LONDON -- With a confrontation between the United States and the United Nations imminent, British Prime Minister Tony Blair suddenly finds himself playing the pivotal role in forming a coalition against Iraq. Between talking tough at a Camp David summit with U.S. President Bush earlier this month and talking coaxingly with French President Jacques Chirac at a meeting of the European Union in Belgium, Blair found time to address a skeptical House of Commons, candidly telling his colleagues that he is "willing to risk everything on this politically." But his political future may not be the only thing he's gambling: His alliance with the United States may be one cause of a recent flurry of terrorist activity within Britain's own borders.
As Britain gears up for a war with Iraq (to date more than 35,000 British troops have been committed to the Persian Gulf), the Blair government and England generally have (in the eyes of terrorists) become legitimate Islamic terrorist targets.
The latest developments have led to more anxiety. Last week 450 troops and light tanks were dispatched to Heathrow as the country faced a high security alert. On Thursday, customs officials at London's Gatwick Airport arrested passenger Hasil Muhammed Rahaham-Alan for taking a hand grenade aboard an aircraft.
And The New York Times reported that John Stevens, the commissioner of London's Metropolitan police, warned that al-Qaeda has a "substantial presence" in the country, and that an attempted terrorist attack in Britain was all but inevitable.
Britain has had terrorist troubles before: From the 1970s through the 1990s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) tried to intimidate the English through bomb attacks aimed, primarily, at politicians. But unlike those attacks -- which pitted Irish against British -- the threat of Islamic terrorism is, in some cases, pitting Londoners against Londoners.
"The irony is that before [September 11], Europe -- and the [United Kingdom] in particular -- were considered sanctuaries for al-Qaeda terrorists," says Jonathan Stephenson, senior fellow for counterterrorism at London's International Institute of Strategic Studies. "The French even named London 'Londonistan' because of the number of suspected terrorists they let in. But the U.K. has taken a more proactive approach [in its anti-terrorism measures] since war with Iraq has become an imminent possibility."
The lines of battle have already been drawn -- and crossed.
Finsbury Park is one such place where that's been made clear. Having received a 25 million-pound grant from the government in 1999, the bustling neighborhood is on the mend. Sitting side by side just outside the local tube station are the Pakistan Women's Welfare Association, Unity Performing Arts and the London Asian African Caribbean Centre. Written on a large, green monolithic building are the words, "Help Centre: Jesus Christ is the Lord." The streets are clean, road works have eased some of the traffic and, considering its multiethnic, multicultural makeup, it is impressive that tensions between communities have rarely reached a boil.
Until now. Finsbury Park is also home to the North Central London Mosque, which counted as one of its imams Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri. Masri, who is wanted on terrorist charges in Yemen, used his power at the North Central London Mosque to criticize the government and issue anti-Semitic screeds. He is also known to have preached to Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber") and Zacarias Moussaoui (the alleged 20th 9-11 hijacker). Masri cuts an almost cartoonish figure of evil: He wears an eye patch and has two hooks for hands. (A land mine blew them off in Afghanistan in the 1980s.) In April the Charity Commission -- the organization that regulates charities in England and Wales -- suspended him from his position. This month, a day after he called the late space shuttle Columbia astronauts a "trinity of evil" (because they were American, Israeli and Hindu) he was ousted from his post as imam.
But neither Masri nor anyone else has been frequenting the North Central London Mosque lately. At about 2 a.m. on Jan. 20, helicopters with spotlights hovered overhead while 150 Scotland Yard police sporting full body armor -- and wearing special overboots as a sign of respect to the mosque -- stormed the building with battering rams and ladders on suspicions of terrorist activity. They confiscated a stun gun and a CS (0-chlorobenzalmalononitrile) gas canister. Investigators detained seven people in the mosque.
The raid was a strategy "to silence the Muslims before bombing Iraq," SheikhOmar Bakri Muhammad, head of the British extremist group al Muhajiroun, toldTime International. "If they arrest us," he told The New York Times, "we will become martyrs."
