NoMuzikNo:zilchide

No one thought it was strange when Muncif Ben Aboud disappeared from his crowded, unkempt neighborhood in the Moroccan city of Tetouan. Men are always leaving Jamaa Mezuak, as the quarter is known. And Muncif, who was 21, had ventured off before, roaming the worn medinas of Casablanca and Marrakesh, posing stiffly for snapshots to take home. His curiosity pulled him in many directions. He was brilliant with numbers but would lose himself in novels. He began training to be a military pilot but then changed his mind and settled on engineering. A year later, in 2006, he switched to mathematics.

That summer, Muncif told his mother he was going to Mauritania, the parched Muslim country south of Morocco. He wanted to study Islam. She saw no reason to worry. He was a good boy; this seemed just another fit of wanderlust. But three days after he left, he called home.

“Forgive me if I have done wrong,” Muncif said. It was a phrase Moroccans use to bid farewell. He was going to Iraq, he said. He wanted to do jihad.

The family was shocked. Muncif had always been strong-willed. He was stubborn in his religious convictions. But the war in Iraq seemed a world away.

Three months later, Muncif’s brother Bilal disappeared. His mother told herself that Bilal, who was 26, must have found a way to Spain, where so many men from the neighborhood went looking for work. It was unthinkable that he would have followed his brother. Bilal’s passions were soccer and hip-hop. He loved to dance. He hardly seemed poised to blow himself up. But one afternoon in October, the telephone rang again.

Bilal was calling to say goodbye. He was in Syria with a group of strangers — some Turks, Moroccans and British Muslim converts — and he was heading to Iraq.

The family pleaded with him to come home. They had already seen one son leave. Bilal said he was sorry and then hung up. That same hour, another phone rang two blocks away. Bilal’s close friend, Hamza Akhlifa, was also calling home to say goodbye. He was in Syria with Bilal, bound for Iraq.

Word quickly spread through the winding streets where the families live, high above a littered bluff at the edge of the city. By the end of last year, at least eight men had left Tetouan for Iraq. They hoped to become martyrs by fighting the American occupation, according to Moroccan security officials. Five of them grew up within blocks of one another, racing through the same narrow alleys, past the same whitewashed homes.

The people of Jamaa Mezuak were no strangers to militant Islam. A few years earlier, five other men from the neighborhood said their own goodbyes. They went to Spain to seek their fortunes. But they became famous as key suspects in the bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid that killed 191 people on March 11, 2004. They called home a few weeks after the attacks, their voices urgent. They were hiding in an apartment on the city’s outskirts. As the Spanish police closed in, an explosion rocked the building. The men died instantly, in a ghastly group suicide.

In the years since Sept. 11, the question of what makes a terrorist has become ever more urgent. Much about young Muslim militants remains opaque, from the texture of their family lives to the full scope of their desires. Theories of radicalization have come and gone. Experts have variously blamed poverty, Arab nationalism, the Internet, geopolitics, alienation, charismatic sheiks, dictatorial regimes and youthful anomie. But in the study of contemporary terrorism, there has never been a laboratory quite like Jamaa Mezuak.

Perhaps no theory could have predicted Jamal Ahmidan, a mastermind of the Madrid bombings. He was a feisty drug dealer with a passion for motorcycles and a weakness for Spanish women. His fellow plotters from the old neighborhood in Morocco included petty criminals and a candy vendor. If they seemed a poor fit for militant Islam, so were the young men from Jamaa Mezuak who eventually left for Iraq. One styled his hair after John Travolta. Another was a frustrated comedian. They had yearned for a life in Europe, it seemed, not death in the Middle East.

What, then, caused them to embrace violent jihad? In a city flooded with televised images of civilians dying in Iraq, the forces of politics and religion surely weighed on these men’s lives. For some of them, public outrage merged with personal grievance. One man lost his job and left for Iraq six months later. Another was forbidden to marry the girl he loved. The drug dealer had languished in a Moroccan jail, separated from his young son.

