The suspects were members of Taqfir wal Hijra. Its founders had fled from Egypt to Algeria. There the organization had been absorbed into al-Qaeda. In 2003, it had arrived in The Hague. Operating in highly secret cells, its members set about recruiting jihadists to travel to Afghanistan for training. The bodies of those who did not return home lay along the trail to and from Afghanistan. As usual, Mossad arranged for their obituaries to appear in local Arab newspapers. Sometimes their families received flowers and a condolence card
One who had escaped was Lionel Dumont, a native Frenchman from Roubaix, an industrial town in the north of France. In his early teens he had converted to Islam and later spent his military service with the French army in Somalia. The brutality of many of his fellow soldiers toward the Muslim population had a powerful and lasting effect on Dumont. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, he went to Bosnia to fight with al-Qaeda–sponsored Mujahideen.
It was a time when Osama bin Laden was looking for new places to defeat the infidel. Almost simultaneously with the fighting in Bosnia, the conflict in Chechnya erupted. Then Albania provided another battlefield for al-Qaeda; chaos and anarchy already prevailed in the country, making it a fertile ground for arms traffickers and other terrorist-linked groups. Al-Qaeda welded them into a powerful force; unlimited funding was provided, along with humanitarian aid. Albania became a springboard into neighboring Kosovo. Dumont was among some five hundred Mujahideen smuggled into the Albanian capital of Tirana. The operation was led by Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. After a kill-or-be-killed conflict against government forces, the Mujahedeen swept on into Macedonia. Again money and aid won over impoverished villagers. In the end it would be NATO that drove them out. But by then al-Qaeda had scooped up hundreds more recruits. Many went to Afghanistan for specialist training.
When an uneasy peace came to the region, Dumont returned to Roubaix and formed his own group, which he trained and led to conduct a number of terrorist attacks. The French police tried, but failed, to arrest him, and Dumont fled to Bosnia. There he became a senior member of the rapidly expanding al-Qaeda organization. Finally captured, he escaped from prison and was spirited along the trail to Afghanistan. Twice Mossad
The budget of hundreds of millions of dollars to create the surveillance arsenal had been approved by Ariel Sharon. But on that morning of January 24, Meir Dagan knew that the one Israeli politician he revered above all others would never recover from the massive stroke that had left Sharon in an ever-deepening coma, paralyzed, and kept alive by a life-support system in his Jerusalem hospital. His medical team had indicated they could do no more. As often as he could Dagan had visited the seventh-floor suite where his old friend lay at death’s door. Each time Dagan stood in the doorway, his sharply intelligent eyes watching Sharon’s heartbeats continuing to move across the monitor positioned near the bed, the blips on the screen pulsing, reducing the old man’s grasp on life to an endless trace. Sharon’s family would be there, grouped around the bed, quiet, the emotions aroused by approaching death seeming to settle even more over them. Dagan could detect the sorrow, despair, and helplessness of the family and the barely concealed resignation of the doctors and nurses. He had wondered if Sharon sensed their presence. More certain was the family gathered around the bed were caught in some deep, primitive, and instinctive ritual, staring silently at the motionless figure, almost as if no words could communicate their inner feelings. Dagan well understood that; in his life as a soldier and head of Mossad, he had seen the effect of death on others many times.
