Through Our Enemies' Eyes
Page 20
While the world waited to see if Iraq would invade Kuwait, bin Laden tried to work with Saudi authorities. Before the invasion, bin Laden “presented a written advice in the form of a detailed, personal, private and confidential letter to the King.” Sa’d al-Faqih has said even though at this point bin Laden was increasingly worried by what he saw as “America in alliance with the [al-Saud] family to loot the country’s resources and suppress Islam in that part of the world … he [bin Laden] was still controlling his thoughts and words at this stage.”20 Before Iraq attacked Kuwait in August 1990, bin Laden, according to Reader’s Digest, had met with Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan and offered to help protect the kingdom, “but only if the United States were not involved” in Saudi military operations.21
Bin Laden “presented a ten-page paper to Prince Sultan,” the Associated Press reported “describing how he and his colleagues could train Saudis to defend themselves and how equipment from his family’s large construction firm could be used to dig trenches on the border with Iraq and lay sand traps against potential invaders.” Bin Laden told Prince Sultan he could “bring all his supporters and defend the country under his command. And he made all the [guarantees] that his supporters would not give you [the Saudi authorities] a hard time. They would defend the country against the invading Iraqi army. And he said ‘You don’t need Americans. You don’t need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be enough. And I will even convince the Afghanis to come and join us instead of the Americans.’”22
For reasons unknown, bin Laden understood Prince Sultan to say that the regime was going to accept his offer. “While he [bin Laden] was expecting some call to mobilize his men and equipment,” al-Faqih says, “he received news that transferred [sic—transformed?] his life completely.” The news was that King Fahd and his ulema had approved entry of U.S. and other Western forces into the kingdom.23
Bin Laden’s reaction to the arrival of U.S. troops was clear and frank. “The American government,” he said, “has made the greatest mistake in entering a peninsula that no religion from among the non-Muslim states has entered for 14 centuries…. Never has Islam suffered a greater disaster than this invasion.” He made it clear that he saw the arrival of U.S. forces as a Crusader attack on Islam, calling the event “a back-breaking calamity” marking “the ascendance of Christian Americans over us and the conquest of our lands.”24 While these words seem counterintuitive to Western readers, Professor Lewis has written that “bin Laden’s view of the Gulf War as American aggression against Iraq may seem a little odd, but it is widely—though by no means universally—accepted in the Islamic world.”25 Lewis then notes another factor that played, and still plays, to bin Laden’s advantage; namely, that for Muslims, Mecca and Medina rank ahead of Jerusalem in the hierarchy of Islamic holy places, notwithstanding the central place of the latter in the substance and rhetoric of the Arab-Israeli peace talks. In the modern era, the major European powers respected this reality. “During the period of Anglo-French domination of the Middle East,” Lewis wrote, “they nibbled at the fringes of Arabia, in Aden and the trucial sheikdoms of the Gulf, but were wise enough to have no military and minimal political involvement in the affairs of the peninsula.”26
For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget but those familiar with Islamic history and literature know, the holy land par excellence is Arabia—Mecca, where the prophet was born; Medina, where he established the first Muslim state; and the Hijaz, whose people were the first to rally to the new faith and become its standard bearers. Muhammad lived and died in Arabia, as did the Rashidun caliphs, his immediate successors as the head of the Islamic community. Thereafter, except for a brief interlude in Syria, the center of the Islamic world and the scene of its major achievements was Iraq, the seat of the calpihate for half a millennium. For Muslims, no piece of land added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compares in significance with Arabia and Iraq…. Of these two, Arabia is by far the most important.27