Yet individual experiences and ideological convictions can only explain so much. Increasingly, terrorism analysts have focused on the importance of social milieu. Some stress that terrorists are not simply loners, overcome by a militant cause. They are more likely to radicalize together with others who share the same passions and afflictions and daily routines. As the story of Jamaa Mezuak suggests, the turn to violence is seldom made alone. Terrorists don’t simply die for a cause, Scott Atran, an anthropologist who studies terrorism, told me. “They die for each other.”

The Neighborhood

There is nothing isolated about Tetouan. This city of 400,000 on the northern tip of Morocco sits just miles from the Mediterranean Sea. It has long been a crossroads between Africa and Europe, a place steeped in many cultures. Today, some of its streets still carry the Spanish names of their colonial past. Men sip espressos in weathered cafes. The city is a short drive from Tangier, the onetime retreat of Paul Bowles and William Burroughs, where the Spanish coastline glimmers seductively on clear nights from across the Strait of Gibraltar. It is a constant reminder of what lies just over the horizon, the promise of a different life.

The neighborhood of Jamaa Mezuak rises up over a meandering, muddy river on the western side of Tetouan, at the foot of a craggy mountain. Lines of parched clothing crisscross the rooftops, sharing space with satellite dishes. Much of the area was once farmland owned by a wealthy man who built the first local mosque, or jamaa, in 1933 and gave it his family’s name, Mezuak. Squatters eventually populated the area. Thousands more poured in from the nearby Rif Mountains after a devastating drought in the early 1980s. Many of these farmers and peasants struggled to adapt to city life and would feel alienated for years to come.

Their neighborhood is a cacophonous blend of urban and rural. Sheep spill down alleys, weaving around oncoming traffic. At night, the animals scuttle into converted garages, watched over by aging shepherds with wooden canes. No one knows exactly how many people live in Jamaa Mezuak — the mayor of Tetouan puts the number at 6,000, though others insist that it is triple that. But the streets teem with life. Drug dealers idle near butcher shops, where plucked chickens hang limply for sale. Boys in soccer jerseys linger on stoops. Their uncles gamble in Cafe Chicago, smoking cigarettes rolled with hashish. Weddings are held at the Palace of Peace, a catering hall aglow with glass chandeliers. Down the street, bearded men in djellabas, the hooded robes, gather outside a mosque as women pass by in whispering clusters and slip behind the mirrored doors of beauty salons.

If there is one outlet for the neighborhood’s wellspring of male energy, it is soccer. In the summer, hundreds of boys gather on bleachers to watch as players glide across a worn, concrete pitch, some of them barefoot. Sitting around the bleachers one afternoon in July, a group of teenagers talked to me about their heroes. They said they worshipped Zinédine Zidane, the Muslim of Algerian descent who conquered the soccer world from France. They loved the Prophet Muhammad. The mere mention of Osama bin Laden elicited a sea of upturned thumbs.

“He’s very courageous,” said Ayman, a short, spunky 13-year-old with honey-colored skin. “Nobody did what he did. He challenges the whole world. He even challenges George Bush.”

Another teenage boy said he would gladly volunteer to fight the American occupation in Iraq if it meant bringing independence to Iraqis. “We want to help our Muslim brothers,” he told me. Of the Americans, he added: “If they kill us, we go to God. If we stay here, there is joblessness.”

Such talk is unremarkable in many Muslim countries. But it hardly fits Morocco’s international image — not only the image that draws honeymooners to Marrakesh but also the one cultivated by many Moroccans. They take pride in their practice of a tolerant Islam and in a historical legacy that some still call “the Moroccan exception.” For decades, this country seemed immune to the political and religious struggles that engulfed the Middle East, not to mention Morocco’s roiling neighbor, Algeria. Only eight miles of ocean separate Morocco from Spain. Morocco’s ancient name, Al Maghreb Al Aqsa, means “the land farthest to the West.” Its strategic position on the map brought centuries of plundering and colonization but also a constant exposure to new languages and ideas. Long after Morocco won independence in 1956 — from Spain in the north and France in the south — croissants are still a mainstay of breakfast. Some restaurants openly serve alcohol. Many women reject the veil.

