Dr. Zawahiri is a caricature straight out of a Faustian nightmare. His apocalyptic worldview would change the life of Osama bin Laden, and cut short the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people around the world.
Born in 1951, and raised in a middle-class Cairo suburb, Zawahiri’s father was a professor of medicine at Cairo University, and his mother was from a distinguished political family. Ayman Zawahiri’s maternal grandfather served the Egyptian ambassador to Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. His uncle was one of the founders of the Arab League, and served as its first secretary general.
Like Osama, Ayman Zawahiri was close to his mother. As a boy, attending the state’s elementary and secondary schools, Ayman was a bookworm who was sometimes bullied. He liked Walt Disney movies and cartoons and watched them at an outdoor movie theater near his home. As he grew to manhood, he hated violent sports and thought they were “inhumane.” His twin sister, Umnya, would also become a physician, as would a younger sister, Heba. Two younger brothers, Hussein and Mohammed, would become architects.
Ayman Zawahiri’s mother inculcated in him a love of literature, and he often wrote love poetry to her.
The patriarch of the Zawahiri clan was his uncle, Mahfouz, who served as Sayyid Qutb’s lawyer when he was put on trial for conspiring to assassinate Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Mahfouz Zawahiri had been one of the last people to see Qutb alive before he was hanged.
As a boy, Ayman grew up listening to his uncle tell stories of Sayyid Qutb’s intellectual brilliance and resilience of character. Qutb had been brutalized in Nasser’s prisons, but had gone to the gallows unrepentant. When Qutb heard that he was sentenced to be hanged he said, “Thank God I have performed Jihad for fifteen years until I have earned this.”
Ayman Zawahiri was fifteen years old when Qutb was executed. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood soon afterward and was an active member until he fled Egypt in 1984.
Zawahiri was one of the plotters who murdered Anwar Sadat in 1981. Furious that Sadat had sold out Palestine by signing the Camp David Accords, and dissatisfied with Egypt’s secular, socialist government, the Muslim Brotherhood planned a very public end for Egypt’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Dressed in Egyptian army uniforms, a hit squad boarded a military vehicle during a dress parade. When the truck passed the presidential box, the attackers jumped down, lobbed hand grenades into the crowd and sprayed the reviewing stand with automatic weapons fire. Anwar Sadat was standing at attention, saluting, when his murderers emptied an AK-47 assault rifle into his chest.
As Sadat fell, one of the shooters bellowed, “I have killed the pharaoh!”
Immediately following Sadat’s assassination, Ayman Zawahiri took part in a plan to attack Sadat’s funeral. When the shooters were arrested before the plan could be carried out, Zawahiri went into hiding. After a few weeks on the down low, he tried to flee to Pakistan. He was arrested on his way to the airport.
Egyptian police kept the arrest secret and held Zawahiri in a dungeon cell in the medieval citadel overlooking Cairo. They knew from the start that Zawahiri was no small fish. Authorities evicted his family and tore his home apart looking for evidence. They found enough to implicate Zawahiri and several others. In police custody, Zawahiri was stripped naked, and beaten with electrical cables. His genitals were shocked with coat hangers attached to car batteries and he was worked over by attack dogs. In a crowning debasement, he was sexually abused, and then raped with a wooden baton.
He broke.
In exchange for his life, Zawahiri informed on his coconspirators and helped Egyptian intelligence to arrest Essam Al-Qamari, a fugitive Egyptian tank commander and key member of Gama’a al-Islamiyya. In exchange for this Judas bargain, Zawahiri was spared his life. Fearing restitution, Zawahiri fled from Egypt first to Tunisia and then to Saudi Arabia.
It is doubtful that Osama bin Laden knew of Zawahiri’s collaboration when they met in Jeddah, sometime in late 1984. Bin Laden was just then beginning his trips to Pakistan, and was not yet an icon of Islamic fundamentalism. Zawahiri’s speeches while in the defendant’s cage had made him well known in Jihad circles. While Zawahiri had withered in prison, the world had changed. Israel had invaded Lebanon, American Marines had been slaughtered in Beirut, and the Afghani insurgents had turned the tide against the invading Russians. Suspected of his treachery, Zawahiri had been eased out of the leadership of al Jihad. He was a broken man, tortured by nightmares. Had he not met the Saudi millionaire, Zawahiri would have probably resumed his career as a physician.
