And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  Saudi Arabia caught on to the threat early on and, with its vast resources, was determined to prevent a new generation of extremists, battle-hardened in Iraq, from returning to the Saudi kingdom. The government set up a rehabilitation program for jihadists and released Gitmo detainees. The Saudi approach was similar to the kind of tough love used in alcohol and drug rehab facilities in the States.

  We were given access to the program’s “campus,” which was a large walled-in compound that had once been a resort. The al-Qaeda veterans were free to swim in one of four pools, kick soccer balls around manicured lawns, and play video games. Meals of lamb and rice were served Saudi-style from communal bowls. There was even room service. The main gate was locked, and the outside walls were topped by barbed wire, but no armed guards were in sight.

  The only requirement was that “patients” attend daily classes, most of which were taught by Islamic clerics. The goal was to convince them that al-Qaeda’s interpretation of Islam was incorrect. Jihad is often translated into English as “holy war,” but in Arabic it means “a struggle”—to purify a soul, for instance, or to defend the faith with arms or with words. The message of the rehabilitation program was that true Islam was the Islam of peace, not of beheadings. The other message was: once you come home, leave your jihad at the door and all will be forgiven.

  Most of the men being treated had become unhinged by images they saw on the Internet or television. “It seems to us that the international conflicts in Israel, in Palestine, in Afghanistan, were the main motivator for them,” said Dr. Abdulrahman Al-Hadlaq, the program’s director. “So when they see those atrocities, they want to help, they want to do something.”

  Saddam Sagami, twenty, was making a sculpture for art class when I sat down next to him on the floor. “I heard about jihad and Palestine and how Muslims were being killed, so I went online and searched for jihad on Google,” he said. “I started contacting jihadis, and we started sharing opinions until I decided I wanted to be part of the jihad and maybe go to Afghanistan or Pakistan.” But those countries were too far away so Sagami went to Iraq instead, to fight US troops and the Shiite-led government. He was arrested and deported back to Saudi Arabia, where he spent two years in prison, and finally ended up in rehab. His story was typical. All the al-Qaeda members I spoke with at the clinic told me they felt it was their duty to defend oppressed Muslims anywhere: in Afghanistan, Chechnya, or Palestine, but that Iraq was easiest to get to. And there were American troops there, who were responsible for crimes like those committed in Abu Ghraib. And those things were being posted on the Internet. I’ve long believed in what I call the real estate law of terrorism: location, location, location. Afghanistan was far away from the Arab world, cold, mountainous, and its people spoke exotic and difficult languages. Iraq was close, Arabic-speaking, familiar to everyone in the Arab world, and had the great advantage of a US troop presence that was providing a steady supply of propaganda opportunities. A few years later, Syria would prove to be just as inviting to Muslims looking for a place to fight.

  Dr. Turki al-Otyan, one of the program’s forty psychologists, said the radicals were mostly “followers” who were often stirred into action by their feelings, not their intellects. “They are not confident. They feel depression, they see emotional things, they cry.”

  In short, they were hotheaded and broken men, and the program was trying to put them back together again. “It’s very important to bring them back to society, to let them settle down, to let them live a normal life,” Al-Hadlaq said. “We try to find jobs for them. We encourage them to get married—as a matter of fact, we help them financially with their weddings. . . . If a man gets married, he will be busy with his wife, with his kids, he will think of other needs. And we think that’s very important emotionally.”

  The man I was most eager to see in Saudi Arabia had little to do with Iraq but everything to do with al-Qaeda. Now that bin Laden is much smaller in death than he had been in life, it’s easy to forget that in 2007 anyone who had caught a glimpse of the terrorist historian was journalistic gold, and Khalid Sulayman was fourteen karat. (He is not to be confused with a man with a similar name who was arrested on terrorism charges in Australia in 2014.)

  Sulayman, then thirty-two, was easily the best-known graduate of the rehabilitation program. He was drawn to Afghanistan in the 1990s by videotapes of Muslims getting killed in Bosnia, Chechnya, and the Philippines, and he arrived there with several important attributes. He had a Saudi passport, which meant he could travel anywhere. He had never appeared on the radar of any of the intelligence services so would not set off alarms when he crossed a border. And he had a background in engineering, which suggested an aptitude for making bombs.