Yet Morocco’s isolation from the Muslim world was never absolute. Political power lies in the hands of a monarchy that claims a direct lineage to Islam’s prophet. In the 1960s, King Hassan II allowed Islamism to spread as a counterweight to secular political opposition. The north became especially fertile ground for Islamist movements and Wahhabism, the puritanical strain of Saudi Islam. Hassan had largely abandoned the area after his forces crushed a Berber rebellion there. For more than 40 years, he rarely visited his palaces in Tangier and Tetouan. Government services in the region slackened, and Islamists filled part of the void, offering free food and medicine to the poor. Wahhabi teachings found their way to cities like Tetouan, where women wearing the niqab, or full-face veil, are now common.

Increasingly, northern Morocco is the site of cross currents: the arrival of tourists and the departure of locals. Since taking the throne in 1999, King Mohammed VI has embraced the region, vacationing in his palaces there and fostering development. But not everyone has reaped the benefits. Many of the locals find their rickety cars are no match for the smooth new highways or that they are woefully untrained to compete for jobs in the area’s lavish resorts. The government has been refurbishing Tetouan in the hope of attracting foreign investment. But the city’s gleaming new high-rises, bus station and art museum are a world away from the garbage-strewn streets of Jamaa Mezuak, where every other wall seems to bear the same graffiti: “Don’t put your trash here, donkey.”

Year after year, thousands of young Moroccans attempt the crossing to Spain, buying fake visas or hiding under trucks parked on ferries. For those who stay behind, the best jobs are often found in Tetouan’s thriving contraband trade. Every morning before dawn, men and women pile into taxis and ride 30 minutes to the border with Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the northern Moroccan coast. They cross over to buy tax-free goods — sneakers, truck tires, peanut butter, linens — and then smuggle them back to Tetouan’s airless markets, climbing a hill they call Tora Bora.

King Mohammed has struggled to manage the country’s rising religious tensions. Early in his reign, he sought to distance himself from his father’s despotic rule by instituting a number of reforms. But his new family laws, which have raised the legal age for marriage and extended women greater rights in divorce proceedings, set off mass demonstrations before they were enacted. As the government secured free trade with the United States, as well as millions of dollars in aid, hard-liners assailed the king for being overly solicitous of the West.

Perhaps nothing has emboldened the king’s detractors more than his reaction to Sept. 11. He swiftly condemned the attacks, authorizing a memorial service for the victims and declaring Morocco an ally of the United States in fighting terror. In response, a group of Moroccan theologians signed a fatwa declaring it a sin to join a coalition against a Muslim state. The kingdom stopped short of sending troops to Afghanistan or Iraq, but it has helped in other ways. The Moroccan security services have reportedly detained and interrogated terror suspects targeted by the C.I.A. As the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, Osama bin Laden released an audio recording in February 2003 in which he singled out Morocco as one of several “tyrannical and apostate regimes, enslaved by America.”

Three months later, on May 16, a dozen Moroccan men blew themselves up at sites around Casablanca, killing 45 people. It was the first major terrorist attack in the nation’s sovereign history — “the price that Morocco paid for collaborating with the United States,” Mohammed Darif, a terrorism specialist at Hassan II University in Casablanca, told me. The attacks in Casablanca marked a turning point. Until then, Moroccan militants had waged jihad predominantly overseas, joining the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later in Kashmir, Bosnia and Chechnya.

Several hundred miles to the north, another plot would soon take shape. It would demonstrate the strange and unpredictable ways in which a terrorist circle can form. And it would eventually propel a new group of men to leave their families in Tetouan for Iraq.

