The Miracle of Yousef: Historical and political thriller

by Gonçalo Coelho

  “I have received information about you, young man. I know you have the ambition to go into battle,” Sheik Omar asserted, looking Yousef firmly in the eye.

  “Yes, that’s why I came here, to fight alongside Muslims.”

  “I’ve seen many who said the same thing until they found themselves in actual combat.”

  “I am confident that I will know how to deal with this perfectly when the time comes.”

  “Very well, if you prove worthy, within a month you shall depart for Afghanistan, just as you wish. To accomplish this, you need only spend some time with me and undertake the tasks I will assign to you. If my evaluation is positive, you shall depart. Do you understand?”

  It was all that Yousef was longing to hear. He spent the ensuing days entirely with Sheik Omar, assisting him and accompanying him in all his daily tasks, as though his very life depended on it. He proved obedient, reliable, intelligent, courageous and determined, and little by little he assumed his place as a soldier of the mujaheddin on his way to war in Afghanistan.

  3

  The wind blew in Yousef’s face with an unusual and ineradicable tenderness, as it will do when the road of destiny opens blissfully before us. Under these circumstances, the asphalt seems to vanish by magic under our gaze. Cars no longer have wheels, but fly like swift birds rushing towards a new world taking shape before our eyes. Yousef was crossing the harsh, daunting Khyber Pass. Behind him lay Pakistan, and at long last his destination was now Afghanistan, for actual participation in the war on the side of the Afghan people – beyond this, the defense of all Muslims, of all the oppressed. When a faith as strong as this invades the soul and we finally surmount the last obstacle on the way to such a cherished objective, the whole universe gives the impression that it has conspired for years on end to lead us here, exactly on this day, exactly at this moment. Everything appears so perfect that the very colors and shapes seem more distinct and vivid. It is an ecstasy of the soul sculpting a scene of sublime perfection, the sense that everything is in the right place. For Yousef, moments like this were always looked upon also as milestones in his life story, taken very seriously spiritually, always accompanied by profound introspection. They had the quality of demonstrating to him that he was following his destiny just as God commanded him. In and of themselves they constituted a supreme proof immune to all sophistry of the existence and the greatness of God.

  On the day that he first traversed the Khyber Pass to become a true mujaheddin in the Afghan jihad, Yousef felt himself to be in total communion with God. The sun shone hard and bright in all its splendor, covering the entire harsh, mountainous landscape with a very white light and spreading its intense heat. Yousef closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, despite the constant jolts of the transport. He sought union with God and sought his heart, feeling that he was truly free. Not even in the greatest victories of the approaching campaign did he ever feel this same sensation of completeness, so free and easy. In this setting death mattered less than destiny, or the supreme glory of knowing he was in the hands of God. Death would come if God so wished, but now Yousef had all the faith in the world that he would meet death fulfilling His will. This freed him of any and all worry, letting him float in the limbo of heroes. He moved forward with his eyes closed, without fear or hesitation.

  4

  On the other side of the Khyber Pass was the war. Stories abounded among Yousef and his comrades in arms of brave muhajeddin who single-handedly defeated huge Soviet columns. Now the time had come for them to enter the battle lines themselves, and create their own legends. Their faith was tremendous. The worst that could happen was death, but its blackest contours faded before the notion that it would greatly enhance the valor and glory of each one of these courageous warriors fighting for something so much greater than themselves, as they came to feel that they were under the sacred protective aura of the Prophet himself who, they sensed with total certainty, was accompanying this campaign against the communist infidel.

  All these beliefs conferred an infinite solidity on each act of the muhajeddin, just as each atom gives solidity to the molecule comprising solid matter, they hovered on an abstract mental plane and were nonetheless more powerful than any palpable reality. Or perhaps for this very reason, inasmuch as a meta-reality can become more powerful in the human mind than reality itself, which is so flawed, so defective, so voluble. Meta-reality, a mere product of our own minds, can become a thousand times more perfect and reach a thousand times farther and deeper within us. This is precisely why it is so powerful and at the same time, so dangerous. Ultimately everything is born, lives and dies within our minds.