  Bin Laden had set up a network of training camps, each housing about forty men. “So you can call it the University of the Jihad,” Khalid told me when we met in Jeddah. Al-Qaeda’s heavy hitters were at the camps: the bloodthirsty Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who had by this time become bin Laden’s personal physician and who would become al-Qaeda’s leader after bin Laden’s death.

  Khalid was popular in the camps, and because he was young, fit, and smart, he was groomed for leadership. The duller men were trained as foot soldiers. Khalid went through one round of training, then went back before 9/11 for a refresher. “I got training on weapons, mines, explosives, electronics, all these things,” he said.

  Rumors were that al-Qaeda was trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and some of the camps were experimenting with chemical weapons on dogs and rabbits. In June 2001, Khalid picked up a buzz that something big was in the works. He was called to meet bin Laden, who offered him land and help in building a home so he could start a life in Afghanistan. Khalid asked bin Laden what he’d have to do in exchange for the leader’s patronage. “You don’t let us down,” bin Laden said, “we don’t let you down.”

  Three months later came the dramatic strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “Even bin Laden was shocked when the buildings fell down,” Khalid said. “He thought the planes would just hit the buildings and just make some damage.” Khalid was surprised that so many of the hijackers were Saudis. They were not known in Afghanistan, which of course was why the 9/11 plotters selected them.

  When the United States launched Operation Jawbreaker against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Khalid went with bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s high command to Tora Bora, a cave complex in the White Mountains in the eastern part of the country. He stayed in bin Laden’s bunker one night, then bin Laden moved everyone to another bunker. Two nights later the first bunker was destroyed by an American airstrike. An Afghan, apparently carrying a GPS locator chip, had met with bin Laden. “And that guy, he was killed because he was sleeping in that bunker,” Khalid said.

  With Tora Bora under attack, bin Laden simply left the camp on foot reportedly on or around December 16, 2001, accompanied only by one of his sons and a bodyguard. Zawahiri left too, taking a different route. The next day, Khalid and some small groups followed, and two days after that the rest of the al-Qaeda fighters left Tora Bora. Khalid’s group trudged through the snow-covered mountains for six days. Then some Afghans, who had previously worked for bin Laden, said they would guide Khalid and his companions to Pakistan and hide them there.

  It was a betrayal. They were arrested by the Pakistanis, handed over to the Americans, and taken to the US base in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city. Khalid said the treatment there was harsh. Stripped naked in the frigid detainment area, the al-Qaeda prisoners were given only one meal a day and were beaten while they were interrogated. “Many people lost their minds,” Khalid said. “They became mental, you know.”

  In January 2002, Khalid and other al-Qaeda prisoners were taken to Guantánamo Bay. Again they were stripped of their clothes and beaten, he said, but it was better than Kandahar: “We at least had three meals. You could pray. You had water.” And it was warm. Khalid was given an orange jumpsui
t and an identification number: JJE 155.

  Three years later, Khalid was repatriated to Saudi Arabia where he was held for eleven months in al-Ha’ir Prison twenty-five miles south of Riyadh. He underwent medical and psychological examinations, and his family came to visit for a week. It was the first time he had seen his relations in five years.

  He was deemed ready for the rehabilitation program, probably because he said he had begun a critical examination of his life while still at Gitmo. He said he had come to understand that he had wronged his family, his country—and himself. The rehab program smoothed his reentry into society in a fairly lavish way. The Saudi authorities bought him a car, paid for his wedding, gave him $20,000 to rent and furnish an apartment, and provided a stipend of $800 a month until he could find a job.