The Road to Spain

No one from the neighborhood made it in Spain like Jamal Ahmidan. A short, pugnacious high-school dropout, he was the sort of guy who drew attention long before he bought his first BMW. He had crooked teeth and striking eyes that earned him the nickname Chino, Spanish for Chinaman. Before he was 30, he had built a lucrative hashish and ecstasy trade that operated from Holland to Morocco. Though he never grew taller than 5-foot-4, he had an indomitable air. He fought anyone who took him on.

“To his face you had to show respect,” one of his childhood friends, Anwar Belaman, told me.

How a small-time drug dealer from Morocco became one of the masterminds of the Madrid attacks is a mystery that continues to dog the Spanish authorities. In the epic bombing trial that concluded in Madrid on Oct. 31, Chino’s personal journey was barely glimpsed, despite his well-documented place at the center of the plot. I pieced together the following narrative from interviews with his mother, six of his siblings and his Moroccan lawyer, as well as neighbors and friends. A number of them had never spoken with a reporter.

Chino grew up as the fourth of 14 children, in a spare, cinder-block house near the center of Jamaa Mezuak. He began working for his father at 15, selling cloth from a stall in one of Tetouan’s crowded markets. He was restless with ambition. One sibling recalled that he yearned to be rich. After his older brother Mustafa moved to Europe, Chino followed in the early ’90s, crossing over illegally and settling in Madrid. Back home, they were considered pioneers — they belonged to the first large wave of Moroccans to arrive in Spain after its economy began to thrive. “They had to start from nothing, as if someone threw them from the sky to the ground,” Chino’s brother Yussef, who is 24, told me.

It was in Madrid that Chino became a man, Rahma, his mother, said. He learned to cook for himself. He told his mother he was working as a mason. In fact, he was selling drugs. He tore around Madrid on a motorcycle and went clubbing through the night, choosing Moroccan-themed locales over tapas bars. He didn’t like to dance. Women made him shy, one sibling said, though he pursued them relentlessly. He worked on his looks. After breaking his front teeth in a motorcycle accident, he paid handsomely for caps. He was fussy about his collection of pricey shirts and jackets, scolding one of his brothers when he borrowed an outfit without permission.

Surrounded by drugs and addicts, Chino succumbed to the temptation himself. He started snorting cocaine soon after he arrived in Spain, several of his brothers said. He fell in love with a teenage Spanish junkie named Rosa, with whom he would eventually have a son. In the early 1990s, while serving time in a Spanish prison for drug trafficking, he began doing heroin, according to his brother Rachid. But he kicked the habit the day he got out, forcing himself through withdrawal with a will that stunned his friends. “He was hooked, but didn’t touch it,” Rachid said.

Chino’s legend in Jamaa Mezuak was sealed by a visit home in 1993. He got drunk at a wedding and passed out in a taxi. When he woke up, Chino later told his friends, he found a man stealing his gold watch, a ring, a Walkman and some money. Chino stabbed the man in a drunken stupor, he claimed, but didn’t think he killed him. The man was later found dead. Chino fled back to Spain before the Moroccan police could find him.

Much of Chino’s life was invisible to his brothers, even after most of them moved to Madrid. They knew that he traveled frequently and that he had been caught crossing European borders with fake papers and drugs. He had served time in jails in Holland, France and Switzerland, several of his brothers told me in a rare interview in their Madrid apartment one evening in July. They look on Chino’s life with a mixture of sadness and awe. They talk with reverence of his escape from a Spanish detention center for illegal immigrants, which he managed by spraying mace in the face of a guard.

It was not until 1998, after Chino had served time in a prison in Spain, that his brothers first heard him mention jihad. He told them that he had seen videos of the mujahedeen who were fighting the Soviet Army in Chechnya. He also began talking obsessively about the plight of the Palestinians. “Before then, he wanted to be rich,” Chino’s 23-year-old brother said. “After, he wanted a life in another world. He wanted to fight.”

Two years later, Chino was arrested in Spain once again, this time for traveling with false documents. A jail official was so alarmed by Chino’s disruptive behavior that he filed a report in which he described Chino as a “megalomaniac” who dreamed of going to Israel “to kill Jews.”