With U.S. troops on the ground, bin Laden “regarded the country from that moment as occupied,” claiming “our country has become an American colony.”28 Because Riyadh sanctioned the basing of non-Muslim forces, “the ruling house of Saud lost the last remnant of legitimization [sic] for bin Laden.”29 Bin Laden said King Fahd had “sided with the Jews and Christians,” and by doing so had committed an “unforgivable sin” and had desecrated the holy sites. Bin Laden also damned the kingdom’s senior clerics, led then by Grand Mufti Shaykh Abd-al-Aziz Bin-Baz, for approving the entry of Christian troops, claiming that by doing so the clerics were playing “the most dangerous of roles in the entirety of the Arab countries.”30 “At stake is not a marginal issue or cause that may be compared to, say, a rise in the unemployment figures or crime rate,” another of bin Laden’s brother Saudi dissidents explained. “This is about the rape of our honor that no one of us must take lightly…. This is because the deployment of any non-Muslim military force in the Peninsula is a pivotal issue that admits of no compromise or tolerance. To remain reticent over an issue like this is equal to condoning murder, imprisonment, torture, and the embezzlement of public money; it is even tantamount to condoning blasphemy and enmity to Islam and the nation [ummah].”31
Bin Laden specifically focused on Shaykh Bin-Baz, characterizing the grand mufti’s dealings with the al-Sauds as associating with “tyrannical idols who have declared war on God and his messenger.” After Bin-Baz issued a mid-1994 fatwa authorizing reconciliation with Israel, bin Laden indicted the grand mufti for abandoning the word of God and urged him to again “join the faithful” by changing his course. “You were not content,” bin Laden angrily wrote to Bin-Baz, “with opening the country of the two holy mosques to the Jewish and crusader occupation forces, so you included the third holy mosque [al-Aqsa in Jerusalem] in the disaster by granting legitimacy to the capitulationist deals that the Arabs are signing with the Jews.” For these actions, bin Laden said, the al-Sauds and the clerics in their pay “would have to suffer the same fate as the Shah of Persia,” that is, the family would have to “dissolve and disappear.”32
In a final effort to stop the arrival of foreign troops, bin Laden turned not to the government or his family’s royal intimates, but to lobbying religious scholars and Islamist activists. According to the Frontline biography, bin Laden “succeeded in extracting a fatwa from one of the senior scholars that [said] training and readiness is a religious duty. He immediately circulated the fatwa and convinced people to have their training in Afghanistan.” The fatwa, issued by Shaykh Bin-Uthaymin, played no role in Iraq’s defeat, but the four thousand Saudis who are said to have trained in Afghan camps as the result of the bin Laden-procured fatwa may yet be heard from.33
For bin Laden, the arrival of non-Muslim forces was the back-breaking straw. It is important to note, however, that many straws made up this lethal load and that bin Laden believed the al-Sauds’ history was replete with examples of their support for “nations that were fighting against Muslims.”34 Bin Laden argued that while the al-Sauds never ceased “to cry in the open over matters affecting the Muslims,” the historical reality was that they never made “any serious effort to serve the interests of the Muslim community apart from small efforts to confuse people and throw some dust in their eyes.”35 When bin Laden talks about the traitorous lineage of Saudi foreign policy, he is not referring to simple mistakes, disagreements over which Muslim issues to emphasize, or the compromises needed in diplomatic give-and-take. Rather, bin Laden argues that throughout the al-Sauds’ rule—save for the reign of King Faisal, who engineered the 1973 oil embargo—Saudi foreign policy has been an expanding record of the un-Islamic aligning of the kingdom with Christians and Jews, a record ignominiously capped by the deployment of Western troops to fight Iraq.36
Bin Laden tackled this issue head-on in his “Declaration of Jihad,” and the relevant passage from it is worth quoting at length, because it crisply communicates bin Laden’s belief tha
t the al-Sauds have consistently betrayed God. In 1996, bin Laden wrote that al-Sauds’ claim that U.S. forces were needed to defend the kingdom,
is another trick by the regime, but it will not fool Muslims as its first trick fooled the Palestinian mujahedin. The first trick resulted in al-Aqsa mosque being lost. When the Muslim people in Palestine rose up in their great jihad against the British occupation in 1354H, corresponding to 1936, Britain failed to stop the mujahedin or their jihad. Their devil inspired them that the armed jihad in Palestine can only be stopped by their agent, King Abd-al-Aziz, who they believed was capable of deceiving the mujahedin. And indeed King Abd-al-Aziz carried out his mission by sending his two sons to meet with the mujahedin leaders in Palestine and inform him [sic— them?] of King Abd-al-Aziz’s pledge to guarantee the British Government’s promises that it would withdraw and meet their demands if they halted this jihad. So King Abd-al-Aziz was behind the loss of the Muslims’ first Qiblah. He allied himself with the Christians against Muslims. And he abandoned the mujahedin, instead of espousing the