Psychological studies show that protracted exposure to beatings and physical brutality fundamentally alters human personality. Some survivors are made into loners. More resilient souls pass through the experience and transcend violence, forgiving their torturers, and trying their best to get on with their lives. Ayman Zawahiri had been abused and demeaned in Egyptian custody. He had been beaten and raped by his jailers; they had done him violence, but he had done worse to himself. He had betrayed the things he believed in and helped the government capture several of his companions and coconspirators. The abuse he had undergone was inexcusable and vile. Zawahiri hated what had been done to him and he hated the men who had had their way with him. But now, he also hated himself. He would turn that self-loathing outward and turn it onto the world.
It’s not known exactly when Osama met Zawahiri, but it was very likely in Jeddah at this time. What is also likely is that Osama gave the Zawahiri family money to rebuild their lives. Osama was a generous man, and regardless of how he felt about the murder of Anwar Sadat, Zawahiri was a Muslim Brother and Osama was obligated to render assistance. The financial aid was sufficient to allow Zawahiri to establish a small practice, and continue to pay rent on his other clinic back in Cairo—certainly things he could not do without a substantial loan.
After he moved to Jeddah, the doctor was quick to insinuate himself into Bin Laden’s Jihadi entourage and in 1986 he joined Osama when he moved his own family to Peshawar. Zawahiri soon ran afoul of the Brotherhood by arranging to have published an elegantly bound, beautifully printed screed called Bitter Harvest.
In this magnum opus, Zawahiri poured out the hatred in his soul. He lambasted the Muslim Brotherhood as a bunch of wimps. He castigated them for “collaborating” with infidel regimes and he condemned the Brotherhood as “tools of the western powers,” and demanded that they “renounce man-made laws, democracy, elections and parliaments.” Copies of Zawahiri’s book were given away in restaurants and markets free of charge all over Peshawar. It was bloodcurdling stuff, and most of those who picked it up quickly put it back on the shelf. It was too radical for even hard-line Jihadists because it pointed out that there were enemies to be fought both outside and inside the Muslim faith.
The history of mankind has been darkened by a number of physicians who turned from medicine to politics. Jean-Paul Marat of the French Revolution and communist guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara are but two bloody examples. Ayman Zawahiri joined them in the pantheon of world terror. Jean-Paul Marat sent hundreds to the guillotine as “the people’s friend,” and Guevara murdered capitalist stooges as a “revolutionary doctor.” Zawahiri planned to out-slaughter them both. And he would answer to a higher authority—he would kill in the name of God almighty.
Zawahiri had embraced a heretical concept in Islam called Takfir. Takfiri doctrine holds that Muslims who are judged not Muslim enough are apostates—worse than nonbelievers—and may be killed with impunity. A corollary to Takfir is called al-Takeyya, and it grants its practitioners a license to carry out religiously sanctioned dissimulation; a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows them to lie, cheat, and steal, as long as they do so for religious purposes.
If this seems counter to a basic concept of right and wrong, that perception is shared by most of the Muslim world. Takfir and Takeyya are considered to be wicked and ridiculous heresy by almost all mainstream Islamic theologians. Dr. Zawahiri, like most other Salafist Jihadis,
played fast and loose with both the Koran, Islam’s divinely revealed foundation, and the Hadith, the sacred body of sayings and traditions of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad.
Like Marat and Che Guevara, Dr. Zawahiri would take it upon himself to decide who needed to be excised from the diseased carcass of a world that he alone could cure. To bring his world-altering visions to reality, Zawahiri could decide who was a good Muslim and who was not. Unhinged by violence, this broken, emotionally crippled little man was a megalomaniacal sociopath bent on destroying the world.
Osama and Zawahiri needed each other. They were never to become fast friends, but they offered each other the means to a similar end. Theirs was a utilitarian and symbiotic relationship. Zawahiri needed capital, and Osama needed intellectual and religious justification for a global campaign of violence.
