by Robert Lacey
It sounds oversimplified. Bin Laden’s protector in Jalalabad was Younis Khalis, a mujahid friend from the old days. But Khalis would soon join forces with the Taliban, and as events unrolled, Mullah Omar’s promise came to pass. There were many Western-style reasons, from personal rivalry to realpolitik, why it made sense for the Taliban leader to be wary of the uninvited Osama—both men had toweringly grandiose visions of their purpose in life. But those visions also locked them firmly into the same Islamic mission. The two holy warriors needed to coexist, and they found a way to do so. Breaking off from a sermon one day, Mullah Omar singled out Bin Laden in the congregation and praised him to the worshippers as one of Islam’s most important spiritual leaders. Osama returned the compliment, telling the world that his fatwas were now being issued from Khorassan, the great Afghan-based empire of the Prophet’s time, from which, according to certain hadiths, the armies of Islam would emerge in the final days, wearing black turbans and unfolding black banners, like the black flag of the Taliban, to defeat the kuffar and march in triumph to Jerusalem.
It was fortunate, perhaps, for the two partners in this messianic alliance that Saudi Arabia could not, for the moment, see a way to break them up. In 1996 the Al-Saud were severely annoyed with Bin Laden, but they had no ready means to implement their displeasure. If they brought Osama back to the Kingdom, he could only be a source of trouble, whether at liberty or in jail. At that date his crimes were matters of inflammatory words, not proven misdeeds for which he could easily be punished—nor, at that point, had he accomplished anything to suggest he would go much beyond words in the future. He seemed, as Bandar bin Sultan later put it, just a “young, misguided kid” with a big mouth and lots of money—“not a threat to the system; not a threat to anyone.” The Saudi government had deliberately passed up on chances to extract Bin Laden from the Sudan in the early 1990s, and in Afghanistan he seemed even more safely out of the way.
In 1996 the Taliban took full control of the Khyber Pass areas where Younis Khalis had been operating and sent a message to Prince Turki Al-Faisal.
“We’ve taken over Jalalabad,” they told him, “and Bin Laden is here. We have offered him sanctuary and we can guarantee his behavior.”
The prince recalled his reply in an interview he gave to the U.S. TV show Nightline in December 2001. “Well, if you have already offered him refuge, make sure he does not operate against the Kingdom or say anything against the Kingdom.” At that moment Turki felt quite confident, he explained, that the Taliban would take charge of “keeping his mouth shut.”
Viewed from the other side of 9/11, this seems an incredibly casual, even negligent, attitude to adopt toward the man who would become the world’s most notorious terrorist. But that was not the position that Bin Laden occupied at the end of 1996. The terrorism expert Peter Bergen has assembled the memories of journalists who went to Afghanistan to interview Osama at this time, and while their stories all play up their own personal sense of risk and danger, none of them presented the lone Saudi exile as a man who could flatten Lower Manhattan. Several of them painted him, even, as faintly mad. Railing at the world windily from remote tents and caves in the Hindu Kush, Bin Laden sounded like a crazed Don Quixote.
“Oh William,” he declared that August, addressing William Perry, the U.S. secretary of defense at the time, “tomorrow you will know which young man is confronting your misguided brethren. . . . These youths will not ask you for explanations. They will sing out that there is nothing between us that needs to be explained—there is only killing and neck smiting.”
Bin Laden titled his eight-thousand-word diatribe “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” It sounded ludicrous. In the context of his flight from the Sudan and his hand-to-mouth survival in Afghanistan, his antique rhetoric seemed especially full of bluster—particularly to Prince Turki, who knew just how little actual fighting “Abu Abdullah” had actually done in the 1980s jihad for which he was now claiming such credit. In the Sudan, Bin Laden had fulminated indignantly for four years and had organized training camps to little effect. Now that he was back in the chaos of Afghanistan, it did not seem to make much difference if he fulminated some more—or even opened up his camps again.
CHAPTER 22
Infinite Reach
By the spring of 1997 Osama Bin Laden had been living in Afghanistan for nearly a year. He had been working with the Taliban to set up a new generation of multinational jihadi training camps, and the recruits were flowing in—including a young electrical engineer from Jeddah, Khaled Al-Hubayshi.