al-Aqsa mosque issue and supporting those struggling for the sake of God’s cause. And here is his son King Fahd, trying to fool Muslims with the second trick in order to squander our remaining holy sites. He lied to the ulema who sanctioned the Americans’ entry and he lied to the Islamic world’s ulema and leaders at the [World Muslim] League’s conference in holy Mecca in the wake of the Islamic world’s condemnation of the crusader forces’ entry into the land of the two holy mosques on the pretext of defending it. He told them that the matter was simple and that the U.S. and coalition troops would leave in a few months. And here we are approaching the seventh year since their arrival and the regime is still unable to move them out.37
Because bin Laden was a popular figure when Iraq attacked, and because the arrival of U.S. troops “met with enormous domestic opposition,” the Saudis decided to more closely control bin Laden. This determination was strengthened when bin Laden acquired the training fatwa and made vigorous “attempts to gather the ulema in an independent body” as an alternative to the government’s Senior Ulema Commission, which, he believed, “had turned into a tool in the hand of the state.” “The regime was not happy with his [bin Laden’s] activities [regarding his attempt to organize dissident ulema] and so they limited his movements to Jeddah only,” according to Frontline. “He was summoned for questioning twice for some of his speeches and activities and was given warnings. To intimidate him, the regime raided his farm in a suburb of Jeddah by the National Guard.” Warnings and raids did not work and it has been reported that bin Laden was incensed by the raid—during which he was absent—and complained about it to Crown Prince Abdullah. The crown prince is said to have “apologized and claimed he [was not] aware and promised to punish whoever were [sic] responsible.” Despite a polite response, bin Laden was placed under house arrest when U.S. forces arrived.38
Bin Laden’s anger can be imagined as he watched the buildup of non-Muslim forces while under detention, comfortable though house arrest must have been in terms of creature comforts. There is no firsthand data about what bin Laden thought at the time, nor about with whom he talked. There may, in fact, have been few of either; bin Laden has said he and his colleagues “were shocked by the fatwas” allowing U.S. troops in the kingdom, and that “we had to wait until this shock disappeared before assessing the situation.” Soon after Iraq’s defeat, however, Sa’d al-Faqih said bin Laden began pressing his brothers to secure the regime’s permission to take a short trip to Pakistan, telling them he had to “finish his little bit of business in Pakistan.” The brothers secured travel documents for him, apparently pledging he would return. In April 1991 bin Laden left for Pakistan and does not appear to have returned since. He did have the decency, however, to write his brothers a “tender letter of apology” for abusing their good offices and embarrassing them with the al-Saud family.39
9
BIN LADEN IN EXILE: AFGHANISTAN AND SUDAN, 1991–1996
The Shepherds, I say, … took them by the hand, and had them to their tents, and made them partake of that which was ready at present. They said, moreover, We would that you should stay here a while, to be acquainted with us, and yet more to solace yourselves with the good of these Delectable Mountains.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678
From 1991 to 1992, Osama bin Laden lived in Afghanistan and then in 1992 went to Sudan, residing there until May 1996. In part of this period, he was active in efforts to stop the bloody fighting among the Afghan mujahedin factions that had increased after the Soviet withdrawal and the defeat at Jalalabad. The precise reason for bin Laden’s move to Sudan is unclear, but it appears to have been motivated by his sense of the intractable nature of the intra-mujahedin conflict and a belief that Saudi-backed agents were trying to kill him.
In Sudan, bin Laden renewed ties made in the Afghan jihad with Hasan al-Turabi and other members of Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front (NIF). From Khartoum, bin Laden built a series of Sudan-based businesses—some in partnership with senior NIF members—that appear to have turned a profit. He also moved fighters from Afghanistan to Sudan and employed them in his businesses; made a connection to Iraq’s intelligence service through its Khartoum station; participated in the Yemeni civil war; survived at least two assassination attempts; and moved Islamic fighters out of Bosnia after the Dayton Accord. Bin Laden also was visited by prominent Saudis carrying an olive branch from the al-Sauds; substantially expanded his organization in East Africa; and sponsored or supported attacks on U.S., Egyptian, and Christian targets outside Sudan.
