When the UN announced in late 1992 that it would put a U.S.-led multinational force in Somalia, bin Laden quickly moved to damage U.S. units therein. His motivation was twofold. First, after the USSR’s demise, the United States became bin Laden’s top enemy, and so U.S. troops were a natural target; bin Laden has said that after the UN stated its plans, “the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and another long battle, thinking that the Americans were like the Russians.”2 The second motivation was a shared belief among bin Laden, his lieutenants, and senior National Islamic Front (NIF) leaders that “the United States would use Somalia as a staging ground to attack Sudan.”3 In 1997, for example, bin Laden told the daily Pakistan that during the UN intervention, “the U.S. tried to make a base under the UN umbrella so that it could capture Sudan and Yemen.”4
Bin Laden believes the UN is Washington’s tool and that even in 1992 the United States—as the UN readied for Somalia—was using it to force a “broad-based” government on the Afghans that would deny them and Islam the fruits of victory. Al Qaeda’s quickly formulated plan for Somalia had two stages: interdicting U.S. forces traveling to Somalia, and attacking the forces after they arrived. In both cases, al Qaeda would use Arab Afghans and local Islamists. Two Yemeni comrades of bin Laden’s, Jamal al-Hindi and Tariq al-Fahdli—the latter fought with bin Laden at Jalalabad in 1989 and was wounded5—led a hastily improvised attack in Aden, while bin Laden’s top military leaders, Abu Ubaydah and Abu Hafs al-Masri, were charged with running al Qaeda’s anti-U.S. operations in Somalia. Although a bit tabloidish, John Miller was on the mark when he wrote in Esquire that “when the Marines landed [in Somalia] in the last days of 1992, bin Laden sent in his own soldiers, armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers. Soon, using the techniques they had perfected against the Russians, they were shooting down American helicopters.”6 Concurring, bin Laden has said, “the only non-Somali group that fought the Americans was the Arab Mujahedin brothers who had come from Afghanistan…. These were successful battles in which we inflicted big losses on the Americans. We used to hunt them down in Mogadishu.”7
In Yemen, al Qaeda’s attacks smacked of poor intelligence on the target and a lack of urban warfare skills. As UN forces assembled for Somalia, some U.S. military personnel transited Aden and occupied hotels for a few days. Al Qaeda focused on two hotels it believed the Americans used—the Gold Mohur and the Movenpick—and on 29 December 1992 detonated a bomb in the former. The bomb intended for the latter exploded prematurely in the hotel’s parking lot. Overall, two tourists were killed and seven other people were wounded. Yemeni security arrested several men and found weapons and explosives in their truck in the Movenpick’s parking lot.8 Although no U.S. soldiers were in the hotels when the attacks occurred—a nearby hotel did billet U.S. soldiers—they have entered al Qaeda battle lore as total victories, because within days after the attacks, all U.S. soldiers left Yemen.9
In 1998 bin Laden summarized the standard version of the event. “The United States wanted to set up a military base for U.S. soldiers in Yemen so that it could send fresh troops to Somalia,” bin Laden told the daily Pakistan. “The Arab mujahedin related to the Afghan jihad carried out two bomb explosions in Yemen to warn the United States, causing damage to some Americans staying in those hotels. The United States received our warning and gave up the idea of setting up its military bases in Yemen. This was the first al Qaeda victory scored against the Crusaders.”10
Interestingly, the al Qaeda attacks on U.S. targets in Aden occurred when the Yemeni regime was trying to stop a series of bombings and assassinations by Islamists in several areas of the country. The results of the Yemenis’ investigation of the attempted hotel bombings and the other violent incidents pointed directly at bin Laden and Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). Even before the hotel attacks, for example, the Yemenis had detained twenty individuals who claimed to be from the “Osama Group” and the “Islamic Jihad Organization.”11 Although most Western terrorism experts identified the Yemeni Islamic Jihad, not bin Laden or Zawahiri, as the culprit for the hotel attacks, media reporting at the time—when put in the context of what since has been reported about bin Laden—strongly suggests the accuracy of his claim of responsibility. In mid-1999, for example, the media reported the Yemeni Islamic Jihad was formed and led in the 1980s by EIJ fighter Muhammed Ibrahim Sharaf. Contemporary reports also suggested bin Laden’s involvement. “Security sources [in Yemen],” Al-Sharq Al-Awsat wrote,