Zawahiri inveigled a cadre of Egyptian fanatics into Osama’s organization. It was simple; he told Osama what he wanted to hear: that the time was right to expand the Jihad he was waging against the Soviet Union. Zawahiri told Bin Laden that he should continue his war against the Russian occupiers, and then expand the horizons of his campaign to embrace both the enemy close at hand, the Soviets and the apostate Arab governments, and the far enemies, the United States and its aggressive Zionist progeny, Israel.
Bin Laden’s creation, the Services Bureau, was a cash cow. It possessed a fortune that had been gathered from donations from all over the world; this treasury was the prize that Zawahiri coveted, and he moved closer to it on two lines of march.
First, Zawahiri sowed discord among Osama’s followers, raising the specter of Takfir, and sorting out Jihadis according to his own estimation of their fitness as Muslims. Second, Zawahiri cynically encouraged Osama to lead from the front, and involve himself personally in combat with Soviet forces.
Zawahiri knew well that Osama was a tactical incompetent—the cunning doctor encouraged Bin Laden to expand the base he was building right under the Soviets’ nose. Zawahiri, himself, seldom visited the frontlines. He knew his own importance to the cause, and kept himself safe in Peshawar. He agitated, spreading fitna, discord, and he bided his time.
All it would take was one well-placed Russian mortar shell and Osama bin Laden would become the martyr that he’d always hoped to become. This was Zawahiri’s simple plan. A Soviet bullet might kill Osama, but not his money or his organization: That would be Zawahiri’s, ripe for the plucking. He encouraged Osama on an ever-more ridiculous series of military actions and hoped for the best.
On that cold winter morning when Abdullah Azzam, Abdul Sayyaf, and Jamal Khalifa went up to the Lion’s Den to retrieve Osama from the frontlines, they found him surrounded by Zawahiri’s handpicked minders.
He had changed.
Osama refused to listen to his friend Azzam’s pleas that this was not a place to make a base, and that the point of the spear was no place for a person so important to the cause. There was an argument. Osama told them that he planned to form an Arab Special Forces command that could strike the oppressors of Islam anywhere in the world. Those enemies included what Bin Laden called the kafir leaders of all the Arab governments: Egypt included.
Azzam was shocked.
The word “kafir” is an ugly word to Muslims. It signifies infidels or unbelievers. Osama had been converted by Zawahiri to the doctrine of the Takfiri. Now, he was not only willing to fight the Russians but other Muslims as well.
Jamal Khalifa urged his brother-in-law again to leave the frontlines. Bin Laden told him: “This is Jihad! This is the way we want to go to heaven.”
* * *
Zawahiri had become Osama’s puppet master. The doctor encouraged Osama to expand the base at the Lion’s Den, and dig increasingly intricate tunnels, bunkers, and air raid shelters. There was no tactical or strategic point to this useless feat of engineering. How the activity of bulldozers, road graders, and tunneling equipment failed to attract the attention of Russian helicopter gunships is anyone’s guess. The base expanded, and the Russians were either blithely ignorant or unwilling to leave the security of their own bunkers.
As the base expanded, Osama’s would-be commandos were anxious to kill Russians. Osama was content to build his base and wait. In March 1987, Osama returned to Saudi Arabia for another round of fund-raising and consultations with Prince Turki, the head of Saudi intelligence. They would discuss, among other things, what was to happen in Afghanistan after the Soviet departure, which was now foreseen as inevitable.
In Osama’s absence, a subordinate launched an ill-conceived attack on the nearby Russian base. It would have stirred a hornet’s nest. Osama returned to the Lion’s Den just as the attack was nearing fruition—he called it back and chastised the instigators.
The attack was canceled, but there was grumbling in the camp—his men wanted action and Osama was not secure enough as a military leader to tell them that the time was not yet right to bring on a general engagement.
The complaining got worse, with Zawahiri’s henchmen agitating for another move against the nearby Russians. Osama was goaded into action. On April 17, 1987, Osama put himself in the point element of one hundred fighters chosen to hit an Afghan Army outpost near the city of Khost. One can imagine Zawahiri waiting for the result.
