in Pennsylvania. Burial—a non-issue for the United States—expresses the rejection of the jihadi suicide bomber as enemy, who when alive belonged to the ummah and whose body when dead does not (or should not) leave a trace in history. Their global movements, with no place and no trace of burial, embodying the very issue of globalization, enabled the United States to assert itself as a world power above any normative consideration. With the “War on Terror” launched by President George W. Bush, the United States expressed its determination to appear as a “global nation” out to pursue its enemy wherever it was found.
In Madr id, on the other hand, the seven young men who perpetrated the attacks on suburban trains heading into the Atocha railway station on 11 March 2004, and who committed suicide a month later when the Spanish police raided their hideout in the town of Leganés, were firstgeneration migrants. They had come from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria and maintained close ties with these countries and their families who had remained behind. The Madrid attacks showed the ties of solidarity that bind the country of origin and the country of immigration, and the
establishment of cross-border networks in which new forms of interaction prevail based on economic transfers, of course, but also on cultural, social, political and even ideological transfers. Like most young firstgeneration migrants, their supposed burial back home highlighted the transnational dimension of the phenomenon in life and death. Through such transnational relations, and with Spain as a port of entry into the Schengen Area, these attacks represented a challenge to free movement within the European Union, a de facto transnational space.
In London, the 7 July 2005 attacks on the underground system and on a bus were perpetrated by four youths holding British citizenship: three of whom were born in Great Britain, the fourth having arrived from Jamaica at a very young age. The public authorities classified these criminals as “homegrown terrorists,” which has become the most common jihadi profile. The term “home” referring to the land or country of origin, for Great Britain means their country of citizenship and “natural” place of burial. Ties with Pakistan, their parents’ homeland for three of them as well as the country where training took place, create ambiguity in establishing a diasporic space marked by an attachment to the ancestral land and integration in the host country. The burial of the perpetrators of 7/7 placed the homegrown terrorist phenomenon within the larger issue of territory and belonging that connects citizenship and transnational networks, nationality and the extent of the diaspora. Citizenship and territorial attachment were the focus of public reaction regarding the handling of the bodies of these youths, and prompted a reconsideration of so-called multicultural policies as the democratic basis for recognizing identities. They are now linked to the problem of security on either side of the border.
A decade on from the London bombings and the 2005 riots in France, the attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and on the Bataclan concert hall, Stade de France stadium and various sidewalk cafés in Paris in November, became a “French 9/11”, claimed by so-called Islamic State (IS). The involvement of three young French “homegrown” jihadis, in the case of Charlie Hebdo, and eight others in the case of the Bataclan, raises the same questions of territorial attachment—these were Belgian and French citizens, and some held dual citizenship (Algerian/French or Moroccan/Belgian). They belonged to a diaspora. But in the case of France, the diasporic space
did not include their parents’ country of origin but instead referred to Syria, defined as the land of an “imagined caliphate” and henceforth the ancestral land of resistance, a land to be reconquered and for which one must fight. The matter of their burial, extensively and recurrently debated in the media after each attack in France, creates the same ambiguity as in the UK, meaning the establishment of a diasporic space marked by an attachment to the ancestral land and integration in France. The difference arises in the representation of the “ancestral land”, which is not the parents’ country of origin that enables them to form diasporic ties, but an “imagined diaspora” in reference to the caliphate. That being the case, the burial of the perpetrators of Charlie Hebdo and 13 November in Paris places the homegrown terrorist phenomenon, as in the British case, within the larger issue of territory and belonging that connects citizenship (single or dual), transnational networks and the extent of an “imagined diaspora”.
The Body of the ummah
The act of burial, like the place of interment, connects individuals to their community and to their ancestors. These bodies, instruments of war and objects of sacrifice, are driven by ambiguous rhetoric as to their attachment to the ummah, a global “imagined community” that calls into question the link between body (blood and identity) and nation, and, consequently, between citizenship, nationality and territory. Radical Islamist leaders counsel young jihadis to break off ties with family authority and to reject nationality and citizenship as a basis for their identity. All that remains is the ummah, the community of believers. Burying their bodies, which as a representation of global power escape state control, amounts to re-territorialising them.
For Kantorowicz, the body, a political object centred on the human being, assumes a tangible aspect, that of the sovereign individual; and a symbolical aspect, that of the body politic, the state, which has a collective dimension.4 The body of the combatant forms part of the nation. National war histories are full of examples of the “repatriation” of soldiers who “died for their country” on enemy soil or tributes to unknown soldiers. All of this fits in with a process that is at once social and political, accompanied by a rhetoric that highlights the link
between body and territory in its modern definition: that of the nation. On the other hand, the body of a jihadi or, as President George W. Bush put it, the “unlawful combatant”, does not belong to any national community or any state, any more than it has any status in international law. His burial is not an issue in itself, whether political, social or legal. No state, no community, no individual explicitly claims his body. It is not made into a “founding moment” of national construction, as in the case of embarrassing bodies whose burial is an issue for the historical reconstruction of the nation—as in the case of the “body of il Duce.”5 The pain caused by suicide attacks is borne by the public, but mourning in their case secretly associates the family sphere with that of the local community.