  The open pick-up truck in which the muhajeddin made their way seemed more like a boat crossing an assortment of whirlwinds, tossing and lurching over the holes and stones in the road. The earth was very bright. Indeed, everything there was very bright. The sun shone stark white on all things, making colors fade. The young man beside Yousef struck up a conversation with him, a young man perfectly in tune with the ideological current that drove them along. As the wheels of the pick-up truck multiplied its infinite rotations over the harsh, arid earth, they were both aware that they were getting closer and closer to a place where miracles happen, where the brave distinguish themselves and face their destiny head on. And how they all admired the spirit of Bin Laden! He was the great example to all of them for a variety of reasons: he was unsurpassed in his humanitarian support for the hostages of war; in his fund raising for these purposes and for the armed struggle; in the organization and creation of the military campaign of the group known as the Afghan-Arabs, which included Yousef; and how he struggled with such commitment at every task to achieve the objective of one day having a single people of Arab brothers, free of foreign oppression, and united by the identity of the pure Islamic base, whose guiding life principles would come, without the pernicious interference of personal judgment, directly from the words of Mohammed, of Sharia. At last, a single, great Islamic people, super-powerful in the world, commensurate with their history and greatness. What an honor to serve such a man and such purposes! And in the eyes of all, Sheik Omar Rasoul Sharif was on a similar pedestal. He was plainly a wholesome man of probity, solid principles, worthy of the highest respect and the most unwavering trust. He was often seen with his men acting like one of them, always with great modesty and simplicity of gesture and attire, although he was a man of few words and was someone the men only addressed when it was really necessary, always with enormous reverence.

  Although they never disclosed their real names, Yousef and his companion kept relating little bits about their lives over the course of their journey, lives that were not really all that long, considering that, as they had just discovered, they were both seventeen years old. Yousef described his parents and brothers and sisters who would be in Jeddah at just that moment, going through their daily routine, at the sidelines of the cause for which they had gone off to fight in Afghanistan. His companion also spoke of the family he had left behind, by coincidence, also in Saudi Arabia and also in Jeddah. When the conversation turned towards the glorious honor of death that might very well arise very soon in such splendid circumstances, Yousef fell silent as though death were something that did not fall within his immediate horizons, in contrast to his other companions. However, he was not in the habit of censoring anyone, and he did not do so with this comrade in arms for emphasizing what an honor imminent death would be, nearly making it seem that this was his only reason for going off to war. At all events, sufficient friendship took root there among these two compatriots who had only just met to make Yousef feel that he would deem it an honor to fight and die by the side of this young man who was the same age as he.

  Finally, after a number of hours on the road, they reached their destination. In the distance there appeared some heavy construction equipment, back-hoes, tractors and bulldozers. In fact, they were building something very different from what Yousef was accustomed to seeing in Jeddah: they were digg
ing out caves, something both primitive and mystical for any follower of Islam. They were drilling through nearly impenetrable quartz. It may be recalled that it was in the inside of a cavern that Mohammed discovered the Koran through the sacred words that the Archangel Gabriel breathed into him. Just as now, too, it was on these very words that it was sought to erect the headquarters of an entire campaign that never managed to have much more than three thousand Afghan-Arabs in total, but whose aims were magnificent and clear: to defeat the mighty Soviet army that dominated Afghanistan – an arduous task. Alongside the caves, tents were set up to shelter the muhajeddin. The military defense set up in the surrounding area was minimal, but this did not concern Yousef or any of his companions. Always present was the notion that something greater, beyond all comprehension, was defending them and driving them forward in everything they did, even if it impelled them to their deaths.