revealed that the “Islamic Jihad Organization” [involved in the violence in Yemen] has branches in other Arab countries, including Egypt, that its leadership is in Khartoum, and that it is financed by a prominent Arab businessman currently residing in Sudan. The sources pointed out that the Organization’s branch in Yemen received their [sic] training in Afghanistan and Pakistan…. Investigations have revealed … that there is a strong link between the military leadership of the Yemen branch and the main political and military organization in Khartoum.12
In Africa, bin Laden sent Abu Hafs al-Masri to Somalia to assess the prospects of success for the Arab Afghans he was deploying and to evaluate the ability of local Muslim tribesmen to absorb military training.13 On his return, Abu Hafs apparently reported positively and the future Nairobi embassy bombers Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, Mohammed Sadiq Howaida, and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed were among those sent to Mogadishu to train fighters from Farah Aideed’s group.14 In total, bin Laden has said he sent 250 fighters to help Aideed and other Somali leaders fighting U.S.-led forces.15 The Washington Post has reported that after his capture in August 1998, Odeh told police “that he helped to train Islamic militants in Somalia who opposed the UN peacekeeping mission there.”16 Islamabad’s the News said another alleged Nairobi bomber, Mohammed Sadiq Howaida, told Pakistani police after his August 1998 arrest that he was one of “a select group of Arabs” sent in 1993 to help Aideed, and Al-Hayah has reported Abu Ubaydah himself commanded just such a group “in the fight against U.S. forces in Somalia.”17 In addition, journalist Mark Bowden in his brilliant book Black Hawk Down says, “Aideed’s men received some expert guidance [on the use of rocket-propelled grenades] from Islamic soldiers smuggled in from Sudan, who had experience fighting Russian helicopters in Afghanistan…. Their fundamentalist advisers told them that the helicopter’s tail rotor was its most vulnerable spot. So they learned to wait until it passed over, and to shoot up at it from behind.” Bowden and others who have looked at the loss of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters on 3 October 1993 report they were hit in the tail rotor by a rocket-propelled grenade.18
While it is not yet possible to definitively document the military activities and successes of al Qaeda and its Somali trainees, al Qaeda fighters Howaida and Ali Muhammed—both now in jail in the United States—have said bin Laden’s forces were directly involved in downing a U.S. helicopter and in two attacks using land mines.19 In 1997 bin Laden told Pakistani journalist Hamid Mirthat his fighters caught a helicopter pilot and “tied his legs, and dragged him through the streets,” and when ABC correspondent John Miller interviewed bin Laden in May 1998, an unnamed bin Laden fighter told Miller “with a big grin” that he claimed credit for “slitting the throats of three American soldiers in Somalia.”20
Whether these attacks were made by al Qaeda fighters, local al Qaeda-trained Somali tribals, or a combination of both—which seems likely, because Abu Ubaydah led combat missions against U.S. forces in Somalia—is of little consequence in terms of the extremely positive impact they had on bin Laden’s organization, its allies, and its international reputation. Bin Laden told Al-Quds Al-Arabi, “U.S. soldiers showed their cowardice and feebleness during the Somali experiment,” and has since cited the attack in rhetorically challenging the U.S. military to come after him. “The Americans are cowards,” bin Laden said in August 1997, “and cannot confront me. If they even think of confronting me, I will teach them a lesson similar to the lesson they were taught a few years ago in Somalia.”21
For bin Laden an
d his followers, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia meant, in John Miller’s breezy phrase, “Another superpower humiliated. Another Bin Ladin victory…. [I]n Somalia, Bin Ladin had taken a swing at the biggest kid in the school yard and given him a black eye.”22 While it is difficult to know how the Muslim man-in-the-street saw the U.S. withdrawal, it is certain that the “street” saw the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan a landmark victory for the mujahedin and, more important, for Islam. Remarks by bin Laden, Abu Hafs al-Masri, and Mohammed Sadiq Howaida strongly suggest that al-Qaeda sees Somalia as another landmark victory. Howaida’s rank in the organization was akin to that of a noncommissioned officer, and his remarks have something of a man-on-the-street quality.