Bur ial, according to Engseng Ho, “the act of combining a place, a person, a text, and a name”, thus reflects a territorial attachment.6 In his essay “Long Distance Nationalism”, Benedict Anderson refers to Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux in the seventeenth century and known for his sermons and funeral orations, who wrote: “Men feel connected to something powerful when they consider that the same earth that bore them and nourished them when they were living will receive them into its bosom when they die.”7 Anderson contrasts this individual immobility characteristic of feudal societies with the remarks made by the nineteenth-century British historian and political thinker Lord Acton, who conversely believed that “exile is the nursery of nationality” or national sentiment. For Bossuet, one’s land is one’s native soil, the village of one’s birth, and for Lord Acton the nationality he describes refers to a territorial attachment. This attachment, like any identity reference, is not fixed in time or space. Given the scale of human migration, place of birth or even native lands as territorial attachment become abstract and distant references, whereas places of interment mark the points of passage or the settlement of a generation.
In the case of jihadis, driven by an identity narrative related to their belonging to the ummah, there is no question of territorial attachment. What fate can be reserved for these bodies transformed into human bombs? It should be noted that even though suicide attacks are hailed on the internet as glorious, the act of suicide bombing erases all real or virtual trace of their physical remains. It is not followed by any public ceremony or glorification by their family or community.
As for the countr ies targeted by attacks, in keeping with the respect for human rights, they are often faced with dilemmas, as they must at once take into account the families’ duties to their dead, and worry about their own sovereignty. The question of sovereignty leads them to use all possible means to “punish the dead” who murdered civilians and who escaped their justice, as if to serve “the vengeance of the Prince and contain the anger of the people.”8 This is reminiscent of Creon, the king in the Sophocles tragedy who denied Antigone’s brother Polyneices a burial, considering him a traitor.
The burial of jihadis who died on the soil of these constitutional states raises different issues, however. Whereas in Antigone, King Creon orders Polyneices to be “left unwept, unmourned, unburied and condemned to feed the birds of prey” and even wishes “deprivation of a sepulcher his punishment,” jihadi burial is not part of any sort of sanctioning strategy aimed at the family or local communities. Nor does it enter into state strategies for fighting terrorism. State counter-radicalization policies often encourage mutual cooperation in border protection and the security of their citizens, while continuing to subject them to the normative constraints imposed by human rights declarations and supranational institutional regulations, particularly with respect to civil liberties. Despite such cooperation at various levels, which tends to align the policies of various states, major differences arise in the way the burial of jihadis is envisaged.
“Dying to kill”:9 this imperative is not specific to jihad or to radical Islam. All religions have known the phenomenon of martyrdom, even if sacrifice or voluntary death in the name of a national or religious cause were not explicitly referred to by this term.10 During the Second World War, Japanese kamikazes downed their planes in enemy territory in the name of God and the nation.11 But the current interpretation of the jihadist narrative, which took root in the colonial period,12 refers to belonging to the ummah, a global nation imagined as the basis for a new identity which, instead of relating to a territory, follows the thread of networks beyond borders. In other words, the mobile body delineates the territory of the ummah.Youths who have chosen the path of jihad thus turn state territories into a cross-border space of movement to affirm a transnational identity. They thereby mean to blur boundaries and define a nation and a nationalism without territory.13
The use of the body as a war tactic and a victim-targeting strategy contrasts two opposing conceptions of power: territorial power and non-territorial power. So-called transnational political acts, those that reach beyond borders, today are helping to create a space of identification beyond national societies; a space that, in its quest for power, seeks to combine the local and the global. The mobile body thus outlines a new, denationalized and deterritorialized geography that is transforming states: national borders are still clearly drawn, but they are traversed by a mesh of networks that criss-cross in space as if to define a new form of territoriality, characterized nevertheless by the extension of state sovereignty.