  When we met at his apartment, Khalid was not at all what I expected from a man who’d once sworn loyalty to bin Laden. He was exceptionally friendly, even lighthearted. He was unfailingly polite, thanking me for coming to visit and bringing us cans of Pepsi and glasses on a metal tray. For the several hours we sat together, I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t smiling. That surprised me. Al-Qaeda doesn’t normally attract happy people. Maybe Khalid changed in prison. Or maybe he was the lone happy-go-lucky warrior in al-Qaeda.

  To get a final assessment of whether the invasion had made Iraq and the United States safer countries or were simply fueling al-Qaeda–style fanaticism, I visited the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) in Washington at the end of August 2007. The center had been established because a primary criticism after 9/11 was the lack of communication between America’s intelligence arms. In the main hall of the NCTC, CIA analysts sat on one side and FBI agents on the other, supposedly so they could compare notes in the event of a terrorist threat.

  The director of the center, retired admiral John Scott Redd, was clearly uncomfortable talking about Iraq, which seemed odd. Iraq was being billed by the White House as the centerpiece in a grand Global War on Terrorism, so important to keeping Americans safe that it was worth dozens of American lives and billions of dollars every month, yet the official in charge of counterterrorism in America didn’t want to talk about it. When I suggested that Iraq had become a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda, he conceded that “in the short term, that’s probably true.” I asked if the United States was safer than it had been before 9/11. “Tactically? Probably not,” he said. “Strategically? We’ll wait and see.”

  Redd said the United States was doing a far better job collecting, analyzing, and sharing information about terrorist threats and estimated that it had foiled a half dozen plots. “We’ve gone on offense,” he said. “We haven’t waited for another attack. We’ve gone after terrorists around the world.” But Redd was under no illusion that the battle against terrorism would be quick or easy. “The Cold War lasted forty years. I suspect this one’s going to last that long.” It was a cop-out. Terrorism is an ancient tactic. It was used forty years ago and four hundred years ago. Weak enemies use terrorism to attack adversaries they cannot defeat. There will be terrorism forty years from now. My question was whether the Iraq war was helping would-be terrorists or hurting them. I was asking if it was true that we were “fighting them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here.” After months of traveling and reporting I came to believe that Washington was trying to put out the fires of terrorism with gasoline.

  SEVEN

  THE NEXT COUPLE OF YEARS were an unsettled time for me. Like most companies, NBC retrenched after the financial crisis in 2008. The network downsized its bureau in Beirut, and I was called back to New York to cover the Middle East long distance, parachuting into the region when major stories broke. I gave up my dream apartment in Beirut and began living out of a suitcase in New York hotels.

  I understood why NBC had to cut costs, but I wasn’t happy about it. I grew up in New York, but after so many years abroad, I wasn’t a New Yorker anymore, and I felt too far away from the action to stay ahead of the news. I didn’t move to Cairo in 1996 and learn Arabic to do mop-up reports on stories that had already moved on the AP wire.

  Staying in hotels also got old in a hurry, so in 2009 I bought a walk-up apartment in the West Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The place badly needed renovating, which took almost a year. I went on a lot of long reporting trips so I could get away from the city. But New York was a blessing in one respect: I began a relationship with Mary Forrest, now my wife and mother of our child.

  I didn’t take much notice when a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his produce by municipal officials. Tunisia, after all, is a small country (population 10.5 million), bounded on two sides by the Mediterranean and overshadowed by Libya, its large neighbor to the east, formerly led by the crackpot regime of Mu’ammar Gadhafi. There weren’t a lot of reasons to go to Tunisia except to do a cultural documentary. Or so I thought.

  Ironically, given the subsequent controversy over a nuclear treaty with Iran, I was in Tehran doing a story on a research reactor when the Arab Spring ignited. Wearing a protective suit to keep radioactive particles out of my clothing, I had spent the day touring the facility. I remember in particular filming a giant tank used to cool radioactive elements.

  When I got back to my hotel, I turned on Press TV, the English-language station in Iran. The big story was that Tunisia’s president of twenty-three years, Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali, had fled the country. Suddenly the protests against the man I had dismissed as a “little Mubarak” had become a big deal.