Bin Laden: “The youth [al Qaeda fighters in Somalia] were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and [would] after a few blows run in defeat. And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda … about being the world leader and the leader of the New World Order, and after a few blows they forget about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat…. With the blessed bullets of our brethren, Allah blunted their edge, destroyed their machination, and defeated their troops. Thus, the band of Christian allies broke up and the cloud of the world order disappeared. They ran away defeated like stray camels running to their resting place near a water hole, when they saw the war show its children [young fighters] and bare its teeth.”23
Abu Hafs al-Masri: “If you could hear our brothers in Somalia, the children and the youth, describe how they were hounding the U.S. troops, you would laugh a great deal to hear how scared the U.S. soldiers were of Somalia children and how they thought death would inevitably come through them. After the Americans failed to control Somalia and found no one to blame for causing their defeat, they blamed us.”24
Sadiq Howaida: “Usama Bin Ladin’s biggest triumph was the eviction of the U.S. Army from Somalia and he took pride that he and his group stayed for one full year in Somalia and had, along with Farah Aideed, inflicted humiliation on the U.S. Army. We defeated the Soviet army in Afghanistan and the U.S. Army in Somalia. Is that a small success?”25
Worldwide Activities 1991–1996
In addition to high-profile attacks in Yemen and Somalia, a review of the 1992–1996 period shows bin Laden was involved in other facets of the worldwide anti-U.S. insurgency he is conducting and striving to incite others to join. The following time line covers the late-1991 through May 1996 period—the period of bin Laden’s stay in Sudan—and clearly shows bin Laden and his organization were consistently active in the military arena, as were groups with which he was known to be in contact. Again, the following is not to say that bin Laden masterminded, ordered, or had foreknowledge of all the attacks. Neither is it to say bin Laden was funding or logistically supporting all the groups. It is simply to say that these activities fit squarely with the themes bin Laden has outlined; they are guerrilla attacks of the sort he wants to incite and they benefit his cause whether or not he was involved in them.
The following outline is not chronological, a fact that in itself shows the uniqueness of the bin Laden phenomenon. A chronological time line is simple to construct for attacks of Hizballah and the Abu Nidal Organization, groups that are in the traditional “terrorist” category; each has a hierarchical command structure and controls all attacks. It is impossible to build such a time line for bin Laden’s organization, however, because al Qaeda has been more involved in supporting long-term Islamist insurgencies—over which it has little, if any, control. The following events should be read as a scorecard showing that bin Laden in this period succeeded in terms of the measures of success he, not the West, has established.
• 1991–1994: The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) in the Philippines carried out attacks financed by bin Laden’s brother-in-law Muhammed Jamal Khalifah. The attacks included the December 1991 bombing of a Catholic Church in Jolo and the murder of Italian missionary priest Father Carceda. In the period, Catholic priests—Filipino and missionary—were favorite ASG targets. From 1991 to 1994, the ASG conducted 26 bombings, 21 kidnappings, 132 murders, and 28 firefights with Philippine forces.26
• 1992–1996: Bin Laden lieutenants Abu Ubaydah and Abu Hafs al-Masri led Arab Afghans and local Islamists in attacks on government forces in Eritrea, Uganda, and the Ogaden area of Ethiopia.27
• 1992–1994: Until his late-1994 death, Gama’at leader Anwar Shaban used bin Laden’s money to “set up camps [in Bosnia] for the Islamic Group and Jihad Organization [EIJ] through which Arab and Egyptian strugglers flooded into the areas.” Bin Laden also gave Muslim volunteers traveling to Bosnia “1,000 Saudi riyals as pocket money.”28
• 27 January 1994: Arab Afghans killed British aid worker Paul Goodall in Zenica, Bosnia.29
• 1992–1994: Bin Laden’s brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifah funded, and perhaps directed, a Jordan-based Islamist group called “Mohammed’s Army.” This group staged a series of bombings in Jordan meant to “eradicate forbidden conduct by force” and, over time, to “topple the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” Twenty-five members of the group were tried in 1994, and eleven—including Khalifah in absentia—were sentenced to death. The U.S. government detained Khalifah in late 1994 and sent him to Jordan. A witness in the case recanted his testimony about Khalifah, and he was released and went to Saudi Arabia, where Saudi officials greeted him at the airport. Jordanian authorities later said bin Laden also funded the attacks of Mohammed’s Army.30