“Go to Afghanistan,” Al-Hubayshi had been told by all the veterans he consulted. “That is the only place you can learn the real jihad.” The twenty-year-old had already tried the Philippines. In 1996 he had sold his car to finance a trip to the southern island of Mindanao, where he spent several months with Muslim separatists who were training at “Camp Vietnam.”
But the Filipino rebels were too casual, in Khaled’s opinion. They did not practice with live ammunition. Having studied electricity, he wanted to develop his expertise in the field of bombs and explosive circuits—and he found all he hoped for when he made his way the next year to Khost, in southern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. It was May 1997.
Bin Laden had been a hero of Khaled’s since his Afghan exploits were reported in the Saudi press in the late 1980s, which got the boy thinking that he might follow in the great man’s footsteps. While studying at technical college, Khaled had been enraged by videocassettes that showed Muslims suffering at the hands of the Serbian army in Bosnia.
“Women were being raped and children killed just because they were Muslims,” he remembers. “I had that young man’s feeling that I had to do something myself. It was genocide. I could not sleep for the thought. Our religion tells us that Muslims must help each other, and the idea of jihad lifted my feeling of helplessness. When I finally got to camp and started training I slept well for the first time in months.”
Khaled Al-Hubayshi’s Guantánamo interrogation sheet sets out the formidable list of terrorist skills that he acquired from 1997 onward under the patronage of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: “The detainee attended three courses at the Kaldan Camp; the Basic, the Gunnery and the Tactics. . . . The detainee’s Basic Course consisted of training on the AK-47 Kalashnikov 7.62 assault rifle, the Seminov SKS/Type-56 7.62 mm semiautomatic rifle, the RPD 7.62 light machine gun, the PK 7.62 mm medium machine gun, the Dushka Dshk-38 12.7 mm heavy machine gun, the RPG-7 (antitank rocket propelled grenade), and the Grenov (RPG-18).”
The mind-boggling array of Russian weaponry is a reminder of the very practical ways in which Al-Qaeda’s war on the West was built on the West’s secret war against the Soviets ten years earlier. It also showed how comprehensively the late-twentieth-century jihadists went about their training.
“We woke before sunrise for Fajr [the dawn prayer],” remembers Khaled. “Then we paraded, all in lines—there must have been 150 of us at Kaldan. We did a warm-up, some physical training, before we went off for two hours running in the mountains, carrying our weapons. Every so often we would stop to do press-ups. We got very fit. I discovered that you’re gonna lose weight if you train with Al-Qaeda!”
Back in civilian life today, the comfortably padded Al-Hubayshi grins wryly at the memory.
“Breakfast was eggs, bread, and ful medames [Arab baked beans]. The food in the Al-Qaeda camps was good and healthy. Then through the day we did our classes. There was a lot to learn: map reading, camouflage, urban warfare, weaponry, explosives—how to blow up a building, a tree, a bridge, a person. Each subject had a different instructor. I remember our explosives instructor, in particular. He was an Egyptian with blond hair, Ahmed Abdullah.”
None of the jihadis used their real names, usually adopting nicknames in the style of Bin Laden’s “Abu Abdullah” (“Father of Abdullah”). Khaled had no children, so he called himself “Abu Sulayman” (“Father of Solomon”),
using the name of his own father on the assumption that he would one day pass on that name to his firstborn.
“We looked at all newcomers very suspiciously,” he remembers. “We knew that the Saudi government, the Egyptians, and the Yemenis were all sending spies. So new arrivals had to prove themselves.”
There was a hierarchy among the jihadis.
“The Yemenis were at the bottom,” remembers Khaled. “They were so poor, they were sort of stuck. They were probably better off in Afghanistan than they were at home, and they couldn’t travel anywhere in any case. They couldn’t get the visas. The Egyptians couldn’t travel much either, and they certainly couldn’t go home. They were wanted men, without much money. The Saudis were top of the heap because we had money. A Saudi wasn’t desperate for $150. His family could wire him $500 anytime. He had a car in his country. He could go home anytime. So if he was here, he’d come to die. He could do the big job.”
