by Robert Fisk
After an hour, two armed Arabs—one with his face covered in a kuffiah scarf, eyes peering at us through spectacles, holding an anti-tank rocket-launcher over his right shoulder—came screaming from behind two rocks. “Stop! Stop!” As the brakes were jammed on, I almost hit my head on the windscreen. “Sorry, sorry,” the bespectacled man said, putting down his rocket-launcher. He pulled a metal detector from the pocket of his combat jacket, the red light flicking over my body in another search. The road grew worse as we continued, the jeep skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights playing across the chasms on either side. “Toyota is good for jihad,” my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising logo the Toyota company would probably forgo.
There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools. Osama bin Laden knew how to build his wartime roads; many an ammunition truck and tank had ground its way up here during the titanic struggle against the Russian army. Now the man who led those guerrillas— the first Arab fighter in the battle against Moscow—was back again in the mountains he knew. There were more Arab checkpoints, more shrieked orders to halt. One very tall man in combat uniform and wearing shades carefully patted my shoulders, body, legs and looked into my face. Salaam aleikum, I said. Peace be upon you. Every Arab I had ever met replied Aleikum salaam to this greeting. But not this one. There was something cold about this man. Osama bin Laden had invited me to meet him in Afghanistan, but this was a warrior without the minimum courtesy. He was a machine, checking out another machine.
IT HAD NOT ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY. Indeed, the first time I met Osama bin Laden, the way could not have been easier. Back in December 1993, I had been covering an Islamic summit in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum when a Saudi journalist friend of mine, Jamal Kashoggi, walked up to me in the lobby of my hotel. Kashoggi, a tall, slightly portly man in a long white dishdash robe, led me by the shoulder outside the hotel. “There is someone I think you should meet,” he said. Kashoggi is a sincere believer—woe betide anyone who regards his round spectacles and roguish sense of humour as a sign of spiritual laxity—and I guessed at once to whom he was referring. Kashoggi had visited bin Laden in Afghanistan during his war against the Russian army. “He has never met a Western reporter before,” he announced. “This will be interesting.” Kashoggi was indulging in a little applied psychology. He wanted to know how bin Laden would respond to an infidel. So did I.
Bin Laden’s story was as instructive as it was epic. When the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi royal family—encouraged by the CIA— sought to provide the Afghans with an Arab legion, preferably led by a Saudi prince, who would lead a guerrilla force against the Russians. Not only would he disprove the popularly held and all too accurate belief that the Saudi leadership was effete and corrupt, he could re-establish the honourable tradition of the Gulf Arab warrior, heedless of his own life in defending the umma, the community of Islam. True to form, the Saudi princes declined this noble mission. Bin Laden, infuriated at both their cowardice and the humiliation of the Afghan Muslims at the hands of the Soviets, took their place and, with money and machinery from his own construction company, set off on his own personal jihad.
A billionaire businessman and himself a Saudi, albeit of humbler Yemeni descent, in the coming years he would be idolised by both Saudis and millions of other Arabs, the stuff of Arab schoolboy legend from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. Not since the British glorified Lawrence of Arabia had an adventurer been portrayed in so heroic, so influential a role. Egyptians, Saudis, Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Algerians, Syrians and Palestinians made their way to the Pakistani border city of Peshawar to fight alongside bin Laden. But when the Afghan mujahedin guerrillas and bin Laden’s Arab legion had driven the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Afghans turned upon each other with wolflike and tribal venom. Sickened by this perversion of Islam—original dissension within the umma led to the division of Sunni and Shia Muslims—bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.
But his journey of spiritual bitterness was not over. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden once more offered his services to the Saudi royal family. They did not need to invite the United States to protect the place of the two holiest shrines of Islam, he argued. Mecca and Medina, the cities in which the Prophet Mohamed received and recited God’s message, should be defended only by Muslims. Bin Laden would lead his “Afghans,” his Arab mujahedin, against the Iraqi army inside Kuwait and drive them from the emirate. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia preferred to put his trust in the Americans. So as the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division arrived in the north-eastern Saudi city of Dhahran and deployed in the desert roughly 500 miles from the city of Medina—the place of the Prophet’s refuge and of the first Islamic society—bin Laden abandoned the corruption of the House of Saud to bestow his generosity on another “Islamic Republic”: Sudan.
Our journey north from Khartoum lay though a landscape of white desert and ancient, unexplored pyramids, dark, squat Pharaonic tombs smaller than those of Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus at Giza. Though it was December, a sharp, superheated breeze moved across the desert, and when Kashoggi tired of the air conditioning and opened his window, it snapped at his Arab headdress. “The people like bin Laden here,” he said, in much the way that one might comment approvingly of a dinner host. “He’s got his business here and his construction company and the government likes him. He helps the poor.” I could understand all this. The Prophet Mohamed, orphaned at an early age, had been obsessed by the poor in seventh-century Arabia, and generosity to those who lived in poverty was one of the most attractive characteristics of Islam. Bin Laden’s progress from “holy” warrior to public benefactor might allow him to walk in the Prophet’s footsteps. He had just completed building a new road from the Khartoum–Port Sudan highway to the tiny desert village of Almatig in northern Sudan, using the same bulldozers he had employed to construct the guerrilla trails of Afghanistan; many of his labourers were the same fighters who had been his comrades in the battle against the Soviet Union. The U.S. State Department took a predictably less charitable view of bin Laden’s beneficence. It accused Sudan of being a “sponsor of international terrorism” and bin Laden himself of operating “terrorist training camps” in the Sudanese desert.
