Europe Fears Converts May Aid Extremism
By CRAIG S. SMITH

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/international/europe/19CONV.html

ST.-PIERRE-EN-FAUCIGNY, France — The Courtailler
brothers grew up in this medieval Alpine town,
children of a butcher who went broke, who divorced his
wife and moved to a job in a meatpacking plant far
away. Two of the three brothers, David and Jérôme,
educated in Catholic schools, foundered in drugs until
they found religion: Islam.

Within five years of David's initial conversion at a
mosque in the British seaside resort of Brighton in
1996, the brothers embraced many of the leading lights
of Europe's Islamic terror network. David, 28, is now
in jail, and in late June, Jérôme, 29, turned himself
in to the police in the Netherlands, days after he was
convicted by a court there of belonging to an
international terrorist group.

The Courtaillers are part of a growing group of people
who found a home in Islam and then veered into
extremism, raising concerns among antiterrorism
officials on both sides of the Atlantic that the new
recruits could provide foreign-born Islamic militants
with invisibility and cover, by escaping the scrutiny
often reserved for young men of Arab descent.

A handful of Westerners have already been arrested on
terrorism charges. Their experiences, the authorities
fear, could foreshadow a deepening problem.

"Converts will be used for striking more and more by
jihadist circles," said Jean-Luc Marret, a terrorism
expert at the Strategic Research Foundation, in Paris.
"They have been used in the past for proselytism,
logistics or support, and they are operationally
useful now."

Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, and many
experts say that while there are no reliable
statistics, they believe that the number of converts
has grown since Sept. 11, 2001, in many ways because
of the campaign against terrorism.

Antoine Sfeir, a French scholar who is writing a book
on the trend, said a small number of converts, many of
them disaffected and often troubled young people, saw
the current wave of Islamic terrorism as "a kind of
combat against the rich, powerful, by the poor men of
the planet."

Only a small fraction of Western Islamic converts
sympathize with terrorism, and even fewer become
engaged in terrorist activity. A few dozen militant
converts have been identified so far. A report by
France's domestic intelligence agency, published by Le
Figaro, estimated last year that there were 30,000 to
50,000 converts in France.

However small the number of them drawn to terrorism,
the police are focusing on this subset as a serious
and growing threat.

"The conversion to Islam of fragile individuals
undoubtedly leads to the risk of diversion to
terrorism," the intelligence agency's report said,
adding that radical groups have recruited converts
because they could cross borders easily or serve as
front men for renting accommodations or providing
other logistical support.

A Transnational Trend


The trend is not only happening in Europe.

Jack Roche, a British-born Australian taxi driver,
converted to Islam, trained in Afghanistan and
returned to Australia, where he was recently sentenced
to nine years in prison for trying to blow up the
Israeli Embassy in Canberra. While planning the attack
and videotaping the embassy, he was questioned by a
guard, whom he told that he was interested in the
district's architecture.

"Is that what it is?" the guard, clearly believing
him, casually replied in a conversation recorded on
the video and later presented at Mr. Roche's trial. "I
didn't think you were going to bomb the joint or
anything."

In the United States, Jose Padilla, held by the
government on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks,
converted to Islam in 1992 while in a Florida jail.

Both David and Jérôme Courtailler, the French
brothers, moved freely through Europe without
attracting the kind of attention focused on Arab men,
even after the French authorities were notified when
David was spotted leaving Afghanistan.

In an interview, one French anti-terrorism official
said many recent converts were women, further
complicating the standard profile.

Militant converts come to Islam in several ways, most
notably through contact with militant Muslims while
serving time in Europe's prisons, where the Islamic
population has skyrocketed. Richard C. Reid, the
so-called shoe bomber from Britain, converted to Islam
in prison. France's prison population is more than 50
percent Muslim.

Another door to Islam is the Tablighi Jamaat, a
missionary group that started in India 75 years ago to
promote Islam in the face of Hindu domination. It is
the world's largest network of Islamic proselytizers.

The Tablighi Jamaat send converts to study in
countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, where they
often meet militant radicals. Several well-known
Western converts are Tablighi Jamaat alumni, including
John Walker Lindh, the American caught fighting with
the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2002, and Hervé Loiseau,
a young French man who froze to death while fleeing
the American attack on Tora Bora in Afghanistan in
late 2001.

Other people convert because of family influence —
particularly in France, where intermarriage between
Christians and Muslims is increasingly common — or
simple peer pressure in predominantly Muslim
neighborhoods.

While there has been a convert presence in Islamic
terror since Al Qaeda's first generation emerged from
the 1980's war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan,
recruitment efforts have been redoubled since the
American invasion there, the authorities say. Seasoned
Qaeda members have begun recruiting a new generation
of militants through European mosques and from among
local militant Islamic groups, the police say.

Jérôme Courtailler was among that group, together with
the Frenchmen Johann Bonté and Jean-Marc Grandvisir.
The three men were arrested in 2001 in connection with
a plot to blow up the American Embassy in Paris, a
plot begun before the Sept. 11 attacks but scheduled
to be carried out after it.