It has been said that Osama Bin Laden deliberately chose Saudis to fill the planes on 9 /11 in order to drive a wedge between the Kingdom and its American supporters, and that makes perfect sense. But there was also a practical element. Until 9 /11 citizens of Saudi Arabia—unlike Egyptians, Yemenis, or most other Arabs—could travel in and out of America with relative ease, since it was assumed that, sooner or later, they would end up back at home.
“You would buy the ticket,” remembers one frequent traveler of those days, “and your travel agent would get the U.S. visa automatically. You didn’t even have to go to the embassy.”
In the 1990s the Saudi government did not allow young Saudi males to travel directly to Afghanistan, but it did not make much effort to stop those who traveled to the camps via Pakistan. Islamic charity workers came and went freely. Using a false passport, Khaled Al-Hubayshi was able to break off his training and resume his job in Jeddah for a spell before going back to Afghanistan to an Al-Qaeda-sponsored camp.
“Each camp,” he recalls, “had its own private sponsors and supporters—a lot of them were funded by charity money. Al-Qaeda camps were for the elite: they had the best training.”
Pakistani support for the camps was indicated by the numbers of young men who were sent off to fight in Kashmir in the campaign against India, while Bin Laden dispatched some of his graduates to stiffen up the Taliban’s military efforts against the Afghan Northern Alliance. It was rent for the hospitality he was receiving from Mullah Omar. But there was not much love lost between the visiting Saudis and local Afghanis.
“We traveled everywhere with a hand grenade,” Khaled remembers. “It was much better protection than a pistol. If there was any trouble with an Afghan, you’d just remove the pin and wave it in front of them. ‘I came here to die,’ you’d say. You could see the fear in their eyes. They would kill you for a hundred dollars—so you had to scare them by acting crazy.”
Khaled was devout, but he had little respect for the religiosity of the Taliban.
“It was just a mask,” he says today. “And, in my opinion, a mask for racism. They believed that their people, the Pashtun, should be rulers of all Afghanistan, so they used religion to control the people. I remember one taxi driver who played music in his cab. The Taliban beat him up and took his car for a week. That was their technique—to scare people, so everybody kept in line. And most of the time it worked pretty well. Nobody fucked up.”
It made for difficulties, however, when the video machine broke down in Khaled’s camp.
“We’d been using the machine to play videos in our lessons about jihad and military techniques. It was not illegal. But when the repairman came, he came creeping in with his tool case, looking everywhere around him like he was on a secret mission.”
Khaled rose through the ranks and graduated to more elite and specialized training programs. By the beginning of 1998 there were some eight thousand non-Afghans stationed in and around the jihadi camps, according to one estimate by Saudi intelligence. It is not known how many of these were trained fighters directly loyal to Bin Laden, but there were enough for him to start putting his lofty dreams into practice—his bombast was no longer so empty. That February he called on Muslims around the world to support his “International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” Signed by militant leaders from Bangladesh, Egypt, Kashmir, and Pakistan, the manifesto reflected the wide-ranging coalition of radicals that had gathered in Afghanistan since the triumph of the Taliban, and it extended Bin Laden’s previous declaration of war on America to civilians.
“We believe that the worst thieves in the world today, and the worst terrorists, are the Americans,” he told PBS’s Frontline. “Nothing could stop you, except perhaps retaliation in kind. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.”
The manifesto made clear that Bin Laden’s basic quarrel still derived from the role that America was playing in his own country. The Gulf War had ended in 1991, but U.S. Air Force planes remained stationed in Saudi bases and the military cities, backed up by large and obvious contingents of U.S. personnel. It was difficult to deny the accusation that Osama lodged in his quaintly biblical language: “Since Allah made it flat, created its desert, and surrounded it with seas,” he declared, “the Arabian Peninsula has never been stormed by any forces like the Crusader armies spreading in it like locusts.” He had no need to add that these infidels had come to Arabia—“stealing its resources, dictating to its leaders, [and] humiliating its people”—at the invitation of the House of Saud.
