Free Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda by Morten Storm, Paul Cruickshank, Tim Lister

had just turned thirty. He was well-built but beginning to put on weight. A thin black beard ran from his sideburns down his jaw and petered out at his chin. His receding hair was swept back. He would often cook tagine and couscous for everyone.
    Moussaoui was clearly intelligent and had recently received a Master’s degree at London’s South Bank University, which was not far from Brixton. Most of the time he was quiet and unassuming, but brooding. He rarely talked about himself and never about his family. He did, however, have a passion for martial arts, especially Filipino knife-fighting.
    Occasionally he would talk in general terms about jihad in Afghanistan and especially in Chechnya, which was at that time the cause célèbre of jihadis. Islamist rebels were battling the might of the Russian army. We all agreed that there was an obligation to support the rebels, through prayer, money or even waging jihad ourselves.
    ‘It would be sinful if we don’t at least raise money,’ Moussaoui once said in his soft French-accented voice, as we sat cross-legged on the floor.
    The age of online videos had dawned and we would watch stuttering, blurry images on websites which championed the Chechen struggle: ambushes of Russian troops, but more often human rights atrocities by the Russians against Chechen civilians in the Chechen capital, Grozny. Moussaoui would stare at the screen, his eyes glistening and his head shaking.
    ‘ Kuffar [infidel] Russians,’ he muttered one day. ‘I would happily die in Grozny if I could take a platoon of them with me.’
    What he never told us was that he had already been to Chechnya and worked for the rebels – helping tell the world of their cause with his IT skills. He had also helped recruit others from abroad to join the Chechen war . Nor did he tell us he had spent time in one of al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan in the spring of 1998. While the rest of us debated jihad, Moussaoui had already lived it.
    In October 1999 the Russians began a ground offensive againstGrozny. Television coverage and videos posted online revealed the true horror of what amounted to a scorched-earth campaign, with tens of thousands of civilians forced to flee their homes.
    Thousands of miles away, my small Salafist circle in Brixton could not contain its anger. One bright autumn morning we emerged from the Brixton mosque furious that the preachers had never called for prayers let alone action in support of the Chechen resistance. Their battle against overwhelming odds made them heroes to us. We also knew that hundreds of foreign fighters, including graduates from Dammaj, had made their way to the Russian Caucasus.
    ‘You see,’ I said to Moussaoui and others, ‘once again the establishment has deserted us, allowing the atheists to murder and maim our people without even raising a murmur. Our preachers are terrified they will fall foul of the police; they are so comfortable with their London life.’
    We picketed the mosque, appealing for money and support for the Chechen resistance.
    On 21 October Russian rockets rained down on a market in Grozny, killing dozens of women and children. I was instantly reminded of the Bosnian Serbs’ shelling of the Sarajevo market, which had killed dozens of Muslims in 1995. The television footage was heartbreaking and enraging – and we redoubled our efforts to shame the mosque establishment into acknowledging the Chechens’ suffering. Sometimes we would register our anger by attending a nearby mosque run by Nigerians that openly supported jihad in Chechnya.
    In autumn 1999 Moussaoui’s demeanour changed. The brooding became anger. He began to turn up at the Brixton mosque wearing combat fatigues and embraced the more militant environment at the Finsbury Park mosque in North London. Among those who trailed in his wake was a tall Jamaican-Englishman called Richard Reid, who had a long, thin face, a straggly beard and unkempt, curly hair held together in a ponytail. In