Minds of Terror.(Inside al Qaeda)(Masterminds of Terror)(Book Review)

Inside al Qaeda, by Mohamed Sifaoui, translated from the French by George Miller; Granta, 2003, $21.95.

Masterminds of Terror, by Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding; Mainstream, 2003, $27.95.

THESE TWO BOOKS cover the same kind of subject, being accounts of real-life encounters with Islamist terrorists, but they are different in their approach. The first book, written by a very brave French-Algerian journalist (who is now in hiding under police protection) is a deeply personal account of three months spent undercover with the members of a Paris terrorist cell of Islamists (and offers some interesting insights into the kinds of milieu frequented by terrorist Willie Brigitte, recently apprehended in Sydney); the second centres on an account of the famous interview in Pakistan by Al-Jazeera journalist Yosri Fouda with the planners of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Ramzi Binaishibh and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, not long before their arrest.

Sifaoui was a journalist in Algiers and only by accident survived a terrible car bomb attack which killed his colleagues at Soir d'Algerie in February 1996. This, and the stories he had to cover for the paper on the hideous crimes committed by Islamists in Algeria, has given him an abiding hatred for these people who, as he says, are only about the negation of all other human beings. He is utterly clear-sighted about the vicious ideology which has spawned the terrorists and holds no brief at all for foolish or malignant Westerners who act as their apologists. And he is disgusted by the way in which Islamists have abused the kindness and goodwill of France in giving them refuge.

Sifaoui came to France after the bomb attack, and has written at length about the situation in Algeria, and dissected Islamist ideology in a way that is rare in France, appearing on television and radio as well as in newspapers. And then came the extraordinary opportunity to burrow deep into the ranks of the Islamists.

Covering the 2002 trial of the Islamists who were responsible for the bomb attacks on the Paris metro in 1995, he became aware of a bearded Islamist who kept attending, and who seemed familiar. He spoke to the man and discovered that he was Karim Bourti, who he'd been at school with in Algiers, and that though Bourti remembered Sifaoui's face, he did not remember his name. On the spur of the moment, Sifaoui decided to take on a new identity--that of Djamel Mostanghemi, naive and influenceable Islamist-en-herbe and journalist who could be persuaded into waging media "jihad" for "the brothers". Thus began a three-month getting-toknow-you campaign in which Bourti, who turned out to be a recruitment officer for the Paris cell, introduced him to the arcane, sordid and dangerous world of Islamism.

For Sifaoui, it was an arduous three months. Not only was there great fear--several times he had very close calls--but simply being in the presence of people who could talk cheerfully about killing total strangers and destroying the country that had given them refuge, was a very difficult thing to bear. Sifaoui has no illusions about these men; not once does he advance a shred of excuse or justification or engage in even a whisper of anti-American or anti-Western sentiment; an honourable and passionate man, he knows the nature of the beast from the inside, and it disgusts him. But with the courage of the true journalist, he is determined to bring witness back from the gates of hell; and he exposes the thinking and attitudes and deepest feelings of these men and their milieu very clearly.