But when Kashoggi and I arrived in Almatig, there was Osama bin Laden in his gold-fringed robe, sitting beneath the canopy of a tent before a crowd of admiring villagers and guarded by the loyal Arab mujahedin who fought alongside him in Afghanistan. Bearded, silent figures—unarmed, but never more than a few yards from the man who recruited them, trained them and then dispatched them to destroy the Soviet army—they watched unsmiling as the Sudanese villagers lined up to thank the Saudi businessman who was about to complete the road linking their slums to Khartoum for the first time in history.
My first impression was of a shy man. With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, he would avert his eyes when the village leaders addressed him. He seemed ill-at-ease with gratitude, incapable of responding with a full smile when children in miniature chadors danced in front of him and preachers admired his wisdom. “We have been waiting for this road through all the revolutions in Sudan,” a bearded sheikh announced. “We waited until we had given up on everybody—and then Osama bin Laden came along.” I noticed how bin Laden, head still bowed, peered up at the old man, acknowledging his age but unhappy that he should be sitting at ease in front of him, a young man relaxing before his elders. He was even more unhappy at the sight of a Westerner standing a few feet away from him, and from time to time he would turn his head to look at me, not with malevolence but with grave suspicion.
Kashoggi put his arms around him. Bin Laden kissed him on both cheeks, one Muslim to another, both acknowledging the common danger they had endured together in Afghanistan. Jamal Kashoggi must have brought the foreigner for a reason. That is what bin Laden w
as thinking. For as Kashoggi spoke, bin Laden looked over his shoulder at me, occasionally nodding. “Robert, I want to introduce you to Sheikh Osama,” Kashoggi half-shouted through children’s songs. Bin Laden was a tall man and he realised that this was an advantage when he shook hands with the English reporter. Salaam aleikum. His hands were firm, not strong, but, yes, he looked like a mountain man. The eyes searched your face. He was lean and had long fingers and a smile which—while it could never be described as kind—did not suggest villainy. He said we might talk, at the back of the tent where we could avoid the shouting of the children.
Looking back now, knowing what we know, understanding the monstrous beast-figure he would become in the collective imagination of the world, I search for some clue, the tiniest piece of evidence, that this man could inspire an act that would change the world for ever—or, more to the point, allow an American president to persuade his people that the world was changed for ever. Certainly his formal denial of “terrorism” gave no hint. The Egyptian press was claiming that bin Laden had brought hundreds of his Arab fighters with him to Sudan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum was suggesting that some of the Arab “Afghans” whom this Saudi entrepreneur had flown to Sudan were now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Bin Laden was well aware of this. “The rubbish of the media and embassies,” he called it. “I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn’t possibly do this job.”
The “job” was certainly ambitious: not just the Almatig connection but a brand-new highway stretching all the way from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of 1,200 kilometres on the old road, now shortened to 800 kilometres by the new bin Laden route that would turn the distance from the capital into a mere day’s journey. In a country that was despised by Saudi Arabia for its support of Saddam Hussein after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait almost as much as it was by the United States, bin Laden had turned the equipment of war to the construction of a pariah state. I did wonder why he could not have done the same to the blighted landscape of Afghanistan, but he refused at first to talk about his war, sitting at the back of the tent and cleaning his teeth with a piece of mishwak wood. But talk he eventually did about a war that he helped to win for the Afghans whom the Americans and the Saudis—and the Pakistanis—all supported against the Russians. He wanted to talk. He thought he was going to be interrogated about “terrorism” and realised that he was being asked about Afghanistan and—despite all the reserve and suspicion he felt towards a foreigner—that he wished to explain how his experience there had shaped his life.
“What I lived through in two years there,” he said, “I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere. When the invasion of Afghanistan started, I was enraged and went there at once—I arrived within days, before the end of 1979, and I went on going back for nine years. I felt outraged that an injustice had been committed against the people of Afghanistan. It made me realise that people who take power in the world use their power under different names to subvert others and to force their opinions on them. Yes, I fought there, but my fellow Muslims did much more than I. Many of them died and I am still alive.” The Russian invasion is often dated to January 1980, but the first Soviet special forces troops entered Kabul before Christmas of 1979 when they—or their Afghan satellites—killed the incumbent communist President Hafizullah Amin and established Babrak Karmal as their puppet in Kabul. Osama bin Laden had moved fast.
