“Ask where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was that I had such friends.”

- Yeats

Again, it was the eleventh day of the month. But this time it was only the third month of the year. Although in the end, these temporal facts didn’t determine much at all. Yet time did play a role that day. More specifically, time spent waiting.

Like city-dwelling commuters stuck in morning rush-hour delays the developed world over, some of the Spanish men, women, and children riding the trains that day were angry, cursing, frustrated. Others were napping. Some were chatting on their cell phones, having no idea what the same high-megahertz frequencies they were using would shortly bring. But none of them had any idea how good they had it. How lucky time would make them that day.

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It had all started in front of a television only five months earlier, in the closing months of 2003. On October 19th al-Jazeera released a pair of audiotapes recorded by Osama bin Ladin. In the first he praised the Iraqi insurgency for its attacks against the American occupation, and invoked imagery of Vietnam by claiming that the Americans were “mired in the swamp of the Tigris and Euphrates.” The second audiotape was directed at the United States and addressed more to Muslim militants outside Iraq. After mocking George W. Bush and wallowing in the American setbacks in Iraq, he reached out to Muslims inhabiting nations that were supporting the war in Iraq, claiming al-Qaeda had the “right to respond when and where we see appropriate against all the countries that participate in this unjust war.”¹

And, for the first time, he mentioned Spain as one of the nations that was in line for retribution. The next day, on October 20th, a group of minimum-wage employees that included a bricklayer, a waiter, a courier, construction workers and several petty criminals went to work putting their plan into motion. In less than five months they would devastate Madrid’s early-morning commute and, for the first time in the modern era, swing an election in favor of terrorist demands.

The socio-economic background of the men who would become Madrid’s first Muslim terrorists is all kinds of important. To a man they were North Africans who’d come to Spain years ago in search of the white collar jobs a blooming Spanish economy had in abundance. Most were Moroccans, although there were Tunisians and others thrown into the mix. Spain hadn’t had many Muslims since the purges of the Reconquista back in the 15th century, and since it wasn’t until 1975 that there was any measurable Muslim presence they were highly aware of their minority status and their lowly rung on the social ladder. But this status wasn’t the singular cause of militant Islam finding root in Spain.