Redefining Territoriality
Al-Qaeda brought to the fore this new aspect of interconnected relations in a deterritorialized and denationalized space. “Mobile” or “shifting” territories are presented by radical Islamist leaders as places where jihad should be conducted. These are the lands of jihad. They follow the contours of the Al-Qaeda nebula: its local cells in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and more precisely in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia in the 1990s, and since 2003 in Iraq and Syria. The process reduces territory to the places where power is exercised through violence and where networks intersect, forming “hubs” that change location depending on the density of encounters to shape “geographies of threats or fear,” to use Stuart Elden’s expression,14 which he considers to be a means to attain political objectives that involve influencing governments by fear. According to Arjun Appadurai, these spaces represent the “geography of anger”15 formed by those who identify according to the ummah, and become globalized through their mobility. As for what are known as transnational actors, such as “pirates, bandits, criminals, smugglers, youth gangs, drug lords, warlords, Mafiosi, traitors, terrorists,” and jihadis too, they exercise a “de facto sovereignty” in these geographies that is manifested by “the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity wherever it is found and practiced, rather than sovereignty grounded in formal ideologies of rule and legality.” These groups “persist and mutate despite state laws and powerful institutions entrusted with the responsibility of eliminating them.”16 Through their
actions they induce states to extend their sovereignty beyond their territory when tracking their networks.
This new dynamic transforms territorial wars into extraterritorial wars. But in a Westphalian world, territory remains the space where power is concentrated. When a faction of Al-Qaeda took control of an area the size of the UK on the border between Syria and Iraq, proclaimed itself “Islamic State,” named Al-Baghdadi its caliph in June 2014 (during Ramadan that year) and expanded its territory by conquering neighbouring areas to cover a territory as large as Great Britain,17 it had no legitimacy in the eyes of international law and the nations concerned. Yet, it confirmed the essential role of territory within the tactics of war and an expansionist strategy.
Several studies point out the similarities as well as changes and/or continuity between Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State organization. “They are both the product of a history of Sunni Islamic revivalist movements that have sought to empower Muslims against what they describe as Islam’s enemies, both external and internal.”18 The ideological divergence of views between Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and their operational differences—namely territorial aspirations and no longer simply a web of networks—converge when it comes to mobilizing young men for jihad, both having the same rhetorical force and discourse about belonging to the ummah. Whereas Al-Qaeda had embarked on a global, deterritorialized jihad, Islamic State propaganda reminds youths of the “religious duty of hijra (migration to Iraq or Syria) to join the caliphate,” and that “migration is the purpose of the Jihad.”19
The ummah’s army for jihad is made up of youths of all social and national origins having a variety of educational and occupational backgrounds. It is virtually impossible to determine a typical profile. They meet in cybercafés, bookshops and neighbourhood mosques to view videos about the wars in Chechnya or Bosnia, and of course the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. They are affected by scenes of suffering and speeches about “Islam humiliated,” harbouring a desire for revenge that drives them to violence. Some have travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen to join training camps there.
Since 2011, many of them have been streaming into Syria. They are “invited”, or say they are “drawn”, by videos and images that promise them heaven on earth if they take part in jihad. Messages and photos
circulate on social media: images of parties and great luxury, and selfies showing smiling men out to prove their happiness and newfound peace.20 Showing the happiness and harmony that reigns in Islamic State territory is also important in attracting young women who are wanted as brides, and to remind them that the Islamic State group subsidizes youths who rally to its organization and its cause.21 Such mobilization follows the rationale of any social movement that aspires to bring about a new society,22 using the rhetoric of “justice to be restored” and “revenge” for the domination its followers have been subjected to. It convinces them to sacrifice themselves for the ummah by using their body—a source of blood and identity—as their weapon of war. This war is a non-territorial war propagated over the internet, which has opened new spaces for communication, mobilization and power.
Patrick Cockburn asserts that the movement generated by the Islamic State organization is “a hundred times bigger and much better organized than the Al-Qaeda of Osama Bin Laden.”23 He proceeds, “What makes their threat particularly alarming is that their base area, the land where they are in control, is today larger by far than anything an Al-Qaeda type of group held before.”24 Recruitment is also more systematic. The leaders target disadvantaged neighbourhoods in European cities with high concentrations of Muslims, such as Roubaix, Brussels and the Seine-St-Denis banlieue of Paris: all places where youth unemployment is far above the national average. These areas are presented as conflict zones between civil society and the police, between generations and cultures. From Mosul, the self-proclaimed caliph, Al-Baghdadi, underlined the duty of jihadis to unify the ummah and asked all “fighters to swear allegiance to the caliphate or give up their weapons.” But despite the call to territorial jihad, all reports concur that the organization’s threat lies mainly in these jihadis’ intention to act anywhere in the world. This makes territorial jihad a global jihad. Such territorial detachment under the influence of globalization rejects “the existing territorial domain in favour of alternative identities. The homeland in this case is not a reservoir of an emotional attachment, but a persistent barrier to religious and economic aspirations.”25
As its name suggests, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, (or Al-Sham in reference to Greater Syria in the ideological jargon) expresses its intention to form a state, appoint a caliph, define its territory, “and
following the Prophet’s example,” plant its flag “as a symbol to rally people to its cause” in reference to black flags “flown by the prophet in his war with the infidels.”26 Even more, to mint its own money, raise an army, and procure weapons and land are focal to the strategy of the self-proclaimed caliphate.