The three-story mosque remains shut, its gates padlocked. Corrugated iron (with "Damage Control" printed on it) covers the windows and doors. Nearby is a stack of aluminium police barricades.
Sgt. Trevor Smith of the Metropolitan Police, one of the officers on duty around the corner, tells me the neighborhood seems quiet because "the mosque is closed." Having taken a week to inspect it, the police handed the building back to its trustees, who have kept it closed because of health and safety concerns. "Fire hazards," says Smith. He tells me that police levels in the neighborhood are back to normal, but that seems hard to believe. After all, when I visited one week after the raid, three police officers were guarding the dormant mosque and two more were standing a block away, outside the Muslim Welfare House, which now serves as the neighborhood's primary mosque. In between the two groups of officers, Sgt. Smith and his partner patrolled.
But the quiet is an uneasy one. As Blair tries to make the argument for joining the United States in a war against Iraq, he finds his attention increasingly distracted by dramatic discoveries at home.
Masri has encouraged young Muslims to participate in a "holy war," and called Blair a "legitimate target" in that war. And willing terrorists seem to be listening. In early January, four Algerians believed to be linked to al-Qaeda were arrested in their flat in Wood Green, a neighborhood near Finsbury Park. They were found experimenting with ricin, a lethal toxin that lacks an antidote. Last month in Manchester, other alleged terrorists were arrested. (One briefly escaped and stabbed a police officer to death.) In November three alleged terrorists of North African descent were charged with plotting a cyanide gas attack on the London Underground. And last October, British authorities nabbed Abu Qatada, a political refugee who had been in Britain since 1994 but had gone into hiding, in London. He was also, it turns out, a fundamentalist cleric who had been convicted of terrorist charges in Jordan and was wanted in the United States.
Foreign terrorists also appear to be gearing up for a London attack. Last month Italian police arrested five Moroccan men who had been squatting in an abandoned farmhouse. Among their laundry was found a kilo of plastic explosives and maps of central London and the London Underground. Two weeks ago, 28 suspected Pakistani terrorists were arrested in Naples. They, too, had been found with a kilo of plastic explosives and a photo of Adm. Sir Michael Boyce, Britain's chief of defense staff.
"We are giving advice to the British government as well warning the British public of the consequences of involving themselves in attacking Iraq, because the consequences of playing with fire is always either you burn yourself or cause other problems," Sheikh Bakri told the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) last August.
The more Blair presses forward with military engagement in Iraq and an alliance with the United States, the more his strategy seems reckless and dangerous, at least as far as the threat of terrorism in his own country.
"The U.K.'s close strategic alliance with the U.S. on Iraq makes it a more attractive target to terrorists than other Western European countries," says Stephenson. London, adds Stephenson, is a ripe target both because the United States is now harder to attack than it was before 9-11 and because there are local terrorist affiliates on the ground in England.
Brits certainly seem anxious about Blair's decision to maintain such a close wartime alliance with the United States. According to a BBC poll of 1,003 adults conducted earlier this month, 87 percent said they thought that Britain's support for the proposed U.S. war with Iraq would make it more likely that Britain would be a terrorist target.
"The moment our forces join with America to bomb and invade Iraq, al-Qaeda will respond by launching a terrorist bombardment here," The Daily Mirror editorialized last week.
And while political survival is obviously secondary to safety, Blair may want to consider pulling out of this risky alliance if only because his numbers are plummeting. According to a poll released Tuesday by The Guardian, his ratings are at their lowest since a fuel crisis in 2000.
Meanwhile, North London adjusts to its unwanted attention.
"The Muslim community does not trust the government here," said a young Turkish Muslim student I met at Harput Kebab House, just a minute from the Finsbury Park mosque. "It wasn't right what they did to that mosque. It was a holy place. That was disrespectful. This war with Iraq just makes things worse."
Asher Price is a former editorial assistant at The New Republic. He studies comparative social policy at Oxford University.
