The Hamburg Cell

The film opens with Ziad Jarrah about to board United Airlines Flight 93. Before boarding, he calls his Turkish wife Aysel Senguen and softly says “I love you.” > “I love you.” The scene then flashes back to five years earlier in Greifswald, Germany, where Jarrah is starting college. He is approached by the Islamic prayer leader Abdulrahman Al-Makhadi, but Jarrah, born in Lebanon to a wealthy family and educated at a Christian school, explains that he is not a practicing Muslim.

He begins a relationship with a fellow student studying to be a dentist. When Aysel Senguen moves to Bochum to attend medical school, Jarrah relocates to Hamburg to be closer to her. He becomes involved with the Hamburg mosque and slowly drifts toward extremism, a path set in contrast with Mohammed Atta, who is already radicalized and follows the teachings of Ramzi bin al Shibh about the supposed “godlessness” of modernity. Jarrah meets Atta and grows more observant in his faith, a shift that strains his relationship with Aysel.

The two leave Germany to train as Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and when Jarrah returns, his worried family urges him to abandon his fixation on jihad. He reassures them and tells them he plans to leave Hamburg for Florida to learn how to pilot planes, hoping to distance himself from the jihadist circle. In the United States, the planning for the hijackings in Washington and New York begins to take shape, while Jarrah wrestles with the pull of Western culture and clashes with Atta’s uncompromising ideology.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 15:20