The areas seized serve to attract not only the young Muslim diaspora, but also others from Europe, from the Middle East and North Africa, the Caucasus and Asia, coming together with local tribes to form an “army”. According to James Clapper, Director of the US Office of National Intelligence, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 9 February 2016, more than 38,200 foreign fighters, including at least 6,900 from Western countries, have travelled to Syria from more than 100 countries since 2012.27 In Europe, France and Belgium are the largest sources of recruitment. In the Middle East, it is Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia. From Asia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh provide most of the recruits.
These young people, regardless of their national origin, see themselves as mobilizing for the caliphate. They have made it their “homeland,” the homeland of an imagined diaspora of the ummah. Whether organized in groups, or local or global networks, whether they act individually or in a collective, organized fashion, their identification— individual and/or collective—with the ummah seems to find fertile ground in this “diasporic” aspect of dispersion. The discourse that underlies the idea of transforming the ummah into a global nation relies on its members finding unity based on overlapping identities (national, regional, religious, linguistic). It also relies on shared experiences (colonization, exile or emigration). Furthermore, it relies on constant references to a denationalized and deterritorialized “we” that establishes itself within the conceptions of the diaspora and the nation.
If diasporas encourage a sor t of “nationalism” that is abstract yet anchored in a physical territory, the ummah generates new impulses based on the transnational communities and networks that seek to consolidate themselves through the strength of a single story fed by symbols, images and objects. So-called Islamic State may have lost a large amount of the territory they had amassed, but the soldiers of the caliphate continue their work in a “deterritorialized” way. They attack where they are, and thus recall the objectives of both territorial “state
building” as well as a global expansion through the “imagined diaspora” that motivates foreign fighters. Every attack—even the most isolated and individual—is now claimed by Islamic State. It uses these claims to further its global ambitions and appropriate a war wherever the selfidentified, self-recruited soldiers and/or combatants act.
The Book
For each attack, official reports specify the terrorists’ place of birth, their travels and sojourns throughout the globe, as well as the complex web that links individuals together. Once mapped, these trajectories clearly mark out the size and scope of transnational networks, as well as the cities that become hubs or places of intersection. Interviews with experts and with public and intelligence officials in the three cities struck by suicide bombers (New York, Madrid and London) help us to grasp the logic of the official reaction to the burial of the enemy/criminal who died within these countries’ borders. They express how and to what extent the burial of suicide bombers poses practical questions above all, leading to a variety of interpretations as to the value of their body. The symbolic importance of burial is political and moral. It touches on the nature of war, the enemy’s legitimacy and recognition of his cause, as well as his death. What plot of earth will, or will not, be allotted to him, and where?28
Meetings with secur ity authorities in New York confirm the view of the suicide bomber as enemy. Meetings with representatives of local communities in the country of origin—Morocco in the case of the perpetrators of the Madrid attacks—or the country of residence—such as Beeston Hill, a suburb of Leeds that was home to the youths who blew themselves up in the London underground—provide additional and contradictory elements to the matter of their burial, despite the silence, secrecy and censorship surrounding these three situations.
The fir st chapter discusses various cases of embarrassing or inconvenient bodies and situates them on the one hand with respect to the discourse of radical Islamist leaders about national territorial and nonterritorial religious belongings, the importance of death for jihad, and sacrifice for the ummah, and on the other with respect to states’ reactions. These radical discourses on the body, identity, nationality, the
ar my, jihad and the ummah, or again on the land of Islam, are evidence of a “strategic ambiguity”, a way of expressing a powerful global vision leaving the field open to local interpretations as to its meaning.29 The following chapters examine the link between the jihadis’ itineraries and their burial. Each case gives rise to a different perspective on globalization with respect to territory.
The Palestinian cause at the heart of all discourse on jihad imposed a detour via Israel, leading that state to experience an increase in the number of suicide attacks in the wake of the second Intifada. This made it possible to gauge the territorial and non-territorial issues of the cause and of burial. Comparing public statements and testimonials of families in refugee camps in Nablus, for instance, reveals two different rationales of war—territorial and non-territorial—despite the “dispute” over these territories, making burial a bargaining chip in peace as well as war.
It has not been possible in my research to locate actual places of burial, often kept secret or censored, or at the least shrouded in silence, but I do hope at least to reveal the logic of states, which varies according to their history, geography, experience with terrorism, and their relationship to immigration and the integration of policies of recognizing differences.