In May 1996 bin Laden decided to leave Sudan in part as an effort to ease U.S. and UN pressure on the NIF regime. Bin Laden told journalist Robert Fisk that he entered Afghanistan for the third time on 16 May 1996, but other reports suggest he did so in late May or early June. The return to Afghanistan was paved by the friendships and personal reputation he had earned in the Afghan jihad.1
Bin Laden went to Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia in April 1991 just as the Afghan Communist regime collapsed. According to Frontline’s unattributed biography of bin Laden, the regime’s end gave birth to intensified “dispute among the Afghan parties.”2 On arrival, bin Laden had access to all Afghan resistance factions through al Qaeda, which was functioning efficiently and, as the Far Eastern Economic Review reported, was “the most powerful and numerically the largest Arab group.”3 At the time, al Qaeda was operating “several camps on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.” Bin Laden soon began acting as a “mediator” to “sort the differences in the [Afghan] factions,” Sa’d al-Faqih and Frontline have reported. “He [bin Laden] spent a great effort [and presumably money] to arbitrate between them, but with no success.”4 Bin Laden was worried that an Afghan civil war would slow the advance of jihad elsewhere and has said he “was in grief during the dispute between these [Afghan] factions.” He later argued that because of this strife “the results of the victory against the Soviet Union are being wasted.” Bin Laden’s mediation efforts were noted at the time in the media. “In 1991 and 1992,” journalist Jamal Ismail told Al-Jazirah,
I interviewed him [bin Laden] more than once…. At that time, … he was head of a reconciliation committee between the Afghan factions that were at war in some states [sic—Afghan provinces?]. He was chosen by the factions as a neutral party that is supportive of the Afghan jihad in general…. After 1992, when the Afghan mujahedin entered the Afghan capital, and were at war with each other, which stunned all observers, Osama bin Laden—along with a number of Islamic activists who were in Peshawar and other Arab countries—exerted intensive mediation efforts between Hekmatyar, Masood, and Rabbani, but all these efforts failed.5
Bin Laden failed to stop the violent factionalism in the so-called Afghan cauldron, but he won high marks among the Afghans for impartiality and negotiating skills. He ordered his followers, for example, to avoid involvement in the intra-mujahedin struggle, telling them “it was a sin to side with any faction.
” In addition, Pakistan’s Nation has said bin Laden “remained mostly neutral in the fray, building up strong relationships in the geographical areas adjacent to and or in the proximity of Pakistan.” The Nation added that these relationships were in the area “roughly approximating the area of the origin of the Taliban.”6 Although bin Laden did not know it at the time, his even-handed attempts at peacemaking would stand him in good stead when he decided to leave Sudan in 1996.
While the Afghan leaders would try the patience of Job, were he a Muslim, bin Laden appears to have decamped from Afghanistan in late-1991 only in part because of their intractability. A number of reports suggest bin Laden left—some say in Hollywood style using a disguise and a private jet—because he had learned he was under threat of assassination, perhaps sponsored by the Saudi intelligence service. Sa’d al-Faqih has said that in addition to stubborn Afghans, bin Laden’s mediation encountered obstacles strewn by Prince Turki al-Faisal, chief of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate. In his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, John K. Cooley has said Turki once admired bin Laden as “a young man who burned with a hard pure flame of devotion to religious principles” and who shared Turki’s antipathy toward the corruption of the Arab world’s leaders and his desire to reverse “the decline and decadence of Islam.” Turki probably also respected bin Laden as the son of the man who helped Turki’s father—King Faisal—gain the Saudi throne and who had funded the government during the new king’s initial months in power. Faqih claims, however, that after the Soviets withdrew “Saudi intelligence [officers] were actually increasing the gap between Afghani factions to keep them fighting.” In addition, the author of Frontline’s unattributed biography says bin Laden grew “suspicious of his [Turki’s] role in Afghanistan, and once had an open confrontation with him in 1991 and accused him [Turki] of being the reason of [sic—for?] the fight between Afghan factions.” This animosity apparently still lingers. In late 1998, bin Laden went out of his way to publicly deride Turki as nothing more than “an envoy for the American government.”7