  I flew to London the next day and filed the Iranian nuclear story. Then I caught a flight to Tunis, where the smell of tear gas was still in the air. I immediately started doing interviews with protesters who were busily ransacking Ben Ali’s homes.

  Much of their anger was directed at his wife, Leila Trabelsi, a onetime hairdresser notorious for her lavish spending. Before fleeing with her husband, Trabelsi reportedly took $65 million in gold bars from the central bank. Her family, often called Tunisia’s Mafia, owned stakes in many of the country’s largest businesses. The new government detained thirty-three of the ousted president’s relatives.

  The uprising in Tunisia was more than a colorful story. I felt certain that the resentments there would spread elsewhere in the Arab world. Rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait could buy their way out of trouble by pumping money into the pockets of their people, but a big, poor country such as Egypt faced a severe reckoning.

  Before I could dig deeper, I had a final obligation typical of the scattershot reporting I had been doing over the previous year—an interview in Washington with a Russian dissident who promised to expose corruption by Vladimir Putin. The Russian was visibly freaked-out during the interview, and by the end of the session I was pretty jumpy myself. I was getting phone calls and e-mails about massive demonstrations in Cairo. Protesters in Tahrir Square were clashing with police, who were responding with tear gas.

  I rushed to Dulles Airport without stopping to pack, dressed in the same shoes and suit I had worn for the interview. I spent two days covering the riots in Cairo in leather-bottom shoes and suit trousers before I had time to buy rough-and-ready clothes.

  This was a different Cairo from the one I knew fifteen years earlier. Back then, everyone was poor but with no dishonor in it, and violence was rare. Many Cairenes were villagers transplanted to the city, and they brought their rural values with them. Opposing the government often meant a beating at the local police station and maybe a stretch in one of Egypt’s brutal prisons. But the abuses were nothing out of the ordinary in that part of the world, roughly the same as those meted out in Tunisia and Syria, and child’s play compared to the iron-fist punishments in Iraq. Egypt then was a medium-grade police state where people could get hurt, but where everything just kind of rolled along. In many ways, Egypt in 1996 was similar to Egypt in 1986 or even 1976.

  But the Egypt of the Arab Spring was an altogether different place. T
he wealth gap had grown enormously. Garden communities with golf courses had sprung up for the first time, and rich people drove their fancy new Mercedeses to fancy new restaurants, many of which served alcohol, usually anathema in Muslim societies.

  Perhaps the biggest change, though, was something small and relatively cheap: the smartphone. Now poor people had a way of communicating with one another. If one man saw an expensively clad guy with a blond woman on each arm, a hundred of his friends soon knew about it too, and so did hundreds more of their friends. Economic resentments, not religious or ethnic divisions, had sent Egyptians into the streets. The Internet, Facebook, and Twitter didn’t cause the revolutions, but like television in Eastern Europe in 1989, technology accelerated the pace of events.

  By January 28, 2011, I was reporting that downtown Cairo was in open revolt. Protesters were throwing paving stones, bottles, and Molotov cocktails, amid shouts of “The people want to topple the regime.” Al Jazeera, the Arab-language TV news network underwritten by the emir of Qatar, was pumping up the unrest. Its coverage was breathless and exciting, and guests would sometimes break into song. Al Jazeera became protester TV.

  I reported the next day that Hosni Mubarak was under intensifying pressure to step down. I had thought him an old fool when he was in his late sixties, and now at eighty-two he was an even bigger fool. Even though he would have been able to leave the country a free man, he dug in his heels because he thought the whole thing was a conspiracy orchestrated by the emir of Qatar and journalists in general—and because he was determined to have his son Gamal, a conspicuous mediocrity, succeed him as president.

  Islamic groups joined the protesters on January 29, and the day after that thousands of inmates, including thirty leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, escaped from prison. Looting became widespread. “From police state to state of chaos,” I said on the air. But Mubarak clung to power, launching a crackdown on journalists, dozens of whom were beaten, harassed, or detained. We used low light and minimal production touches when we filmed our nightly reports in order not to draw attention to ourselves. “If the protesters win, they believe they will win Egypt,” I said on the Nightly News.