  Yousef had heard tell of the building of these caves, yet even so he was astonished. To him it stood as one more proof of the tenacity of Bin Laden and the power of this undertaking. Seven caves had been built here, some of them as much as sixty meters deep by six meters high, for such diverse purposes as air-raid shelters, hospitals and arms depots. However, this construction had cost time, and Yousef was quick to perceive that everyone was getting impatient with the ongoing work of shelter construction. What they wanted, without further ado, was action, and action would not be long in coming.

  5

  It was such an incredible feeling to be at the center of events. It was here that the future of the Islamic world was being decided! Indeed, one could even go so far as to say that much more than this was to be decided here: the end of the Cold War. The end of an era. Support to defeat the communist enemy rained down from the skies, chiefly from Saudi Arabia and the United States. There were powerful portable missiles arriving, Stingers, that would inflict heavy losses on the Soviets. Nevertheless, as far as the so-called Afghan-Arabs were concerned who, under the command of Bin Laden, felt that they comprised the world’s first common Arab army, parallel to NATO, the Stinger missiles wouldn’t even be necessary since the muhajeddin alone, driven by a just cause and divine power, were enough to defeat the enemy. At bottom, what was involved was a struggle for the entire Islamic nation! For all of these reasons, felt and sensed, the will to go into battle was immense within this group of Arabs from various nations, to put an end to communist Afghanistan and bring about the emergence of a new country that would have Islam as its religion, law and government, as was due.

  It is important to point out that when Yousef reached the Jaji encampment in the mountains of Afghanistan, the year was 1986, which by some coincidence, fateful or otherwise, had been designated the Year of Peace by the United Nations. In that same year, the USSR, under the authority of the supreme head of State, Mikhail Gorbachev, presented a calendar for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. However, it would take another three years to complete this withdrawal and, consequently, to heal what the Soviet leader referred to several times in his speeches as a bleeding wound.[2] In 1986, while the Americans were funding and supporting the military enemies of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, in January, Gorbachev himself proposed the elimination of the arsenal of medium-range nuclear missiles of the two countries by the year 2000. Ronald Reagan was able to meet the challenge with equal skill and ambition and, somewhat surprisingly, several months later, the two heads of state agreed to shorten the deadline to ten years, that is, by 1996. We now know that these idyllic plans led nowhere, but even to speak of such intentions certainly had a big impact in the media at that time considering that, most probably, neither Reagan or Gorbachev would ever have believed it possible to go back to living in a world without nuclear weapons. On the date that this book is being written, the world is comprised of not just two single nuclear powers, but several, with Iran next on the horizon. If we take the trouble to inquire into the two key events of 1986, we will also find two others related to the Soviet Union: the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the launching of the MIR Space Station. This last leads one to wonder whether Mikhail Gorbachev may have had enough of earthly problems such as the wound of Afghanistan (which others had left for him to heal, and that still others were trying to ensure would be more painful than Vietnam had been for the Americans), and he may have found that, in light of these circumstances, the best course was to focus his efforts on Perestroika and the space race. Only the future will tell us whether the conquests of territory on the moon will really be more peaceful than those on earth, when men are finally capable of shipping their wars beyond the confines of the earth. But Gorbachev would leave other deep marks on the 20th Century. According to the political assumptions of Glasnost (‘openness’), he would determine that the political and administrative future of the nations of Europe’s Eastern and the Warsaw Pact should no longer be decided by the USSR, and that their sovereignty and freedom of action should be absolute. It would be under his leadership that the Berlin Wall would come down in December of 1989. The world of the future was in the making.

