Jihadists on rise in Europe
PATRICK E. TYLER AND DON VAN NATTA JR.; The New York Times
LUTON, England - The call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered, counterterrorism officials say.
In this former industrial town north of London, several young Britons whose parents emigrated from Pakistan after World War II have turned against their families' new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing St.
They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. They call the Sept. 11 hijackers the "Magnificent 19" and regard the train bombings in Madrid, Spain, as a clever way to drive a wedge into Europe.
On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his loyalty to bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed bin Laden's offer of a truce - provided that all foreign troops be withdrawn from Iraq in three months - Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that host them, Mohammad said.
"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans should take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death - that is what they are looking for."
On working-class streets of old industrial cities like Crawley, Luton, Birmingham and Manchester, and in the Arab enclaves of Germany, France, Switzerland and other parts of Europe, intelligence officials say a fervor for militancy is intensifying and becoming more open.
In Hamburg, Mustafa Yoldas, the director of the Council of Islamic Communities, saw a correlation to the discord in Iraq.
"This is a very dangerous situation at the moment," Yoldas said. "My impression is that Muslims have become more and more angry against the United States."
Hundreds of young Muslim men are answering the call of extremists into groups affiliated or aligned with al-Qaida, intelligence and counterterrorism officials in the region say.
Even more worrying, said a senior British counterterrorism official, is that the level of "chatter" - communications among suspected terrorist figures and their supporters - has markedly increased since bin Laden's warning to Europe this month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries that planning is advanced toward another strike in Europe.
Stoking that anger are some of the same Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Mainstream Muslims are outraged by the situation, saying the actions of a few are causing their communities to be singled out for surveillance and making the larger, non-Muslim population distrust them.
Muhammad Sulaiman, a stalwart of the mainstream Central Mosque in Luton, was penniless when he arrived from the Kashmiri frontier of Pakistan in 1956. He raised money to build the Central Mosque and now leads a campaign to ban Al Muhajiroun radicals from the city's 10 mosques.
"This is show-off business," he says in accented English. "I don't want these kids in my mosque."
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