Ironically, during Osama’s youth, it was his brother Mahrous who was the son of Muhammed bin Laden most noted for fervent devotion to Islam. When more than one thousand armed anti-al-Saud Islamic extremists—led by a Wahhabi radical named Juheiman al-Utaiba—seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979, for example, it was afterward discovered that Mahrous had allowed the rebels to use Bin Laden Company trucks to drive into the area of the mosque. Also found in the trucks were maps of the tunnels and passages under the Grand Mosque. The Bin Laden Company was rebuilding the mosque and had been given the maps by the government, and its trucks carried permits allowing them to enter and depart the Grand Mosque and Mecca at all hours without being inspected. According to Frontline, Mahrous had formed a friendship with several exiled members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and these individuals had duped him into providing Bin Laden Company trucks. Mahrous was arrested by Saudi authorities but was later freed and now manages the Bin Laden Company office in Medina. Osama bin Laden, according to Frontline, did not support either the raid or the ideology of the Juheiman al-Utaiba. Interestingly, Osama now echoes the claims that al-Utaiba made in 1979, namely, that “the House of Saud has sunk into decadence and immorality” and that al-Sauds have involved the kingdom in un-Islamic alliances with “Western powers.”53
The al-Sauds’ gentle treatment of Mahrous bin Laden in the midst of their otherwise savage response to the mosque takeover goes a long way toward explaining the elite social status and economic power of the bin Laden family in the kingdom, as well as toward understanding why Riyadh will do everything possible to avoid having to deal decisively with the Osama bin Laden issue. While a prominent Arab social scientist has argued that despite their wealth, the bin Ladens are a “marginal” family in Saudi society because they are from Yemen, it is impossible to believe that a marginal family could have survived—let alone continued to flourish—in the wake of Mahrous’s activities, charges that Osama’s brother Khalid sponsors Islamist groups, the Saudis’ issuance of an arrest warrant for Osama, and Riyadh’s subsequent revoking of his citizenship. Frontline’s biography of Osama amply captures the strength and durability of the al-Saud–bin Laden tie. “Had it been some other group [than the bin Ladens],” Frontline concluded, “there is no doubt that Mahrous—whether accomplice or patsy—would have been thrown in prison and the group banned from further economic activity in the kingdom, the sentencing serving as a warning to others. Such was not the case.”54 In November 2001, as if to confirm Frontline’s judgment, one of the most senior Saudi princes told the Arab News that the bin Ladens “are an exemplary family and a model for patriotism, good behavior and conduct. They did not face anything [negative because of Osama’s activities], either from the state or from the citizens [of Saudi Arabia].”55
7
BIN LADEN AND THE AFGHAN WAR, 1979–1989: FACILITATOR, ENGINEER, FIGHTER, AND VISIONARY
These mountains are the basis of my plan. God has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for the emancipation of the Negro race; they are full of natural forts where one man for defense will be equal to one hundred for attack; they are full also of good hiding places, where large numbers of brave men could be concealed, and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time.
John Brown to Frederick Douglass, 1847
Like an Islamic Maltese Falcon, the Afghans’ victorious jihad against the Soviet Union was for the Muslim world “the stuff that dreams are made of.” In discussing the Afghan war, the imprisoned spiritual leader of Egypt’s Gama’at, Shaykh Omar Abdul Rahman, has said his “strongest emotion [about the Afghan jihad] was pride. I felt so proud of my religion, so proud of the power that Muslims had. And I knew that Allah would aid these people and that Islam would be victorious in the end.”1 For bin Laden, the Afghan jihad was a personal turning point and a historic moment for the Muslim world. Concurring with Shaykh Rahman, bin Laden has said that, in Afghanistan, “the largest heretic power on earth was destroyed and [it was] where the superpower myth vanished in the face of the mujahedin’s outcry of Allah Akbar [God is great].”2
In addition, bin Laden’s participation in the Afghan war was the indispensable stepping-stone toward the leadership role he has risen to in the Islamic world. “It is crucial to understand,” Professor Magnus Ranstorp has written in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, “that Bin Laden’s constituency stems primarily from his legendary role in fighting alongside the [Afghan] Mujahedin and among those 7,000 to 9,000 Arabs he came in contact with during his ten-year guerrilla experience in Afghanistan.”3 On this point, John Miller wrote in Esquire that bin Laden believes “the United States, which was so heavily involved in supporting the Afghan rebels, misses the profound point of the exercise: Through sheer will, even superpowers can be defeated.” Miller says bin Laden told him “there is a lesson to learn from this [the Afghans’ victory] for he who wishes to learn…. The Soviet Union entered Afghanistan in the last week of 1979, and with Allah’s help their flag was folded a few years later and thrown in the trash, and there was nothing left to call the Soviet Union…. It cleared from Muslim minds the myth of the superpowers.”4