• 1992–1995: Until the Dayton Accord ended the Bosnian war, bin Laden gave money to Fatih Hasanein, head of the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), to buy weapons for Bosnian fighters and fund the recruitment and training of foreign Islamists.31
• 1994–1996: After Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (GIA)—to which bin Laden gave “seed money” and whose leaders are mostly Arab Afghans—published plans to eliminate Algeria’s “Jews, Christians, and polytheists,” the group began attacking non-Muslim foreigners, killing 114 people by late 1996. Catholic targets topped the GIA list: two priests and five nuns were killed from October 1994 to December 1995; seven monks were beheaded in May 1996; and the Bishop of Oran was assassinated in August 1996.32
• 24–27 December 1994: On 24 December four GIA fighters hijacked an Air France flight in Algiers and forced it to fly to Marseilles. In Marseilles, the hijackers killed three French passengers. After the murders, French security forces stormed the aircraft and killed the four GIA fighters. On 27 December, the GIA murdered four French priests in Algeria to retaliate for the death of its fighters in Marseilles.33
• 1991–1994: In Yemen, al Qaeda and the EIJ attacked two hotels in Aden where they mistakenly believed U.S. troops were billeted on their way to Somalia. Between 1991 and at least the end of 1992, bin Laden operatives also attacked Yemeni petroleum installations and assassinated Yemeni socialist party officials. Then, in 1993 and 1994, bin Laden sent al Qaeda fighters from Pakistan and Afghanistan—via Sudan—to fight the Yemeni Communists in the civil war that yielded a reunified Yemen.34
• 1993–1996: Bin Laden broadened his international involvement by supporting Islamists in Lebanon, Bosnia, Kashmir, Tajikistan, and Chechnya. Between 1993 and his death in May 1996, bin Laden’s military chief, Abu Ubaydah, participated “in operations carried out by Islamists” in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, and Libya.35
• January 1993–October 1994: Bin Laden’s Arab Afghans and/or the Somali Islamists they trained attacked U.S. troops in Somalia.36
• 26 February 1993: Ramzi Yousef detonated a bomb in the underground garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six people and wounding one thousand. Bin Laden said Yousef was “a Muslim who defended Islam from American aggression.”37
• 7 and 13 December 1993: On 7 December ASG fighters threw hand grenades into Davao City’s Catholic cathedral, killing 7 and wounding 130. On 13 December insurgents in Bul
uan, Maquindinao—probably ASG fighters—stopped a bus and executed nine passengers after identifying them as Christians.38
• 27 February 1994: In Zuk, Lebanon, Sunni Islamists bombed a Maronite Christian Church, killing nine and wounding sixty. The media speculated the attack was to deter a visit by Pope John Paul II. The Vatican canceled the visit soon after the attack.39
• 24 August 1994: North African Islamist fighters raided the Atlas-Sane Hotel in Marrakech, Morocco, killing two Spanish tourists and wounding two other people. The attackers also robbed the hotel’s cashier. After the Islamists were caught, Moroccan authorities found the attackers’ group had planned additional assaults in Fez, Casablanca, and Tangiers. Targets in the cities included uniformed policemen, a synagogue, tourist buses, and a beach used by European tourists for nude bathing.40
• 11 December 1994: A bomb put on a Philippines Air 747 by Ramzi Yousef exploded in flight between Manila and Tokyo. One person died and ten were wounded.41
• 1995: When the Dayton Accord was signed, bin Laden used the Islamic nongovernmental organization Human Concern International (HCI)—started with bin Laden’s funds during the Afghan jihad—to move Islamist fighters from Bosnia. Some were resettled in Sudan.42
• January 1995: Plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton were stopped in Manila, as were plans to bomb U.S. airliners flying the Pacific. The plots were devised by Wali Khan and Ramzi Yousef and supported by Khalifah.43
• 4 April 1995: The ASG raided Ipil in Zamboanga del Suro, killing fifty-three and wounding forty-five, mostly Catholics. It also burned 120 commercial and residential buildings, destroyed 25 vehicles, and robbed 4 banks.44
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 23