Mr. Bonté converted to Islam while staying with his
brother-in-law, Djamel Beghal, an Algerian-born
Frenchman and confessed Qaeda member, in Leicester,
England, in 1999. Jérôme Courtailler also converted to
Islam in Leicester under Mr. Beghal's influence. Mr.
Beghal is believed to have been the ringleader of the
American Embassy bombing plan, the French authorities
say.

The Path to Jihad


The road from convert to jihadist can be remarkably
short, terrorism experts say, because someone new to
Islam does not have the cultural bearings or religious
grounding to resist radical interpretations of Islam,
and many come with a romanticized notion of an Islamic
conflict with the West.

"The problem is that the less you know about Islam
when you come into it, the easier it is for someone to
present you with the `forgotten obligation' of jihad,"
said Steven Simon, a terrorism expert at the Rand
Corporation.

David Courtailler went to Brighton in 1996 to break
free of his drug habit and found support among
conservative Muslims. "For David, Islam ordered his
life," said his lawyer, Philibert Lepy.

American investigators said he was soon keeping
company with Muslim radicals and stayed for a time at
an apartment used by Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now
being prosecuted in Alexandria, Va., in connection
with the Sept. 11 attacks.

In court testimony, David Courtailler said friends had
offered him a trip to Afghanistan to study the Koran.
He accepted and was given nearly $2,000 in cash, an
Islamabad phone number and a plane ticket to Pakistan.
Within days of his arrival he was taken by car over
the Khyber Pass to Al Qaeda's notorious Khalden
training camp near the Afghan city of Khost.

Mr. Courtailler has testified that he asked for
training in bomb making, but that his request was
denied because his Arabic was not good enough. His
sojourn in Camp Khalden coincided with that of many
other Qaeda militants, including Mr. Reid and Mr.
Moussaoui, as well as Ahmed Ressam, who was convicted
of taking part in a plot in 1999 to bomb Los Angeles
International Airport.

When Mr. Courtailler returned to Europe in August
1998, an American intelligence service notified the
French that he and three other Qaeda-trained men were
on their way. Despite that information, Mr.
Courtailler was able to pass through borders
undetected, European police officials say, almost
certainly in part because of his ethnicity.

According to French antiterrorism officials, a man in
London named Omar Deghayes, now at the American
military's detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,
gave Mr. Courtailler phone numbers for militants in
Spain and Morocco, including one arrested in
connection with the Madrid train bombings in March and
another now serving a 19-year sentence for his role in
suicide bombings last year in Casablanca.

Mr. Courtailler stayed with that second man in
Tangier, Morocco. It was not until he returned to
France several months later and was arrested for
stealing a pair of shoes in Caen in Normandy that
French antiterrorism authorities became aware again of
his whereabouts. He was charged with having terrorist
associations and released on the French equivalent of
bail seven months later.

He soon disappeared, traveling again to Britain, where
he spent time in Leicester, where Mr. Beghal lived,
investigators said. While he was there, his brother,
Jérôme, joined him and converted to Islam.

A Web of Conspirators


Investigators now believe that while in Britain in
2000, David Courtailler provided help to a terrorist
cell planning a huge bomb attack. His name was on a
fake French driver's license found later along with a
large quantity of explosives in a Birmingham
apartment.

Jérôme Courtailler moved to Rotterdam, where Dutch
intelligence agents intercepted his phone calls with
various terrorism suspects, including a Tunisian
soccer player named Nizar Trabelsi, who was to be the
suicide bomber in the American Embassy plot, according
to court documents. Jérôme is also believed to have
known Mr. Moussaoui and to have met Mr. Reid when he
was in the Netherlands buying the shoes that were
eventually turned into bombs.

Jérôme Courtailler was arrested days after the Sept.
11 attacks in connection with the Paris plot. Dozens
of fake passports were found in his Dutch apartment,
together with videos of Chechnya, the attack on the
American Embassy in Kenya and Osama bin Laden, and
instructions on how to make a bomb.

Investigators say they believe that he was the source
of the fake Belgian passports used by the suicide
bombers who killed the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed
Shah Massoud in Afghanistan on Sept. 9, 2001.

In 2002, a Dutch judge dismissed the charges against
Jérôme Courtailler, who was accused of belonging to an
international criminal organization, because the
evidence consisted mostly of information from
illegally obtained wiretaps. For the next two years he
lived near St.-Pierre-en-Faucigny under the watchful
eye of France's intelligence services.

The Dutch prosecutor in the case appealed the
dismissal, and Jérôme Courtailler was convicted and
sentenced to six years in prison. He gave himself up
in Rotterdam on June 24.

David Courtailler, meanwhile, was also recently
convicted of consorting with terrorists with an intent
to carry out violent acts. He is now serving what
remains of his four-year sentence, having already
served more than a year awaiting trial and having had
two years of the sentence suspended. Barring new
charges, he will be free in about six months.







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