Bin Laden’s activities during the Afghan jihad are the subject of debate, confusion, and distortion. In 1994 he told Al-Quds Al-Arabi that he went to Lahore, Pakistan, soon after the Soviet invasion and began “working with the Islamic Group [Pakistan’s Jamaat Islami] there to support the mujahedin against the Soviet invasion.”5 Egyptian journalist Issam Darraz, in his 1991 book Osama Bin Laden Recounts Arab Al-Ansar Lion’s Lair Battles in Afghanistan, says that his research shows “Osama bin Laden came to Pakistan just 17 days after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan … and handed him [Jamaat chief Qazi Hussein Ahmad] a sum of money for a donation for the mujahedin.” Given the Jamaat’s close ties to Pakistani president Zia and his military and intelligence services, it must be assumed that at this time bin Laden met and began working with Pakistani officials, signaling, as Mary Anne Weaver wrote in the New Yorker, the start of a relationship in which bin Laden “dined regularly with President Zia ul-Haq … and cultivated generals in the Pakistani intelligence service.”6
Soon after, bin Laden is said to have become involved in combat-support activities. According to a Pakistani who fought with bin Laden in the jihad—and later worked for him in Sudan—bin Laden “was a hero to us because he was always on the front line, always moving ahead of everyone else. He not only gave of his money, but he gave of himself.”7 Al-Quds al-Arabi editor Abd-al-Bari Atwan has noted the romance surrounding bin Laden’s career in the Afghan jihad, saying, “he is a man that seeks the afterlife and who truly feels that he has lived more than enough. You feel there is a sadness in him—which he did not express—that he was not martyred when he was fighting the Soviet Army of the communists of the heathen. You feel like he is saying: Why am I alive?”8 Bin Laden also has described the joy he derived from fighting in Afghanistan, saying “those were the prettiest days of our lives … what I lived in two years there, I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere.”9
At the spectrum’s other end are those who take satisfaction in questioning and denigrating bin Laden’s activities in the Afghan jihad. The New Republic has said, “Bin Laden has cultivated a reputation as a courageous warrior, although his real contribution may have been simply to bank roll Afghan rebels and their families.”10 A former senior U.S. intelligence official—who is now a media “expert”—has told Frontline “the Afghan people did that [defeated the Soviets]. The Arab role in the combat situation on the ground was minimal to non-existent, period.” The same official claims bin Laden and the Arab Afghans were “a rag tag bunch of Muslims who were taken from one jail or another, whether it’s in Cairo or Algiers or any other country in the Gulf [sic] and put on an airplane to go to the jihad” and were “by and large a disrupting factor in the jihad.” Bin Laden, he adds, “was not a valiant warrior on the battlefield … [but] his activities have taken on mythical proportions, when, in
fact, he spent more time in Pakistan with refugees, fund-raising and establishing centers for widows and orphans of martyrs in the Afghan jihad.”11
A retired U.S. congressman, who supported the mujahedin and is a self-proclaimed Afghan expert, cast more aspersions on bin Laden, claiming, “Whenever I see that picture of bin Laden with an AK-47, I think he probably doesn’t even know how to chamber a round.”12 In an even more condescending tone, another retired U.S. government counterterrorism official has said that bin Laden’s hatred for the United States—especially for U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia—can be attributed “to the passion of an idealist and someone who’s relatively young and when you’re young and full of passion and you really believe what you say you believe, you’re going to do some things which, to the rest of the world, may not appear terribly rational.”13
The data in the public domain suggest the truth about bin Laden’s activities in Afghanistan is much closer to the picture of him as “the great Freedom fighter of the Islamic world” than to the Western experts’ description of him as an Islamic do-gooder or an immature, irrational youth. Indeed, British journalist Mark Huband has written that the latter description of bin Laden and the Arab Afghans borders on self-delusion. “American officials who were on the ground in Afghanistan,” Huband wrote, “portray the Arabs as lacking the fighting spirit of the Afghans themselves, and as having been deemed unreliable by the Afghan commanders, though this perception has not been borne out by the vitality of the Islamist groups that subsequently have emerged in the Arab world.” Regarding bin Laden and the Afghan jihad, the vital points are that he fully committed to the Afghan cause; that his role in the jihad grew, changed, and increased in importance over time; that he engaged in combat activity as a construction engineer and as a fighter; that he provided financial aid to Afghan and non-Afghan fighters; and that his career in Afghanistan gave him the unassailable credentials that today anchor the leadership role he has grown into. The credentials also allowed bin Laden to return to Afghanistan in 1996 under the willing protection of all Afghan parties.14 British journalist Robert Fisk may be on the mark in saying that when “the history of the Afghan resistance movement is written, Mr. Bin Ladin’s own contribution to the mujahedin—and the indirect result of his training and assistance—might turn out to be the turning point in the recent history of militant fundamentalism; even if today, he tries to minimize his role.”15
