Mohammed Haydar Zammar, 9/11 plotter who turned to Isis, captured by Kurds in Syria - Times of London

Mohammed Haydar Zammar, 9/11 plotter who turned to Isis, captured by Kurds in Syria
Hannah Lucinda Smith, Istanbul
April 20 2018, 12:00pm,
The Times

Mohammed Haydar Zammar in Hamburg in 2001, shortly after several members of his al-Qaeda cell carried out the 9/11 attacks

A key member of the al-Qaeda cell that plotted the 9/11 attacks has been captured by Kurdish forces in Syria.

Mohammed Haydar Zammar, 57, a Syrian-born German citizen who later switched his allegiance to Islamic State, was detained more than a month ago, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces said. Described as an “outspoken, flamboyant jihadist”, Zammar was believed to have recruited members of the Hamburg cell that included the 9/11 ringleaders Mohammed Atta, who piloted the first plane into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, Ziad Samir Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi.

The group met at the city’s al-Quds mosque in the late 1990s. The US congressional report on 9/11 stated that they were “core members of a group of radical Muslims, hosting sessions that involved extremely anti-American discussions”. It may have been Zammar’s influence that made them volunteer for the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Days after the attack Zammar was in court after police found pamphlets written by Osama bin Laden in his flat. He said that he had been distributing them in the city and that it was “a declaration of war on the US”.

Zammar fled to Morocco in October 2001, but was quickly rendered to Syria under a CIA programme. He was held in the notorious Far’ Falastin prison in Damascus. After the uprising against President Assad in 2011, Zammar was released and joined the jihadist opposition. He resurfaced in Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula, where he forged links between jihadists and Isis.


It is not known when or how Zammar returned to Syria, or why he switched his allegiance to Isis at a time when the groups were becoming rivals. However, his jihadist past stretches back decades. Zammar’s family left their native Aleppo for Hamburg in 1971, to escape the secular regime of Hafez al-Assad, the father of President Assad.

Zammar was radicalised as a youth and went to Afghanistan, where he was trained by al-Qaeda. In 1995 he went to Bosnia to fight Serbian forces. A year later he was back in Afghanistan, where he met Bin Laden.