“Finish this!”
Crown Prince Abdullah issued the order with his customary bluntness. Osama Bin Laden’s insulting and defiant February declaration of jihad had been bad enough, but a month or so afterward the Mabahith had picked up some Bin Laden followers transporting missiles that were intended for use inside the Kingdom. They had planned to attack the U.S. consulate in Jeddah.
“We had kept complaining to the Taliban,” remembers Turki Al-Faisal, “but here was solid evidence that Bin Laden was doing fieldwork at home, in Saudi Arabia itself. Enough was enough.”
The Al-Saud could no longer allow Bin Laden to roam free in Afghanistan, and in June 1998, Prince Turki flew off to Kandahar. As his plane banked over the airport, the intelligence boss could clearly make out Tar nak Farms, the huddle of mud-walled buildings, where, his agents reported, Osama had been living for some time—the new headquarters of his campaign to mount global jihad.
The Taliban leaders were waiting, grouped around Mullah Omar—a remarkable sight with their collection of missing eyes, arms, and legs. They were easily the world’s most physically disabled government.
“I can’t just give him to you to put on a plane,” was Omar’s response to Turki’s opening argument, which had been a reproachful reminder of the mullah’s original undertaking that he would prevent Bin Laden from operating or speaking against the Kingdom while he was in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had scarcely stopped talking and giving interviews since his arrival, and that was clearly in breach of what the Taliban had promised.
“We provided him shelter,” responded the Taliban leader, launching into a long lecture on the Pashtun code of hospitality and its strict rules against betraying guests.
The prince was prepared for some such tactic. To back up his own arguments, he had brought from Riyadh the learned Sheikh Abdullah Turki, a scholar of Islam-wide renown and one of the Saudi ulema, who now pointed out to the Taliban how a guest who repeatedly broke his word, as Bin Laden had done in giving so many aggressive and troublemaking interviews to the world’s press, forfeited his claim to his host’s protection. As a former Saudi minister of religious endowments, Sheikh Abdullah also provided a not-so-subtle reminder to the Afghans of the Saudi charities that were financing their revolution so generously—but whose spending ultimately depended on a certain give-and-take.
Mullah Omar seemed unmoved by either consideration. Offering a face-saving compromise, Prince Turki suggested the formation of a jo
int Saudi-Taliban commission that would negotiate an Islamic mechanism to hand over the jihadist, and he recalls leaving them with a final question: “Are you agreed in principle that you will give us Bin Laden?”
Prince Turki is quite adamant that Mullah Omar’s answer was a firm “Yes”—and that no money or aid changed hands. Observers have suggested that the arrival of several hundred new 4x4 pickup trucks in Kandahar later that summer was a Saudi down payment on the deal, but Prince Turki denies this.
“The trucks,” agrees Ahmed Rashid, “could have come from any of the talibs’ Gulf sponsors.”
At the end of July the Taliban used their new trucks, enhanced with machine guns, to finally capture the northern town of Mazar-e Sharif. This historic center of Shia worship, the “Noble Shrine,” had resisted Taliban attacks the previous summer and was now punished with a series of ghastly reprisals. Ahmed Rashid later estimated that six thousand to eight thousand Shia men, women, and children were slaughtered in a rampage of murder and rape that included slitting people’s throats and bleeding them to death, halal-style, and packing hundreds of victims into shipping containers without water, to be baked alive in the desert sun.
The massacre of Mazar-e Sharif was the Taliban’s most gruesome atrocity yet. But it was overshadowed in the world’s headlines by news from Africa. On August 7, 1998, the eighth anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990, two teams of Al-Qaeda suicide bombers launched onslaughts against America’s embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Two hundred twenty-four people died and more than forty-five hundred were injured in attacks that were coordinated to within eight minutes of each other. The double campaign had been organized on the ground by Ahmed Abdullah, Khaled Al-Hubayshi’s blond-haired Egyptian explosives instructor, whose final act was to press the detonator he had wired into the dashboard of the truck that he drove into the U.S. embassy parking lot in Dar es Salaam.