Bin Laden first visited Pakistan and Afghanistan in early 1980; Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has said in his excellent book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, that bin Laden went with his family’s blessing, all of whom “responded enthusiastically” to his decision to support the Afghans. The initial visits were information-gathering endeavors to see what the insurgents needed and how he could help meet the requirements. They also were occasions for meeting leaders of established and nascent mujahedin groups and for donating funds to them.16 At this point, bin Laden was on good terms with the al-Saud regime. He has said he was working with Saudi authorities in the first years of the Afghan war, and Jeune Afrique has reported that at this time bin Laden was the point man in Pakistan for Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi intelligence chief.17 During the early visits, bin Laden also renewed contact with Rabbani and Sayyaf and arranged to meet such other Afghan leaders as Ahmad Shah Masood, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Yunis Khalis, and Jalaluddin Haqqani.18 In other visits, bin Laden may have seen his first combat with Sayyaf’s Islamic Union party.19
In addition to expanding his Pakistani and Afghan contacts, bin Laden made a point of connecting with non-Afghan Muslims who, like himself, came to Pakistan to assist the mujahedin. Some of these men belonged to existing, or would later form, Islamist groups and political parties with which bin Laden would have enduring ties. Among these organizations are the Egyptian Gama’at al-Islamiyya (IG), the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Yemen’s al-Islah party, the Islamic Union of Kurdistan, the Filipino Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), Burma’s Rohinga Solidarity Organization, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, the Kashmiri Harakat-ul-Ansar, and the Algerian fighters who later founded Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (GIA).20 This list continued expanding after the Soviets’ 1989 withdrawal, and by November 1998 London’s Al-Hawadith estimated “bin Laden had reached alliances with some thirty fundamentalist organizations in the world,” an estimate that must be considered conservative.21
Bin Laden also provided funds for some groups to transport their fighters to Afghanistan22 and personally established underground-railroad-type safe houses to assist the travel of Muslim volunteers. These facilities were in Jeddah and at a Bin Laden-owned business in Cairo; the latter was run by bin Laden’s brother Khalid and operated under the cover of hiring laborers to work in the kingdom.23 Bin Laden also provided training for large numbers of non-Afghan Muslims in the Afghan camps he built or funded in the 1980s.24 In 1998, for example, the U.K.-based Al-Wasat Magazine reported that bin Laden funded “all the needs” of Gama’at fighters traveling from Egypt to Afghanistan, while Al-Sharq al-Awsat has claimed five hundred Filipino Islamists were trained in bin Laden’s Pakistani and Afghan camps in the early 1980s.25 Captured EIJ operative, and former Arab Afghan fighter, Shawqi Atiyah has told an Egyptian court that the EIJ’s “main source of funding during the training period in Afghanistan depended on Osama bin Laden,” and, more generally, Al-Wasat Magazine has analyzed the trial testimony of captured EIJ fighters and concluded that “all the Egyptian organizations that operated in Afghanistan relied to a large degree for their financing on bin Laden’s financial support.”26
Osama’s Circle of Friends
Early in the Afghan jihad, bin Laden also befriended a number of men who would become important operatives and/or senior lieutenants in the al Qaeda organization. Among these individuals were:
• Wali Khan Amin Shah (aka Osama Azmiry) and Wa’il Julaidan: Both Saudi nationals, Wali Khan and Julaidan accompanied bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1980 and fought with him in the 1989 battles near Jalalabad. Julaidan ended his graduate studies in the United States before joining the Afghan jihad. He was bin Laden’s logistics chief, as well as his voice in the community of Islamic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the Peshawar area, serving for a period as president of the Islamic Coordination Council that represented thirteen NGOs. Bin Laden has described Wali Khan as one of the “cream of the Arab brethren” and “one of the best youths,” and has said Julaidan’s contribution to the Afghan jihad was close to Shaykh Azzam’s. In 1998 bin Laden told Al-Jarzirah that “We and the Shaykh [Azzam] were in one boat, as is known to you, together with our brother Wa’il Jalaidan.” Wali Khan later was involved in plots to assassinate President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II in Manila. In 1994 he was captured in Malaysia and is now in a U.S. prison. Julaidan still represents Islamic NGOs, surfacing in January 2000 as executive director of the Saudis’ Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo, and most recently as the chief of the Pakistan-based Islamic charity, Rabita.27
• Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim (aka Abu Hajir al-Iraqi): Salim was born to Iraqi parents in Sudan. He later studied electrical engineering in Baghdad and was an Iraqi army communications officer from 1981 to 1983. He fought against Iran until 1983, when he deserted and traveled through Iran to Pakistan. Salim met bin Laden in Peshawar in 1986, was weapons-trained at a bin Laden camp, and later became al Qaeda’s chief buyer of communications gear and sophisticated weapons, including chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) materials. In late 1998 bin Laden said Abu Hajir was “one of the best men I have ever met.” Abu Hajir is now in U.S. custody.28
• Wadih El-Hage: El-Hage was born in Lebanon to a Christian family. He converted to Islam, studied urban planning in the United States, and became a U.S. citizen through marriage. In the mid-1980s, El-Hage went to Peshawar to join the jihad, but because of a crippled arm, he was limited to working in hospitals belonging to Islamic relief agencies. He was later bin Laden’s personal secreta
ry in Khartoum and, in 1994, was sent to Nairobi to run bin Laden’s Kenyan operations. El-Hage returned to the United States in September 1997 and was arrested by the FBI in October 1998. He was convicted on terrorism charges in May 2001.29
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 16
