by Adrian Levy
Noncombatants led by the Mauritanian, including his friend Abu Yahya al-Libi, a scholar from Tripoli who had studied under him in Nouakchott, and Osama’s finance chief Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, made a beeline for the Chagai Hills, from where they hoped to cross into Balochistan.
The military faction, led by Saif al-Adel, continued northward, intending to regroup with Al Qaeda units coming from the west and north. They would gather near the town of Zurmat in a remote valley under the protection of Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani.
They would not be running for long, Saif predicted. He already had a head full of plans and would share them with everyone shortly. “We will take revenge—around the world—for the Panjwai massacre,” he pledged. “Even if it is only one American life, brutally taken, that will be sufficient.”5
December 10, 2001, Toba Kakar Mountains, Eastern Zabul Province, Afghanistan
The headlamps of a half dozen vehicles flickered across the darkened hillsides. They were following an old drug-smuggling track that was seeded with hair-trigger land mines sewn in previous conflicts. From the drivers, the Mauritanian overheard stories of Arabs fleeing ahead of them flipping their rides on boulders, or mistaking the shadows for bends and driving off the edge in the dark. His hands shook and he called for the convoy to stop. They had to rest.
The driver knew of a house belonging to an Afghan smuggler, he said. He went off to talk to the man, returning a half hour later to say they could stay the night and in the morning this man would guide them over the border.
As soon as they arrived, the smuggler’s mother, who had lived through the Soviet war and was delighted to have Arab guests, began cooking. The Mauritanian watched as the damp wood she fed into the stove bled sooty, pungent smoke. In a place where fuel and food were in short supply, a puffing chimney was sure to attract attention. Neighbors soon began to gather. But their host remained nonchalant, addressing everyone with the grandiloquence that the ignorant do best: “If Afghanistan falls into the hands of the Americans today, we will recover it tomorrow, as we did with the English and the Soviets.”
What of Al Qaeda? the Mauritanian thought. His movement—virtually all of it—was here in this room, and in a villager’s hands. It was so fractured that it might not survive even a single roundup. For the next twenty-four hours he listened to his old radio set, his paranoia growing as he heard reports that in Kabul a new pro-American power led by Hamid Karzai was rising.
After dark on December 11, the smuggler produced a sack of tribal robes: “Get dressed.” It was time to leave, on foot.
The Mauritanian, his former student Abu Yahya, and moneyman Sheikh Saeed set out, winding their way up steep passes and across the forlorn desert. Tracers from ancient Soviet DShK heavy machine guns lit up the sky to the north. They rested a few hours in a shepherd’s hut but voices woke them at dawn. Country people were arguing loudly in some gnarly language, and the only things the Mauritanian could understand were the names: “Al Qaeda,” “Osama,” and “the Arabs.”
The bounty was now so high no one could be trusted. He rousted everyone and they got on their way without even a cup of tea. Over the next four days they barely stopped at all, sliding down rocky gorges, notching up as many miles as they could until dawn prayer, when, exhausted, they sheltered through the daylight hours in caves or clefts. By the fifth morning, with everyone starving and sore, the smuggler pointed to the distant horizon: “Pakistan.”
A junior brother was chosen as the guinea pig and he set off downhill to join a road, while the others hung back, waiting to see what would happen. A day and a half later, a panting courier arrived with a message: “Success!” Incredibly, the brother had made it to Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan Province.6
Now it was the Mauritanian’s turn, and he, Sheikh Saeed, and Abu Yahya squeezed into a rickety car with a disheveled driver who claimed to be a practiced guide but looked like a ravenous shepherd who would eat his own flock. It was pouring rain, the track was slicked with mud, and the Mauritanian felt his legs shaking. The greater his dread, the hotter he got in his borrowed robes and the more the windows steamed up. But when they reached the border post, the young Pakistani soldiers manning it waved them on. Assuming the misted-up car was crammed with sweaty Afghan nomads, they did not even come out of their hut.
Eight days after leaving Kandahar, they had made it out of the cauldron. The Mauritanian’s sense of relief was tinged with guilt for those they had left behind at the airport, where the radio sets were all now silent.
December 17, 2001, Balochistan, Pakistan
They spent their first night of freedom at an old British hill fort. The Eid al-Fitr feast marking the end of Ramadan was upon them and they were about to scout around for something to eat when someone’s mobile phone sprang to life. Stifling the ringing, surprised that anyone could get a signal in this wilderness, the Mauritanian answered. A male voice spoke somberly: “Tora Bora has fallen.” And Sheikh Osama had vanished.
The Mauritanian gasped. “Kabul, Kandahar, and now this.”7 Desperate and scared, he wrote a letter to his family. “My Dear Wife and Children.” He wished them a happy Eid and conjured a day, quite soon, when he hoped they would be reunited. “Under the desert lights I am thinking of you all.” Then he crammed it into the pocket of his robe, wondering where to send it.
The next afternoon, they entered Quetta to find it overcome with Afghan refugees and transformed into a jittery roundabout of rumors. The bus station spilled over with veiled travelers. Makeshift camps rose up on every bend with the doors to every improvised dwelling pulled shut, heightening the air of clandestine furtiveness. The city’s private Imdad Hospital was filled with injured Al Qaeda fighters, with the Taliban guarding the doors. As they drove through the streets with their faces obscured, the Mauritanian recalled Mullah Omar’s warning to Osama in 1998: “Never trust the Pakistanis.”
“Do not be deceived by the banners bearing your photograph and the people filling the streets shouting your name,” Omar had said. Pakistanis were only ever good at “screaming and holding demonstrations,” and they had a history of doing Washington’s bidding.
That night, they bedded down among the whitewashed terraces of Pashtunabad, a network of narrow alleys and mud-brick masjids, glued together with prayers.
December 18, 2001, Barmal, Paktika Province, Afghanistan
Two hundred miles north in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah reached the frontier district and breathed deeply. This was his kind of place: a border zone filled with brigands, where only religion was cherished more highly than money. To the east lay the forested Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, and in every spare cot it seemed a wounded Al Qaeda fighter was laid up, awaiting transit to hospitals in Pakistan.
Abu Zubaydah had discovered Barmal in 1991, while he was hiking over from the Pakistani side to bring arms and cash for Ibn Sheikh at Khaldan. “And today, I wangle to bring them out of Afghanistan, all of Afghanistan, and by any means. Praise God,” he wrote in his diary.8
Doing things in reverse would be touch and go. Disguising these Arabs before they tested the border was a challenge. In skin tone, hair color, beard length, and voice they stood out. He found a local maulvi (Islamic scholar) and paid for an edict permitting imperiled (religious) men to shave off their beards, dress as women, and pay bribes. Burqas were distributed. Small groups were ferried into the foothills, from where they would climb up to the snow-filled passes. On the Pakistani side, smugglers’ trails led down into the deeply forested ravines of Shawal, a dank valley dotted with ancient redbrick fortresses, and on to Shakai, a lush expanse of apple and apricot orchards where Pashtunwali was the only law that mattered. If they got that far they would be safe.
This was the land of Nek Muhammad Wazir, a hardhead from Wana, the bustling hub of South Waziristan. Handsome, cocky, and sporting a lavish, piratical beard, he had been born into the jihad of the 1980s, and while only in his early teens he had been recruited by the ISI, an
d paid by the CIA, to run guns and dollars into Afghanistan.
The son of a khasadar (tribal constable), a birthright that gave him high status, Nek was schooled in the Jamia Darul Uloom Waziristan madrassa, where teachers recounted how he had once flounced out of class having been beaten with a cane, only to return with a rifle.9
Nek had squandered the early 1990s carjacking and dealing guns and drugs until an old warlord introduced him to the Afghan Taliban, for whom he became a raging gun, rising to be a midlevel commander known as “the stubborn one,” always the last to quit the battle. He had been one of the last to leave the field during the battle for Bagram airport in November 2001, remaining steadfast in his foxhole, eyeballing U.S. and British special forces even as they engulfed the airstrip and his fellow Talibs fled.
Now back in Wana, Nek agreed to Abu Zubaydah’s request to host Al Qaeda refugees. He had plenty of accommodations for them, as many locals migrated to the low plains during winter, leaving their compounds empty. Sensing there was good money to be made, and possibly lean times ahead, Nek offered attractive rental terms and onward travel arrangements for fighters searching for new battlegrounds or for a sanctuary in which to shelter their families deeper inside Pakistan.
Those heading down to the plains were concealed on commercial minibuses and sent first to Dera Ismail Khan, a city on the edge of the Tribal Areas. From there, journeys were coordinated by Abu Zubaydah’s “loyal Pakistani brothers” in Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed.10
Over the border in Afghanistan, Saif al-Adel’s group had reached Shahikot, a craggy valley south of Gardez. Protected on all sides by snow-clad mountains, its name meant Place of the King and for centuries it had been used as a redoubt for Afghan guerrillas.
On Saif’s orders and erring on the side of caution, they split again. One hundred veterans dug in with heavy weapons at an altitude of ten thousand feet to wait for the Americans, while tribal militias loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani took a second contingent farther northeast, toward Khost, from which point they could be smuggled into Waziristan. Their orders were to regroup in Pakistan, ready, Saif said, “for the next round of attacks.” He had one last piece of advice: “Keep listening to the news and you will know when we are on the rise once more.”11
December 19, 2001, Quetta, Pakistan
On his second day in the city, the Mauritanian received a hand-delivered message from Mokhtar saying that Osama’s family had reached Pakistan safely, having escaped the border ambush of November 25 in which their Yemeni driver had been captured. Jubilant that Saad bin Laden and the other family members were still alive, he told his companions: “If Osama’s sons are alive, so is the movement.” They were currently hiding at a secret location but could not stay permanently. What could the shura do to help?
The Mauritanian, Sheikh Saeed, and Abu Yahya discussed how best to safeguard the bin Laden caravan. Feeling slightly overwhelmed by this new responsibility, over the course of several hours they kept returning to the same brazen idea: send Osama’s family to Iran.
For the epicenter of Shia power and faith to help an outlawed Sunni militia like Al Qaeda might have seemed to be an unusual concept for them to dwell on, but the situation there was fluid, with sufficient ambiguity in its foreign policy for Al Qaeda to exploit it.
Then there was geography. Iran shared a common border with Balochistan and so was realistically within reach. It also offered a protective bubble that U.S. forces dared not penetrate. Tehran was, the Mauritanian argued, no nearer to restoring diplomatic relations with Washington than in 1979.
From personal experience he also knew that strategic Iran sometimes backed causes it did not personally endorse if only to antagonize its sworn enemies, America and Israel. While living in Sudan in 1995, he and Saif al-Adel had been sent to Tehran by Osama to negotiate a mutually beneficial arrangement. As a result, Al Qaeda fighters had been invited to train in a camp run by (Shia) Hezbollah and the Quds Force (a clandestine special division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard) in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, where they learned how to manufacture shaped charges that transformed roadside bombs into far more lethal armor-piercing death traps.12 In the run-up to the embassy bombings of 1998, Osama’s phone records showed that 10 percent of the calls he and his deputies made were to Iran.13 And before 9/11, Tehran publicly railed against the persecution of Shias in Afghanistan while secretly assisting some of the hijackers to transit through Iran to the West.
The downside was obvious. They all suspected that Iran had played a role in the fall of the Taliban, which had by now completely melted away, and they were equally worried about entrusting Osama’s family to “rejectionists,” as they described Shias, whose “mannerisms resembled those of Jews and the hypocrites,” the Mauritanian said.
Sheikh Saeed, too, advised caution. The world had changed significantly as a result of 9/11. Everyone was scared of Washington’s retribution. Iran was unpredictable and capable of shifting in any direction to save itself from regime change by dint of the U.S. military. Who could vouch for it remaining anti-American for long?
Unable to reach an agreement, the Mauritanian sent a message to Saif al-Adel through Abu Zubaydah in Barmal. Saif had the most recent knowledge of Al Qaeda’s Iranian network, as he had been Osama’s main liaison with Tehran and had coordinated previous meetings with Revolutionary Guard officials.
Saif came back with news that the Iranians seemed receptive. “Create a point in Iran and meet the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that works [against the Jews] in Palestine, but [do it] without the knowledge of the Iranian government,” Saif advised. Zubaydah recorded the advice in his diary.
Al Qaeda’s best hope was to reach General Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force. Qassem, who supposedly described himself as “the smallest soldier” in reference to his short stature and his low profile, was the officer who handled Iran’s covert foreign policy interests, and if Al Qaeda was of any use to him, he would find a way to help.
Born in Rabor, an impoverished mountain village in eastern Iran, Qassem had little formal education but joined the Revolutionary Guard at age twenty-two in 1979. Since 1998, when he took command of the Quds Force, he had become close to Iran’s supreme leader.14 “Hajji Qassem,” as most Iranians deferentially referred to the reclusive silver-haired military official, pursued a hard-line agenda to create an anti-American archipelago of resistance across the Middle East. The Quds Force—which was conspicuously headquartered in the former U.S. embassy compound in Tehran—stood accused of orchestrating the bombing of the Israeli embassy and of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994, respectively, killing 114 people.
Because Saif was still on military duties in Afghanistan, everyone agreed that the Mauritanian should go alone to Iran. He was a respected scholar and had been there once before. But with the letter to his family still crumpled in his pocket, he panicked. Compared to General Suleimani, the thirty-three-year-old felt like a minnow. Military chief Saif knew how to speak to high-ranking Iranian soldiers like Qassem. But how would Mahfouz cope alone?
While he was still deliberating, the Taliban got in touch and forced his hand. Mullah Omar, who was now in Quetta, also wanted to explore the Iranian route. Would the Mauritanian represent his interests, too?15
Field craft was not his forte, but the Mauritanian was tutored on taking some crude security measures. He would travel under an assumed identity and claim to represent the innocent families of martyrs fleeing the American war in Afghanistan. No one could know of his real position in the outfits he represented or his real name.
The journey to Iran would be hard, warned Abu Zubaydah, who was now putting in the miles and shuttling between Barmal, Miram Shah, and Bannu. Afghanistan had “become a strange jungle” and was descending back into the chaotic days that had preceded the Taliban. “Bandits are widespread, and kidnapping, kidnapping of girls, rather, even boys (the disease of sodomy is widespread here). And stealing cars, and the ropes that stop the cars
[on] the roads to collect taxes and levies from all.” He should find another way to go.
The Mauritanian sought out relatives of Mokhtar who ran a Quetta-based bus company servicing the Iranian border. An uncle rustled up some fake ID papers and put together an itinerary. He should take the regular passenger service southwest from Quetta along the N40 highway, passing through the arid Chagai Hills, and on to the border town of Taftan, a famous drug-smuggling route that was also used by those fleeing to Europe and was known locally as “the road to London.”
He would need plenty of hard cash, as along the 450-mile, twelve-hour journey the bus passed through several Pakistani army and intelligence checkpoints. If he got as far as Taftan, Pakistan’s only legal gateway into Iran, he would have to find a backdoor across. Hopefully agents of Hajji Qassem would be waiting for him in Mirjaveh, the town on the other side.
His phone rang. Another of Mokhtar’s relatives called from Karachi. “Brace yourself.” The Mauritanian could take no more bad news.
“Your wife and children are alive and in a safe house here.”
The Mauritanian cried. He was delighted and conflicted. Desperate to see them, he was now committed to seeking protection for the bin Laden caravan in Iran. He wavered. Could he get out of the trip? How would he? His panicked mind flicked through a litany of excuses until he stopped it. There was no way out. Warned that phones were being tapped all over Pakistan, he dared not even call his wife.
After al-Isha prayer on December 19, cursing these chaotic times, the Mauritanian wrapped himself in tribal robes, took a suitcase of U.S. dollars from Sheikh Saeed, and rehearsed his cover story. “I am Dr. Abdullah, a Mauritanian religious scholar who taught in Kandahar.”
The poor bookworm had inadvertently become caught up in the stampede to leave the country and, as a literate man, he carried a message on behalf of two shuras.
