Free A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Steve Hendricks

the mosque in an old garage. Squeezed among low-rent tabaccherie on Viale Jenner, the garage was bland, modern, forgettable, and advertised by no sign. One passed through its iron gate and into another world, like entering a gay bar in Biloxi.
    Saad set himself up as imam, but his power was soon eclipsed by that of another exiled Egyptian loyal to the Blind Sheikh and Gamaa. He, Anwar Shaaban, was a naval engineer of middle age whose appearance suggested a withered cornstalk: widen the nose of Osama bin Laden, set glasses on it, and there was Shaaban. He had waged jihad in Afghanistan, then had come to Italy a political refugee, ungratefully. Western godlessness and materialism disgusted him, as did the slumbering, as he saw it, of Milan’s Muslims in the West’s downy bed. He preached a brimstone Islam.
    Not long after Shaaban became imam, the Bosnian War erupted in the former Yugoslavia, just across the Adriatic from Italy. The advantage in the war lay with well-armed Serbia (sometimes aided by Croatia, sometimes opposed by it), which set to brutally cleansing itself of Bosnian grime. Europe and the United States stood aloof, as if the Serbs were only spring cleaning, and embargoed arms to all sides—an act neutral on its face but in truth punitive to the weaker Bosnians. Muslim nations tended to be less numb to the Serbs’ many atrocities (they did not mind the Bosnians’ so much), because half of Bosnians were Muslim and nearly all of the Serbs were Christian. Many Muslims called for a defense of their brothers and sisters in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Islamists of more malignant temperament saw in that defense a chance to establish a terrorist beachhead in the West. Bosnia, they believed, could become Europe’s Afghanistan.
    Shaaban was one of the earliest such visionaries. He had many allies in Europe, and together they began to marshal an army, first from the ex-mujahidin who had found sanctuary in Europe but soon from young men new to jihad. Shaaban’s congregation—predominantly young, male, and immigrant—made a fine recruiting ground. Many of his parishioners were barely literate in their own language, let alone the new one, were bewildered by the differences from their homeland, and were further isolated by the slights and sneers of Italians. They turned to Shaaban for all manner of spiritual and practical guidance: how to keep one’s faith among unbelievers, how to renew a visa, how to find a flat, how to import a bride. Their trust in him and their alienation from Italy made them receptive to his talk of holy war against the West and of the ennobling deprivations of battlefield camps. He enlisted many such men and began taking them to Bosnia and returning for more. His allies from other European cities did the same.
    To pay for their travel, camp supplies, and arms, he raised money from rich Arabs in Europe and the Middle East and supplemented their donations by extorting halal butchers in Milan on threat of torching their shops. Some of the arms purchases were elaborate. According to one terrorist, Shaaban’s circle bought assault rifles, grenades, and missiles from traders in Russia (where weapons circulated freely after the fall of Communism), shipped the arms by sea to Italy, and forwarded them to Croatia and from there on to Bosnia. Swiss corporations owned by Arabs and Pakistanis oversaw the logistics, and Swiss banks handled the payments, some of which were also filtered through charities like the Lucerne-based Mother Teresa of Calcutta Center. (In Milan, Shaaban had his own charity, Il Paradiso, whose relief also tended to ordnance.) The chain of supply for the arms shipments was, however, deemed too complicated, and simpler ones were established.
    The army that Shaaban and his colleagues assembled in Bosnia was known as the Islamic Brigade. Although Shaaban consulted on battlefield strategy, his chief role when in Bosnia seems to have been more inspirational than strategic. He was something