  Meanwhile, in the encampment of the newly formed multinational Arab legion in the mountains of Afghanistan, the will to make history was tremendous, but the means for achieving this were completely different from those of Gorbachev. The approach to be used here was the old-fashioned one of military combat, the philosophy of war and death. The American, Saudi and Pakistani governments were also aligned on the same side of the barricades against the Russians, although they tried to keep it a secret. It all added up to huge wheels in a mechanism that it was no longer possible to stop. Looking through a magnifying glass (or perhaps a microscope) at one of the identifiable points of this huge historic mechanism we see the Jaji encampment in Northeastern Afghanistan, very close to the border with Pakistan, nestled in the mountains and Pashtun tribal areas. This is where Bin Laden built what was called the Lion’s Den, and here the men’s blood seethed with longing. The Saudi millionaire sought to build solid shelters for his men, and had requisitioned construction equipment from the Saudi Binladin Group to excavate the caverns. He contemplated additional expedients and additional protection before placing the lives of his men at risk, but most of them were getting impatient, and preferred instead that there should be no more delays in going into battle, even if this compelled them to do so in a precipitous fashion and with scant probabilities of success. Yousef understood Bin Laden. He never spoke to him directly, but in his conversations with Sheik Omar – who now treated Yousef as an adopted son – he plainly showed him how much he idolized the man. Because of this, to continue faithful to him was more than a duty, it was a pure enactment of the soul. He saw in Bin Laden and Sheik Omar the soul of the entire future of the undertaking.

  Months went by in which Yousef became increasingly familiar with the encampment and his comrades. Despite the delays and anxieties, the precarious hygiene and food, and the low morale that began to work away at even the most imperturbable spirits at the encampment, Yousef never succumbed. He was always among the most committed in all military training, and strove hardest at all tasks assigned to him. He was also one of the most patient. He drank in all Sheik Omar’s words like a nectar of the Gods, deeming them the most sincere and sensible of all. They helped him to see all that they were engaged in, actions guided by causes and well-defined objectives, with the benefit of a long-term view, placing him at a greater and greater distance from the real surrounding circumstances in which human beings were fighting and killing each other. These causes and objectives overshadowed all other things. All else was reduced to trifling significance in contrast to their magnificence.

  In 1987, Bin Laden left the Jaji encampment for Saudi Arabia. Sheik Omar asked his faithful follower to be his eyes and ears during those days while the leader was away. Yousef was radiant. It was his first big mission. He knew that responding to all of Sheik Omar’s orders with discipline and commitment was the only road to victory. He wanted to learn everything from his mentor because he
wanted to make history, influencing the world and fighting the infidels who sought nothing more nor less than little by little to bring about the end of true Islam. Yousef’s ambition was to become a great fighter, a great revolutionary, and he felt he was in the presence of the right guide. To execute his mission with excellence, all he had to do now was watch and listen, something that turned out not to be as easy as it might seem at first glance. At the encampment, surrounding Bin Laden, there was always a vast horde of Egyptians. Under the influence of Sheik Omar, Yousef saw them as deviants who had no other thought than to sway the inspiring Saudi leader in favor of their own causes. He thought that here lay the reason that Sheik Omar had entrusted him with this mission and focused his attention on them.

  Around this time in the Jaji encampment, there was also a Sheik Tameem, who according to Sheik Omar himself was an extremely courageous man of great valor, very open and uninhibited in his way of expressing his ideas, but also capable of persuading a number of men to rush into combat in Bin Laden’s absence. Sheik Tameem, who weighed one hundred and many kilos, stoked a fervent longing to go into combat immediately, to suffer the worthy martyrdom of death that would make him great and glorious in Heaven and win him entry to the gates of Paradise. One day, he got some of the men to agree to join an assault on the enemy. Yousef felt divided. He could not utter a word against going into combat because that would prove him unworthy of their company, it would make him seem a coward, the worst of all sins in that group at that time. Sheik Omar, however, was deadset against this initiative, though he was incapable of stopping it. Yousef kept his cool. The battle raging within him was of little interest to him, as it was of little interest to the men around him when compared to the greater causes and goals. He met with Sheik Omar for a walk over the mountains, and they both agreed that it was necessary to do something. They would have to get in touch with Bin Laden and inform him that something was about to happen in his absence, against his wishes. Sheik Omar was in a delicate position. He did not want it known under any circumstances that he had acted in any way whatsoever against the plans and behind the back of Sheik Tameem. So he decided to leave things in Yousef’s hands, emphasizing the point in these words: