The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Maqdisi renewed contact with his former pupil Bin’ali via WhatsApp. On the table was an offer to stop denouncing IS if they freed Kassig. If IS stopped taking hostages altogether, he and Qatada might even be willing to negotiate reconciliation with Al Qaeda.

  However, before any deal could be struck, Maqdisi was rearrested and accused by Jordanian intelligence of “using the Internet to promote and incite views of jihadi terrorist organizations,” even though he had official authorization to communicate with Bin’ali.

  On November 16, 2014, Kassig’s execution video was posted online, along with footage showing the beheading of more than a dozen Syrian soldiers. “To Obama, the dog of Rome,” Jihadi John declared. A female convert originally from London wrote on Twitter: “So many beheadings at the same time, Allahu Akhbar, this video is beautiful.”

  November 2014, Mosul

  Islamic State announced new oaths of loyalty from groups in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan. Less principled than the clerics in Amman, some former Al Qaeda affiliates were struggling to maintain supporters and needed to back the winning horse. Islamic State was moving in, stealing territory and influence from under al-Zawahiri’s nose. Abu Bakr even sent an audacious demand that he swear bayat to IS. Al-Zawahiri did not reply.

  In December 2014, Abu Bakr went further, branding Maqdisi and Qatada as “stooges” of the West in the latest edition of Dabiq, Islamic State’s English-language online magazine, featuring a full-page photograph of the two in conversation headlined “misleading scholars.”86

  The bloodshed continued into January 2015, when Jihadi John beheaded Japanese reporter Kenji Goto, along with his friend, a Japanese security consultant called Haruna Yukawa.

  Weeks later, Jihadi John was unmasked as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born computer programming graduate who had been brought up in West London. A shy schoolboy who had had trouble talking to girls, according to former classmates at Quintin Kynaston Academy, Emwazi had been stirred by a jihadi preacher who came to speak at Westminster University, where he had later studied. In the summer of 2009, Emwazi had traveled to Tanzania, claiming to be going on safari. Detained in Dar-es-Salaam, he was eventually deported to the United Kingdom and questioned by counterterrorism officials, who accused him of trying to link up with Al Qaeda offshoot Al Shabaab. Emwazi moved to Kuwait, but on a trip back to the United Kingdom he was detained again in July 2010 and barred from leaving. He sought advice from CAGE, the London-based human rights group run by former Guantánamo Bay inmate Moazzam Begg.

  “I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote to CAGE.87 But now “I feel like a prisoner … A person imprisoned and controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace and country, Kuwait.” He cited the mistreatment of Aafia Siddiqui as one of his inspirations to fight on for “freedom and justice.”88 In early 2013, after changing his name by deed poll, he sneaked out of the United Kingdom and headed for Syria.

  Emwazi would eventually be run to ground in Raqqa in November 2015, killed by a drone strike after another West London convert, called Aine Lesley Davis, was caught by Turkish intelligence officers trying to cross back into Europe.89

  January 2015, New York City

  Abu Anas al-Libi had also been an angry young man. Best known for leaving a copy of Al Qaeda’s war manual in a house he had rented in Manchester, England, al-Libi had so enraged the Mauritanian and other prisoners during their time together in Tehran that they had asked to move to a different compound. On the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list since 2002, he was finally due to stand trial in New York in early 2015.

  It was not just al-Libi’s testimony that everyone wanted to hear. There were also documents. In the run-up, prosecutors asked the judge if they could introduce letters al-Libi had sent to Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad and that had been recovered during the raid that killed him.90 They promised an enticing glimpse into the trove that was still classified and under the exclusive purview of the CIA’s Document Exploitation (DOCEX) team based in McLean, Virginia. Despite vigorous efforts by the Defense Intelligence Agency and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to gain access, barely anyone outside the CIA had seen the documents, and only 10 percent of them had even been analyzed.91

  But after al-Libi died, unexpectedly, in a New York hospital after liver surgery on January 2, 2015, most of the correspondence remained under seal.92 It looked like nobody would be getting to see the real story that the Abbottabad documents told about Al Qaeda’s fortunes any time soon.

  Days later, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada made one last attempt at rapprochement between Al Qaeda and Islamic State when they tried to negotiate the release of a Jordanian pilot, Muath al-Kasasbeh, who had been shot down over IS-held territory. Making sure that he had the full backing of Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID) and communicating via encrypted Telegram messenger, Maqdisi sent word that in exchange for the pilot’s release, Jordan would free Sajida al-Rishawi, who in 2005 along with her husband had been sent by Zarqawi to bomb the wedding party at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman. While her husband had died, her suicide belt had jammed and she had been arrested and sentenced to death.

  Maqdisi advised IS that as inheritors of Zarqawi’s legacy, they had an obligation to save her, and that killing Kasasbeh went against Islam. But before going ahead with any exchange, the Jordanian authorities wanted evidence that the pilot was still alive.

  On February 3, Maqdisi received an encrypted file. As he typed, letter-by-letter, a password sent by separate e-mail, he realized with horror that it read: “Maqdisi the pimp, the sole of the tyrant’s shoe, son of the English whore.”93

  Seconds later a video appeared on his screen showing the pilot being dragged into a cage, doused in petrol, and set alight. It was posted online three hours later. Maqdisi and the GID had been set up by IS, and would-be hotel bomber Sajida al-Rishawi was executed the next day.

  “I’m an enemy of the US,” said his friend Abu Qatada. “But my advice to them is that jihad is changing to a movement of the whole ummah and the world is deteriorating. You know how it is with playground slides: once you let go you cannot stop.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Eliminating the caliphate will be an achievement. But more likely it will be just the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.”

  —STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL, SEPTEMBER 2016

  March 2015, Tourist Complex, Quds Force Training Facility, Tehran, Iran

  “I ask God to release our brothers from prison so they can come to help us carry the load,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman had written to Osama bin Laden concerning the Iran-based shura members in July 2010.1 “They are qualified,” he continued, naming Saif al-Adel, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, and Abu Mohammed al-Masri. “If God facilitates their release they will really need to spend at least six months (and maybe a year) relearning how things work, refreshing their knowledge, their activity and vitality … Then, maybe, we could turn things over to them.”

  For the past eighteen months, Al Qaeda had been secretly negotiating to free the three men, along with two Jordanians who had once been part of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle—his brother-in-law Khalid al-Aruri and his childhood friend Sari Shihab. If Iran let them out then Al Qaeda would free an Iranian diplomat being held hostage by Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.2 It was important to make this look like a simple exchange of prisoners, not a new era of mutual cooperation between Al Qaeda and Iran.

  When a deal was reached in March 2015, Saif and the other shura members were quietly moved out of the Tourist Complex and into supervised apartments in District 9, the middle-class area where the Mauritanian had also lived ahead of his escape. Empty at last, Block 300 was handed back to the Quds Force trainees. But getting Al Qaeda’s army council out of the country and discreetly into Syria, where they all wanted to go, would take careful coordination and management.

  Given the recent fates of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith and Abu Anas al-Libi, and
still suspicious that Iran might have colluded with the Americans over Abbottabad, Saif and his colleagues advanced cautiously. They were especially wary of Iran’s ongoing talks with the United Nations Security Council and the Obama administration about the United States ending economic sanctions in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. The shura members needed to get back into the fight and not become pawns again.

  Small steps were taken first. Following the model used with the Mauritanian, the first stage in their rehabilitation came when their families were allowed to leave the country. Saif’s wife, Asma, who was pregnant, flew to Doha, where she was put up by the bin Ladens. After she lost the baby, she filed for divorce, unable to countenance another epoch of jihad in another country. She had had enough of life on the run.

  Al-Aruri’s wife, Alia, who had never gone to Iran but remained in Zarqa with the rest of Zarqawi’s family, was delighted to hear that her husband had been freed. Expecting to be reunited with him, she instead received a message saying that he was not returning to Jordan. The situation in Syria was at a critical juncture and he was heading there.3 She should continue to wait until he sent for her.

  The news also reached Hamzah bin Laden, Osama’s favorite son, who regarded the military council members as his mentors. They had “spared no pain or expense in guiding us down this path” to jihad, he declared in an audio statement, the first time anyone had heard from him since he narrowly escaped being killed at Abbottabad.4

  The timing of Hamzah’s first declaration to the world in fifteen years was no coincidence but evidence that after five years of being groomed at an undisclosed location, he was also now readying to enter the cause of global jihad as an adult and reinvigorate Al Qaeda’s fortunes. Supporting his statement was one from al-Zawahiri, introducing Hamzah to the world as a “lion from the den” of Al Qaeda.

  During his lifetime, Osama had endlessly lectured the bin Laden boys on the day one of them would succeed him, and in his eyes Hamzah always stood out.

  Now that he was being introduced as the lodestar, Hamzah raised a slogan, “We Are All Osama.” Al Qaeda believed that Hamzah, handsome, charismatic, and, according to those who knew him, fearless, a boy the doctor had known since he was a baby, would appeal to the Islamic State generation.5

  Summer 2011, Doha, Qatar

  Hamzah’s elevation was not certain, and getting him this far, alive, had been hard. At the time of the raid that killed his father, he had been in Peshawar, staying with Mohammed Aslam, Ibrahim’s point-man. As soon as he heard the news, Aslam knew Hamzah had to get out of Pakistan. Using dead brother Khalid bin Laden’s fake ID cards, Aslam had bought Hamzah a ticket to Doha, telling the boy to mingle with Pakistani laborers traveling to work there on construction projects connected to the 2022 World Cup. His wife and children flew separately.

  Qatar, once the poorest cousin of the Gulf states, a former pearl-fishing backwater and British protectorate where the United States had its largest military base in the Middle East, had become a regionally influential, petroleum-rich monarchy. It was the home of the Taliban government-in-exile (since June 2013) and served as a sanctuary for Hamas, rebels from Syria, militias fleeing Libya, and allies of the Muslim Brotherhood across the region.6

  When he arrived, Hamzah did not contact his half brothers and sisters, who lived with their mother in a horseshoe-shaped compound in the much-sought-after neighborhood of West Bay Lagoon, but quietly sought out Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s old friends.

  The 9/11 mastermind had passed through this Gulf nation many times during the 1990s, helped by several wealthy and influential Qataris. When Khalid left Qatar in 1996 and linked up with Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora to plan the Twin Towers attacks, the FBI director suggested he had been tipped off by the kingdom’s security services.7

  After 9/11, Khalid had returned to Qatar, again sheltering “with the help of prominent patrons.” The assistance had continued into the Zarqawi era, when the Jordanian hardman was said to have received Qatari passports and more than $1 million in a special bank account.

  In 2011, the U.S. Treasury Department named two Qatar-based facilitators who helped run Al Qaeda’s core pipeline through Iran as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.8 In 2015, the department named two further Qataris as “major facilitators of the al-Nusrah Front and al-Qaida.”9 One of them was accused of having links that went back over a decade and involved Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s Pakistani courier Hassan Ghul. The Qatari had arranged “a fraudulent passport” that Ghul had used to visit Qatar and “transfer money to al-Qaida in Pakistan.”

  By 2015, Ghul was dead, detected in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan in 2012 after sending an e-mail to his wife using an account that was being monitored by the U.S intelligence community. A drone strike in October 2012 had finished him off.10

  Hamzah bin Laden kept his head down in Qatar. “I’d like to stay undercover and be like any other jihadist and be treated like any other,” he had told his father in his last surviving letter.11 He adopted a new identity, and he returned to jurisprudence and hadith studies that had begun under the Mauritanian in Tehran. One of his new tutors was Hajjaj al-Ajmi, who told an audience in Doha in 2013 not to bother with donations to humanitarian programs in Syria. “Give your money to the ones who will spend it on jihad, not aid,” he thundered.12

  The path Hamzah had chosen could not have been more different from that followed by his half brothers, Abdul Rahman, Omar, Othman, Mohammed, and Ladin.

  In a deal brokered by Zaina, Omar’s British wife, they, their mother, Najwa, and sisters Rukaiya and Nour had the run of six large villas with crenelated roofs that were provided rent-free by the Qatari authorities, along with top-of-the-range SUVs and a full complement of servants. Sometimes even the grocery shopping was done for them. Other bills were picked up by Bakr bin Laden, Osama’s older brother, who paid each family member a stipend on the understanding that they did not talk.13

  The more conservative members of Osama’s surviving family remained in Jeddah: Amal and her children, Seham and her two surviving daughters and four grandchildren; Hamzah’s mother, Khairiah; Iman and her young family; and Fatima and her two children from Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Only Saad’s widow, Wafa, had broken away, taking her young children back to live with her parents in Port Sudan, along with a lump sum that represented Saad’s inheritance.

  Although Bakr bin Laden and the Qataris kept a tight rein on finances, for most of bin Laden’s sons it was the first time they had practically anything they could wish for. Omar bought Harleys, raced superbikes, and smoked cigars. Othman drove expensive cars and Ladin traveled in private jets. Occasionally, Najwa’s youngest daughters, Rukaiya and Nour (both of whom were now fashion-conscious college students who wore mirrored sunglasses with their stylish abayas), accompanied their mother on shopping trips to London, traveling on Qatari passports.14

  At home, Najwa went out shopping with Zaina, spending money on things she would never have been allowed to buy when Osama was still around: makeup, clothes, skin treatments, luxury goods, and gifts for her daughters. The only person outside the family she consented to meet was a British teacher from one of Qatar’s top international schools, who had been introduced by Zaina and taught her English.15

  Occasionally, Najwa and her daughters flew to Paris to meet up with Osama’s mother, Allia, who, despite being in her seventies, was still glamorous and embraced all the French capital had to offer, rarely speaking of her son or how he had destroyed her world.

  Despite Qatar’s generosity and Bakr’s largesse, or perhaps because of it, the sons exiled in Doha did not live as one big happy family. Regular bust-ups rocked the compound as they argued over money or family matters. Chairs got broken. Walls were thumped in frustration. Ladin, now twenty-three, spent most of his time playing computer games or sleeping. Abdul Rahman, aged thirty-eight, who had suffered problems all his life caused by childhood hydrocephalus and was married to a cousin from Saudi Arabia, made frequent trips abroad and
caused the Qatari authorities some consternation when he attempted to reenter the country on one occasion with sex toys in his suitcase.

  Younger brother Othman, who with his two wives, a daughter of Saif al-Adel and a daughter of Mohammed al-Islambouli, had escaped Pakistan in late May 2011, was at war with Zaina, who he accused of being a British spy, even though Seham had informed the family that Osama had known about his son’s marriage and had blessed the union “if it makes Omar happy.”16

  More mild-mannered Mohammed bin Laden stayed at home with his wife and children, relieved that he, too, had escaped the chaos of Pakistan. He had been too traumatized to fulfill his father’s last written request that he enroll in a degree course to study “strategic sciences, sociology and psychology.”17

  After so many years following their father around the world’s trouble spots, the long years of incarceration in Iran, their near miss in Pakistan, and the unspoken fear that they as well as Khairiah had somehow led to their father’s entrapment in Abbottabad, they all worried about going out in public for fear of being recognized, followed, or abducted by the CIA and instead they spent most days lounging in the majlis, watching old footage of their father’s hero, Sayyid Qutb, and browsing secret Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.

  None of them had been tempted by the opportunities offered by Education City, a huge campus on the outskirts of Doha where top U.S. universities, including Georgetown and Texas A&M, had opened up campuses. What was the point of education? Omar complained to Zaina. Who would give a son of Osama bin Laden a job?

  Encouraged by Zaina, Omar had tried several times to earn a living. He banked on his family’s reputation for construction, teaming up with a Spanish firm bidding for lucrative projects linked to the 2022 World Cup.

  But his lack of experience and unrealistic expectations put people off. “I need to make a hundred million dollars,” he would say. “I need to make a billion.” When his business failed, Omar fell into a deep depression, while Bakr bailed him out to the tune of $1 million. Afterward, he became bad-tempered and silent.