Mustafa Setmarian, the Syrian with Spanish nationality who in recent years has been placed at the top of Al Qaeda's leadership, is dead.
He was executed by the Syrian government in 2011 in Sednaya prison, near Damascus, where the regime then concentrated political critics. It was at the beginning of the war in that country and Setmarian was executed in delayed revenge for his role in the uprisings of the early 1980s in Homs against the then dictator Hafed El Assad.
This has been verified by international terrorism expert and academic from the Elcano Royal Institute Fernando Reinares through confidential information from high-level sources in Syria and Pakistan.
Setmarian was wanted by Spanish justice since 2001 and has always been the shadow of jihadist terrorism in Spain: it is suspected that he could have played a role in the first major attack of this type in Spain (the one in 1985 against the El Descanso restaurant, frequented by Americans and where 18 people died), it is suspected that he was the fertilizer of the first local Islamist cell (dismantled by Judge Garzón in the Dátil operation of 2001) and it is suspected that he could have inspired in one way or another the 11-M attacks . More suspicions than certainties, like so many things in his life.
Setmarian was detained in late 2005 in Quetta, Pakistan, and was reportedly transferred to the American government. That would have happened in 2005 or 2006. There is no confirmation or document in this either. Neither about his time in secret American prisons (there was talk of Bagram and Diego García) nor about his subsequent delivery to Syria, nor about the release that was speculated about and that is now completely denied.
The alleged execution of Setmarian, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, had been published on Islamist networks nine months ago, and has now been confirmed by Reinares.
In June 2009, British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith explained to Reuters that Setmarian was detained in Syria at the time, and had possibly been there for several years.
The agency was able to speak briefly with Setmarian's wife, Elena Moreno, a native of Calanda (Teruel), who converted to Islam, and with whom he had four children: "The most likely thing is that, I don't know when or how, they took him to Syria." "said the woman. She has lived for years without knowing where her husband was.
At the time, Stafford-Smith detailed that Setmarian may have been held in secret prisons in the United States before being handed over to Syria. The American and Syrian governments never confirmed whether they had him imprisoned.
The law firm that handled its affairs in Spain told this newspaper this week that it had no record of that death.
He also said he no longer maintains any type of contact with Moreno.
Born on October 26, 1958, Setmarian sympathized from a young age with the Combatant Vanguard, the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, originally from Egypt. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Aleppo.
At the beginning of the 80s he fled to Jordan, where he received - with the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood - his first training in insurgency and urban guerrilla warfare. He passes through Egypt and finally ends up in Spain, where it is known that he worked - there is a card from the Junta de Andalucía, with an address in Alfacar (Granada) - as a traveling salesman.
In 1987, according to the journalistic reconstruction that has been made of his life, Setmarian led the trip of a group of Syrians to Peshawar (Pakistan), where he had his first contact with Afghan Islam. There he supposedly met Osama Bin Laden, with whom he would form an intense relationship.
Setmarian was recruited as a military instructor in the first jihadist camps.
Until 1995 he lived between Spain and Afghanistan; At that time he moved to London, where he published the magazine Al-Ansar, a jihadist propaganda magazine linked to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group. From this group was one of the main members of the 11-M command, Allekema Lamari.
His concern for communication led him to found a communication agency through which some contacts were managed between the Western press and the jihadist world.
The most famous is the interview that CNN journalist Peter Bergen conducted with Bin Laden in Tora Bora in 1997; In the photographs that Bergen took, Bin Laden and Setmarian are seen together.
In 2007, Bergen would publish the enormous book Osama de cerca (published in Spain by Debate), in which he details the life of the sheikh, but also of his circle, including Setmarian.
At the end of 2004, the United States included the Hispanic-Syrian on the list of the most wanted terrorists and offered $5 million for reliable information on his whereabouts.
Shortly after, on January 25, 2005, he himself detailed his life on jihadist websites: “I am honored to have known Sheikh Osama since 1988 and I am honored to have joined Al-Qaeda and to have worked there until 1992. I also trained several of their first vanguards and I trained in their camps and other Afghan Arab camps, especially in my area of knowledge: explosives engineering, special operations and guerrilla warfare, for which I received extensive training in Iraq, Egypt and Jordan. I am honored to have participated during that period in the Afghan jihad against the Russians and the communists, until we annihilated his life, folded their flags and made an example of them, as we will do with the United States with the help of God. I am also honored to have emigrated to the home of Islam in Afghanistan when it was created, and I am honored to have sworn allegiance to the Emir of the Believers, Mullah Mujahideen Muhammad Omar, hand in hand, in Muharram in the year 1421 (2000). Later I worked as a mujahidin for the Taliban Ministry of Defense and founded the “foreigners camp” (al-Guraba); I trained many Arabs and non-Arabs in it. Infidels and apostates have tested the strength of some of my pupils in Central Asia, in the country of the two Holy Mosques unjustly known as "Saudi Arabia" and in other countries.
Setmarian would later be critical of the Al Qaeda attacks on the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies in 1998 and then of 9/11, predicting that it would mark the end of the sanctuary they had achieved in Afghanistan after dislodging the Soviets.
"Although in '96 he entered the circle closest to Osama Bin Laden - Reinares explains in a telephone conversation with La Vanguardia - he was never in the organizational hierarchy of Al Qaeda, and with 9/11 he distanced himself from Al Qaeda and moved to the Taliban. Time proves Setmarian right, because after 9/11 what happens is that the United States invades Afghanistan and destroys its refuges.”
Setmarian has also had a verbose doctrinal side.
In Peshawar he wrote under the pseudonym Omar Abdelhakem (Umar Abd al-Hakim).
In May 1991 he published a 900-page essay titled The Jihadist and Islamic Revolution in Syria or The Syrian Experience.
In December 2004, he posted an even longer text on the Internet, 1,400 pages long, entitled Call to Global Islamic Resistance, which made him famous among his coreligionists.
His most disturbing proposal called for a phase of jihad carried out “by individuals or small autonomous groups,” which he called leaderless resistance. In reality, that is what has happened, but possibly not because his instructions were followed but because of the geopolitical and police circumstances. “This great work that he writes is striking,” explains Reinares, “but it has very little impact, beyond having generated crazy things like saying that he was number 2 in the Al Qaeda structure. "That was said in Spain at the precise moment when they had just harshly criticized him in the jihadist propaganda organs."
“The evolution towards decentralization and atomization of global jihad, in my opinion, responds more to a natural evolution than to a doctrinal or strategic guideline,” adds the academic.
Certainly Setmarian considered that these actions should serve a “more ambitious” objective of territorial control. “Without confrontations on the ground and without controlling the territory, an Islamic state cannot be established, which is the strategic goal of the resistance,” he wrote.
In addition to betting on small cells, this ideologue insisted that the attacks had to be high-profile and eye-catching. His rhetoric was brutal, and he defended, for example, hanging the infidels "with the intestines of the last Christian priest." "Mutilated bodies, skeletons, terrorism... What beautiful words!" He added.
In some videos seized by the police, Setmarian is seen teaching, possibly in Pakistan. He says: “If you hear in Malaysia what is happening in Chechnya, go stab the Russian attaché to death. If a man living in Sweden sights a white Jew, he attacks him."