With his Iraqi engineer Mohamed Saad, who was now building the highway to Port Sudan, bin Laden blasted massive tunnels into the Zazai Mountains of Paktia Province for guerrilla hospitals and arms dumps, then cut a mujahedin dirt trail across Afghanistan to within 25 kilometres of Kabul, a remarkable feat of engineering that the Russians were never able to destroy. But what lessons had bin Laden drawn from the war against the Russians? He was wounded five times and 500 of his Arab fighters were killed in combat with the Soviets—their graves lie just inside the Afghan border at Torkham—and even bin Laden was not immortal, was he?
“I was never afraid of death,” he replied. “As Muslims, we believe that when we die, we go to heaven.” He was no longer irritating his teeth with the piece of mishwak wood but talking slowly and continuously, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “Before a battle, God sends us seqina—tranquillity. Once I was only thirty metres from the Russians and they were trying to capture me. I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep. This experience of seqina has been written about in our earliest books. I saw a 120-millimetre mortar shell land in front of me, but it did not blow up. Four more bombs were dropped from a Russian plane on our headquarters but they did not explode. We beat the Soviet Union. The Russians fled . . . My time in Afghanistan was the most important experience of my life.”
But what of the Arab mujahedin whom he took to Afghanistan—members of a guerrilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States to fight the Russians, and who were forgotten by their mentors when the war was over? Bin Laden seemed ready for the question. “Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help,” he said. “When my mujahedin were victorious and the Russians were driven out, differences started so I returned to road construction in Taif and Abha. I brought back the equipment I had used to build tunnels and roads for the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Yes, I helped some of my comrades come here after the war.” How many? Osama bin Laden shook his head. “I don’t want to say. But they are here with me now, they are working right here, building this road to Port Sudan.”
A month earlier, I had been on assignment in the Bosnian war and I told bin Laden that Bosnian Muslim fighters in the town of Travnik had mentioned his name to me. This awoke his interest. Each time I saw bin Laden, he was fascinated to hear not what his enemies thought of him but of what Muslim ulema and militants said of him. “I feel the same about Bosnia,” he said. “But the situation there does not provide the same opportunities as Afghanistan. A small number of mujahedin have gone to fight in Bosnia-Hercegovina but the Croats won’t allow the mujahedin in through Croatia as the Pakistanis did with Afghanistan.” But wasn’t it a bit of an anticlimax to be fighting for Islam and God in Afghanistan and end up road-building in Sudan? Bin Laden was now more studied in his use of words. “They like this work and so do I. This is a great project which we are achieving for the people here; it helps the Muslims and improves their lives.”
This was the moment when I noticed that other men, Sudanese who were very definitely not among bin Laden’s former comrades, had gathered to listen to our conversation. Bin Laden, of course, had been aware of their presence long before me. What did he think about the war in Algeria? I asked. But a man in a green suit calling himself Mohamed Moussa—he claimed to be Nigerian although he was a Sudanese government security agent—tapped me on the arm. “You have asked more than enough questions,” he announced. So how about a picture? Bin Laden hesitated—something he rarely did—and I sensed that prudence was fighting with vanity. In the end, he stood on the new road in his gold-fringed robe and smiled wanly at my camera for two pictures, then raised his left hand like a president telling the press when their time was up. At which point Osama bin Laden went off to inspect his highway.
But what was the nature of the latest “Islamic Republic” to capture bin Laden’s imagination? He maintained a home in Khartoum—he would keep a small apartment in the Saudi city of Jeddah until the Saudis themselves deprived him of his citizenship—and lived in Sudan with his four wives, one of them only a teenager. His bin Laden company—not to be confused with the larger construction business run by his cousins—was paid in Sudanese currency which was then used to purchase sesame, corn and sunflower seeds for export. Profits did not seem to be bin Laden’s top priority. Was Sudan?
Certainly it boasted another potential Islamic “monster” for the West. Hassan Abdullah Turabi, the enemy of Western “tyranny,” a “devil” according to the Egypti
an newspapers, was supposedly the Ayatollah of Khartoum, the scholarly leader of the National Islamic Front which provided the nervous system for General Omar Bashir’s military government. Indeed, Bashir’s palace boasted the very staircase upon which General Charles Gordon had been cut down in 1885 by followers of Mohamed Ahmed ibn Abdullah, the Mahdi, who like bin Laden also demanded a return to Islamic “purity.” But when I went to talk to Turabi in his old English office, he sat birdlike on a chair, perched partly on his left leg that was hooked beneath him, his white robe adorned with a tiny patterned scarf, hands fluttering in front of a black beard that was now flecked with white. He it was who had organised the “Popular Arab and Islamic Conference” which I had ostensibly arrived to cover, and within the vast conference centre in Khartoum I found gathered every shade of mutually hostile Islamist, Christian, nationalist and intégriste, all bound by Turabi’s plea of moderation. Shias, Sunnis, Arabs, non-Arabs, Yassir Arafat’s Fatah movement and all of his Arab enemies—Hamas, Hizballah, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, the FIS as they called themselves under their French acronym—the whole shebang, along with representatives of the Pakistan People’s Party, the an-Nahda party of Tunisia, Afghans of all persuasions and an envoy from Mohamed Aideed of Somalia who was himself “too busy to come”—as a conference official discreetly put it—because he was being hunted by the American military in Mogadishu.