The operation was the worst-kept secret of the Soviet-Afghan war. Zawahiri made certain that news of the attack was spread all over Peshawar. Bored Jihadis took it upon themselves to take buses up to the base camp at Jaji and insert themselves into the attacking column. One intrepid American-born Jihadi, Abu Rida, drove his own car from the city and found the gathering column by asking a mule driver where to find Osama bin Laden.
The staging area was a chaos of shouting troops, braying mules, crackling radios. Orders and counterorders were shouted down the valley. First, the cars carrying ammunition were delayed and the attacking troops were without rifle bullets. Rocket launchers and mortars had to be manhandled into positions to cover the attack—something that could have been done days in advance. No provision had been made for food or water, and some men wandered back to base camp for something to eat. The electrical devices and wires necessary to fire the artillery rockets got left back at base. A rider was sent galloping and hallowing back up the mountain to retrieve them.
Osama’s collegial leadership style did not seem to empower officers to give orders. There was a lot of standing around. By twos and threes, some fighters went back to their bunkers and went to sleep. No one seemed to have thought to stop them.
All of this was in broad daylight and in plain sight of the objective.
The Afghan army soldiers manning Osama’s target also slipped away, leaving one man behind with an obsolete Gorjunov machine gun. He was either very brave, or just wanted to see what would happen next. He stayed at his gun, held his fire, and waited.
Somewhere in the massing body of troops, Osama was sick—a thing that happened regularly before contact with the enemy. He did his best to buck up in front of his men, but his languid demeanor and sulky expression did not engender confidence.
Osama allowed one of his lieutenants to give a preattack oration. The pep talk was cut short when the sole remaining Afghan defender decided to open fire. He’d had a long time to aim.
A stream of tracers ripped into the milling throng, splattering one of the attackers cold dead, and seriously wounding two others. Belt after belt of 7.62 mm bullets spanged over the rocks, tearing long sparks in the gathering dusk. Mules heehawed and threw off their loads, horses bolted, and troops without orders flattened or scattered. No one called for covering fire, or ordered any maneuvers. Somewhere, Osama took cover behind a rock and froze. Fighters ran away, and their officers scuttled after them.
The single defender kept firing until the barrel of his weapon glowed red and then white hot. One man kept a hundred leaderless Jihadis pinned down until darkness fell. When he ran out of ammunition, the Afghani soldier sauntered back to rejoin his unit, already a mile back from the point of att
ack.
It was over. Disgusted, Osama’s men returned to the Lion’s Den. Some gathered their remaining equipment and left, never to return. It was a flat-out fiasco, and amazingly only one man paid for it with his life. Osama’s reputation as a military commander was at rock bottom.
The Afghan fighters who witnessed the debacle spread the word—one soldier had defeated the Arabs. Word got back to the Pakistani army, who began closing down Osama’s guesthouses in Peshawar.
It seemed that Osama bin Laden’s Excellent Adventure was over.
He returned to Peshawar where, quite predictably, Ayman Zawahiri advised him that it was necessary to show more resolve. What was necessary for morale was for Osama to lead another attack. This one would be better planned, and Osama would be assisted by one of Zawahiri’s trusted Egyptian commanders, Abu Ubaydah.
In May, Osama accompanied a nine-man reconnaissance against a Russian rifle squad. That he would again risk his life in direct combat says something either about Osama’s personal valor, or the hold that Zawahiri had over him.
It is unthinkable that anyone who cared about the emir’s safety would willingly put him in direct contact with a technologically superior enemy.
The nine men wobbled forward, made contact and exchanged fire. The Russians withdrew in an orderly fashion. For the Soviets, it was a routine firefight. Zawahiri’s pal Abu Ubaydah persuaded Osama that it had been a resounding success.
It was a success—if the intent was to show the Russians where to find the base.
The Soviets organized a battalion-sized block-and-sweep operation against the Lion’s Den. They assembled dozens of trucks and armored vehicles and closed in. Osama was in a well-covered and camouflaged position. The camp had been greatly improved over the past months, and hundred-foot-long tunnels had been bored into solid rock. The place could have withstood anything short of a nuclear attack, and the Russians were coming at them with a lackadaisical, slow-moving operation in the full light of day.
SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden Page 14
